fourcolorlove | open } { ship smash 2025

"Oh. For the last little bit, yeah."

Most people don't want to engage with her after her shows. Which is fair, she's between jobs at the moment so her performance is rather terrible. A former cleric she used to know says that crime is more her stage and sadly he is not wrong.

Unfortunately, she's taking a break from Nathan Ford and his gaggle of mischief makers. She'll go back, if when they need her, but right now, she needs to focus on herself a little bit.

"I'm just passing through, but wanted to try and make a little coin before I moved on." And because she can't help but talk about people to deflect from herself. "And you? Are you going to be staying in town a while?"

"I'm also passing through. I haven't quite decided where I'm going next." There are always needs for clerics out in the world, and Solmerra likes helping people. Eventually she'll go back to Vallaki because in many ways that's become home, but that'll be a while yet.

She offers out her hand. "I'm Solmerra Trueblood."

Sophie nods as she reaches out to shake her hand. "Sophie Devereaux. This place is a good waystation if nothing else."

Especially if you can pay for the place to rest your head, which Solmerra seems like she can. She's trying to connect with people on a real level though, so she pushes notions of wealth to the side.

"May I ask where you're coming from?"

"Vallaki, most recently." It may not be where she's from originally, but it's become her home over the years, a place she always goes back to eventually to see her friends. Her time in Barovia changed everything for her.

"What about you? Where are you from?"

"Oh, here and there. Most recently of Waterdeep. Still have friends there, actually." She taps her finger against her chin as she tries to place where exactly Solmerra is referring to. "You know, I thought I'd been everywhere in Faerun, but I've only met a couple of people who claim to have been from Vallaki. Never been there myself."

"Well, until more recently, you couldn't visit it. It was stuck on a demiplane, due to a curse. All of Barovia was."

And Solmerra had been part of the team to break that curse, even if it came with costs they hadn't expected.

Oh, that sounds like a story. Sophie's eyebrows go up and she leans in a bit, because she may be a lackluster bard in terms of performance but that doesn't mean that she doesn't love a good story.

"Sounds like you know more than I do." She tips her head to the side. "Perhaps we can trade? A story for a story?"

"I know more than most people, I think." She doesn't want to brag about her role in things -- well there is a part of her that's proud but it'll always be a mixed feeling considering the Ireena of it all.

"I'd like that. I have a good friend whose a bard, I'm not as good of a storyteller as her but I can try."

"In my experience, being a storyteller is all about finding the truth of it. Fancy words are one thing, but sometimes if you lean too much on it, it can obscure the heart of it." She pauses as she makes a face. "It's something I'm trying to be better with. Just being honest."

Honesty isn't really her most reliable trait. But if she's going to move forward, she knows she needs to try.

"Truth has never been an issue for me, I imagine some people wish I could lie better." Solmerra is honest to a fault, even when lies would be kinder. It's gotten her in trouble from time to time, but it's just a part of who she is.

"If I'm going to tell this story, I'll need a drink."

"Well, that I can do." She smiles as she raises her hand, signaling the bar keep to bring them another round.

Soon they have a fresh set of drinks a plate of snacks to share, and Sophie shifts, leaning back in her seat. "So. Barovia. Where do we begin?"

Solmerra takes a good sip of her drink before starting. She's told this story a few times before, as not many people know of Barovia due to it being in another plane for so long.

"My best friend Bryn had gone missing and I went after her, which brought me to Barovia, which had been under a curse for centuries due to a deal a vampire named Strahd had made with a dark power."

Yes just like she thought. All the juicy elements of a good horror story. A lost love, a powerful vampire. She is already in. (Also she is totally inferring with Bryn, but that's how she would punch it up if she were telling it.)

"How did the curse work? I know this is skipping ahead but I assume it hid Barovia from everyone else?"

Bryn was and is a lost love, even if Solmerra hasn't led with that. She still sends to her friend occasionally but their lives just took them in very different places. Bryn is in the underdark with the rest of the vampires. Solmerra had needed to figure herself out after Barovia. Some endings are meant to be bittersweet.

"It did, it put Barovia in a plane of it's own and if you ended up there, there was no way to get out unless you broke the curse. The curse created a domain of dread and it tied the souls of the people there so even if they died, they wouldn't be free."

"That's awful." And it is. Sophie is not one for people needlessly suffering, and she has a feeling that the people who suffered in Barovia were not ones who deserved to suffer. She's not immune to the idea that some people deserve a little suffering. "Those poor people."

"I met two people who became great friends to me during that time. They were searching for people who had gotten lost in Barovia as well. Alondra was looking for her mother, and Sabrina was looking for her son." Solmerra doesn't want to tell their stories for them but mentioning the initial interests in finding their people seems important.

"Sometimes having a team with a common goal makes all the difference." Sophie leans back in her seat. "I have - well, had one. It's good to be going into something hard with people you can trust."

"We didn't trust each other at first. I think Alondra hated me, and I wasn't her biggest fan either." Solmerra takes a swig of her drink. She also files away to ask later what happened to Sophie's team.

"Growing pains are also normal." She thinks back on the awkwardness as they all learned Parker, her and Eliot's early stumbles. "No one works perfectly together on the first go."

"It's true. I was...very devout and young when we were in Barovia. I thought we should kill all the vampires because Kelemvor is very clear about the undead. It became more complicated when we found Bryn and she was a vampire." And as complicated as it was, she never could get herself to warm up to the idea of killing her best friend.

"And she was also a follower of Kelemvor? Or she was when she left you?" Sophie could only imagine the kind of shock that would have been to a young cleric without a lot of real world experience. "That must have been so hard to see."

"She was when she left, but it had been over ten years for her. Time moved differently in Barovia." It was hard to reconcile at the time, how far away Bryn felt, she had tried to cling to the girl she had loved but it wasn't enough in the end. "It was. I thought I might have to kill her -- but I could never bring myself to really consider it. She meant too much to me, even if it went against what I was taught."

"Sometimes that's also true. Even as much as we believe in something, it doesn't replace the people connection." Sophie has always loved people more than the gods, wouldn't let the gods dictate her view of people if she could help it. "People are with you, every day. The gods can feel like they're so far away - though I suppose that isn't always true of clerics."

"Kelemvor isn't the most hands on god, and I couldn't feel him while I was in Barovia anyways, I was cut off from him. The dark powers there fueled my magic, trying to influence me. But even if I had heard him...I don't think I ever could of killed her. So instead I worked on freeing her from the vampire who sired her, one of Strahd's brides."

It had made sense at the time that taking out an actually evil vampire was more important than someone like Bryn who was just trying to survive and didn't kill people to feed.

"How many brides did he have?" Sophie can't help but be curious for all the details she can muster. "Is polygamy common in Barovia?"

putting sophie in a season 2ish kind of spot

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