Who: Brother and sister, elves, the people who actually run the Reformation Center in Vallaki. By Izek’s account they came into the Baron’s service about thirty years ago. They use magic to change minds, and they have guards of their own whose loyalty Izek no longer trusts.
Where: A comfortable sitting room inside the Reformation Center, in two armchairs.
Status: Hostile. We are standing in front of them. Nobody has rolled initiative yet.
First met: Session 14, on the new burgomistress’s first order.
What we saw
The Baron talked about “the twins” as if they were a good bakery. Ernst told us what their tea and their rooms do to people. Leena at the supply shop no longer remembers her husband because of them. Until this evening none of us had seen them.
They were sitting in armchairs, unhurried, in a room that looked more like a study than a prison office. We told them the Baron was dead and the burgomistress had ordered them to stop. Their answer was that they work for the Burgomaster, and that what we described sounded like a coup. They pointed out, correctly, that we had been talking to the devil. They called him a monster. Then they defended their own work in the same breath: they are “making them think right.” They are “cleaning their heads.”
We said, in so many words, to stop that. One of them said we had no authority here and that this was going to be annoying to clean up. Then the room went quiet in the way rooms do just before a fight.
What we do not know
- What “cleaning” actually involves, beyond the tea and the rooms Ernst described. We searched an office on the way in that held decades of intake and treatment logs.
- How many of the Center’s guards are theirs. The two in the courtroom did not recognise Izek and drew on him, which he did not like.
- What they did to Izek. That office had a cot extended with a crate and a chair built for a very large man, and he has no memory of ever being in it.
- Whether “annoying to clean up” means us.
Appears in: S14. See also: Izek, Ernst Larnak, Henrik the Coffin Maker, Vallaki, Quests & Threads.