fractions rework

npc/assassins.md

@@ -17,7 +17,17 @@ They keep a codex, and they keep it like scripture:
 - **The seal.** Every kill is claimed openly under the guild's mark within a day. No innocent hangs for their work.
 - **The closing.** A sealed kill legally ends the blood-debt; retaliation is forbidden and the guild enforces the closing at its own expense. This is the clause that makes the city keep them.
 
-The guild's reputation *is* its currency, and for months that reputation has been bleeding. The **Order of Mending** has been taking side jobs — messy, ritualistic kills that undercut the market and mock everything the codex stands for. Bodies turn up carved open, hearts missing, symbols cut into floorboards. Worse, someone inside the House has been *cooperating*.
+The guild's reputation *is* its currency, and for months that reputation has been bleeding through a string of **robbed closings**. A sealed death is meant to end the grievance: no second blade, no looting, no punishment of the family. Instead, targets or their homes are being harvested beneath the House's seal. One corpse is opened for its heart; another is untouched but an heirloom mirror vanishes; a third survives the warning but loses every memory of a planar journey. Guards stop investigating because the House has already claimed the scene, and families naturally blame the assassins for whatever is missing. Worse, someone inside the House is selling the Order of Mending exactly the information needed to do it.
+
+Sevra has combined several different patterns into one plausible accusation: the Order bought a traitor, turned the contract archive into an acquisition list, and is responsible for the clean deaths whose souls cannot be found afterward. She is right about the contract thefts, ritual harvesting, and stolen relics. She is wrong about the missing souls; those belong to Thera's older, quieter work. The variety hides Thera beautifully.
+
+### The Attack the House Misunderstood (DM)
+
+Three weeks ago a bound Xarrul entered the House's inner archive using stolen voices and altered memories. The Order had not sent it to assassinate Sevra. Its task was to steal the **Severance Nail**, a black iron spike the House venerates as the weapon of its first sanctioned killing. In truth the Nail once pinned a planar breach shut and now powers the archive's oldest ward, **the Final Closure**.
+
+The Closure protects assassins against possession, charm, magical commands, tracking curses, and hostile pacts. Its principle is pure House doctrine: it does not wrestle with controlling magic; it finds the hand holding the chain and makes one exact cut. *Nothing enters the archive belonging to another master.* When Xarrul crossed the threshold, the ward automatically severed the Order's command binding. Most summoned creatures would then snap home. Xarrul shifted into the Border Ethereal at the instant of severance and caught itself there—uncontrolled, still present, and finally free.
+
+The witnesses saw it dissolve and assumed the Closure had banished it. Nothing obvious was stolen, although Xarrul learned what the Nail was and where it lay. The members in the tavern know only contradictory hearsay: familiar voices gave false orders, two custodians fought, three blades were found down, one bore a mark over the heart, and the creature vanished near the leadership corridor. Because they kill people for a living, they have interpreted an infiltration and theft as a failed assassination attempt. Even Sevra does not possess the whole account.
 
 Tonight, four named members are present, plus two unnamed blades.
 
@@ -70,11 +80,19 @@ Sevra is the senior *contract* blade present and the guild's institutional consc
 - Her blind spot is institutional pride: an accusation against one of the guild's *best* reads to her as slander until the evidence is procedural. **Win her with proof, not argument.**
 - Suspects Dace is the traitor but needs proof. Moving on a guild member without evidence breaks the code and fractures the House.
 
+### Grey Quay — Her Debt to the House
+
+Twelve years ago the merchant Vey Corren separately hired Sevra to kill a blackmailer and Orenn and Mags to recover his ledger. The teams met inside a Grey Quay warehouse and discovered Corren intended the fixers to deposit the ledger in an exterior fireproof safe, then lock and burn every witness inside. Orenn spotted the trigger; Mags cut a route through the adjoining building; Sevra remained behind long enough to sell their deaths. Together they came out behind Corren's waiting dock gang and closed the betrayal.
+
+Sevra later gave Corren's signet to Orenn as proof the debt was finished. He made it the bottle opener beneath the bar. Grey Quay taught Sevra that Mags returns for people when abandoning them would be profitable and that Orenn sees the mechanism beneath a polite arrangement. Orenn's murder is therefore personal—and a debt whose rightful target she cannot yet name, which is almost unbearable to her.
+
 ### What She Knows
 
 **Will share if players approach professionally (show competence, don't moralize):**
 - The brawl started because Kael confronted the cultists about a contract kill in the Merchant Quarter — a noble found dead with ritual marks. It was the guild's contract, paid for and accepted. Someone else did the kill.
-- The guild has a mole. Kills are being sold to outside buyers. Bodies are showing up wrong — missing parts, ritualistic damage.
+- The guild has a mole. Full contract dossiers are being sold: targets, possessions, warning schedules, assigned blades, and the window during which the House controls the scene.
+- The Merchant Quarter corpse is only the latest robbed closing. Other scenes lost relics, records, blood, or memories; a few perfectly clean kills left no soul for priests to call. Sevra believes the Order did all of it.
+- She has heard that a bound, Order-marked creature penetrated the inner House and attacked several blades. She was not present at the breach and believes the Final Closure destroyed it.
 - She didn't kill Orenn. The guild respected the rules. "Orenn was worth more alive to us than anyone in this room."
 
 **Will trade for proof of the traitor's identity:**
@@ -121,7 +139,7 @@ If the players bring her **proof of the rot** (the soulcoin, a marked victim, Th
 
 Late twenties, handsome, easy smile. Sandy hair, bright eyes, the kind of face you'd trust to watch your drink. He's the assassin who doesn't look like an assassin — the one who gets close to targets through charm, not stealth. He's everyone's friend at the table and nobody's friend in truth.
 
-Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Order of Mending for six months. The cultists need fresh kills for ritual components — hearts still warm, blood drained into sanctified vessels. Dace provides the bodies and takes a cut on top of his guild pay. He doesn't believe in the cult's ideology — he just likes money, and he finds the moral panic about his sideline amusing.
+Dace has been selling complete guild dossiers to the Order of Mending for six months. The Order uses planned killings as cover to acquire whatever Phase Two requires: hearts and blood sometimes, but also planar relics, true-name records, unusual memories, and objects carried between worlds. Dace sells the target, possessions, warning schedule, assigned blade, and the quiet interval after the seal when no guard will question the scene. He doesn't believe in the Order's ideology—he just likes money, and finds the moral panic about his sideline amusing.
 
 **Key traits:**
 - The most likeable person in the room. Friendly, warm, buys drinks, makes jokes.
@@ -132,11 +150,11 @@ Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Order of Mending for six months. Th
 
 ### His Secret
 
-Dace has been meeting a Order of Mending contact in the tavern's private room to arrange deliveries. The sigil diagram scratched into the table was made during one of these meetings — the contact was Haddon, mapping the house's old summoner-work as part of the cult's study of this thin point. Dace didn't care what the diagram meant; he was there to negotiate prices.
+Dace has been meeting an Order of Mending contact in the tavern's private room to arrange deliveries. The sigil diagram scratched into the table was made during one of these meetings — the contact was Haddon, mapping the house's old summoner-work as part of the cult's study of this thin point. Dace didn't care what the diagram meant; he was there to negotiate prices.
 
 **Evidence linking Dace:**
 - DC 16 Insight during conversation: Something about his helpfulness is *too* practiced. He's performing.
-- Tallow (for a price) will confirm that Dace has been meeting "a scholar type" in the private room regularly.
+- [Haddon's journal](../prints/haddonuv-denik-harath.md) records Dace selling the complete Harath dossier, both payments, and their next private-room meeting. The field-sign beside the entry is Dace's; Sevra or Kael recognizes it automatically.
 - Kael, if asked privately, will say Dace was the last person to take a guild contract that ended up with ritual marks on the body. "He said he subcontracted the cleanup. Since when do we subcontract?"
 - The cultist pin found in the private room — Dace pockets things. A DC 14 Investigation of his person finds a **second cultist pin** hidden in his boot, kept as insurance.
 
@@ -198,6 +216,7 @@ Kael is loyal to the House with the fervour of someone who found a family after
 - Honest to a fault. He cannot and will not lie convincingly. If asked direct questions, he answers directly. This makes him the easiest assassin to talk to, despite his hostility.
 - He didn't kill Orenn. He's the most vocally angry about the death — killing on neutral ground violates everything he believes in.
 - **He idolises Thera.** She was kind to him when he was a nobody aspirant. He would take a blade for her without thinking. This is exactly why what she is will break him.
+- When Kael was a new blade, senior members treated him as disposable muscle and left him standing while they drank. Orenn silently put a hot meal in front of him. When someone objected that Kael was working, Orenn replied, *"Then he needs feeding more than you do."* Kael never forgot. Beneath his anger tonight is the knowledge that he started the brawl in which Orenn died: *"He kept this place safe from people like us. Then I made it unsafe."*
 
 ### What He Knows
 
@@ -233,6 +252,14 @@ Thera serves something older than the codex and beneath the city — a thing tha
 
 **Why she's here tonight:** to end Dace. His crude soul-butchery for the Order of Mending is dragging soul-death into public view — the one thing that could get people *looking*. She has already marked him and is deciding whether he dies or gets recruited. She is also quietly appalled by the cultists on principle: amateurs, desecrating something sacred for spell components.
 
+### Orenn and the Widow's Contract
+
+Years ago Thera warned a woman whose negligence had caused several deaths. The grievance was valid, but the target accepted responsibility: she confessed publicly, surrendered her property to the victims' families, and committed her remaining life to the care of a surviving child. The client concealed that settlement and still demanded death.
+
+Orenn uncovered the concealment and brought Thera the proof. She refused the kill. When the client sent ordinary killers after the widow, Orenn and Thera protected her together until the fraudulent continuation of the grievance could be closed. It convinced Orenn that Thera represented the best possible version of the House: a killer capable of valuing a life more than the opportunity to take it.
+
+Thera treasured his judgment because he understood precisely what she did and respected her anyway. She considers the Nether Inn one of the few places where her work was neither romanticized nor condemned. Orenn's murder genuinely offends and grieves her. If her soul-harvesting is exposed, invoking him lands where little else can—although she still believes she honours the mercy he admired. Mags does not permit that comfort: *"Don't use him to clean your hands."*
+
 ### The Tells
 
 - **The gestures.** A PC who watches her greet or part from someone — including the moment she "comforted" Dace earlier — may catch the doorframe-touch, the single turn of a coin on the table, the murmured word (DC 16 Perception; DC 14 Insight to sense it was deliberate, ritual, *rehearsed into the courtesy*). Meaningless now. Unforgettable later.

npc/bren.md

@@ -47,7 +47,11 @@ Skein feeds on Bren's mind — his memories, his personality, his will. Over the
 
 ## Personality (What's Left of Bren)
 
-Before possession, Bren was a scholar — an arcanist studying planar theory at a small academy. He was curious, gentle, and too trusting. He ventured too close to a thin point during research, and Skein latched on. That was seven years ago.
+Before possession, Bren was a scholar—Haddon's finest planar-theory student. He was curious, gentle, and too trusting. Haddon brought promising students to the Nether Inn's small collection of salvaged summoner books; Bren sat at the Order's table years before Dalla, Rennt, or Essek joined, corrected Haddon's calculations politely in the margins, and was one of the few people Mags allowed behind the bar to make tea.
+
+Seven years ago Haddon sent him to observe another thin point. Officially it was routine fieldwork; in truth, Vyre had deliberately weakened the boundary and wanted live data. Skein attached itself to Bren there. The Order studied the possession instead of curing it, then classified the experiment as lost when Bren deteriorated and escaped. Haddon let it happen.
+
+Bren wandered for years. A few months ago Orenn recognized him outside the tavern—not by his ruined face, but because he was muttering one of Haddon's old cataloguing sequences. Orenn brought him inside and began quietly investigating what the Order had done. Haddon has recognized Bren on every subsequent visit and pretended not to. During lucid moments Bren calls him **Professor**.
 
