Nosgoth
We did not end up going to the Tall Woods. Instead, we are in Nosgoth.
Clarence’s plan to sneak up on a Tall Man and Analyze it was foiled by the fact that Tall Men can tell when someone is looking at them. Luckily, we thought to test this before Clarence convinced us to go traipsing off to the Tall Woods. I ended up transforming into a Tall Man, to check how exactly a Tall Man’s vision-sensing worked. It was a very unpleasant experience; as a Tall Man, I knew both who was looking at me and the most efficient way to make them stop it by killing them. Knowing if people were looking at me felt important, because really I didn’t want to move while anyone was watching. The correct way to move was in quick scuttles when people glanced away, obviously. My vision was weird, with the color leached out of it, and seemed integrated with my sense that told me who was looking at me. My body was made of wood (I was right!) and seemed doll-like and lifeless.
The vision-sensing (vision-o-vision, Clarence’s Analyze told us) is very versatile. I could tell how many people were looking at me (although not how many eyes they were looking at me with). I could also use it to see through glamours sometimes: Otto glamoured to look like a tree looked like a tree unless he was looking at me, in which case he looked like Otto looking at me with his eyeballs, and if I stabbed him in those eyeballs maybe he would stop. This means that there was no way to sneak up on a Tall Man using our cloud, as its myriad unblinking eyes would let the Tall Man see through the glamour. Analyze also feels like being looked at, which put a stop to Clarence’s plan for stealth-Analysis even without a cloud. Leviazizmoth’s Tremorsense also set off the vision-o-vision.
“I’m done,” I announced after two intensely uncomfortable minutes. “I would not recommend the experience to anyone. Ever.” I turned back to human and reveled in bendable limbs and normal colorful vision which didn’t let me know I was being watched. “No wonder they’re so hostile, it’s very uncomfortable knowing you’re being stared at all the time.”
So the Tall Woods were out. We had a brief discussion about whether to retrieve the emerald there before crossing the Chasm, but Clarence pointed out that the emerald might be the only thing keeping the Tall Men mostly confined to the woods, and spreading them out over the human-habitable areas would not improve matters. Anyway, nobody wanted to deal with the Tall Men if we could avoid it.
The other concern was Jacqueline. Drinking a few sips of Mariana’s blood had not helped, and yet more of her arm had faded. The newly faded parts were still kind of there; there was a resistance when I tried putting my hand through the empty space where the middle part of her forearm should have been. It felt odd to have things pass through her partially present flesh, she said, but not uncomfortable. Still, we all agreed it was worrying and should be dealt with sooner rather than later. Therefore, we went to Nosgoth. This was likely a vampire problem, and hopefully the vampires would know what to do.
We arrived at the Chasm around sunset and began the long descent. As we flew, the light faded and the slice of sky grew smaller. It made sense, for a group of beings that feared sunlight, but I didn’t like how enclosed it felt between the walls of the Chasm with the sky fading away. Soon, the shadow of the cliffs was so dark that none of us except Jacqueline could see where we were going. I’m not sure if this was her cloud-enhanced eyes or vampiric night-vision, but she managed to find the staircase cut into the rock of the far side of the Chasm and followed it downwards until we finally reached a wide ledge.
Looking around by flashlight, we found ourselves at the foot of an enormous golden door. The height was hard to discern by the glints of light reflecting off the intricately carved surface, as the beam diffused before reaching a clear ceiling. Otto measured out the distance between the two gargoyles flanking the door and found it to be 92 paces, or something like a hundred meters. In short, the door was large enough allow someone to bring a medium-to-large building through, provided they could be bothered to come up with a scheme for getting the building down to the ledge.
I was impressed.
Citrine, oblivious to everyone else’s awestruck gazing, flew over to the large lionlike gargoyle next to the hinge and gave a wave. “Hello! Would you let us in, please?” When the gargoyle didn’t respond, she moved closer to the center of the door and knocked lightly.
