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npc/orenn.md

@@ -38,6 +38,17 @@ Orenn was a cleaner for over twenty years. When the city's underworld spawned so
 
 They retired fifteen years ago after a job that went wrong — details are scarce, but Mags has a scar that runs from her left temple to her jaw, and Orenn stopped sleeping well after that. They bought the Burnt Tongue because it was the last place anyone would look for them, and because the thin point in the cellar needed watching.
 
+### The Retirement That Wasn't
+
+"Retired" was always a story Orenn told the world — and, on his gentler days, himself. The truth is buried behind a concealed door in the cellar, in the **[Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md)**: a hidden warren that is the couple's real workplace. They never stopped. They just moved the work downstairs and got quiet about it.
+
+- **The fortune.** Twenty years of expensive, discreet cleaner work is stacked in the [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room) — well over 2,000 gp in coin, gems, and deeds. The modest life upstairs (their bedroom lockbox, 150 gp, two silver rings) is genuine and sentimental. The war-chest below is genuine and paranoid. Both are true. That contradiction *is* Orenn.
+- **The laboratory.** They still brew — fiend-hunting alchemicals for themselves, and Veil Dust as a *tool* for watching the thin point (never for sale). See the [Workroom](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-workroom-laboratory).
+- **The Guest.** Their darkest ongoing secret: a **changeling** they captured eleven years ago and never released, held in a cell below and used as an off-book spy — most recently to infiltrate the **Lambent Order**. This is *how* Orenn was "investigating the cult." See **[the-guest.md](the-guest.md)**. Orenn told himself, and the Guest, that they'd let it go "eventually." Fifteen years of eventually. He died still meaning to.
+- **The Guest's predecessor** starved to death in the next cell when it stopped being useful ([Cell Two](../location/deep-cellar.md#cell-two--the-long-dead)). Orenn allowed that. The calm, courteous barkeep who treated every patron with respect was also a man who could keep a person in a cage for a decade and sleep — mostly — at night. The players may learn this. It should complicate how they grieve him.
+
+Orenn was not a good man wearing a bad past. He was a genuinely kind man who had done, and was still doing, monstrous things — and had made his peace with the arithmetic. That's the dark history the Deep Cellar reveals, without anyone having to confess a word.
+
 ## How He Died
 
 Xarrul killed Orenn with the full chain: **Brand of Spite** to mark him, **Visions of Spite** to freeze him in a hallucination of his own worst fear, then claws through a body that couldn't flinch. Against an unsuspecting, unresisting target with no allies to intervene, all three stages collapsed into seconds. Orenn was behind the bar during the brawl. Everyone was distracted. Xarrul materialized just enough to touch him from the other side, branded him, locked his mind, and struck — then retreated to the Ethereal Plane before the dust settled. The expression on Orenn's face isn't surprise at death. It's the last frame of whatever Xarrul forced him to see.
@@ -61,6 +72,7 @@ He didn't know about Xarrul specifically, but he was preparing. The holy water,
 ## Items on His Person
 
 - A set of **tavern keys** (all rooms, cellar trapdoor, front door)
+- A **plain black iron key**, heavier than the rest, that fits nothing upstairs. It opens the **[concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** to the Deep Cellar and the Arcane-locked [Vault](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-vault-treasure-room) below. Anyone who searches the body (DC 12 Investigation, or automatic if they loot him) finds it; recognizing what it opens is the mystery. The Guest, if reached, will happily point at it.
 - A **silver ring** (plain, matches one in the lockbox upstairs)
 - 12 gp, 8 sp in a belt pouch
 - A **small silver mirror** (not magical, but Orenn carried it out of habit — in the cleaner days, mirrors were used to spot ethereal entities by the distortion they cause in reflections. DC 15 Perception while using the mirror in the cellar reveals faint distortions near the thin point.)