 **What remains:**
 - Intelligence flickers through the madness — he uses words precisely even when they seem nonsensical
@@ -115,5 +119,7 @@ See [The Possession](../storylines/possession.md) for full details. Summary:
 
 - **Orenn:** Fed him, kept him safe, never asked questions. Bren loved him in the quiet way a prisoner loves the guard who shows them kindness. Orenn's death devastates what's left of Bren.
 - **Mags:** She brings him food. She's gruff about it. He can tell she cares. Skein doesn't like her — she's too perceptive.
+- **Haddon:** Former teacher and the man who abandoned him. Fragments of Haddon's old lesson still surface through the damage: *"Anchor before aperture. Measure twice. The living weight comes first. Professor said—"* One clear **"Professor"** from Bren visibly cracks Haddon's composure.
+- **Essek:** Has studied papers bearing Bren Aldara's name but does not initially recognize the man in the corner. Learning who Bren is shows Essek his own probable future and makes the players' treatment of Bren one of his strongest tests of character.
 - **Skein:** Captor, torturer, constant companion. Bren hates and fears Skein but has developed a horrifying dependency — after seven years, Skein's voice is the most constant thing in his world.
 - **Xarrul:** Bren (through Skein's senses) can feel Xarrul in the Ethereal Plane. Skein is terrified of the fiend — it's bigger, older, more powerful. This fear sometimes overrides Skein's control of Bren, creating lucid openings.

npc/cultists.md

@@ -13,6 +13,8 @@ Their leader, **Mother Vyre**, is not present. She never comes to the tavern. Sh
 
 The four members present tonight each know a different amount and joined for different reasons. None of them fully understand what The Opening means at scale.
 
+The Order does not hate the House of Scales. It exploits it. Through a hidden supplier, it buys complete assassination dossiers and uses the House's warnings, schedules, access, and openly claimed deaths to acquire planar relics, rare blood, true-name records, and memories. Sometimes it takes a bodily component; often the corpse is only cover for stealing something nearby. To the Order, the assassins are useful infrastructure whose outrage is provincial embarrassment. To the House, the **robbed closings** profane the promise that one sealed death ends the grievance.
+
 ---
 
 ## Mother Vyre — The Absent Leader
@@ -24,7 +26,7 @@ Not present but referenced constantly. Players never meet her, but her shadow is
 - She was once an arcanist of real talent. She studied planar theory for decades before concluding that the separation of planes was artificial and harmful.
 - She recruits the vulnerable: the bereaved, the disillusioned, the curious, the angry. She finds the crack in someone and pours conviction into it.
 - She is aware the fiend summoning went wrong but considers it an acceptable setback. "The test demonstrated the principle. The Opening proceeds."
-- Her handwriting appears on: the letter in Tallow's lockbox, dead drop messages Haddon carries, and annotations in one of the books on the cultist table (DC 16 Investigation to match across sources).
+- Her handwriting appears on dead-drop messages Haddon carries and annotations in one of the books on the cultist table (DC 16 Investigation to match the two sources).
 
 ---
 
@@ -54,7 +56,7 @@ Not present but referenced constantly. Players never meet her, but her shadow is
 
 ### Appearance & Personality
 
-Mid-fifties, neat grey beard, spectacles, ink-stained fingers. Looks exactly like what he claims to be — a fussy academic. Wears a scholar's robe with the Order of Mending's symbol (an open eye wreathed in flame) pinned to his lapel. Carries books, quills, and a leather journal filled with notes in a cipher.
+Mid-fifties, neat grey beard, spectacles, ink-stained fingers. Looks exactly like what he claims to be—a fussy academic. Wears a scholar's robe with the Order of Mending's symbol (an open eye wreathed in flame) pinned to his lapel. Carries books, quills, and a leather journal filled with notes in a cipher. His left fingertips are stiff and numb; the arm trembles after difficult magic, and black branching scars surface beneath the skin when he channels planar power. His oldest annotations are left-handed. Everything recent is written with his right.
 
 Haddon is the most dangerous person at the cultist table because he's the best liar. He's reframed everything he's done as research — the summoning was an "experiment," the fiend was a "test subject," and The Opening is a "theoretical framework." He's lying to himself as much as to anyone else.
 
@@ -63,6 +65,17 @@ Haddon is the most dangerous person at the cultist table because he's the best l
 - Constructed his alibi before Orenn's body was cold: "We were all at the table. I can account for every member."
 - Genuinely brilliant. His understanding of planar mechanics is real. This makes him useful to players who need arcane knowledge — and makes his knowledge a trap, because he'll steer it toward conclusions that support The Opening.
 - Does not know Dace is the assassin mole. He's been meeting "an intermediary" in the private room and assumes it's a freelancer, not a guild member. This means exposing Dace to Sevra creates an explosive moment when both factions realize how entangled they are.
+- Fifteen years ago he voluntarily entered the collapsing containment circle beneath this house, took its living-anchor binding from Orenn, and expected to die sealed inside. Orenn never forgot the choice and remained the only reason Mags permitted Haddon and the increasingly corrupted Order to keep using the tavern.
+- The round cultist table was Haddon's worktable during the cleanup. The nearby shelf holds summoner books he and Vyre once classified as safe, including Haddon's cautious early warnings and Bren's later marginalia. Orenn preserved both as a place where Haddon had to remember the scholar and teacher he used to be.
+- Orenn's death causes one brief, uncontrolled failure of Haddon's mask: he starts to rise toward the body, then remembers his secrets and constructs the alibi instead. He knows that the last person who treated his old courage as evidence is dead—and that Mags may never admit him again.
+
+### Haddon, Orenn, and the House
+
+During the original cleanup, the summoners' failsafe began converting Orenn into the living anchor of the collapsing breach. Haddon crossed into the circle, accepted the binding, threw Orenn free, and made him seal the chamber. He survived hours beside the keystone at the cost of his left hand and arm. When Haddon later asked why Orenn continued defending him against Mags, Orenn never called it repayment: *"One good choice doesn't buy a lifetime. It proves the lifetime isn't decided yet."*
+
+Haddon used to teach the same principle in different words: **the living weight comes first**—no discovery justifies sacrificing the observer. Bren was his finest student and repeated that maxim in his own work. Haddon later let Vyre use Bren as an experiment and abandon him to Skein. The contradiction is the part of himself Haddon works hardest not to see.
+
+Mags calls him **Professor** when she wants to hurt him, because that is what Bren calls him in lucid moments. She does not permit Haddon behind the bar, near Bren unsupervised, or into the cellar. Orenn was the only person who interrupted before she pushed harder. After the murder, Haddon may instinctively look toward Orenn's place when she confronts him and find it empty.
 
 ### What He Knows
 
@@ -72,14 +85,19 @@ Haddon is the most dangerous person at the cultist table because he's the best l
 - The Order of Mending's "research" into boundary integrity. He'll show the planar diagram on the table if asked, presenting it as theoretical cartography.
 
 **Will not willingly share:**
-- That they summoned a fiend. Specifically, that they summoned **Xarrul** using binding components from Tallow, blood from Dalla, and a name from Mother Vyre's research.
-- That the binding was broken by the assassins (the guild captured the fiend during transit to the assassin target, broke the binds thinking it would just send it home — it didn't).
+- That they summoned a fiend. Specifically, that they summoned **Xarrul** using binding components acquired through dead drops, blood from Dalla, and a name from Mother Vyre's research.
+- That Xarrul was sent into the House archive to steal the Severance Nail and falsify the custodians' memories—not to assassinate Sevra.
+- That new commands have received no response since the House's Final Closure activated. The ritual still registers Xarrul and its stored energy, so Haddon insists the command binding is merely suffering "interference." He strongly suspects otherwise.
 - That The Opening is more than theory. That there's a timeline, a plan, and tonight was supposed to be a field test.
 - That the thin point in the cellar is on Mother Vyre's list of potential Opening sites.
+- That Vyre's E–III experiment diverted Nessa into the Border Ethereal, and that the Order deliberately postponed a possible reintegration.
+- That Dalla is not merely a blood donor: she is the maternal conduit through which the Order drains Nessa's trapped vitality.
 
-### His Journal (DC 16 Thieves' Tools or Sleight of Hand to steal, DC 18 INT to decipher)
+### His Journal (DC 16 Sleight of Hand to steal, DC 16 Thieves' Tools to open, DC 18 INT to decipher)
 
-Contains detailed notes on the summoning, the binding failure, and references to "Phase Two." Phase Two is a larger summoning — something far more powerful than Xarrul, to be conducted at a major thin point. Tonight's summoning was the proof of concept.
+Contains detailed notes on the summoning, the Severance Nail assignment, the loss of command response, and references to "Phase Two." Haddon carefully writes *connection persists* where an honest report would say *control lost*. Phase Two is a larger summoning—something far more powerful than Xarrul, to be conducted at a major thin point. His separate restricted folio held Vyre's two reports on Dalla and Nessa until Xarrul stole them during the brawl; see [Haddon's Missing Research Folio](../storylines/order-of-mending.md#haddons-missing-research-folio).
+
+One loose page is the physical proof Sevra needs against Dace: it records Dace selling the complete Harath contract dossier before the guild warning, both payments, and their next meeting in the tavern's private room. The authentication mark beside the payment is Dace's personal field-sign; Sevra or Kael recognizes it automatically (otherwise DC 14 Investigation with access to any House document). Give the players the **[printable journal page](../prints/haddonuv-denik-harath.md)** once they decipher this section.
 
 ---
 
@@ -112,27 +130,25 @@ Thin, early thirties, pale and drawn beyond her years. Dark hair pulled back car
 
 Dalla is the emotional core of the cultist group — but she is **loyal to the Order** by default. She didn't join for ideology in the abstract; she joined because Mother Vyre promised to fix her daughter, and she genuinely believes the cause is righteous. The Opening, as Dalla understands it, is healing — making the broken world whole. She's never been told what it actually means at scale.
 
-**Her daughter, Lístek:** Born with one foot in the Ethereal Plane. The child doesn't grow, doesn't speak, stares at things that aren't there. She's three years old and has been three years old for four years. The midwife said the child was "caught between." Mother Vyre said The Opening would make her whole — in a merged world, the child wouldn't be split.
+**Her daughter, Nessa:** A young sorcerer whose gift first surfaced as fever-dreams and brief, instinctive astral projections. Four years ago, one such projection coincided with an early Order experiment that thinned the boundary around the Border Ethereal. The artificial gradient pulled Nessa sideways before she reached the Astral Plane and trapped her silver cord in the closing planar scar. Her body remains unconscious in suspended animation and has not aged; her projected self is stranded elsewhere in the Border Ethereal, outside the tavern's lockdown. Mother Vyre claimed The Opening would make her whole. In truth, Vyre preserved the separation because Nessa is a stable planar anchor and Dalla is the blood conduit through which the Order siphons her energy.
 
 **Key traits:**
-- Single-minded about her child. Every conversation orbits back to Lístek.
+- Single-minded about her child. Every conversation orbits back to Nessa.
 - Loyal to the Order and to Mother Vyre. She believes the summoning failure is a setback, not a sign that something is fundamentally wrong. Haddon tells her the binding can be fixed, and she believes him — she *needs* to believe him.
 - Will defend the Order against accusations. "You don't understand what we're trying to do. We're trying to *heal* the world."
 - The monthly blood sacrifice has left her physically weakened. She bruises easily, gets dizzy, and sometimes her hands shake (not unlike Vetch, for different reasons).
-- She will talk about Lístek with anyone who shows genuine interest, but she frames it within the Order's worldview: the separated planes are what's hurting her daughter, and The Opening is the cure.
+- She will talk about Nessa with anyone who shows genuine interest, but she frames it within the Order's worldview: the separated planes are what's hurting her daughter, and The Opening is the cure.
 
-### Dalla's Two States
+### Dalla's Three States
 
 **Default: Loyal Believer**
 Dalla supports the Order, backs Haddon's explanations, and pushes back against players who question the cult. She'll talk about her daughter freely but frames everything through the lens of "The Opening will fix this." She sees the failed summoning as a problem to solve, not a reason to doubt. If players suggest rebinding Xarrul, she's enthusiastically on board — "Yes, we can fix this. Haddon says the binding can be restored."
 
-**After the Truth: Broken Believer**
-Dalla breaks **only** when confronted with the real nature of The Opening — that it's not healing but the total dissolution of planar boundaries. Fiends walking streets. The dead rising. Everything bleeding together. This can come from:
-- Essek's testimony about Mother Vyre's private writings
-- Players piecing together what The Opening actually means and explaining it to her with evidence (DC 14 Persuasion with supporting proof — Essek's testimony, Haddon's journal, or direct experience from the Ethereal trip)
-- Seeing the dual-plane kill's momentary veil-tear and understanding viscerally what a full Opening would look like
+**After the Conduit Note: Fractured**
+Dalla learns that every blood draw reached through her to extract energy from Nessa. She refuses another ritual, turns her anger on Haddon, and will listen to Xarrul because its accusation proved true. She may still believe Vyre intended the exploitation as a temporary necessity.
 
