Day 2
The one useful bit of furniture I have in my room at the moment is a storage chest to fit any extra equipment I don't feel like lugging around. Since I'm a wizard, not a workhorse, there's only so much I'm willing to drag from place to place. Not that I have much on me at the moment anyway. My current possessions consist of the clothes on my back and some leather armor, the only things which survived my magical trip to Mordavia. I have some scattered crowns and kopeks I've looted off those even less fortune (and alive) than me, as well as a small dagger for when I'm forced into close combat. A few of Olga's garlic and avocado sandwiches are all I have in the way of rations. Other than that, I have a key ring with the key to my room and the adventurer's guild, and a few potions and mana fruit which I picked up today that I'll talk about later.
The last item on my list is the only one I've been unable to get rid of. The six-tentacled starfish. Try as I might, I've been physically unable, or perhaps unwilling to let it out of my grasp. Somehow it's tied to this whole mess related to the Dark One, and I wouldn't want it falling into the wrong hands. I just hope those hands aren't mine. And I'm not entirely sure I can trust the innkeepers not to rummage through my equipment when I'm not looking in any case, I may need to avoid storing anything too incriminating.
The Burgomeister still seems a little annoyed that I'm still both alive and under his watch, but there's not much either of us can do about that at this point, aside from sending me wandering out into the night. People here apparently don't bother to commit suicide, they just let the local monster population do all the messy work for them. I've tried explaining to the people that I'm a Prince of Shapier as well as a hero, and really should be someone they could both trust and rely on, but from the looks of the things they've seen too many curious strangers disappear already to bother getting attached to one.
Gaining access to Dr. Cranium turned out to be easier than I expected. The door to his house has a large nose with a mustache resting above the doorway, and a chain of bells stretching down from one nostril like you can imagine what. Getting in is a simple matter of being able to duplicate a sequence of chimes. Apparently Dr. Cranium prefers to entertain guests on the basis of their pattern recognition skills alone.
The hallway on the inside was a lot more elaborate than anything I'd seen so far. Marble bricks appear to line the walls, and strange portholes are scattered around the room. The door on the right allowed me to run into the largest Antwerp population this side of Spielburg, and the door on the left was another Antwerp-powered puzzle Dr. Cranium apparently designed to frustrate visitors trying to enter his laboratory. In the middle of the room was a pseudo-scientific device labeled as a Transcendental Receiving Animal Processor, also known as a (T.R.A.P.) for those of us who prefer to save a few syllables.
The T.R.A.P. is an animal catching device designed to play a game of 20 questions with you and figure out what animal you might want to catch, telling you what methods or bait you should use. After a bit of messing around it was a simple enough matter to program it to catch a baby Antwerp for me with a bit of avocado taken from one of Olga's sandwiches, and use the bouncing little beastie to grab a key from the maze. After fixing the good doctor's keyhole, I made it into the laboratory.
Dr. Cranium is I guess what you would call a consistent naturalist. Despite living in a world defined and shaped by what most of us would consider to be magical forces, he steadfastly asserts that everything in nature is a product of purely logical scientific principles.
Given that I'm a magic user by trade, this leaves us with about as much in common as you might imagine. He insists that everything I consider to be magical in nature, including my own flaunting of the laws of nature and manipulation of the elements, is simply a matter of scientific laws which have yet to be fully classified or studied. To him, magic is just the unknown or the unexplainable. And similarly I would consider most of what a scientist like him does to be magical in nature, or comparable to the manipulation of magical and elemental forces which I make my practice. He sees everything as a matter of science and rigorous study, whereas for me it's all a matter of magic and applying one's will onto the universe. Both methods have their own systems of rules and limitations, and both regard the other as a lot of wasteful nonsense. I gave up hope after trying to debate with the Herr Doctor for a while, although he did leave me thinking that half the time we were just saying the same thing in different ways.
Most of the villagers call the doc "mad", although he prefers just "Dr. Cranium". Aside from the obvious difference in our years, we share a lot of the same meddling ways and curiosity about the world around us that makes us targets of suspicion from the locals. My sort of work involves single-handedly taking it upon myself to right wrongs and dispose of evil wherever I find it. He's more interested in bringing the dead back to life and brewing the perfect cup of tea. If he starts breeding skeletal armies or sending out waves of undead zombies to terrorize the townsfolk we may have to suspend our working relationship, but other than that the man seems fairly harmless, just obsessively devoted to his craft.