The sound echoed more than it should have, seeming to reverberate through the metal, and then something erupted from the ground. A small pedestal reaching a little above waist-height, topped by a shiny metal spike. I was reminded unpleasantly of the sacrifice machine we found in the power plant, but Jacqueline calmly pressed a finger to it, allowing a few drops of blood to run down the spike into the cup at the bottom. There was a congratulatory-sounding ding and the pedestal retracted into the floor, followed by the doors slowly swinging open.
After a harried scramble out of the way of the oncoming door, we took a look at the hallway beyond. Like the door had been, everything about it was painstakingly detailed. A swirling pattern in purple and red on the velvet carpet down the center of the hall. Creamy marble tiles to the sides reflecting the torchlight. (Nosgoth does have electricity, so the torches were not due to a lack of technology but an aesthetic choice. It worked rather well.) Portraits depicting rather snobby-looking people dotted the walls. Kaine V, Florence, Carmella, Kaine IX… There were a lot of Kaines, and none of them looked particularly sane or like they would be very amenable to visitors.
“Oh, wow.” Clarence was staring upward at the ceiling. No, not the ceiling exactly. The roof of the cave was very far away but there were panels suspended lower down forming an artificial ceiling. The line of panels, each with a detailed mural, extended in a line to the door at the end of the hall. At the time, they didn’t make much sense, besides the symbols for Steve and Lily. I recognized the eye peering through Lily’s star: it was the extremely creepy eye that is the last thing I remember before Lara kidnapped us. I should have known it was Lily, the eye had had the same kind of awful feeling around it as that doll back in the lab had, the one that was possessed by Steve.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure the ceiling explains recent vampire history. There are the vampires as winged people, the appearance of Steve and Lily and their monsters, and the transformation of the vampires at Lily’s hand. Just before the end of the hall, the vampires submit to Lily, and the last panel shows the rainbows of the new Blood modern vampires are bound to. But I’ll get to that later.
The door at the end of the hall opened on its own, revealing a very pale man wearing a dark red shirt with too many ruffles, a belt of glass vials containing a rainbow fluid slung around his waist. The distinct bands of color looked familiar, like the liquid that leaked from Jacqueline’s missing elbow. Upon seeing us, he gave an flourishing bow, grasping Jacqueline’s hand and kissing it. “Jacqueline! It has been much too long. How did your sabbatical go?”
“I can honestly say that I do not know,” said Jacqueline, tugging her hand back.
Ruffle Shirt (he never introduced himself) gave a laughing sigh and smiled. “Of course. We missed you. Come in, Kaine will want to see you and your guests.”
“I don’t remember much,” Jacqueline admitted. “Would you tell me about Kaine?”
“He is our leader, of course. Oh.” Ruffle Shirt frowned. “When you say you don’t remember much…”
“As long as I have known Jacqueline, she has been confused about pretty much everything she’s encountered,” Citrine explained helpfully.
“Ah, well, that’s our Jacqueline.” He gave another little chuckle. Like he was remembering fondly the habits of someone he had known a long time.
“I think I am more confused than when you once knew me,” Jacqueline clarified. “I must have gazed too long at the Irrigo.” Or maybe she said Virigo, or Irado, or something else. We didn’t have any time alone, and now she’s gone off to find a message she left for herself in the library so I haven’t been able to ask what it was. But Ruffle Shirt seemed to know what she was talking about, nodding slowly at her explanation. “But this place does seem familiar,” she went on. “Did the Star once shine over Nosgoth?”
“The Star always shines over Nosgoth,” said Ruffle Shirt, leading us deeper into the caverns. “As for Kaine, he is our leader. Or rather, he communicates directly with our true lord and queen. She has been with us from the beginning, long before this catastrophe, before the Star remade us in its image.”