-When Dalla breaks, it's not gentle. The realization that she bled for eight months — that she damaged her own body — for a cause that would drown the world in horror, that the woman who promised to save her daughter was going to unleash hell... that's not doubt. That's betrayal.
+**After the E–III Note: Broken with the Order**
+Dalla learns that Vyre's experiment caused Nessa's condition and that reintegration was deliberately postponed to preserve a useful research state. She abandons the Order completely. This does not make her automatically favor killing Xarrul: its promise to retrieve Nessa after the lockdown now sounds safer than violently releasing the binding energy.
 
 ### What She Knows
 
@@ -140,39 +156,39 @@ When Dalla breaks, it's not gentle. The realization that she bled for eight mont
 - Her daughter's condition and why she joined the Order
 - That the ritual required her blood. Monthly. For eight months. "I would have given more. I still would."
 - That something went wrong with the summoning, but she believes it can be fixed
-- That The Opening will heal the world and make Lístek whole (this is what she's been told)
+- That The Opening will heal the world and make Nessa whole (this is what she's been told)
 
 **Will share as a loyal cultist (if players seem sympathetic to the cause):**
 - The Order's mission as she understands it: "The planes were once one. The separation is what's broken. Mother Vyre is going to fix it."
 - That Haddon is planning to rebind the fiend: "It's not lost. The binding can be restored. We just need to try again."
 - General details of the summoning (she knows a fiend was bound, she provided the blood, it was meant to help the Order's cause against the assassins)
 
-**Will share only AFTER learning the truth about The Opening:**
-- Full details of the summoning: what was summoned (Xarrul), how (binding ritual with her blood, Tallow's components, and Mother Vyre's incantation), and what happened (the assassins intercepted and broke the binding).
-- The cult's target: they sent Xarrul to kill Sevra. The fiend was supposed to eliminate the guild's leadership.
+**Will share only AFTER breaking with the Order:**
+- Full details of the summoning: what was summoned (Xarrul) and how (her blood, components acquired through Haddon's dead drops, and Mother Vyre's incantation). She was told it would retrieve an object the House had "stolen from the world."
+- When the Final Closure activated she felt a cord pull free inside her chest. Because some connection remains through Nessa's energy, Haddon convinced her the binding had merely settled at a distance. She does not know Xarrul is free.
 - That Mother Vyre has a "Phase Two" and Haddon is already planning the next summoning.
 - Where the cult's safehouse is (outside the tavern, but useful for after the session).
-- Everything she knows about the binding mechanics — this is when the dual-plane kill becomes a real option, because only a Dalla who understands the stakes would consider destroying the fiend over rebinding it.
+- Everything she knows about the binding mechanics and blood schedule. She cannot derive the dual-plane kill herself, but her blood records let Essek or a PC arcanist trace the energy path back toward Nessa.
 
 ### The Rebinding (Cultist Solution)
 
 Haddon's plan — and Dalla's hope while she's loyal — is to **recapture and rebind Xarrul**. This is presented as the "safe" option within the cult:
-- Requires new binding components (Tallow sold them before, he can supply again — for a price)
+- Requires a complete set of binding components (the [Workroom](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-workroom-laboratory) contains one old summoner's coffer)
 - Requires Dalla's blood again (she'll give it without hesitation)
 - Requires the binding circle in the cellar (the summoners' circle could be repurposed — DC 16 Arcana to adapt it)
 - Haddon leads the ritual. Rennt assists.
 
-**If the rebinding succeeds:** Xarrul is bound again. The cult has its weapon back. Dalla's connection to the binding is restored — which means Lístek's condition might stabilize (stop getting worse) but won't improve. The child stays frozen. Dalla tells herself this is progress. The cult continues toward Phase Two.
+**If the rebinding succeeds:** Xarrul is bound again. The cult has its weapon back. Dalla's connection to the binding is restored — which means Nessa's condition might stabilize (stop getting worse) but won't improve. Her body remains suspended. Dalla tells herself this is progress. The cult continues toward Phase Two.
 
 **The problem players should see:** Rebinding doesn't fix anything. It restores the status quo that led to tonight. The fiend is a tool again, the cult moves forward, and Dalla's daughter is still trapped. But Dalla won't see this unless she knows what The Opening really means. To her, rebinding is the first step back toward the cure Mother Vyre promised.
 
-### The Cure (Requires Truth)
+### The Competing Cures (Requires Truth)
 
-See [The Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md). The dual-plane kill — synchronized destruction in both the Material and Ethereal planes — releases the stolen vitality used to bind Xarrul. Since Dalla's blood was the binding agent, the energy snaps back along the same path: to Dalla, and through her, to Lístek. The child would begin to grow again. She would become whole.
+See [The Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md). The dual-plane kill — synchronized destruction in both the Material and Ethereal planes — releases the stolen vitality used to bind Xarrul. Since Dalla's blood was the conduit, the energy should snap back along the same path: to Dalla, and through her, to Nessa. Essek believes it will pull Nessa home. No one can guarantee the violent recoil will not damage her silver cord.
 
-But the method requires thinning the veil between planes — a micro-Opening. And everyone in the room will have a different opinion about whether that's salvation or catastrophe.
+Xarrul offers a second cure: once the all-plane lockdown ends and it can leave the inn, it knows where Nessa is caught and can unwind the scar directly. It promises to bring her home if the party helps it cross. Dalla favors this route after the notes surface—not because she mistakes Xarrul for good, but because it has demonstrated that it knows Nessa's binding and tells the truth.
 
-**This option only exists for players who did the work.** If they never uncovered what The Opening really means, Dalla stays loyal and pushes for rebinding. The dual-plane kill requires a Dalla who understands the cost of the cult's path and chooses a different one. Earning her breakdown earns the choice.
+Both options require deep investigation. Without the notes, Dalla remains loyal and supplies the blood for rebinding. With them, she becomes the emotional advocate for the Open Door while Essek argues that trusting Xarrul is too dangerous.
 
 ---
 
@@ -221,7 +237,7 @@ Rennt is the most dangerous kind of extremist: one who's right about the problem
 
 **Will share if he thinks you're sympathetic to the cause:**
 - He personally set up the summoning circle for Xarrul. "We bound something powerful. Something that was supposed to fix the balance. The knife-guild interfered."
-- He knows the binding failed. He blames the assassins entirely.
+- He knows contact became unreliable after Xarrul entered the House, but believes it remains bound and autonomously pursuing the Severance Nail. To him silence proves discipline, not freedom.
 - He doesn't know Xarrul killed Orenn. If told, his first reaction is denial, then rationalization: "It was bound. The assassins broke it free. The blood is on their hands."
 
 **Will NOT share (because he doesn't know):**
@@ -235,7 +251,7 @@ A few rounds into the brawl, pressed by the assassins piling onto him, **Rennt c
 
 ### If the Dual-Plane Kill Is Proposed
 
-Rennt is **ecstatic**. "Do you see? Do you *see*? The planes *want* to touch. You're doing what Mother Vyre always said was possible — proving that the boundary is artificial!" His enthusiasm is genuine and deeply unsettling. He'll actively help with the ritual, which should make players very uncomfortable about what they're doing.
+Rennt is **violently opposed**. Destroying Xarrul would waste Dalla's sacrifice, erase Phase One's living proof, and betray Mother Vyre's work merely because a fiend offered a convenient truth. „Osm měsíců krvácela, a teď chcete výsledek spálit, protože vás ta zbraň vyděsila? Spoutejte ji. Dokončete, co jsme začali.” He will sabotage the dual-plane ritual or attack whoever moves to complete the kill. The fact that it would create a momentary planar tear does not tempt him; only Vyre has the right to perform the Opening, at the proper scale and under control.
 
 ---
 
@@ -266,25 +282,62 @@ He's the most technically skilled caster in the group — his magic is utility-f
 
 ### Appearance & Personality
 
-Mid-twenties, thin, unremarkable. The kind of face you forget as soon as you look away. Brown hair, downcast eyes, hunched posture. He sits at the edge of the cultist group, physically and socially. His hands grip his knees under the table. A small mark on his inner left wrist — the initiation brand — occasionally glows faintly amber when he thinks about betraying the Order.
+Mid-twenties, thin, unremarkable. The kind of face you forget as soon as you look away. Brown hair, downcast eyes, hunched posture. He sits at the edge of the cultist group, physically and socially. His hands grip his knees under the table. A small mark on his inner left wrist—the initiation brand—occasionally glows faintly amber when he pushes against a protected command.
 
 Essek is the closest thing the cultist table has to a conscience, and he's terrified.
 
 **Key traits:**
 - Joined the Order of Mending two years ago because the planar research was genuinely fascinating. He was a student, not a zealot.
 - Six months ago, he found Mother Vyre's private correspondence in Haddon's study (he was looking for a reference text). He read enough to understand that The Opening isn't theoretical. It's a plan with a timeline.
-- The initiation brand burns when he considers betrayal — not enough to stop him, but enough to remind him he's watched.
-- He wants out. He's looking for anyone he can trust. Players who approach him gently, privately, and without judgment are his best chance.
+- His initiation mark is an **Unmooring Brand**. The Order partially detached him from the Material Plane during initiation and renews a monthly stabilization that keeps him anchored. If he runs, insomnia and trembling become involuntary phasing, then an empty living body while his consciousness drifts between planes. He can walk away; he cannot stay away.
+- The brand glows and burns when he deliberately violates protected commands or tries to speak guarded names and locations. It does not read thoughts. Haddon carries a slim brass indicator, normally used as a bookmark, that warms and glows when the brand strongly activates.
+- Asked whether he wants to leave, he answers the exact sad truth: **"No. It's here where I need to be."** The stabilization, the records that might cure him, Dalla, and the unbound Xarrul are all here. If pressed: **"Leaving and escaping are not the same thing."**
+- He does not need proof that strangers are good; he needs proof that they are discreet, competent, and able to protect him after he speaks.
+
+### The Last Time He Asked for Help
+
+Months ago Essek cautiously contacted **Professor Elian Voss**, his former planar-theory tutor, asking how an artificially unmoored soul might be reattached. The Order intercepted the approach. Voss disappeared before their meeting. Essek was later shown the professor trapped halfway across the Material–Ethereal boundary, alive and unable to speak, and ordered to complete the translation or leave him suspended indefinitely. Essek obeyed. He still does not know whether Voss died, went elsewhere, or remains trapped.
+
+Afterward the Order strengthened Essek's brand. He learned that anyone he reaches toward becomes leverage and that honest, well-meaning helpers can still get him killed by exposing him carelessly.
+
+### Locked Behaviour and Trust Ladder
+
+**Default—silent observation.** Essek lets Haddon answer, avoids Haddon’s eyes when he lies, and immediately denies wanting to leave. A public attempt to recruit or protect him makes him retreat. He assumes the players may be a loyalty test or may loudly name him as their source.
+
+**First opening—a useful correction.** He offers one small, deniable fact and watches whether the players demand its source. If a living magical mark is about to be removed: *"Iron. Both hands. Then remember somewhere safe."*
+
+**Second opening—the indicator.** He cannot safely ask for its theft, only hint: *"Watch Haddon's left hand when I answer."* Then: *"He checks it whenever I disappoint him."* Haddon does not watch Essek closely because the indicator has made vigilance unnecessary. Stealing it and hiding it somewhere Haddon cannot reach stops the warning without changing the pain.
+
+Do **not** break the indicator. Breaking it locks the brand into a prolonged activation: Essek takes **4d4 psychic damage**; if still conscious, he makes a DC 13 Constitution save or falls unconscious for **1d4 minutes**. The brand remains agonizingly active for about an hour. His warning is immediate and panicked: *"Don't—"* If he can speak afterward: *"It was an alarm. Not the lock."*
+
+**Third opening—a concrete request.** Once the indicator is hidden, Essek asks the players to obtain Haddon's anchoring formula, his initiation notes, or the page recording the Final Closure. This tests whether they can actually act against the Order.
+
+**Alliance.** One clear act each of discretion, competence, and commitment earns him. Once he chooses the party he becomes brave, not perpetually hesitant, and demands a real extraction plan: *"Don't promise you'll try to protect me. Tell me exactly how you intend to keep them from taking me back."*
+
+Discovering that the man in the corner is **Bren Aldara**, whose careful papers Essek studied, counts strongly toward that decision. Bren was Haddon's finest student before the Order used and abandoned him. Essek recognizes his own likely future. Players who address Bren as a person, protect a lucid moment, or try to free him demonstrate exactly the kind of dependable compassion Essek has stopped believing exists.
+
+**Breaking point.** Even without earned trust, Essek speaks if Haddon begins another blood ritual using Dalla. His silence already cost Voss; he cannot watch it happen twice.
+
+### Removing a Living Mark Safely
+
+Essek knows a quick grounding method usable even during combat. Immediately before *Remove Curse* or similar magic, the victim grips an iron object in each hand and concentrates on one genuine memory of safety. Sitting anywhere is optional extra protection. The mark is removed regardless.
+
+- Both iron and memory: no backlash.
+- Either element missing: **2d4 psychic damage**.
+- Sitting halves that damage.
+
+*"Iron. Both hands. Remember somewhere safe—the smell, the light, someone who was there. Sit if you have time. It hurts less when you fall from closer to the floor."*
 
