Quickleaf
Legend
Van Djik's Manor
Docking the long canoe, and having divvied the spoils from L'Ollonais' sea cave treasure, you make your ways through Nassau by night. Random shots and whooping hollers echo from the shoreline, interrupting the ocean breeze and soft call of gulls; pirates left too long without a venture can be counted on to make a ruckus. The route to Piet Hien Van Djik's manor takes you away from the center of the port onto dirty roads toward a forgotten ramshackle house at the western edge of Nassau, built into the hillside.
Mambo Asizwe in Nassau whispered that Van Djik was a cursed dwarf, cursed by the will of the loa. Yet the Netherlands revere him as a national hero. The truth, as with most things in the pirate port, likely lay somewhere in between...
A surly mixed race doorman, his face and body tattooed in the semblance of a living skeleton or ghoul, receives you as if he'd been expecting your arrival. "Master awaits you in his drawing room," he says in a heavy accent marking him as a man more accustomed to pidgin than proper English. Opening the door, he walks you through a home in disrepair. Floorboards are warped from leaks in the roof that have gone untended too long. Cobwebs begin to grow at the edges of the window sills. And yet there is an astounding amount of wealth on display, from grandiose oil paintings to chairs in golden filigree. Bowing stiffly, the tattooed doorman gestures for you to enter through parted sliding doors into the drawing room from which wheezing coughing echoes. The room is positively festooned with exquisite dwarven sabers and gilded ornamentation.
Nia's eyes, trained to pick out fetishes and charms, recognize several protective totems from Carribbean folklore scattered about the drawing room, icons of bone and grave earth intended to ward off death.
[SECTION]
"Well, don't stand on ceremony...ack ack..." groans an ancient voice thick with Dutch accent. The room is poorly lit by a single oil lamp on a desk and ambient moonlight; within the shadows, a dwarven figure stirs from the cot he was lying on, brushing transparent mosquito netting out of the way as he stands with a strained wheeze. "Come in, gezagvoerder (captain)," he gestures to Katerina, "I knew it was only a matter of time before you sought me out. Ack...ack...You've been circling my old ship for a few days, I've been told. Well, Blackbeard's ship, but that black-bearded bastard doesn't know her half as well as I do."
Body hunched over as if in constant abdominal pain, Van Djik moves to his desk to uncork a bottle of jenever, a juniper-flavored alcohol. With shaky fingers he tries to set out seven shot glasses, but his coordination is not what it once was, making a mess of the jenever as he pours it. Nodding after his doorman, he levels his yellowed eyes upon your party, "You must think it strange; here is an aanarden dwarf trying to stay alive against all odds, and as his manservant he takes a man with the visage of Death himself." Van Djik chuckles ruefully to himself, half-raising his shot glass with a grunt and tossing it back like it's water.
It's clear the dwarf has signs of advanced yellow fever, yet when he spots Old Zef, his yellowed eyes shine with fierce light, and he switches to speaking in Dutch, "Well, you look almost as old as me, countryman! Whose flag did you fly under?"[/SECTION]
Docking the long canoe, and having divvied the spoils from L'Ollonais' sea cave treasure, you make your ways through Nassau by night. Random shots and whooping hollers echo from the shoreline, interrupting the ocean breeze and soft call of gulls; pirates left too long without a venture can be counted on to make a ruckus. The route to Piet Hien Van Djik's manor takes you away from the center of the port onto dirty roads toward a forgotten ramshackle house at the western edge of Nassau, built into the hillside.
Mambo Asizwe in Nassau whispered that Van Djik was a cursed dwarf, cursed by the will of the loa. Yet the Netherlands revere him as a national hero. The truth, as with most things in the pirate port, likely lay somewhere in between...
A surly mixed race doorman, his face and body tattooed in the semblance of a living skeleton or ghoul, receives you as if he'd been expecting your arrival. "Master awaits you in his drawing room," he says in a heavy accent marking him as a man more accustomed to pidgin than proper English. Opening the door, he walks you through a home in disrepair. Floorboards are warped from leaks in the roof that have gone untended too long. Cobwebs begin to grow at the edges of the window sills. And yet there is an astounding amount of wealth on display, from grandiose oil paintings to chairs in golden filigree. Bowing stiffly, the tattooed doorman gestures for you to enter through parted sliding doors into the drawing room from which wheezing coughing echoes. The room is positively festooned with exquisite dwarven sabers and gilded ornamentation.
Nia's eyes, trained to pick out fetishes and charms, recognize several protective totems from Carribbean folklore scattered about the drawing room, icons of bone and grave earth intended to ward off death.
[SECTION]
"Well, don't stand on ceremony...ack ack..." groans an ancient voice thick with Dutch accent. The room is poorly lit by a single oil lamp on a desk and ambient moonlight; within the shadows, a dwarven figure stirs from the cot he was lying on, brushing transparent mosquito netting out of the way as he stands with a strained wheeze. "Come in, gezagvoerder (captain)," he gestures to Katerina, "I knew it was only a matter of time before you sought me out. Ack...ack...You've been circling my old ship for a few days, I've been told. Well, Blackbeard's ship, but that black-bearded bastard doesn't know her half as well as I do."Body hunched over as if in constant abdominal pain, Van Djik moves to his desk to uncork a bottle of jenever, a juniper-flavored alcohol. With shaky fingers he tries to set out seven shot glasses, but his coordination is not what it once was, making a mess of the jenever as he pours it. Nodding after his doorman, he levels his yellowed eyes upon your party, "You must think it strange; here is an aanarden dwarf trying to stay alive against all odds, and as his manservant he takes a man with the visage of Death himself." Van Djik chuckles ruefully to himself, half-raising his shot glass with a grunt and tossing it back like it's water.
It's clear the dwarf has signs of advanced yellow fever, yet when he spots Old Zef, his yellowed eyes shine with fierce light, and he switches to speaking in Dutch, "Well, you look almost as old as me, countryman! Whose flag did you fly under?"[/SECTION]
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