The second hall opened up into the large cavern that seems to comprise the main living space. There were some freestanding buildings (with an overabundance of turrets and balconies) scattered around on stilts, and the walls were lined with cubbyholes covered by heavy-looking curtains for privacy. Most surfaces—floor, buildings, spaces between the alcoves on the walls—were carved with swirly patterns, and some of the remaining places were being etched by masked servants. I guess the vampires really have a thing for intricate detail. You wouldn’t think it from looking at Jacqueline, although maybe she displays it instead with minutely detailed questions about everything.
There was something weird about the space, though. I spotted one servant on a portable ladder, brushing dust off the partly decorated archway above one of the alcoves, and a few others clambering precariously up the wall using sparse handholds. But there weren’t many handholds, and some sections didn’t have any at all. So how did people access the alcoves? For that matter, how did they get in and out of the houses? There didn’t seem to be any stairs. Despite the mural on the way in, nobody here had visible wings, and I didn’t think they had invisible ones like Citrine.
Ruffle Shirt led us to the largest building, which had five balconies and two towers but still no stairs. “Come, come, we wouldn’t want to keep Kaine waiting.” He noticed our confusion at the four meter gap between our heads and the front door. “Ah, yes, your guests.” He snapped his fingers and several masked servants lowered a platform to haul us up. Ruffle Shirt did not deign to ride the platform, instead floating upward like he was a balloon. Jacqueline, unperturbed, floated after him. I think this place is bringing back memories for her, or maybe she’s been remembering things and didn’t tell us.
Jacqueline was being reminded of the finer points of vampire etiquette when the platform finally arrived at the porch. “Of course he has time to see you,” Ruffle Shirt was saying. “It’s not like he has much to do, there are very few vampires here besides the Nulls.”
“Nulls?” I asked. “You mean these servants are all Nullified?” It was impossible to tell, with their black clothing covering all possibly-green skin and metal masks covering pointed teeth and sealed-up eyes. “What happens if you leave them alone?”
“They go back to being alive again,” said Ruffle Shirt, confirming the Flesh Worker’s theory. He seemed puzzled with my caring about such a mundane and unimportant matter. “And then you Nullify them all over again, it’s very tiresome.”
“Go back to being alive again?” I repeated. “What do you mean? Alive like a human? Alive like a vampire? Do they get their memories back?”
Ruffle Shirt was apparently done with me. “Lord Kaine will see you now,” he said with extra haughtiness. “And your companions. Do be polite,” he instructed us, giving me a suspicious glare.
He opened the heavy wooden door to reveal a large carpeted room lit by a mix of candles and electric chandeliers. People milled around at the far end, clustered around a thronelike chair. Some nobles in fancy robes or armor, all extremely pale. Some normal looking people without masks who I suspected Nullified based on their vacant expressions, but recently so due to the lack of green skin. Everyone was focused on the man in the chair. He was quite large, about Otto’s size, and had long pointy ears like an elf, only there aren’t elves anymore. His eyes were unsettling, red irises on black sclera, and they widened in shock at seeing us.
“Jacqueline!” He bellowed, jumping out of his chair and striding over to us. He was an inch shorter than Otto, but looked taller because the points of his ears reached slightly above the top of his head. “You have returned! Of course you did, the cameras were acting up. It is horrible! But now Jacqueline is here, she will fix DVR. And Kaine will once again wield the power of television!”
So he referred to himself in the third person. Yay. The other noticeable feature of Kaine’s speech is his accent, which I can’t place. The consonants seem muted, sort of the opposite of the highly articulated Patan accent, and the vowels are different from any accent I’ve heard.
“I know not what a DVR is,” Jacqueline apologized. She was starting to sound more formal and old fashioned, as if old habits were coming back with her return home. I think she’s been remembering a lot more lately than she’s told us. “I know nothing of Nosgoth, only that I do not know.”