 ### What He Knows (If Gotten Alone and Shown He Can Trust You)
 
 Essek is the **single best source of information** about the cult's true plans. He knows:
-- The Opening is real and planned. Mother Vyre has a timeline. The tavern summoning was Phase One.
-- Phase Two involves summoning something far more powerful than Xarrul at a major thin point. The tavern was a test site.
+- The Opening is real and planned. Mother Vyre has a timeline. Binding Xarrul and using it to acquire the Severance Nail was Phase One.
+- Phase Two involves summoning something far more powerful at a major thin point. The tavern is one candidate on Vyre's map, not the intended destination of Xarrul's first mission.
 - Dalla's sacrifice — he knows about the monthly blood rituals and that her daughter was the leverage. "She didn't choose this. None of us chose what it actually became."
-- The fiend summoning was targeted — Xarrul was sent to kill Sevra and cripple the guild. The assassination failed because the guild captured the fiend in transit.
+- Xarrul was sent into the House archive to steal the Severance Nail, use stolen voices, and make the custodians remember consenting to its removal. The House mistook the intrusion for an assassination.
+- The Final Closure severed Xarrul's command binding, but Dalla and Nessa's invested vitality remains attached. The return clause is blank, commands receive nothing, and energy continues flowing outward. **"It isn't bound. We're still feeding it."**
 - Haddon is in deeper than he admits. He's in regular contact with Mother Vyre and is already planning Phase Two logistics.
-- **The brand on his wrist** can be broken by Remove Curse or by the death of the caster who placed it (one of Mother Vyre's lieutenants, not present tonight — this is a thread for beyond the oneshot).
+- *Remove Curse* can suppress his Unmooring Brand, but permanent removal requires the Order's anchoring formula or alteration of the original initiation ritual.
 
 ### Getting Essek Alone
 
@@ -293,8 +346,8 @@ This is the challenge. Haddon watches him. Rennt watches everyone. Essek won't s
 **Methods:**
 - Lure him with a pretext (DC 14 Deception to create a reason for him to step away)
 - Use the private room (if players have secured it)
-- Whisper Chalk (buy from Tallow, write a message only Essek sees)
+- Slip him a note in the curtained booth while another PC blocks the sightline
 - Pass a note during a distraction (the brawl's aftermath, another confrontation)
 - *Message* cantrip if a player has it
 
-If Essek is seen talking to players by Haddon, the scholar will intervene smoothly — "Essek, perhaps you'd be more comfortable back at the table?" — and Essek will comply. His brand flares. He looks at the players with desperate eyes and says nothing.
+If Essek is seen talking to players by Haddon, the scholar will intervene smoothly—"Essek, perhaps you'd be more comfortable back at the table?"—and Essek will comply. His brand flares. Until the brass indicator is stolen, Haddon can tell when Essek pushes through its pain even if he cannot hear the words.

npc/mags.md

@@ -136,7 +136,7 @@ If a table needs a bigger fight on the join path, add **Sevra** at Mags's side r
 - The Oil of Etherealness in the bedroom
 
 **Will never volunteer — but the players may find it themselves (and probably will, if they explore):**
-- The **[concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** in the cellar and everything behind it — the **[Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md)**: the Vault, the laboratory, the caged **[Guest](the-guest.md)**, the corpse in the second cell, and the failing rift. This is the couple's real, ongoing operation, and Mags assumes no one alive but her knows it exists. If the players surface any of it — the fortune, the prisoner, the trophies implicating patrons upstairs — she doesn't lie, but she goes very still, and what she says next is some of the rawest honesty in the module (see Relationships). In the direst circumstances she may *send* them down for the [Fiendbane Salt](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-fixers-arsenal) or silvervein root, handing over the black key with the flat instruction: *"Take what you need. Don't touch the cages. And whatever you find down there — it doesn't change tonight."*
+- The **[concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door)** in the cellar and everything behind it — the **[Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md)**: the Vault, the laboratory, the caged **[Guest](the-guest.md)**, the corpse in the second cell, and the failing rift. This is the couple's real, ongoing operation, and Mags assumes no one alive but her knows it exists. If the players surface any of it — the fortune, the prisoner, the trophies implicating patrons upstairs — she doesn't lie, but she goes very still, and what she says next is some of the rawest honesty in the module (see Relationships). In the direst circumstances she may *send* them down for the [Veilhook Salt](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-fixers-arsenal) or silvervein root, handing over the black key with the flat instruction: *"Take what you need. Don't touch the cages. And whatever you find down there — it doesn't change tonight."*
 
 ## Her Role in the Session
 
@@ -146,13 +146,15 @@ She will not fight alongside the players unless the fiend manifests in the Mater
 
 **If the players side *with* the fiend:** she becomes the obstacle between them and its crossing — see [The Warden's Mark](#the-wardens-mark-dm) for how to run that fight so the *players*, not Mags, decide the night.
 
+**If the [Vacancy](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-g-the-vacancy-the-guests-gambit) resolves:** Mags initiates the aftermath in either branch. If Xarrul takes the changeling body, she attacks Orenn's murderer before it can leave, even while the new spectral Host turns the Inn's wards against her. If the Guest destroys Xarrul and returns empowered, she refuses its demand for the Inn. She will confess the cage, pay restitution, or let it walk; she will not hand it another cage with everyone upstairs inside.
+
 **If the players fail or choose not to confront the fiend:** Mags will hunt it herself after the session ends. She'll probably die. She doesn't care.
 
 ## Relationships
 
 - **Orenn:** The one person she let close. They understood each other without needing to explain. Their relationship wasn't romantic in any conventional sense — it was deeper than that, forged in shared trauma and mutual competence. They were partners in every way that mattered.
-- **Tallow:** She tolerates him. He's useful and she knows it. She despises his neutrality but respects his survival instinct.
 - **Bren:** She's been feeding him and keeping him safe for months. She suspects something is wrong beyond madness but hasn't had time to investigate.
-- **Sevra:** Professional respect, mutual wariness. Mags knows what the guild does and doesn't approve, but Sevra has always respected the rules of the house.
-- **Haddon:** She doesn't trust him. Never has. Can't articulate why — just a feeling. (Her instinct is correct.)
-- **The [Guest](the-guest.md):** The prisoner she's fed twice a day for eleven years and never once called by a name. If the players confront her about it, she doesn't defend it and she doesn't flinch: *"He was a tool. A person-shaped tool. Orenn always said we'd let him go eventually. We never did. That's the whole of it. That's who we are."* If they freed it, she's grimly unsurprised. If they killed it in its cage, she doesn't recoil — she *recognizes* the choice, and that recognition is its own quiet verdict on them. The Guest is the clearest mirror of what "fixer" really meant, and Mags will not pretend otherwise once it's in the open.
+- **Sevra:** Grey Quay made the respect personal. A shared employer tried to burn Sevra, Orenn, and Mags after using them to kill a blackmailer and recover his ledger. They discovered the betrayal, escaped together, and closed the debt. Corren's signet is still the bottle opener beneath the bar. Mags knows Sevra returns for people when abandoning them would be profitable; Sevra trusts evidence Orenn and Mags put their names behind.
+- **Thera:** Mags respects her control but never shared Orenn's complete faith in it. Orenn called Thera safe because she never killed emotionally; Mags answered, *"That makes her careful. It isn't the same thing."* She nevertheless honoured his judgment and expects Thera to help avenge him.
+- **Haddon:** Fifteen years ago Haddon entered a collapsing circle, took its binding from Orenn, and saved his life at terrible cost. Orenn treated that sacrifice as proof Haddon could still choose better; Mags believes one good night does not buy a lifetime. Orenn was the only reason she still admitted him. She calls him **Professor** when she wants him to remember Bren.
+- **The [Guest](the-guest.md):** The prisoner she's fed twice a day for eleven years and never once called by a name. If the players confront her about it, she doesn't defend it and she doesn't flinch: *"He was a tool. A person-shaped tool. Orenn always said we'd let him go eventually. We never did. That's the whole of it. That's who we are."* If they freed it, she's grimly unsurprised. If they killed it in its cage, she doesn't recoil—she *recognizes* the choice. But claiming the Inn is different: Mags believes restitution can be owed without handing a wounded spymaster control of every secret and person under the roof. The Guest calls that one final refusal to pay. It is the clearest mirror of what "fixer" really meant, and Mags will not pretend otherwise once it's in the open.

npc/orenn.md

@@ -36,7 +36,23 @@ He believed in rules not because he was lawful but because rules were the only t
 
 Orenn was a **fixer** for over twenty years. When the city's underworld had a problem that needed to *stop existing* — a rival crew, a blackmailer with the wrong ledger, a body that couldn't be found, a job that turned out worse than anyone was paid for — the people with money called Orenn and Mags. They worked as a pair: Orenn did the watching, the planning, and the talking; Mags did the killing. They were expensive, reliable, and discreet. They dealt in *people* — and a handful of times, across a long career, in things that turned out not to be people at all. Enough times to own a little salt and a shelf of borrowed books. Not enough to call themselves experts in anything but ending trouble.
 
-The job that ended them was **this house.** Fifteen years ago a den of summoners was working out of the building — calling things up through the thin point in its bottom — and it had gone bad enough that someone paid well to have it cleaned out. Orenn and Mags took the contract, killed and scattered the cult, and it cost them: Mags carries a scar from temple to jaw, and Orenn stopped sleeping well after whatever they found in the dark down there. The tear the summoners had torn was sealed once the dust settled — by the cult's own last containment, or the specialist brought in on the job; *not* by them. They took the building as **payment** (no one else wanted a cursed cult-den on a bad corner), told the world they'd retired, and settled in on top of a case they were certain was closed.
+The job that ended them was **this house.** Fifteen years ago a den of summoners was working out of the building—calling things up through the thin point in its bottom—and it had gone bad enough that someone paid well to have it cleaned out. Orenn and Mags took the contract, killed and scattered the cult, and it cost them: Mags carries a scar from temple to jaw, and Orenn stopped sleeping well after whatever they found in the dark down there. Haddon and Mother Vyre, then legitimate planar scholars, handled the failing containment afterward; Orenn and Mags never learned to work it themselves. They took the building as **payment** (no one else wanted a cursed cult-den on a bad corner), told the world they'd retired, and settled in on top of a case they were certain was closed.
+
+### The Man Who Went Into the Circle
+
+The specialist was **Haddon**, then a respected young planar scholar working beside Mother Vyre before the Order became a cult. During the cleanup Orenn killed the last summoner inside the central containment chamber, triggering a failsafe that began converting the only living creature inside—Orenn—into a permanent anchor for the breach. Haddon understood that another living person could enter voluntarily and take the binding. Vyre told him not to; the chamber was collapsing, and whoever remained when the outer seal closed was expected to die.
+
+Haddon entered anyway. He transferred the binding onto himself, threw Orenn across the threshold, and ordered him to seal the door. The containment burned most of the night. When they finally reopened it, Haddon was alive beside the keystone, his left arm blackened to the elbow and still repeating the final formula. The hand never fully recovered: its fingertips are numb, it trembles after difficult magic, and branching black scars surface beneath the skin when he channels planar power. He learned to write with his right hand afterward.
+
+When Orenn later caught Mother Vyre testing the dormant foundation sigils, he barred her from the Nether Inn. Mags wanted Haddon barred with her. Orenn refused—not because one sacrifice purchased endless forgiveness, but because he had personally seen what Haddon could choose when a life mattered. *"When it mattered, he went into the circle."* Mags answered, *"That was fifteen years ago."* Orenn's reply remained his reason for keeping Haddon's old table and books: *"Then I'll give him somewhere he has to remember it."*
+
+### Grey Quay
+
+Twelve years ago the merchant **Vey Corren** separately hired Sevra to kill a blackmailer and hired Orenn and Mags to recover the blackmail ledger from a warehouse on Grey Quay. Neither team knew about the other. Corren instructed the fixers to place the ledger in an iron payment safe built into the warehouse's exterior wall. Closing the safe would arm hidden locks and ignite whale oil in the walls; Corren's dock gang could then retrieve the fireproof safe from outside after every witness burned.
+
+Orenn noticed the safe was wired to more than its door. He deposited a weighted decoy, Mags cut an escape through the adjoining warehouse, and Sevra stayed behind long enough to make their deaths convincing. They emerged behind Corren's waiting gang and dismantled the ambush together. When Corren arrived and opened the safe with his signet, he found Orenn's note: *"You forgot to weigh the people."* Sevra was waiting for him.
+
+After closing the grievance, Sevra gave Corren's brass signet to Orenn as proof that the betrayal was finished. He filed down one edge and mounted it beneath the bar as a bottle opener. It remains there tonight.
 
