Morning comes to Cheddar under a pale autumn sun, the mist still hanging low over the meadows and hedgerows. The vicar's house smells faintly of bread and woodsmoke, and Ramsey is given a simple breakfast before setting out. The mayor is nowhere to be seen, but Worthington gives him a small paper-wrapped bundle — cheese, bread, and an apple — for his walk.
The road east toward the Mendip Hills is a quiet one. The hedges grow thick here, and rooks circle overhead, their calls carrying far in the cool air. A couple of farmers pass Ramsey with carts of turnips and swedes bound for Cheddar market, and each gives him the cautious once-over typical of rural folk assessing a stranger.
As the hills rise ahead, he spots a column of smoke twisting from a patch of woodland to the north. The charcoal burners’ camp, most likely. The path to it is less a road than a narrow, muddy track, and he can feel the air grow cooler and stiller as the trees close in. The scent of burnt wood mixes with something else — a faint but unpleasant tang, not unlike the slimy substance he found in the forge yesterday.
Ramsey steps into a small clearing where three low huts of turf and wood sit around a smouldering charcoal mound. Two men are working nearby, their faces and clothes blackened from soot. One has an axe in hand; the other, a long hook for tending the mound.
They stop when they see Ramsey approaching them. The man with the axe narrows his eyes. “Don’t get many visitors,” he says, voice rough. “What’s your business here?”
The unpleasant smell is stronger now. Ramsey can’t see the source — it’s not the charcoal — but it’s definitely here.
Ramsey decides to make an Observation test using his Empathy score but fails the first roll. He pushes it and succeeds with 6x1.
When he leans in a second time the clearing seems to open up for him: the slime is not random dribble but a thin trail, half-dried, leading from the edge of the charcoal mound straight into the little copse to the north. The smell is the same foul, oily tang he found in the forge. As he follows the trail with his eyes he picks out other, smaller details that a casual glance missed:
The ground under the slime shows depressions that aren’t like sheep or oxen. They’re a little too narrow and too long, with four shallow gouges at the front like splayed toes. The stride is irregular — sometimes a long loping step, sometimes a short, awkward shuffle — as if whatever made them can change posture.
On a nearby thorn-bush a tuft of coarse dark hair is caught and stuck fast with the same greasy slime. It looks like horsehair at first, but the strands are a touch thicker and stiffer than normal, and there’s a faint singeing at the tips as though they passed close to flame or heat.
A small pile of gnawed bone fragments lies half buried in the leaf litter, the edges rasped as if something with teeth dragged at the marrow. A sapling nearby bears upward scratches at about shoulder height.
The air around the path feels a degree colder, and the birds have gone quiet; even the pop of the charcoal fires seems damped. The burners’ hackles rise when Ramsey points this out.
The charcoal burners exchange looks. One mutters, “That’s fresh—less than a night old.” He gestures toward the woods. “We lost a mare two nights back near the north hollow. Weird lights were seen. If you can follow that trail...” He stops, eyes on the smeared hair, and looks at Ramsey with a mixture of hope and fear.
Ramsey tries to talk to the burners to get some more information out of them about the beast. Sadly, he fluffs his first Empathy/Manipulation roll, pushes it, and fluffs the second. This gives him the Hopeless mental condition.
The burners’ faces harden almost as soon as Ramsey starts talking.
At first they just exchange those wary sideways looks again, but when he presses — asking where the mare was lost, what they saw, whether they’d come with him — the man with the axe spits into the dirt.
“You asking too many questions for a stranger,” he says flatly. “And you’ve got the stink of trouble about you. We don’t need more trouble.”
The other hooks a thumb toward the track back to Cheddar. “If you’re wise, you’ll be on your way. That thing don’t like being hunted, and neither do we.”
They turn back to their work, clearly shutting poor Ramsey out. The only sign they even heard him is the way they keep watching him out of the corners of their eyes. The trail of slime into the copse is still there — but Ramsey would be going without their blessing or guidance if he follows it up. The other alternative is to examine the hair and bones. It seems like cowardice to go back to the vicarage empty-handed...BUT this is a solo game, and Ramsey is not sure he wants to face the vaesen alone. Seems a bit terrifying to me. But interesting.
This solo game is also going to be useful in helping me to learn the rules of Vaesen as I plan on running a West Country Vaesen game with actual players in the not too distant future...
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