Our intrepid adventurers enter the house of Durst, but through the windows in the back into the dining room where they heard the sound of a party. Cracking it open & parting the curtains, the sound disappears, the lights go out, but the warmth & scent of a feast within remains. Once the last member of the group climbs in, the window slams shut, a clock somewhere in the house strikes six, & blood weeps from the painting over the empty hearth.
Beneath this dwelling lurks a beast
Who hungers for a bloody feast.
He sleeps until the midnight chime
Then wakes to feed his dark design.
If morsels seek to flee their doom,
Then bring toward his secret room
A gift to soothe his savage mood
But mind the servants of his brood.
Some checking reveals that mist has moved up to the window, which means they’re trapped based on their understanding of what walking through the mist will do (thanks to Viggo’s testimony). Barefoot, only one of them even wearing regular clothes, they make their way to the central room & up the stairs. Finding several suits of breastplate armour on display, Ariadne & Cotswold suit up, the former grabbing a Durst family longsword above the mantle. This is helpful when the very fancy suit of animated full-plate attacks them as they reach the third floor.
Other than that one fight, they avoid everything creepy & even potentially hazardous, including the movement out of the corners of their eyes coming from the mirror in the room adjacent to the nursery. They open the door with a weapon, seeing dried blood marking infernal circles around a crib w/the sound of a cooing baby coming within. With incredible caution, they find a woman’s finger under the crib & the crib itself is empty (the sound disappears as they looked). At this point, they go to the mirror in the last room, where the reflection shows a fair maiden in servant’s clothes standing next to them; her eyes sewn shut, her fingers gone as well as her nose & ears & lips & teeth. Still able to hear, but clearly unable to speak, they learn that the baby is downstairs. Asking for how to get there, she steps out of view from the reflection’s PoV as the mirror swings open to reveal stairs leading to the attic.
Up the stairs, they begin looking with intent rather than making a beeline, grabbing what may be of value to toss out the window if not of immediate use (figuring the mist won’t destroy it & they can examine in greater depth if they escape). Echo has a pact weapon that he summons to use as the de facto tool for touching anything they investigate. It’s when they pick a padlock to what is revealed to be the bedroom for Rose & Thorn, their skeletons lying in rest at the centre of the room, that their ghosts appear to answer questions. Rose asks them to go to the basement, where they’re certain their mother took their baby brother, & where the monster is. Their dollhouse is a perfect model of the house they’re in, & they use this to pre-check hidden rooms & possible valuables to investigate the place.
They find a collection of (study reveals them to be high-quality shams) ritual books in the library, as well as a halfling corpse w/armour that Echo can wear. Spending some time, they learn more of Gustav’s poorly hidden affair w/the nursemaid, Elisabeth’s anger, & Walter’s bastard heritage. At the conservatory, they find a stray dog (a chocolate Carpathian shepherd dog) whose collar says Merlin, whom they adopt.
It’s at this point, they ascend to the secret entrance in the attic, which is a spiral staircase that will take them to the basement.
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