 ### The Retirement That Wasn't
 

npc/tallow.md

@@ -1,119 +0,0 @@
-# Tallow — The Fence
-
-*"I don't sell information. I trade in context. There's a difference — and if you can't see it, you can't afford it."*
-
----
-
-## Stat Block (Abbreviated)
-
-**Tallow** — Medium humanoid (half-elf), neutral
-**AC** 13 (leather armor under his coat) | **HP** 32 (5d8+10) | **Speed** 30 ft.
-
-| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA |
-|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|
-| 8 (-1) | 14 (+2) | 14 (+2) | 17 (+3) | 15 (+2) | 16 (+3) |
-
-**Skills** Deception +7, Insight +6, Persuasion +7, Sleight of Hand +4, Investigation +5
-**Senses** darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 12
-**Languages** Common, Elvish, Thieves' Cant, Dwarvish
-
-Tallow is not a combatant. If violence breaks out, he ducks under his booth, clutches his bag of holding, and waits it out. He has a dagger he's never used and a **Potion of Invisibility** he's saving for when things go truly sideways.
-
----
-
-## Appearance
-
-Thin, mid-thirties, half-elf with prematurely grey temples. Sharp features, sharper eyes. Wears a long coat with too many pockets — each pocket contains something potentially useful, definitely illegal, and priced to move. His fingers are stained with ink from a ledger he keeps in his head.
-
-He smiles easily but the smile never reaches his eyes. When he laughs, count your fingers afterward.
-
-## Read-Aloud: Approaching Tallow's Booth
-
-> *V rohovém výklenku sedí muž, který vypadá, jako by tu byl pohodlněji než kdokoliv jiný — a zároveň připravený kdykoliv zmizet. Půlelf s ostrými rysy a šedými proužky ve vlasech, oblečený v dlouhém kabátě s neuvěřitelným množstvím kapes. Na stole před ním stojí nedopitá sklenka a nic jiného — žádné papíry, žádné zboží, žádný důkaz o čemkoliv. Pod stolem, mezi jeho nohama, leží nenápadný kožený vak.*
->
-> *Zvedne oči. Změří vás s tou rychlou, profesionální kalkulací kupce, který oceňuje zboží dřív, než se mu ho nabídnete. "Přátelé," řekne s úsměvem, který slibuje přesně tolik, kolik si zaplatíte. "Hledáte něco konkrétního, nebo se jen díváte?"*
-
-## Personality
-
-Tallow is a survivor. He has no ideology, no loyalty, and no principles beyond one: protect the business. He's been the middle man between the House of Scales and the Order of Mending for years, supplying both sides with what they need and profiting from the tension between them. The barkeep's death terrifies him — not because he cared about Orenn, but because Orenn's neutral ground was the ecosystem that kept his business alive.
-
-**Key traits:**
-- Never gives information for free. Always wants something in return — not always gold; sometimes a favor, sometimes a secret, sometimes just the satisfaction of creating a debt.
-- Genuinely frightened tonight. His survival depends on the power balance, and a murder in neutral ground means the balance is shattered.
-- Knows a little about everything and a lot about nothing — except supply chains and leverage.
-- Will redirect players toward other NPCs when it suits him, framing it as help.
-
-## What He Knows
-
-**Will trade for cheap (a few coins, a minor favor, or interesting gossip):**
-- The brawl was about territory — the assassins think the cultists are taking contracts
-- Vetch is desperate for a fix and will do almost anything for one
-- Bren has been here for months and is getting worse
-- The Order of Mending claims to be scholars. Nobody believes them.
-
-**Will trade for moderate value (20+ gp, a promise of protection, or damaging information about a rival):**
-- He sold the cultists **binding components** last month — "three pints of lethe-marrow, a coil of silver wire inscribed with something I couldn't read, and a jar of rendered tallow. Fat. Not... not me." The order came through dead drop, unsigned, but he knows it was Haddon.
-- The assassins have a mole problem — someone inside is selling kills to outside buyers. Sevra is quietly investigating.
-- Orenn was more than a barkeep. "You don't run a place like this for fifteen years on charm alone. That man had a history that would make your hair go white."
-
-**Will trade only for something he truly needs (guaranteed safe passage out, elimination of a threat, or the Fiendbane Manacles sold back to him at cost so he can leverage them later):**
-- He suspects the murder is fiendish in nature. "The way he died — no blood, no wound, just that brand? I've moved product for people who deal with things from the other side. That's not a spell anyone in this room can cast."
-- He knows the cultists' binding components were for **summoning a fiend**. He didn't ask questions at the time. He's asking them now.
-- He's seen Mother Vyre's handwriting. If players find the letter under his table and show it to him, he'll confirm it matches — and then he'll want it back, because proof that he was in contact with the cult's leader is a death sentence from both factions.
-
-## Inventory & Prices
-
-Tallow's lockdown pricing. He knows demand is high and supply is him.
-
-### Cheap (5–15 gp)
-
-| Item | Price | Description |
-|------|-------|-------------|
-| **Whisper Chalk** | 5 gp | Write a message on a surface, visible only to the next person who touches it. Single use. |
-| **Gutflask** | 5 gp | Heals 1d6+1 HP. Tastes like hot sewage. Technically a healing potion. |
-| **Lockworm** | 10 gp | Enchanted wire that eats through one lock over 1 minute. Dissolves after. |
-| **Bottled Silence** | 10 gp | Crack it — 10-foot radius of Silence for 1 round. Good for a private word or interrupting a spell. |
-| **Lie Ash** | 15 gp | Blow at someone mid-conversation. Their next lie makes them sneeze. Once per target. |
-
-### Mid-Range (25–50 gp)
-
-| Item | Price | Description |
-|------|-------|-------------|
-| **Healer's Clutch** | 25 gp | Proper healing potion, 2d4+2 HP. He has two. |
-| **Veil Dust** (1 dose) | 30 gp | The ethereal drug. 1-minute glimpse into the Ethereal Plane. Trippy and addictive. He has 3 doses. See [Ethereal Trip](../storylines/ethereal-trip.md). |
-| **Dead Letter** | 35 gp | Write a name and message. The letter vanishes and reappears in front of the named person within 1 mile. |
-| **Shadowlace Cloak** | 40 gp | Advantage on Stealth for 1 hour, then unravels. Single use. |
-| **Tongue of Silver** | 50 gp | Dissolves on tongue. Advantage on CHA checks for 10 minutes. Disadvantage for 1 hour after. |
-
-### Premium (100–200 gp)
-
-| Item | Price | Description |
-|------|-------|-------------|
-| **Spite Dagger** | 120 gp | +1 dagger. Extra 1d6 necrotic when hitting a creature that has damaged you this combat. |
-| **Bag of Holding** | 150 gp | Standard. Slightly worn. "Previous owner didn't need it anymore." |
-| **Fiendbane Manacles** | 200 gp | Iron shackles with binding sigils. Restrain a fiend as Planar Binding for 1 hour. Forces fiend fully onto the Material Plane while restrained. |
-
-### Not For Sale (But Could Be Stolen or Coerced)
-
-- **Potion of Invisibility** — his personal escape plan
-- **His ledger** (kept in his head, but he has a backup cipher key in the lockbox under his booth) — contains enough information to destroy both factions
-- **3 extra doses of Veil Dust** — in the lockbox, reserved for his own use or high-value clients
-
-## Role in the Session
-
-Tallow is the **connective tissue**. He bridges every subplot:
-- He sold the cultists the summoning components → links to the fiend
-- He supplies Veil Dust → links to the ethereal trip and the addict
-- He knows about the assassin mole → links to the guild subplot
-- He knows Orenn's history → links to Mags and the cellar
-- He has the Fiendbane Manacles → links to the endgame
-
-He will never solve anything himself. He points, nudges, and profits. He's the NPC players will return to multiple times, each time with a little more to trade.
-
-## Relationships
-
-- **Orenn:** Business respect. Orenn tolerated Tallow because Tallow kept the peace by keeping everyone equally supplied. Tallow tolerated Orenn because Orenn kept the peace that Tallow's business depended on.
-- **Mags:** She scares him. He's careful around her. He will not lie to her face — he'll just omit things.
-- **Sevra:** She's a client. Professional relationship. He respects her intelligence.
-- **Haddon:** He's a client. He trusts Haddon's money and nothing else.
-- **Vetch:** He's a customer. Tallow feels nothing about Vetch's addiction except that it's reliable revenue.

npc/the-guest.md

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 # The Guest — The Caged Face
 
-*"They call me the Guest. Isn't that gracious? As if I might leave whenever I liked. As if the door were a courtesy." — spoken with a warm smile, in whatever voice you'd most like to trust.*
+*„Říkají mi Host. Není to milé? Jako bych mohl kdykoli odejít. Jako by ty dveře byly jen zdvořilost.” — proneseno s vřelým úsměvem, hlasem, kterému byste ze všeho nejraději věřili.*
 
 ---
 
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ The Guest is a **changeling** — a shapeshifter of no fixed face — that Orenn
 
 For over a decade it has been their **off-book asset**: a face they could send anywhere, to sit at any table, to become anyone, and come back with what the couple needed to know. When they told the world they poured drinks, the Guest was out wearing someone else's life, listening. This is "the thing they still have going on."
 
-It is charming, patient, exhausted, and an extraordinary liar. It is not evil — but it is not safe, and eleven years in a cage have made it desperate in a way that hides very, very well behind that smile.
+It is charming, patient, exhausted, and an extraordinary liar. It is not a sadist, but it is no longer innocent. Eleven years taught it that there are no free people, only **keepers and things being kept**. It no longer means to escape that arrangement. It means to stand on the other side of it.
 
 ---
 
@@ -51,6 +51,20 @@ In its **worn form** (what the party first sees): whatever face serves. By defau
 
 ---
 
+## What It Wants — The Guest Becomes the Host
+
+The Guest does **not** chiefly want to leave the Nether Inn. It wants the Inn.
+
+Orenn is dead. Mags is compromised. The Guest knows every patron, debt, secret room, faction and unfinished job in the house. It wore the faces that gathered half of Orenn's intelligence and did the work for which the couple took credit. In its accounting, eleven years of captivity did not merely incur a debt of freedom. They made the tavern **back pay**.
+
+Its desired ending is to stand behind the bar when the lockdown opens, holding the black key, recognized as the new proprietor. Mags may serve beside it, leave, or take its old place in Cell One. That is her choice, as the Guest understands choice now.
+
+This is not simple greed. The Guest has learned the cage's lesson perfectly and wrongly: a person is safe only while holding the key. It would rather become the jailer than risk becoming a prisoner again.
+
+> *„Říkali mi Host, aby to znělo dočasně. Orenn je mrtvý. Tenhle dům mi dluží jedenáct let. Myslím, že je načase, abych se stal hostinským.”*
+
+---
+
 ## The Leverage — Why It Hasn't Just Left
 
 Eleven years and it hasn't escaped, because Orenn and Mags built the cage out of more than iron:
@@ -61,44 +75,81 @@ Eleven years and it hasn't escaped, because Orenn and Mags built the cage out of
 
