1.2 - In Search of Sanity - The Dead Don't Dream

"Yes, I'll hold onto the scroll, Glasses."

A shiver ran through him as he looked towards the yawning void beneath the island, a shiver that was repeated as he looked at the sickly yellow sky. He closed the shed door but knew nothing would keep whatever lurked below from rising like bile once more.

"Inside."

As he walked back in, he wondered when he started to think of the hospital of horrors as safety.

He was loathe to suggest looking for more supplies after darkness from above tried to snatch him away the last time he'd done so... but it seemed logical.

"Those smaller doors, perhaps, before we go deeper?"

"Sure. Why not?" Grim agreed. "If we find the administrators office, we might also discover files that finally gives us our names back."

As an afterthought, Razhel lingers back at the fallen nightgaunt long enough to cut/break off one of its horns. She wraps it in cloth and stuffs it into her pack, before rejoining the others in the central area. "Smaller doors then?" She questions, to make sure she understands the plan moving forward.

"Small doors," he said with a resigned nod. Once everyone was ready, he'd open the doors with his magic hand, light inside with glowing orbs if necessary, and peer in with his arcane vision. He breathed a bit easier now, getting back to being at least useful in this regard, but the memory of the night-black creature's claws pulling him into the sky wouldn't be kept at bay for long.

You head inside to take shelter from the unruly weather. Razhel, on the way, yanks one of the nightgaunt's horns free of its head with a sickening, ripping sound.

With Elias in the lead you check the smaller doors. The western door, nearest the large, interior double doors, seems stuck as if something is blocking the other side of it.

When you try the other door, however, you find that it opens into what would have once been a storage closet. The room is partially collapsed, destroying most fo the buckets, mops, and dusters that were stored here.

The western wall has fallen away, however, opening into the room beyond. As you step inside, you see a long desk, several chairs, a sideboard, and numerous once-stately landscape paintings barricade the western door of this somber conference room. The toppled wall you entered through makes the barricade all but worthless, however, a point driver home by the masked bodies littering the ground. Six of them in total, the room is the site of an apparent slaughter. The masks, if one could call them that, are a mixture of sheets, grain bags, and shirts - in each case wrapped tightly around the body's head and cinched tight around the throat.

"Were they hooded then killed?" he asked rhetorically as his mage hand picked up anything possibly useful. "Should we take off a hood? I somehow feel like we shouldn't."

What if they had blackness where their faces should be? He shuddered.

He cautiously approached the nearest body to look over its wounds.

Elias moves into the room and takes in the destruction and the massacre. Moving closer, he does what he can to learn more about the bodies.

Grim will search over the bodies and remove anything that appears may be of use.

Grim tugs on the facial hairs at his chin and slips the golden ring into his pocket. In his head, the Trickster chuckled...greedy old spirit.

"Let's check out the other smaller door." He pointed toward the one in the southeastern wall.

"Suffocated, all of them, patients and staff, about 3 days ago," he said sadly. "Yes, the smaller door. Before we go, was there anything useful on them?"

"Intriguing," Iosef says, kneeling near the bodies, "The masks over their faces, the sheer brutality of the strangulation as the cords dug into their necks as they died...stories are still told in Rozenport taverns, and by parents to spook their children into behaving, about the Bag Lady, a serial killer that terrorized the city around half a century ago. The way they tell it, the stories, well, look like this. I would venture someone is going out of their way to copy her work." He gestures as he stands and shakes his head. "Terrible," he adds before turning to Grim.

"Yes, let's."

Iosef looks around the room as he steps inside.

Elias walks into the room and looks around. Seeing the two bodies, he gets ready for trouble.

This whole place is trouble. Razhel expects it in every room..every corner.