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Gypsy Gale Candy
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Inside the thick front door is a tall and cozy room that could best be described as a foyer. She gets a fire started and asks you to sit down before running off into an adjacent hallway. The place is very big, very quiet and quite intimidating. I imagine it was originally built by a person who owned lots of land and people, though its design and architecture isn’t familiar with existing plantations of the old world. The fire was nice and warm, though, and the big leather couch parked next to it was soft and comfortable. The red haired woman returned moments later with a stack of blankets, clothes, footwear and other sundries before scurrying off again. I thought there was a family or maybe an organized group that lived here, but I can’t hear any signs of life beyond the two of us. She comes back again, this time with a cup of hot black tea in each hand, hands me a cuppa and sits down on a chair opposite the couch.
“My name is Clara,” she states firmly, “and my mother and grandmother raised me to believe that one day a true man would return to the world, and if that happened I ought to be hospitable to him, to have clothes, tools and weapons ready for use. I’ve been waiting for this day my entire life and… I don’t even know how to feel. You act like you don’t know why you’re here, which scares me. Please, tell me the whole story, how you got here and what you’ve been doing.”
>"I woke up not long ago with no memory in a room with only a bed, and a note informing me that outside the room I was in was a guard who would kill me if I opened the door. What is the likelihood that one of these 'masters of fate' arranged this?"
“No, that doesn’t sound like their style. They’d kill you in your sleep rather than play games. I have a feeling someone else set this up, maybe as some kind of test. If you’re supposed to be a hero, they wanted to make sure you could stand up to the task.”
>Ask her if the letter sequence YDBM means anything to her.
“Hmm. I wanna say I saw that carved into a tree somewhere, but I can’t recall. Honestly, those letters could mean anything, but it certainly isn’t common in these parts.”
I tell her about the notes left inside and outside the house, and about meeting the stranger at the “Marble Gardens”.
“Right, that makes more sense now. YDBM is probably an monogram of someone’s name, though I couldn’t tell you who. I’ve never seen any marble gardens in real life, but they’re a location in a popular children’s story, a place where the innocent can live and laugh, free from the threat of monsters and mutants. Many adults have taken to calling the afterlife the Marble Gardens, others insist that it’s a real place, like the Fountain of Youth or the City of Gold, but anyone who actually goes looking for the place never returns to tell of it. Hell, maybe they do find the gardens and never wish to return? Must be a nice place.”
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