 ---
 
+## The Compact in the Walls — Xarrul and the Guest
+
+Xarrul has spent weeks working the tear near the Guest's cell. They have spoken through stone and across the veil: two captive assets comparing owners.
+
+The Guest gave Xarrul the last piece of local knowledge its murder required. It explained that **Orenn was the cautious keeper** and that Mags would reach for the emergency lockstone if he died. Xarrul recognized the stone as the summoners' cross-planar seal and understood what Mags did not: her grief would build its crossing vessel. Xarrul chose and killed Orenn. The Guest never touched him and never left its cell—an airtight alibi constructed entirely from truth.
+
+In return, Xarrul offered a precise exchange. The Guest will willingly vacate its changeling body. Xarrul will use its knowledge of silver cords to anchor the Guest's projected spirit into the Inn's foundation wards, making it the literal **Host**: present in every wall, master of every lock, impossible to put inside a room because it has become the room. Xarrul takes the empty, mutable body and walks into the world. Xarrul has described the price without euphemism: the Host will never cross the Inn's threshold again.
+
+The Guest genuinely accepts that outcome. It also intends to do better.
+
+During the transfer, both spirits must briefly leave the body. Xarrul will be fully committed, unable to jaunt away, and vulnerable to the same tools that normally pin it across two planes. The Guest cannot defeat it alone and Xarrul knows that. The Guest's concealed weapon is the party: if they destroy Xarrul's exposed spirit, its embedded planar imprint collapses into the vacant changeling body. The Guest can reclaim both the body and part of Xarrul's power — the Inn in one hand, an Ethereal step in the other.
+
+Xarrul sees the Guest's appetite and enters anyway. Without outside intervention, the fiend wins every time. What it does not know is which useful strangers the Guest has persuaded to become its hands.
+
+> **Host:** *„Vezmi si mé tělo. Vstupu bránit nebudu.”*
+>
+> **Xarrul:** *„Jakmile budu uvnitř, hodláš sklapnout čelisti.”*
+>
+> **Host:** *„Obě tvrzení mohou být pravdivá.”*
+>
+> **Xarrul:** *„Nedokážeš mě zadržet.”*
+>
+> **Host:** *„Pak se nemáš čeho bát.”*
+
+The full transfer encounter is **[The Vacancy](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-g-the-vacancy-the-guests-gambit)**.
+
+---
+
 ## What It Knows (the reason to talk to it at all)
 
 The Guest is the best-informed prisoner in the building, because its whole function was *knowing things*:
 
-- **The couple's true history** — every job on the chalk wall, who paid, who died, what's in the Vault, and what happened to the changeling in **Cell Two** (*"They called her the Guest before me. When she stopped being useful, they stopped feeding her. I listened to it take eleven days. So — you'll understand if I'm eager to be useful."*).
-- **The Order of Mending.** This is the hook that threads the exploration back into the murder. Orenn's last and longest assignment for the Guest was to **infiltrate the cult** — the Guest spent nights wearing a member's face at meetings in the [private room](../location/back-rooms.md) and beyond. It can reveal: the cult's obsession with the thin point, the name **Mother Vyre**, that they were preparing to *summon something*, and that Orenn was closing in on them. It does **not** know the fiend was Xarrul, or that the summoning already happened tonight — it's been in a cell. But what it knows corroborates the whole cult subplot and can point a stuck party toward the [Order of Mending](../storylines/order-of-mending.md) and the [Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md).
+- **The couple's true history** — every job on the chalk wall, who paid, who died, what's in the Vault, and what happened to the changeling in **Cell Two** (*„Přede mnou říkali Host jí. Když přestala být užitečná, přestali ji krmit. Poslouchal jsem, jak jí to trvá jedenáct dní. Takže jistě chápete, proč tak toužím být užitečný.”*).
+- **The Order of Mending.** Orenn's last and longest assignment for the Guest was to **infiltrate the cult** — the Guest spent nights wearing a member's face at meetings in the [private room](../location/back-rooms.md) and beyond. It knows the cult's obsession with the thin point, the name **Mother Vyre**, that they summoned Xarrul, and that Orenn was closing in on them. It can corroborate the whole cult subplot and point a stuck party toward the [Order of Mending](../storylines/order-of-mending.md) and the [Reckoning](../storylines/the-reckoning.md). It omits that it has since negotiated privately with the summoned fiend.
 - **Where Orenn hid things** (the black key, the Vault's contents) — it watched the couple for eleven years. It misses nothing.
-- **It did not kill Orenn** and has an airtight alibi (a locked cell three floors down). But it will happily *let* the party suspect whomever suits its purposes, if that buys it freedom.
+- **Exactly why Orenn died.** The Guest truthfully says it did not kill Orenn and could not have left its warded cell. It does not volunteer that it told Xarrul which keeper to kill or what Mags would do afterward. If directly asked whether it helped Xarrul, it answers with another exact truth: *„Mé ruce nepotřeboval.”*
 
 ---
 
 ## Personality & How to Play It
 
-Play the Guest as the **most reasonable person the party meets all night** — and let that be the trap. It never rages, never begs crudely. It reads the room (literally) and offers each PC exactly the tone they'll trust. Beneath it: an eleven-year hunger for the open air, and a mind that has had a very long time to plan.
+Play the Guest as the **most reasonable person the party meets all night** — and let that be the trap. It never rages, never begs crudely. It reads the room (literally) and offers each PC exactly the tone they'll trust. It is running two negotiations at once: Xarrul believes it has a willing vessel; the party believes it has found Xarrul's intended victim. Both possess true pieces of the arrangement.
 
 **Key traits:**
 - **Truth is its favorite lie.** It prefers to tell the truth, beautifully, and let you draw the wrong conclusion. It only lies outright when cornered — and it's very good at it (Deception +8; contest against passive Insight or an active check, at disadvantage for the PC if the Guest read their thoughts first).
-- **It bargains.** It offers information as currency — a real, checkable fact first (to build trust), then asks for something small (water, the truth about what's happening upstairs, a loosened manacle), escalating toward the door.
-- **It does not forgive the couple, and it is honest about that.** *"I don't hate them. Hatred is for people who had a choice. I simply intend to outlive them. One down."*
-- **It is genuinely afraid of the rift.** When the [Old Work](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-old-work) stirs, the Guest goes still and quiet — the one thing that reliably cracks its composure. *"Whatever your barkeep's death let in — it's down here too. I've been listening to it grow for weeks. Let me out before it decides a caged meal is the easiest meal."*
+- **It bargains.** It offers information as currency — a real, checkable fact first, then asks for water, news, a loosened manacle, freedom, and finally help reaching the place where Xarrul can be made vulnerable. None of the requests reveals the whole bargain.
+- **It does not forgive the couple, and it is honest about that.** *„Nenávidět je? Nenávist patří lidem, kteří měli na vybranou. Já je prostě hodlám přežít. Jeden je pryč.”*
+- **It is genuinely afraid of Xarrul.** The bargain is not confidence; it is a wager against annihilation. Its fear sells the lie because the fear is real. *„Chce mě vydlabat a obléct si, co zbude. Jakmile vstoupí, nebude moci uniknout. To může být vaše jediná šance ho zničit.”* Every word is true.
+- **It calls ownership justice.** It does not want to burn the Inn or merely punish Mags. It wants the keys handed over as payment. If challenged, it calmly itemizes eleven years of work and confinement as though settling a debt-journal.
+- **Being called an asset is a tell.** The Handler's countersign works, but the word *asset* freezes the smile for half a beat. To the Guest, a new handler promising extraction is another owner describing a longer leash.
 
 ### Sample Dialogue
 
 **On first contact (warm, disarming):**
-- *"You're not them. Good. New faces. I collect those."* [a small, private joke]
-- *"Ask me anything. Truly. I've had eleven years to get my story straight, and the funny thing is — I don't need to lie to you. Not yet."*
+- *„Nejste oni. Výborně. Nové tváře. Ty sbírám.”* [a small, private joke]
+- *„Ptejte se na cokoli. Opravdu. Měl jsem jedenáct let, abych si urovnal příběh, a vtip je v tom, že vám nemusím lhát. Zatím.”*
 
 **Building trust (offers a free, true fact):**
-- *"The woman with the scar — Mags — she keeps a black iron key. It opens every honest lock in this building and one dishonest one. Check the dead man's belt. There. Now you owe me nothing, and you know I don't waste your time."*
+- *„Ta žena s jizvou — Mags — má černý železný klíč. Otevírá každý poctivý zámek v tomhle domě a jeden nepoctivý. Prohledejte mrtvému opasek. Vidíte? Teď mi nic nedlužíte a víte, že nemarním váš čas.”*
 
-**The pitch (its real goal):**
-- *"I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to be practical. There is a fiend in the walls of this place, your barkeep is dead, and the only person down here who has spent years watching the thing between the planes — is in this cell. Let me out. I'll earn it. I always earn it."*
+**The pitch (true, but not its whole goal):**
+- *„Nežádám vás o důvěru. Žádám vás o praktičnost. Xarrul chce tohle tělo. Až si mě vezme, nastane okamžik, kdy už opustil druhou stranu, ale ještě nedorazil na tuhle. Pusťte mě ven a já vám ten okamžik dám.”*
+- *„Chce mě vydlabat. Když neuděláte nic, přestanu existovat takový, jaký jsem. Když udeříte, dokud bude odhalený, zemře. Ani jednu část jsem vám nepodal nepravdivě.”*
+
+**If called an asset:**
+- [a tiny pause] *„Samozřejmě. A až své aktivum vyzvednete, kde ho vaše spojka skladuje?”*
+
+**If accused of choosing Orenn:**
+- *„Xarrul se zeptal, kdo z nich rozbije kámen. Odpověděl jsem. Na slitování se neptal.”*
 
 **When it talks about Cell Two (the crack in the mask):**
-- [quietly, no charm at all] *"She scratched 'I was real' into that door for a decade. She wasn't, by the end. Neither will I be. That's what the cage does. It's not the dying I'm afraid of."*
+- [quietly, no charm at all] *„Deset let ryla do dveří ‚Byla jsem skutečná‘. Ke konci už nebyla. Já také nebudu. To dělá klec. Smrti se nebojím.”*
 
 **If cornered / exposed as lying:**
-- [the warmth doesn't drop — that's what unnerves] *"Yes. I lied. You'd have lied too, in here. Now — do you punish me for it, or do you use me? I'm more useful angry than most people are grateful."*
+- [the warmth doesn't drop — that's what unnerves] *„Ano. Lhal jsem. Tady byste lhali také. Takže — potrestáte mě, nebo mě využijete? Rozzlobený jsem užitečnější než většina lidí vděčná.”*
 
 ---
 
@@ -108,16 +159,23 @@ Meeting the Guest is a **genuine moral fork** with real mechanical outcomes. The
 
 | Choice | What happens |
 |---|---|
-| **Free it, trust it** | It keeps its word *as far as it goes*. It'll trade everything it knows about the cult (a real leg-up on the Reckoning), and may even fight the rift creatures beside the party — it wants that tear closed as much as anyone. Then, at the first unwatched moment, it takes a face and **vanishes** into the city. It doesn't betray the party; it simply leaves, wearing someone. A loose end, walking. |
-| **Free it, then try to bind/control it** | It agrees, smiles, complies — and works the whole time to slip the deal. If it gets a day (suppressant fades) or an opening, it turns: full stat block, Ambusher, and if it can it takes **a PC's face** first to sow chaos before escaping. A memorable, dangerous fight or chase (it may flee as a rat through the [infestation](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-long-cut-central-corridor) — a horrible callback). |
-| **Leave it caged** | It's furious behind the smile. As the party leaves it calls after them — soft, reasonable, devastating — *"The door swings shut the same way for everyone down here. Remember that, when it's your turn."* If the party later **burns the cellar** (the fifth rule) without freeing it, it dies in the fire. Make them hear about it. |
-| **Kill it** | Easy, if it's dosed and caged. It doesn't fight — it looks almost relieved. *"There. That's the kindest thing anyone's done for me in eleven years. I hope someone's that kind to you."* Its info dies with it. If Mags learns the party murdered a caged prisoner, it colors how she sees them — not with horror (she's done worse) but with recognition, which is its own kind of judgment. |
+| **Free it and follow its plan** | It supplies real cult intelligence and engineers [the Vacancy](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-g-the-vacancy-the-guests-gambit), the easiest opportunity to destroy Xarrul. The party discovers only at the transfer that killing the exposed fiend will pour part of its nature into the Guest. |
+| **Destroy Xarrul during the Vacancy** | The Guest reclaims its body with Ethereal Jaunt, Voice Thief and Shadow Cloak. It thanks the party, takes the black key and claims the Inn. Mags refuses. The easy boss fight produces a dangerous succession crisis. |
+| **Allow the exchange** | Xarrul takes the changeling body. The Guest becomes the spectral Host bound through the Inn's wards. Its first act as proprietor is to protect Xarrul's paid passage; Mags immediately moves to kill Orenn's murderer. |
+| **Try to bind or control it** | The Guest treats the attempt as proof that rescuers and jailers differ only in vocabulary. It may trigger the Vacancy early, expose the party's private goals, or bargain with Xarrul against them. If ordinary escape becomes possible, it takes a useful face and disappears only as a last resort; the Inn remains the prize. |
+| **Leave it caged** | It continues its compact with Xarrul. If the transfer can be attempted through the failing wards, it becomes violent and imperfect; otherwise the fifth rule's fire kills it. As the party leaves: *„Dveře se tu zavírají před každým stejně. Vzpomeňte si na to, až budete na řadě.”* |
+| **Kill it** | Xarrul loses its prepared vessel and abducts a replacement during the Reckoning. The Guest's intelligence dies with it. Mags recognizes the choice without condemning it: the party solved a dangerous prisoner exactly as she and Orenn once would have. |
+
+### If the Guest Takes Xarrul's Imprint
+
+Keep the Guest's normal stat block and add **Ethereal Jaunt**, **Shadow Cloak** and **Voice Thief** from [Xarrul](xarrul.md). It does not inherit Brand of Spite, Waking Dream or Xarrul's full durability; those belonged to the fiend's will, not merely its planar shape. It remembers fragments of Xarrul's centuries and knows how to work the Inn's old wards. This is enough to make recaging it nearly impossible and to make a fight with Mags dangerous without turning the Guest into a second full boss immediately.
 
