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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jackdaw" data-source="post: 6871057" data-attributes="member: 6789113">It's expected that each generation of Vistani will produce a girl with "the sight". Some have been more gifted than others, but there's a belief among their people that this girl is essential to their survival and her premature death (before a successor is chosen and trained) represents a time of hardship. Madame Eva suspects that Strahd was nursed back to health during one of these times, that no one was around to say "You must let him die". She is 82 years old now, and the seventh Vistani seer to serve since Strahd's undeath (most of the seers live long human lifespans). She was actually born outside Barovia (her mother insisted) and arrived the first time when she was 5 years old. She started having the visions of foresight when she was 9 but she hid them, not wanting the burden of responsibility, which she sensed would make her central to the fate of Barovia and her people. When she was 14 she began having dreams of Strahd himself, and Rahadin, the two of them conspiring to make her an undead bride (she was was beautiful back then). The terror of it caused her to pour boiling pitch on her own face, to remove her beauty and change her fate. It did: she stopped dreaming of Strahd as a husband and finally admitted to her shocked family that she had "the sight". Her great aunt accepted her as a disciple on her 15th birthday and she's been sinking under the weight of it ever since. Some of the foolish young Vistani have joked that she is so old that "she's Strahd's sister", but they usually find themselves bedridden with gut fever a day later. Strahd has actually visited her for two tarokka readings in the past, when she was in her 40s, but he bade her to stop each time halfway through, somehow fearful of seeing his fate laid out. She still doesn't know if he knows she lied to him during those readings (she couldn't stomach using her gift to aid him). She fears he's toying with her somehow, and allowing her to disseminate false hope among the occasional adventuring party.That's an angle, anyway <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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