Kaine frowned, furry eyebrows dipping dramatically. “Is this Jacqueline madness or honest-to-god amnesia madness?” he asked suspiciously. “Kaine cannot tell!” He brightened, face suddenly taking on an expression of excitement and delight. “This is fine! Hello, guests! What brings you here, to the wonderful nation of Nosgoth?”
“Jacqueline’s elbow is disappearing,” Citrine said helpfully, setting off a long discussion full of misunderstandings. Jacqueline explained to Kaine that she couldn’t show him her elbow because it was missing. Kaine explained to Jacqueline what elbows were, pulling in courtiers to back him up on the fact that elbows were real, and that you could use words to talk about their physical reality (or lack thereof, probably). The eventual conclusion was that Jacqueline’s elbow had vanished because she had not drunk enough Blood recently.
“You have been gone for ten years,” Kaine objected, his absurdly expressive eyebrows flailing frantically like they were trying to gain enough momentum to escape his face. “This is impossible! You would have opened the ninth gate long before now, if you had not drunk Blood. This is most concerning!” He stopped, eyebrows calming a bit. “Did you lose your memory in a dungeon?” he asked, opening the door to his throne room and leading us out.
“I don’t know,” said Jacqueline promptly. Kaine harrumphed and gave a shake of his long white hair.
“Excuse me Lord Kaine,” I put in. “We found her in a dungeon. So it’s likely she lost her memory there.” I barely stopped myself from adding that we couldn’t actually be sure where her memory had gotten to, perhaps it had been lost before she arrived a the dungeon and it was only a coincidence that there was a correlation between dungeons and memory loss. Something about Kaine makes me want to Jacqueline it up just to annoy him.
“See?” Kaine pointed at me. “This guest is helpful. Unlike Jacqueline! And unlike court!” he yelled back through the door. “Useless, lazy court!”
Outside, he handed Jacqueline a vial of rainbow liquid he called Blood, which she took solemnly, then went off to a bathroom to drink (she felt shy about drinking in front of us). “Now, inform me of your travels,” he demanded as he led us to another room. “Do you have news of Penitencia?”
He was very excited when he heard that the Penitent Pope had supposedly been killed by his heir, and even more excited when we told him that Jacqueline had interviewed Crisanta. “What did she say?” he cackled, face twitching in amusement. “Did she cry? Did Jacqueline ask her infuriating questions about her philosophy until she exploded?”
“That is exactly what happened,” Citrine told him seriously. She’s right, in a way. Although Crisanta exploded with being shot by someone who had heard her answers to Jacqueline’s questions, rather than fury at the questions themselves.
“Ohohoho, this is good news you bring me,” said Kaine, rubbing his hands together with nervous energy. “Now you will fix Kaine’s TV” —to Clarence, who had been poking at the TV for the entire explanation of Penitencia— “and the rest of Jacqueline’s very amusing guests will tell me about how you crushed Penitencia!”
“It started when we decided to break into the city to steal—” Citrine broke off, evidently remembering it was supposed to be a secret. In the awkward silence, Clarence turned the TV on and off a few times to test it, then started flicking through channels. I was surprised to see that there were still shows on, even if none of them looked familiar. Unless Kaine had them recorded?
“Soooo, what is this blood stuff anyway?” I asked Kaine, trying to distract him from what Citrine had been saying. “Jacqueline bit someone yesterday but it didn’t make her elbow come back. And that stuff you gave her sure didn’t look like human blood, so what is it? I want to make sure she is fed properly, to avoid a repeat of the disappearing elbow.”
Kaine was successfully distracted. “That is a common misconception,” he informed us, “thinking you simply need to nom a neck. Wrong! You drink someone’s blood and you absorb some of their memories, only their memories.”
Which means Jacqueline has some of Mariana’s memories. I wonder if we would have gotten more coherent answers from her and Otto if Jacqueline had been able to give them back.
“My elbow’s back,” Jacqueline reported, coming back in. “And my knee, and the patch of my stomach that was starting to feel slightly intangible. This is much nicer.” Jacqueline hadn’t told us about her knee or her stomach. She didn’t tell us about her elbow, either, until we noticed it after she collapsed.
