[Commune with the vermin.]
In a dead end corner of a darkened alleyway in the quietest neighborhood you can find, you meditate. The heavy smell of sewage lays thick here, and piles of discarded rubbish conceal your presence. You carefully draw your cloak out beneath you as you take a seat on the damp ground. How strange your appearance would be to any who could behold you—a one-eyed tiefling with pale blue skin, dressed like a barmaid, shrouded in a hooded cotton cloak, making communion in a filthy dead-end street.
You have no need of sigils or crests or pentagrams, for the vermin are always watching. You simply sit with your legs crossed, hands palm-up in offering of a bit of meat. A rat comes, scurrying up your leg, and begins to feed on the table scrap. Soon another comes, and another, and another, until there is a small swarm of rats around you, each crawling over the next.
The teeming mass of rats begins to take a composite shape. A body, now arms, now legs—a headless figure made of rats. A raven descends on the blind alley, lands upon the living sculpture’s shoulders. The rats rise up to accept it. Little rodent paws pull the raven down, its talons and its dark scaly legs descending into the mass of rats, so that its oily black wings rest upon the shoulders of the figure like a dark, feathered mantle. Rats for a body and a raven’s head.
“Hail, Stolas,” you say solemnly.
The raven-headed king opens its mouth wide. Nestled within its dark beak is a cold gray eye. Your eye.
Rodent squeaks fill the air. In their reverberations you hear a deep and resonant voice.
“What ho, child of mist?”
What do you do? (Choose 2)
A. Ask the occult king for power.
B. Ask the occult king for secrets.
C. Ask the occult king for advice.
D. Ask to see the city through vermin eyes for a time.
E. Offer praise to the occult king.