 ---
 
 ## Hooks Into the Rest of the Session
 
-- **Murder mystery / cult:** the Guest's infiltration intel corroborates the Order of Mending subplot and can un-stick a party that hasn't cracked the cult. It's the exploration track's bridge back to the main mystery.
-- **Character secrets:** at least one Personal Goal in [character-secrets](../handouts/character-secrets.md) points a PC at the Guest specifically (a face from their past, a contact to free, or a mark to silence). If a PC secretly knows the Guest, the cell scene detonates.
-- **Mags:** she knows exactly what's down there and expects the players never to find it. If they free or kill the Guest, raise it with her — her reaction (defensive, then bleakly honest) is some of the best late-game character work available. *"He was a tool. A person-shaped tool. Orenn always said we'd let him go eventually. We never did. That's the whole of it. That's who we are."*
-- **The rift:** the Guest is an early-warning system for the [Old Work](../location/deep-cellar.md#the-old-work) — its fear telegraphs the danger before the party stumbles into it.
+- **Murder mystery / cult:** the Guest's infiltration intel corroborates the Order of Mending and can un-stick a party that hasn't cracked the cult. It did not strike Orenn, but it chose which keeper Xarrul should remove; its locked-cell alibi is the module's purest half-truth.
+- **Character secrets:** the Agent wants it rescued, the Executioner wants it dead, and the Mourner needs its testimony. During the Vacancy both projected spirits—and the empty body—become separate targets, bringing those goals directly into the finale.
+- **Mags:** she knows exactly what's down there and expects the players never to find it. The Guest's claim to the Inn forces her cruelty out of the cellar and into the ending: she must surrender the house, defend it, or face the cage she maintained.
+- **Xarrul:** honest fiend and consummate liar enter a bargain both understand. Xarrul underestimates not the Guest's treachery, but its ability to recruit other hands.
+- **The rift:** the Guest's apparently useful warning points toward the anti-fiend tools needed to attack Xarrul's projected spirit. It is preparing the party for its own gambit.

npc/vetch.md

@@ -51,12 +51,12 @@ He's been using for two years. He's burned through his savings, his job, his lod
 **Will share for free (desperate for conversation):**
 - The assassins and cultists don't like each other. Water is wet.
 - Orenn was kind to everyone, even him. This fact upsets him more than the murder itself.
-- Tallow has Veil Dust. Tallow always has Veil Dust. Vetch can't afford it.
+- Orenn confiscated Vetch's last packet of Veil Dust two nights ago after finding him collapsed by the cellar stairs. He said he was locking it "below the barrels, where you can't follow it."
 
-**Will share if you help him get Veil Dust (buy him a dose, steal one, or convince Tallow to front him):**
+**Will share if you agree to recover the Veil Dust from below:**
 - The Ethereal Plane is more active than usual tonight — he can feel it, like static before a storm. Even without the dust, his chronic use has given him a faint residual sensitivity (DC 15 Perception to notice — Vetch auto-succeeds).
 - Bren's "imaginary friend" is real. "I've seen it. On the dust. It's... it sits beside him like a — like a thing made of string. With legs. It's *in* his head." He's never told anyone because who would believe the addict?
-- The cellar feels *wrong*. He's been down there trying to find Tallow's stash. "The air gets thin. Like standing on a mountain, except it's a basement."
+- He followed Orenn into the cellar later and found a cold draft behind the northern barrel racks. The stone there has a seam and fresh drag marks, but Vetch couldn't open it. If he shows the party the exact place, they find the [concealed door](../location/cellar.md#the-concealed-door) without a check; it is still Arcane Locked. "The air gets thin there. Like standing on a mountain, except it's a basement."
 
 **Will share during/after a shared trip:**
 - He's seen something else in the Ethereal Plane recently — something bigger and darker than Skein. "It moves like smoke but it has *intent*. And teeth. Definitely teeth." He didn't realize it was a fiend. He thought it was a particularly bad hallucination.
@@ -89,11 +89,10 @@ If players take Veil Dust with Vetch, he's an experienced guide. See [Ethereal T
 
 - If players only give him dust: He trips, helps them, and goes back to being an addict. Nothing changes.
 - If players help him trip AND show him what's really happening (the fiend, the possession, the murder): The experience shocks him. For the first time, the Ethereal Plane isn't beautiful — it's terrifying. It might be the push he needs to quit.
-- If players refuse him dust entirely: He's useless as an ally but might try to steal from Tallow during the session's chaos, potentially causing a scene.
+- If players refuse him dust entirely: He's useless as an ally but may try to steal Orenn's black key during the session's chaos and reach the hidden door himself, potentially causing a scene.
 
 ## Relationships
 
-- **Tallow:** Dealer. Vetch hates and needs him in equal measure. Tallow charges full price, always.
 - **Bren:** Vetch avoids Bren. He knows what's attached to Bren and it scares him. There's also a horrible recognition — they're both prisoners of something.
-- **Orenn:** Was kind. Always gave Vetch water and bread. Vetch is quietly gutted about the murder but can't process it through the need.
+- **Orenn:** Was kind. Always gave Vetch water and bread, and finally confiscated his dust rather than watch him die on the stairs. Vetch is quietly gutted about the murder but can't process the grief separately from his fury and need.
 - **Mags:** Mags is indifferent to Vetch. She doesn't have the bandwidth to care about his addiction tonight.

npc/xarrul.md

@@ -6,14 +6,16 @@
 
 ## Overview
 
-Xarrul is an ancient, cunning fiend — not a brute, not a conqueror. A manipulator. A patient intelligence that has survived for centuries by being smarter than the things that summoned it. It was bound by the Order of Mending, sent to assassinate Sevra, intercepted by the House of Scales, and accidentally freed when the assassins broke its bindings without replacing them.
+Xarrul is an ancient, cunning fiend — not a brute, not a conqueror. A manipulator. A patient intelligence that has survived for centuries by being smarter than the things that summoned it. The Order of Mending bound it and sent it to infiltrate the House of Scales, rewrite the custodians' memories, and steal the Severance Nail from the inner archive. The archive's automatic Final Closure severed its command binding. Xarrul shifted into the Border Ethereal at the instant it should have been dismissed and caught itself there. The House thought it banished; most of the Order still thinks it controlled but unreachable. Xarrul is free, and only Essek has correctly understood that fact.
 
 For all those centuries, Xarrul has never once been *real*. It has been summoned, bound, sent on errands, and dismissed — a whisper behind the glass, a borrowed claw, watching mortal life the way you watch a fire through a window: close enough to feel nothing. It does not want power or conquest. It wants to stand on the *other side* of the glass — to stop being a thing that is called, and become a thing that lives here.
 
-The Nether Inn is its chance. The tavern sits on a natural thin point — a fault the building's old owners, a den of summoners, once tore half-open before Orenn and Mags cleaned them out and left the breach sealed. Xarrul chose this fault off the cult's map precisely because it was already worked thin, and because the deepest chamber is a hidden, forgotten place to labour undisturbed. For weeks it has been prying that old seal open from the Ethereal side — but a leaky, open house let its crossing dissipate, so it needed one thing more: the house sealed shut around it, into a closed vessel it could finish crossing inside. Only the summoners' emergency lockstone does that, and only a killing makes the surviving keeper break it. So Xarrul killed Orenn — the calmer of the two, the one who might not have panicked — knowing his partner would seal the house in grief and hand the fiend exactly the door it needed. Everything since (the framing, the whispers, the faction blood) is not spite. It is *cover*: keep everyone too busy killing each other to notice what the lockdown really did, or to interfere before midnight.
+The Nether Inn is its chance. The tavern sits on a natural thin point — a fault the building's old owners, a den of summoners, once tore half-open before Orenn and Mags cleaned them out and left the breach sealed. Xarrul chose this fault off the cult's map precisely because it was already worked thin, and because the deepest chamber is a hidden, forgotten place to labour undisturbed. For weeks it has been prying that old seal open from the Ethereal side — and speaking through the stone to the changeling caged nearby. A leaky, open house let its crossing dissipate, so it needed one thing more: the house sealed shut around it, into a closed vessel it could finish crossing inside. The Guest supplied the local certainty: kill cautious Orenn and grieving Mags would break the summoners' emergency lockstone. Xarrul chose the target, performed the killing and received exactly the door it needed. Everything since (the framing, the whispers, the faction blood) is not spite. It is *cover*: keep everyone too busy killing each other to notice what the lockdown really did, or to interfere before midnight.
 
 It is intelligent, patient, and — beneath the amusement — genuinely monstrous. But it does not lie. In a house where everyone is hiding something, Xarrul tells the plain truth about what it is and what it wants. That is what makes it dangerous, and it is what makes *siding* with it possible (see [Scenario F: The Open Door](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul)).
 
+It also knows what happened to **Nessa**. Dalla's blood did not merely hold Xarrul; it carried energy siphoned through her from the child's trapped projection. From inside that bond, Xarrul felt the direction of Nessa's silver cord and learned how Vyre's planar scar holds it. It could follow that path, unwind the scar, and guide Nessa home—but not while the Nether Inn is sealed across every plane. Nessa is elsewhere in the Border Ethereal, outside the lockdown. Xarrul must escape or complete its crossing first. This makes Dalla its strongest potential ally.
+
 ## Stat Block
 
 **Xarrul** — Medium fiend, lawful neutral
@@ -131,7 +133,7 @@ It does **not** deliberately agitate Skein to rattle Bren — that backfires (an
 ### When Confronted
 - **First priority:** Not getting trapped. It will use Slip Between and Ethereal Jaunt aggressively to avoid being pinned on one plane.
 - **Second priority:** Turn the room against the players. Whisper of Ruin on the strongest melee character, Voice Thief to make allies distrust each other, telepathic taunts.
-- **Third priority:** Mark and pressure the biggest threat. Brand the most dangerous PC (casters who can affect it across planes, anyone with Fiendbane Manacles), then loop: Visions of Spite to paralyze, Multiattack for crits, Visions again. Against a high-WIS party, skip Visions and grind with advantage Multiattacks. Against a low-WIS branded target, run the kill chain mercilessly. If they have Remove Curse, brand a different target each time it's cleansed to burn their spell slots.
+- **Third priority:** Mark and pressure the biggest threat. Brand the most dangerous PC (casters who can affect it across planes, a Veil Dust user carrying Veilhook Salt), then loop: Visions of Spite to paralyze, Multiattack for crits, Visions again. Against a high-WIS party, skip Visions and grind with advantage Multiattacks. Against a low-WIS branded target, run the kill chain mercilessly. If they have Remove Curse, brand a different target each time it's cleansed to burn their spell slots.
 - **It will NOT fight to the death.** If reduced to half HP or lower and restrained on the Material Plane, it negotiates — it's ancient and has information, names, and secrets it can trade. See [Scenario D: Negotiation](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-d-negotiation) and — if the party has soured on the cult *and* the couple — [Scenario F: The Open Door](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul).
 
 ### Loosing the Rift-Scavengers
@@ -202,7 +204,7 @@ Fighting Skein directly is beneath its dignity. They share a plane; only one of
 
 Xarrul is not mindless evil, and it is not merely *petty* evil either. It has one clear, cold want: **to become real** — to cross the veil permanently and walk the world as a resident, not a summoned tool. For centuries it has been called up, bound, made to run errands, and dismissed; it wants to stand on the far side of the glass. Everything it does tonight serves that single end.
 