The self-confessed supernatural skeptic also happened to have in his possession a useful little spell scroll teaching a skill that promised to let the caster glide across large bodies of water, and Dr. Cranium was more than happy to make the spell mine, eager to be rid of the challenge to his view of the world. He also offered to help me out by brewing some healing and poison cure potions when he could find the time, and urged me to come back to visit whenever I felt like it. At least someone in these parts was glad to see me.
Erana's garden turned up a few secrets as well when I took the time to explore it. The garden has plants and flowers which seem to come from all over the world, bonded together by the magical aura that still fills the place, years after Erana's disappearance. Like her staff at the front of the town, there's not a monster in the valley that will go anywhere near it. A graceful pool forms a small moat around a central island containing a tree filled with magical fruit. The fruit, I've found, can only be plucked by a skilled enough magician. It has mana-restoring properties, but vanishes if anyone tries to pluck it physically. Only a well-aimed "fetch" spell can snag it. Enchanted lanterns softly peal out music and provide illumination at night, while one lantern also held a pouch of money I gladly grabbed. After some detailed sensing out of the magical aura of the pace, I was able to find an enchanted tulip in center of the pond which gave me a protection spell to ward off physical attacks. I tried out the "glide" spell on the pool's water as well, walking over water was certainly a strange experience, although I'm not sure what use I'll have for it in these parts, most bodies of water lead to the swamp and I doubt I could sustain the spell long enough to leave the valley.
I've been a little remiss in my rundown of the inhabitants of Mordavia. In addition to the townsfolk and gypsies I've encountered there's also a lone resident named Boris Stovich who guards the gate to the castle of the Boyar. Claims to be no relation to the Olga Stovich who lives in town. He's far less superstitious and more pleasant than the rest of the locals, not what I'd expect from someone whose job is based around keeping unwanted guests out. He's employed by the current residents of the castle, which has apparently been through a few hands. And no, he says I can't expect to have an audience with the nobles any time soon.
From what I've heard the castle of the Boyar used to be owned by the Borgov family, and Boyar was the title given to them, like Baron or Duke or something similar. The Boyar family "disappeared" at the time of the "great disturbance", which I assume refers to the whole mess with the cult of the Dark One and Erana no one wants to talk about. Since then the castle had been empty for years, until it was recently apparently taken over by a cousin of the Boyars. The odd thing is no one seems to have met or dealt with the current inhabitants, everyone here keeps to themselves. Even Boris himself hasn't met the master of the castle, as Boris refers to him respectfully. He's guarded about the details but supposedly there are three main residents: the master himself, a male foreigner, and the master's daughter. I can only assume the master's daughter must be Katrina, the woman I met earlier. She must know something more about what's going on here, although I couldn't say yet whose side she would be on. I suspect I'll need to make my way into the castle eventually, and right now she's my only lead.
All of which leads me to the question of what am I doing here, and who brought me here. None of the local townsfolk seem to be that adept in the kind of magic it would take to bring me here, and while I'm sure Dr. Cranium has done his share of experiments with powerful energies I'd doubt he'd have any motivation to manipulate magical forces he denies the very existence of. As obvious candidates that leaves me with the gypsies and the inhabitants of the castle that might be mixed up in my presence here somehow. Unless if I missed something exploring the valley, or someone outside the valley has taken an interest in events here.
In addition, it's hard to imagine how my presence here could be of any use to anyone. I can thin out the local monster population fairly well, but everyone here is too walled in (literally in some cases) and guarded for me to be of much use to them, and the only things of adventuresome interest here is an old monastery which apparently eats people and an encroaching night they have to be eternally vigilant against. I'll probably just have to knuckle under and put myself at risk to figure out what it is everyone's warning me against, but I'm not seeing any kind of pattern or grand scheme coming out of this just yet.
I've been staying up late in order to be able to practice a bit of magic without fear of
retribution, and one consequence of that is that I seem to have run into another visitor to the inn. A small hairy creature which calls itself a Domovoi, which is apparently some kind of guardian spirit who watches over a house and brings luck to people. It showed up in the lobby of the inn after midnight, sitting on a shelf, scratching its blue furry body and giving me vague warnings about evil and the dangers in the valley. It tells me Mordavia badly needs a hero to keep away the dark magic, but other than that it's not been too helpful. Well, at least I have one fan in this place.