2026-03-09 11:15 - 16:00 PST
Thalia Kairos and Father Frances ventured to the outskirts of town, to a condemned laboratory, where Oswald Foxglove made his poisons. Per Ryu’s warnings1, their mark would be on the lower floors, and that there would be traps along the way. They made their way down and, Obfuscated, Thalia confronted him.
The facility that Thalia opens up smells fragrant and floral, overwhelmingly so. The interior has been completely transformed into an interior garden, with harsh LED lights attached to the ceiling. Botanist’s tools and other gardening implements are organized neatly along shelves and holders. Inside the facility is, as Ryu suggested, not something that looks like a man. The creature’s torso is completely hollow, with some sort of unidentifiable plants and fungi cultivated inside. Like a terrarium. Smaller terrariums can be seen along the creature’s legs and arms. Only the creature’s head resembles anything humanlike. Oswald’s face is almost as disturbing as his body. Inverted nose, spiny, dirt covered cheeks, oversized glossy eyes. As the shadows start to creep into the room, Oswald looks up from his work. A torpored Kindred, organs still intact, dissected and splayed across a lab table. In a sharp, irate voice, he asks: “Please, kindly, visit another time.”
He activated some traps and they destroyed him, limb by limb, until there was nothing that could move. Then Thalia gathered up his still unliving pieces into a bag and Frances healed the torpored kindred. This turned out to be someone Thalia knew.
Thalia would have actually spoken with this man at Ally’s community center, quite some time ago. He tried to pass as a caitiff, ended up being a high generation Tzimisce. Thalia warned him to stay out of trouble. Roy, the man on the table, has long black hair, a firm jawline, and thick eyebrows. Boyband “bad-boy” sort of demeanor. He’s not fully conscious, still, but he may wake if fed another point of blood.
Before leaving, Thalia found what her informant was after,
Meanwhile, Thalia has been searching for the device or tool Ryu warned her about. In Oswald’s hollow chest cavity, attached to his exposed heart, is some thin, square strip of metal, with a few near-microscopic holes. Thalia has never seen anything like it.
And Frances found a journal documenting Oswald’s metamorphosis.
Frances uncovers a great deal of complicated anatomical textbooks, biology lab reports, and, most notably, the depraved ravings of Oswald. In a simple journal, Oswald documents his process of metamorphosis, attributing it to a blend of Vicissitude2, Quietus3, and something called Enlightened Science4. Frances doesn’t know of that last discipline. Oswald claims that he’s devised a means of replicating the terrarium technology he had worked on in life and hopes that his newest subject will be proof of that reproduction.
Footnotes
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The signature blood-altering power of the Banu Haqim ↩
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what ↩