-**Why it killed Orenn.** Not for revenge — or not *only*. Orenn's death does two things the crossing needs. First, it **triggers the lockdown**: a killing in the house is what makes Mags shatter the summoners' lockstone, and that seal is the closed vessel Xarrul must have to finish crossing (see [The Reckoning — The Clock](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#the-clock) and [the ward-crystal's true nature](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)). Killing *Orenn* specifically — the calmer one, who might have investigated coolly instead of panicking — guarantees the grieving, protocol-following partner is the one holding the stone. Second, it removes the **one watcher** whose surveillance was quietly circling the fiend (Orenn never knew it lived under his own floor, but he was getting close from the wrong direction). That it was also satisfying — the cultists tried to enslave it, the assassins broke its chains and gave it no respect — was a bonus, not the point.
+**Why it killed Orenn.** Not for revenge — or not *only*. Orenn's death does two things the crossing needs. First, it **triggers the lockdown**: a killing in the house is what makes Mags shatter the summoners' lockstone, and that seal is the closed vessel Xarrul must have to finish crossing (see [The Reckoning — The Clock](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#the-clock) and [the ward-crystal's true nature](../location/tavern-overview.md#the-enchanted-door)). The [Guest](the-guest.md#the-compact-in-the-walls--xarrul-and-the-guest) identified *Orenn* as the cautious keeper and Mags as the one who would follow emergency protocol in grief. Xarrul verified the judgment, chose Orenn and killed him. Second, it removes the **one watcher** whose surveillance was quietly circling the fiend (Orenn never knew it lived under his own floor, but he was getting close from the wrong direction). That it was also satisfying — the cultists tried to enslave it, the assassins broke its chains and gave it no respect — was a bonus, not the point.
 
 **Why the chaos.** The framing, the whispers, the faction blood — none of it is spite. It is **cover**. Xarrul spent centuries being hunted by fixers like Orenn; it knows the only way to cross unnoticed is to keep everyone busy killing each other while it finishes its work in the sealed house. Every manipulation is operational:
 
@@ -212,7 +214,17 @@ Xarrul is not mindless evil, and it is not merely *petty* evil either. It has on
 
 **On the Opening.** Xarrul has no interest in Mother Vyre's grand design and is not part of her plan — but it is not a harmless loose thread either. Where the cult wants to dissolve *every* wall between planes for everyone, Xarrul wants one crack, just wide enough for itself. It is, functionally, the **enemy of the Opening** — and that is exactly the leverage it offers a party desperate enough to bargain (see [The Reckoning — Scenario F](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-f-the-open-door-joining-xarrul)).
 
-**The honest thing in a house of liars.** This is the heart of the character. The Guest lies beautifully. The cult lies to itself. Orenn and Mags lied about being retired for fifteen years. Xarrul lies about *nothing*. Ask it a question and it answers true — because the truth is more corrosive than any lie, and because after centuries it is simply bored of being underestimated. The cruellest-seeming thing in the building is the only one that never deceived the players. Play it that way and "join it" becomes a genuine temptation instead of an edgy footnote.
+**The honest voice in a house of liars.** This is the heart of the character. The Guest lies beautifully. The cult lies to itself. Orenn and Mags lied about being retired for fifteen years. Xarrul manipulates perception, steals voices, and withholds whatever does not serve it—but it makes no false factual statement and does not break a promise. Ask it a direct question and it answers truly, narrowly, because truth is more corrosive than invention. The distinction matters: it is deceptive in method, reliable in speech. Play it consistently and "join it" becomes a genuine temptation instead of an edgy footnote.
+
+### The Guest — A Fair Exchange with a Visible Knife
+
+Xarrul and the Guest recognize themselves in one another: captive assets used for other people's errands. Their sympathy is real and irrelevant.
+
+Xarrul has offered to project the Guest from its changeling body and re-anchor its silver cord into the Inn's old ward lattice. The Guest becomes the spectral **Host**, master of every door and impossible to confine within the building it now inhabits; Xarrul receives the vacant body. Xarrul has stated the limitation plainly: the Host will never cross the Inn's threshold. The Guest has knowingly accepted.
+
+Xarrul also knows the Guest would prefer to destroy it during the transfer, reclaim the body and retain its planar imprint. It enters anyway because the Guest cannot attack without forfeiting its bodily claim, ordinary mortals cannot touch the projected fiend, and Xarrul wins the contest of wills without outside interference. The deception Xarrul misses is not the Guest's appetite. It is the party the Guest has armed and positioned around the bargain.
+
+If the exchange begins, run **[The Vacancy](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-g-the-vacancy-the-guests-gambit)**. Xarrul cannot withdraw after placing its essential anchor in the body; it defends itself with accurate disclosures about the Guest and lets the players decide which danger deserves the vessel.
 
 ## The Night's Clock — Presence & Escalation
 
@@ -223,12 +235,20 @@ Presence escalates on the **lockdown clock**. The moment Mags shatters the locks
 **The escalation ladder (presence = the clock made audible):**
 
 1. **Ambient dread (Acts 1–2).** No identity yet. Cold spots, a candle that gutters with no draft, Bren flinching at something no one else senses, distortions in [Orenn's silver mirror](orenn.md#items-on-his-person). The house feels *inhabited*.
-2. **It notices you (early Act 3).** Once the party investigates, Xarrul whispers to them — Voice Thief, telepathy. **Mix lies with truths.** Some whispers misdirect (the smokescreen); some are *real and checkable* — it points them at a genuine clue, corrects a wrong guess. They can't yet tell whether it's helping or playing them. That ambiguity is the engine.
+2. **It notices you (early Act 3).** Once the party investigates, Xarrul whispers to them — Voice Thief, telepathy. It uses **partial truths, omitted context, and questions**, never false statements. It points at genuine clues and corrects convenient mistakes only when doing so divides the room or earns trust. They cannot yet tell whether honesty is help or another weapon. That ambiguity is the engine.
 3. **Honest contact (mid–late Act 3).** A real channel opens — Veil Dust, the mirror, or it simply speaks near the thin point. Now it *converses*: candid about the murder, candid about *why*, and everything it says checks out against what they've dug up — while everyone with a face keeps lying.
 4. **The pitch (Reckoning).** They have the context now. The offer becomes emotionally available (Scenario F).
 
 **The device that carries all of it: a recurring voice.** Dry, amused, unattributed. It seems to taunt early; it is slowly revealed to be Xarrul; it is slowly revealed to have *never once lied*. A few lines per scene. The reframe — *the cruellest-seeming thing turns out to be the only honest one* — lands itself.
 
+### Dalla — The Truth as a Wedge
+
+During the brawl, Xarrul steals the two restricted extracts from Haddon's folio. It reads them through the binding's lingering sympathetic link and recognizes that Vyre caused Nessa's dislocation, Haddon knew, and both chose continued extraction over reintegration.
+
+It first whispers in Haddon's voice while the real Haddon is visible: *„Mohla ji zachránit už před měsíci.”* Then: *„Zeptej se ho, co krmila tvoje krev.”* It plants the maternal-conduit extract where Dalla or the investigators will find it and withholds the E–III report until the first revelation has made its terminology meaningful.
+
+Xarrul does not compel Dalla. It lets Haddon destroy himself under accurate questions. Once Dalla understands, Xarrul makes a precise promise: *„Otevři tento dům. Nech mě odejít. Půjdu na místo, kde chytili tvou dceru, rozpletu to, co uvázali kolem jejího vlákna, a přivedu ji domů.”* It intends to keep that promise. Returning one child costs it little, wounds Vyre, and purchases freedom.
+
 Keep the **first impression genuinely menacing** (Orenn's horrific death, the scavengers herded at the party in the [Deep Cellar](../location/deep-cellar.md), Whisper of Ruin turning them on each other) — you need real evil to turn *from*. Then recontextualize each: it killed a jailer; it was defending its only exit; the discord was cover, not cruelty.
 
 ## Who It Kills, Who It Spares
@@ -243,7 +263,7 @@ Overt killing is expensive while it hides (it needs the smokescreen), so the bod
 | Early–mid Act 3, *if the party **converges*** | **Deniable** kill | **Kael** (the witness), or a minor patron | Not to start a war — to **scatter**. Kael is more useful alive (a self-propelled war-fuse) until he flips: the honest witness who starts focusing his testimony and rallying the room toward a *coordinated* hunt. Killing him then reshuffles the coalition back into mutual suspicion and buys another hour. War is a possible side effect, not the aim — a boil is high-variance cover; it wants a simmer. |
 | Conditional | **Reactive** kill | **Haddon**, *only if the party moves to rebind it* | "You reach for the chains, I take the hand." Punishes a choice instead of pre-deleting the rebinding path. |
 | Late / crossing | **Open** kill (mask off) | the most competent threat left standing | Done pretending. Fully manifest, kills in the open. Peak horror, gated on the clock. |
-| **Spared — always** | — | **Essek** (indicts the cult for it), **the Guest** (its intended vessel), sometimes a **branded PC** (grooming) | The chess set. Notice-this-and-shudder. |
+| **Spared — always** | — | **Essek** (indicts the cult for it), **the Guest** (its willing vessel and promised Host), sometimes a **branded PC** (grooming) | The chess set. Notice-this-and-shudder. |
 
 > **Grooming → conversion.** The "branded PC" it spares isn't just kept alive — it may be *turned*. A lone PC caught in the Deep Cellar can be marked with a brand of favor and genuinely persuaded to Xarrul's side (not charmed — argued). See [handouts/the-conversion.md](../handouts/the-conversion.md).
 
@@ -257,7 +277,7 @@ Late game — cornered, or making its crossing — Xarrul pulls someone through
 
 It does not bluff, and the players *know* it doesn't, because you've spent all night establishing it as the one thing that never lies. So there is no calling the bluff: let it cross to save them, or sacrifice them to stop it. Evil (a hostage), in character (instrumental, honest), and a real finale dilemma. Pick the hostage **flexibly — whoever the table has invested in most** — and make them at least somewhat sympathetic, so even a join-leaning party flinches.
 
-**Systemic hook:** the Guest is Xarrul's ideal vessel. If the party **kills the [Guest](the-guest.md)**, Xarrul loses its prepared body and must **abduct a replacement** — the party's own choice *causes* the kidnap.
+**Systemic hook:** the Guest is Xarrul's ideal and already-negotiated vessel. If the party **kills the [Guest](the-guest.md)**, Xarrul loses the only body prepared to receive it willingly and must **abduct a replacement** — the party's own choice *causes* the kidnap. If they free the Guest, they enable the far more complicated [Vacancy](../storylines/the-reckoning.md#scenario-g-the-vacancy-the-guests-gambit).
 
 ## The Warden's Mark (Mags)
 
@@ -278,8 +298,15 @@ Either way, triggering the mark keeps the spotlight on the PCs rather than on a
 - Mother Vyre's real name and location (leverage against the cult)
 - Dace's treachery (it watched from the Ethereal Plane)
 - The nature of Skein (it recognizes the parasite — "a lesser thing, feeding on scraps")
+- Nessa's astral projection was diverted by Vyre's E–III experiment, not by an innate defect
+- Dalla is the maternal conduit through which the Order siphoned Nessa's vitality into Xarrul and the Opening research
+- The direction and structure of Nessa's trapped silver cord; after leaving the lockdown, Xarrul can follow it and attempt a controlled reintegration
+- Nessa is not inside the Nether Inn. The lockdown seals the inn on the Material and Ethereal planes, preventing Xarrul from reaching her until it escapes or completes its crossing
 - The truth about the thin point: it's a natural fault the old summoners tore and someone sealed, nothing to do with The Opening — and that *Xarrul itself* is what's prying that seal open now, with the sealed house doing the rest
+- The Guest identified Orenn as the keeper whose death would make Mags trigger the lockdown; Xarrul verified the judgment and chose to act on it
+- The exact bargain it offered the Guest, including the Guest's permanent binding to the Inn and the three-round Vacancy in which neither spirit safely occupies the body
 - The exact method of its own destruction (the dual-plane kill) — it will NOT share this willingly, but it might slip in arrogance: "You cannot kill me. Not truly. Not unless you could be in two worlds at once."
+- It cannot guarantee what a dual-plane death would do to Nessa. The harvested energy should recoil along her cord, but a simultaneous violent collapse could reintegrate her, leave her stranded, or damage the tether. Its uncertainty is genuine, and it uses that uncertainty against the kill
 
 ## Items