“You must take care of yourself, Jacqueline,” Kaine admonished her, eyebrows once again sliding towards his nose. “Starving yourself like that, irresponsibly opening gates, biting people… That’s not proper nourishment for a Rainbow-Drinker! You need the complete package: memories, dreams, anger, joy… these are the different colors of the Blood you see.” He led us out of the room, up a wide staircase, and opened the thick metal door with a flourish. “Now, Kaine will show you the distillery, you will see how Blood is manufactured.”
The distillery was a small (compared to everything else in this place) well-lit room mostly filled with a complicated array of glass tubing. It centered on a large glass bubble, in which stood a naked man, frantically banging on the glass. His mouth gaped in a terrified scream, but the thick glass blocked the sound. At least I knew he wasn’t suffocating, since that’s impossible now. One vampire watched him, and two others busied themselves with an array of levers attached to the tubing.
“I think we’ve got enough pressure, could you check the level of… Oh! Lord Kaine, how kind of you to visit us!” The vampire noticed the rest of us and looked conflicted. “Lord Kaine, are you sure it is wise to show this to the guests?”
Kaine’s large ears twitched in annoyance. They appeared to be almost as mobile as his eyebrows. “You dare question Lord Kaine?” he asked menacingly. “Kaine is happy to impart the gift of knowledge on his subjects.”
Since when were we his subjects? Unless he meant Jacqueline only. I was starting to have a bad feeling about our being allowed to leave, especially if we were being shown some sort of vampire secret in the distillation process.
“What do you mean your subj—I mean, of course, Lord Kaine,” the technician corrected with discreet eye roll. He turned back to the levers, pulling one down with a nod at his two companions, who simultaneously pushed a combination of buttons on a different panel. The glass sphere quickly filled with goopy grey liquid, enveloping the struggling man. Colors swirled into the grey, leaking out from the center, as well as wherever a flash hand or leg bumped into the glass. They didn’t mix, but formed distinct bands of color like the vial of Blood Kaine had shown us.
The technicians turned a wheel and with a great sucking sound the liquid sluiced out of the bubble, leaving the man lying on the bottom. Blank face, slightly glowing eyes. A Nullified. Kaine redirected our attention to the set of glass tubes where the liquid was being filtered, colors getting more vivid as the thin grey remnant drained away. There was a creak of a lever from the technicians’ part of the room and the colorful result slid out of view. The setup gave a ding and ejected a tray with sixteen vials of rainbow liquid.
“Behold!” announced Kaine. “The distillation process! Now you know how the Blood is brewed.”
Sixteen vials of Blood for one human. That didn’t seem like a good trade. Then again, we don’t know exactly how long a vial of Blood lasts, nor how long it takes a Nullified to go back to normal. The Blood distillation process was a point of contention later, when we were left alone in this alcove while Jacqueline went to the archive.
“They have to be stopped,” Clarence declared. Perhaps a bit hastily, given the servant who had accompanied us to the alcove had only just left, drawing the curtain closed behind him. Giving us the illusion of privacy, since there was no way the curtains did much in the way of soundproofing. “We can’t let them keep Nullifying people just to feed themselves, they’re looping these people in constant suffering!”
“That’s probably better than the alternative,” I pointed out. “Imagine if they just stayed Nullified forever instead of getting juiced again. At least this way they’re not pulling many more victims into the cycle. They seemed kind of responsible about it, honestly.” I was surprised by this. But Kaine had said that they rarely made new vampires, because then they would have to go get more people to Nullify, and everyone was too lazy for that. I approved, even if it was out of laziness rather than concern for the suffering of their victims.
Clarence wasn’t buying it. “We need to stop them,” he repeated. “We’ll just have to overthrow Nosgoth. It will be harder than Penitencia because we’ll need to destroy the whole society rather than just assassinating their leadership, but I’m sure we can figure something out.”
