The Reformation Center

Where

The guard district of Vallaki.

Status

We are inside, on the evening of the festival, with Izek beside us. Two courtroom guards are asleep and tied up. The twins are in front of us and will not stop. Nobody has rested.

First entered

Session 14, on the new burgomistress's first order.

What everyone told us first

It was on the list of laws at the gate on our first evening: follow the laws of Vallaki, the guard said, and you should have no business in the Reformation Center. After that, everybody we met had something to add, and none of it was good.

• Roger: "People go in there and come out wrong." Fake smiles. Sometimes they've forgotten their own families, and all they say is that all is well. A friend of his came out no longer really talkative.
• The bard: "I believe they employ dark magics." Stay out if at all possible.
• Danika: don't get sent there, because there's nothing you can do about it short of overthrowing the government. (Noted.)
• Milivoj, confessing to the theft of the bones, was afraid of "the gallows or worse, the Reformation Center."
• The Baron, fondly, the day he hired us: "Either people come out of the Reformation Center thinking more appropriately, or they don't come out at all." It is run by "the twins". He wanted to send Lady Wachter there to be fixed.
• Ernst, who survived it, told us the worst of it at the canapé party: a tea that addles the mind until you can't tell truth from fiction; a room where, unless you keep smiling, you are filled with bone-deep terror, and they leave you there for hours; and for the ones who won't break, a lightless basement where "creatures" patrol the hall and bring food, not much of it. His elder brother passed his food through to him in the next cell until he starved. "There's only one devil in Barovia, and you are flashing his writ."
• The man in the Wachter cellar, found sitting in a fake pentagram, begged us not to send him back. His crime was chuckling during a festival. He died to a ward when we led him out.
• Udo, whom we found chained in the Baron's mansion, had been "picked out from the usual Reformation intake for special attention."
• Izek, on the afternoon of the festival: the twins are elves, "elves proper", who wandered in and "offered their services to the Baron when he was starting up his jolly ways," about thirty years ago by his count, soon after the old Baron died in very mysterious circumstances. They have various means of changing people's minds, "no small magics", though they are not super powerful people as far as he knows. They keep a cadre of guards who "might not be entirely their own selves." The Center usually holds a couple of dozen prisoners. And: "I try and avoid the place."

What we found inside

Ireena's first order as burgomistress was to "dismantle the Reformation Center as much as you can… Empty the hall." So we walked in with Izek and no other guards. The front doors weren't even latched.

The courtroom

Pews for the public, a little fence and gate between them and the business end, and at the far end a throne with a guard either side. The guards didn't recognise their own captain: "I don't recognise you. Who are you? You must be bad." They didn't look quite in their right minds. Izek asked us not to kill them if at all possible, so Fëanor put them both to sleep and Lily tied them up. They are still there, bound and alive.

The office

Through a door beside the throne, a corridor with three doors. The first opened on a large desk with an oversized chair, shelves of logbooks going back decades ("Aversion therapy tried, successful"), and a cot lengthened with a crate at the foot for someone of unusual height. We asked Izek if it was his bed. "I have no memory of being here." The Baroness's name was not in the logbook we checked. The desk held a pouch of coin and a potion of healing. We took the potion.

The twins

The next door opened on two people in armchairs, chatting: Ilimir and Ivalice, a brother and a sister, hard to tell apart. They had not been told there was a new burgomistress. They work for the Burgomaster, they said, who enables them to ply their trade, and when we told them he was dead they called it a coup. They think the devil is "a monster" and suspect we have his blessing. Asked what they think they are doing to people: "We're making them think right. Cleaning their heads." Told to stop, they said we have no authority here, and that they know how to make sure people say whatever they want them to say. The last thing either of them said was:

"This is going to be annoying to clean up."

That is where we are. Initiative has not been rolled yet.

What we have not seen

The rest of the building: the third door round the corner, any upper floor, the basement Ernst described, the cells. Somewhere in here are about two dozen prisoners. One of them, Izek told us the night before the festival, is Henrik, arrested for harbouring the "seditious agitators" who did not exist.

Open questions

• What exactly is "cleaning" a head, and can it be undone?
• How many of the guards are theirs?
• Izek has no memory of an office built for a man his size. What did they do to him?
• Did "annoying to clean up" mean us?