Play Report 31 — Worlds Dampest Physician

After getting his ass kicked by the corpse-eaters, Hant needs medical care or risks death while trying to recover from his wounds. Wary of using a public sanatorium run by royalists, Almuund takes it upon himself to find someone, and puts an enticing offer into the Valley Collaboration: he is willing to pay good money to a healer who could, on short notice, help someone out with wounds of unnatural origin, and who perhaps ideally would be willing to do additional work in the future in and around nightmares. I have one npc in the settlement who would definitely respond to this with interest, and I go to the retainer hiring procedure in tnu to see if any others appear. I get two more results: a neutral agent, and an assassin. The assassin maps pretty well to another local npc, and the agent is easy enough to spin up on the go, so Almuund has the following leads:

A man named Maxwell claims that he can have a real deal physician scholar from Catage here within a day.
Malcolm Gladstone, the guy who runs the prestigious local windmill, has experience as a field medic from the war and would let someone recuperate on his homestead under his eye for a price. (the fact that he is an evil assassin who feeds the unfortunate of the city to the horrible windmill-shaped entity he lives with is not a known quantity)
Adhira, a woman Hant briefly encountered previously while recovering from Basilisk-Man venom, says she is a capable healer with magical ability. (her past as the high priestess of a nightmare temple in which she aimed to trap as many people as possible as revenge for the destruction of her culture, before she was ousted by a new priest, is not a known quantity… yet)

Almuund decides to hire Adhira. She arrives the next night, quietly sneaking a variety of objects into the room the party is renting: a bowl of still wet mud, an incense holder shaped like a boat, a piece of splintered wood of unknown origin, and multiple jugs of frigid river water. These are placed around Hant’s bed, and she dons a set of soaking wet robes and chants over his body, restoring use of his leg and speeding the overall healing process. She will repeat this process for 10 days, drawing patterns of mud on the floor and pouring river water on Hant. When not looked at directly, the mud patterns seem to squirm.

Before and after the treatments, Adhira Almuund and Hant have some conversations.

Adhira asks, while taking off the sodden black cloak and donning something warm and dry, what the party goes into nightmares for. “Research,” says Almuund. It isn’t quite what she wanted to hear but she decides to try to aim the party at her rival nightmare priest anyways. She volunteers the location of The River Temple, saying that she served it as a priestess “of the river kingdom” before it was overwhelmed by a nightmare. She warns the party of Matheo, its current high priest, calling him a liar who wishes to entrap all of humanity in the nightmare (true, but so did she, once — she is conflicted on whether she would do so again given the opportunity).

Almuund takes these opportunities to ask about a lot of things, such as more river facts. Adhira confirms that a wooden boat he pulled from the river much further south is of the river kingdom’s craft, and that she knows of the upside-down river the party encountered down there — “a deathtrap,” she calls it. “Don’t go in there.” Almuund also makes her an offer to trade spell formulae, as he really wants to know Cure Wounds. Adhira accepts when Almuund pitches in the expenses top record her formula, in addition to writing and providing a formula of his own (Truth Telling, in this case. She can see uses for it).

Hant feels some genuine sympathy when hearing of another whose spirituality has been displaced by something different and worse.

At the end of 10 days, Hant is back on his feet and has a new noticeable chest scar. The party prepares for another, more cautious and considered, crack at the local nightmare.