“Have you considered the possibility that this is a terrible plan?” I asked him.
“Yeah, it does seem kind of dubious,” Otto agreed. “We have more important things to do with the Chaos Emeralds and April and whatever Sorin’s up to. I agree that we should do something about Nosgoth, but now is not the time.”
“Hmph.”
“Saving the world with the Chaos Emeralds might actually fix the problem,” I noticed. “If it makes things go back the way they were, the vampires will go back to drinking blood. I mean the regular kind of blood, not the rainbow stuff. Anyway, they could have large groups of paid blood-donors, and nobody would get killed or have their personality removed. That seems pretty okay to me.”
Kaine had verified that vampires used to drink plain old blood. Like everyone else, they had been changed by the Cataclysm. Unlike the changes in humans, which made us harder to kill, the vampires were almost wiped out by the puzzle of their new requirements. Their old feeding patterns didn’t work anymore, and they began starving. A starving vampire was dangerous in the old days, but new vampires are worse. The longer they go without proper food, the more gates they open.
“More gates means more power,” Kaine had explained. “But also insanity, and it is very difficult to solve puzzles while insane.”
The vampires think of things in puzzles. They used to be plotters and manipulators, so they gravitated naturally towards Lily rather than Steve. Even though many of them opened too many gates and vanished, the remaining ones seem to appreciate the puzzle of survival Lily crafted just for them.
They are susceptible to other puzzles, like that of the Chaos Emeralds. We learned this from an offhand comment of Jacqueline’s noting that the repaired TV reminded her of Botfly, only less evil. It turns out that Kaine’s scientists are the ones who made it in the first place.
“We should have not done the thing with the Botfly,” he said mournfully, patting his TV affectionately. “They wanted to try it, to make something out of the dreams, and Kaine said, what harm? But the Botfly, it does not obey anyone!”
They had been experimenting with Chaos Emeralds. The vampires had had several of them long before the Cataclysm, when they hadn’t been as useful. Why use a Warp crystal which will drive you nuts when you could just call on the Warp directly at (usually) much less risk? But an immortal society is in the habit of storing away power when they find it, so they kept the emeralds in a very cold freezer where they couldn’t corrupt anyone, just in case there came a time when they would be needed.
Once the Cataclysm rendered the Warp inaccessible, the gems in the freezer suddenly seemed much more relevant. They could use the emeralds to power oldspells that used to work, but now that they were actually paying attention to them, there suddenly were lots of theories about what technology or magic the emeralds might enable. Things really took off when someone forgot to put an emerald back in the freezer, and learned that if you leave a Chaos Emerald alone for a month, it will create a pocket dimension around itself. Based on old spell-creation techniques, Kaine’s scientists had come up with a way to attach a distiller to the large golden ring forming the portal to the pocket dimension, and extract spells. But while the setup produced spells, it was hard to get it to make anything useful. At first, it only made Locator, and when they tried to get it to do something else by adjusting the chemicals, they just got Locator Locator.
“So many Locators!” Kaine complained, obviously still irritated by the emeralds’ singleminded desire to locate other emeralds (are they lonely or something? Or maybe they just have a very high opinion of their own importance). “The emeralds really like them. Then they got a Locator Locator Locator, but my useless assistant lost! it Maybe he did it on purpose, because I threw him against the wall for telling me this stupid spell existed.”
“Three levels deep?” Clarence asked in amazement. “How far does it go?”
Kaine scowled. “There were rumors of a four-level Locator. But Kaine did not have to find out, because Kaine’s clever scientists figured out the right chemicals to use to stop making more Locators.”
Even so, the spells they got weren’t often very useful. So they tried a different tack, figuring out how to improve existing mons and creating updates for them that could be applied later. Which is probably where Parasonico’s updates are coming from, although it doesn’t explain why they’re coming from the dark area and not Nosgoth. Unless someone else has a spell distillery.
They also found out that they could use the emeralds to improve media. If you put an emerald in a medium and left it alone, nothing would happen; it was about the same as leaving it in the freezer. But when they tried having someone wear the medium for a couple months, the medium’s energy and capacity expanded a small amount. Permanently, it seemed; the improvements held even when the medium was passed to someone else and the emerald removed. There was one slight problem: the person wearing the medium while it had the emerald in it went insane.
That didn’t sound like the sort of thing that would stop Kaine from continuing with this miraculous medium improvement factory. He didn’t say they continued, but I’m not sure if Kaine would have told us if they had. (It sure seems like Kaine is incapable of keeping secrets. But maybe he’s pretending he’s terribly talkative as part of some larger strategy where we’re all going to end up blackmailed into working for him. Which seems extremely unlikely, but that’s kind of the point of such a deception, that you don’t expect it.) Anyway, someone has to have done it. It seems the only explanation for Indra’s heart being so far out of the bounds of any other medium we’ve encountered.
“Kaine would have loved to keep going,” Kaine went on, after a little more rambling about the variety of utterly useless spells they managed to distill, “but useless assistant sold Chaos Emeralds to kobold.”
A kobold? Sorin!
“Any idea what the kobold was trying to achieve by buying all your emeralds?” Otto asked. “We’ve been tracking him but we don’t know what he’s up to. We do know he had some of those emeralds, perhaps we could retrieve them.”
Kaine shrugged, an expression of annoyance twisting his lips. “Kaine was in the shower when assistant sold emeralds to kobold, and assistant did not have an explanation. Kaine sent emissaries to find kobold, but they brought back nothing! So Kaine does not know why kobold ruins everything.” He then explained his theory about how everything was Sorin’s fault. The Cataclysm, the Rain Bird, how useless his court was, the problems with his TV that Clarence had fixed (even though he’d gotten that particular TV five years after Sorin bought the emeralds from the hapless assistant). “Kaine is not paranoid!” he insisted. “Kaine is just sure everyone is trying to kill him. The court are fools who do not believe Kaine when he says he is on to them.”
So the picture of what’s going on is making slightly more sense. Emeralds as a source of spells and of medium enhancement. The ring in the Tall Woods an emerald in a pocket dimension, and Mariana’s emerald as… what? A source of spells, but Sorin wouldn’t have kept her around for that if all he got was Locator. A medium enhancer? After all, Indra’s medium is a heart…
Kaine wants us to get the emeralds back to him if we find Sorin. I’d be almost inclined to hand one over for him to put in the spell distiller, since it seems like it could be useful. It’s not like we can take it with us, it’s the size of a room and Jacqueline’s box isn’t nearly that big (and is also full of corpses). But if we give him one, he might suspect we have more, and anyway I don’t think he would want to give it back when we return. Clarence could probably copy his design, but we’d still have to wait around a month with the emerald unstable, keeping everyone away from it.
We’re waiting for Jacqueline to get back from the archives. She’s gone to retrieve a message she left herself in case of amnesia (apparently this is a common practice among vampires). I’m half expecting it will reveal a vital piece of information that will change everything, but in the meantime we’re planning on heading to Roto-Mar next. The blue emerald’s been there for 50 years, so I’m a bit worried what it’s done to the place. We’re also hoping to get the remaining Locator, which is either in Roto-Mar, or somewhere on the way to the coast. It could be a trap by Sorin (or someone else, but he’s known to have had Locators), but we’re hoping it might tell us more about the other players in this game of emeralds we’ve gotten ourselves into. And anyway, we don’t want to leave Locators lying around where someone could use them to track us and our emeralds. Or Locator Locators, since we’ll have all the Locators. Which means we’ll need to get ahold of the Locator Locator Locator, only we still couldn’t be sure we’re safe, because the fabled fourth level Locator might exist… I should probably stop thinking about this before I get hopelessly paranoid.