"On the Account": The Sweet Embrace of Death (Session 1.3)

Santo Domingo, January 1651: The crew of the Fortune's Folly have won the battle for the Lopez plantation. As flames rise all around, they now attempt to win the peace...

With the plantation owners and hired hands disarmed and kept under guard, the pirates return their attention to plundering the great house for weapons. Guillaume is able to convince some of the farmhands to brave the flames to bring out their armory, but they are blocked from entering the house by a fearful group of freed slaves - until Guillaume is able to enlist the help of Affonso, the plantation's blacksmith and the leader of the freed slaves.

With a few armfuls of muskets and gunpowder thus retrieved, Affonso and the pirates discuss what to do next. As things currently stand, the freed slaves have formed into three factions:

• One group, composed mostly of noncombatants and the infirm, wishes to flee the plantation together and found a secret camp in the deserted interior
• One group wishes to arm themselves, seize control of the plantation, and prepare to fight off any Spanish forces who attempt to return them to slavery, and
• One group with no long-term plans as such, but an immediate and intense interest in exacting revenge on the plantation owners and hired hands

Representatives from each faction give a short speech to the crowd of freed slaves, and Affonso invites the pirates to also have their say. Joe speaks for the crew of the Folly, and chooses a cautious and somewhat noncommittal approach: send as many freed slaves as wish to leave the island off to sea on the Folly, and have those who wish to stay keep the Europeans alive as hostages or free them to deflect the wrath of the neighboring planters.

Joe's measured approach calms the passions of many in the crowd, but the fate of the overseers remains a sticking point: will no-one make them pay for the sufferings they have inflicted?

To break the deadlock, Affonso proposes a solution which which he thinks will appease the most hot-headed of the hardliners. Seven days ago, the plantation owner's young son Miguel returned to the plantation after one of his customary sketching trips into the countryside, rounded up ten slaves and one of the overseers, and disappeared off with them into the hills. If the fate of these missing members of Affonso's group can be discerned, he believes that the consensus among the freed slaves will tilt towards Joe's plan. 

After some deliberation the pirates agree. They are introduced to João and Tshilobu, two members of the hardliner group who have family members among the missing people, and who will guide them to Miguel's ostensible destination: the deserted de Flores plantation, eight miles away. Tshilobu is a hunter who knows the region well; João was the plantation's "cutter," standing ready to strike off the hands of slaves who got them caught in the cane crushers, and Affonso believes that retrieving the abductees will help to reintegrate him into the community.

A few last minute preparations and discoveries are then made:

• A horse-drawn wagon is prepared for the trip. The colonial militia will likely arrive just after dawn, so there is no time to walk to the de Flores plantation; at the same time, there are not enough horses for all the pirates. The wagon should get them there and back by dawn.
• Asking after the specific slaves that were taken, Red Knife and Tshilobu discover some patterns: one of the abductees, Maria, was a skilled traditional healer and spirit medium, while the other nine were the most economically unproductive among the slaves - the old, the sick, and victims of industrial accidents mostly involving the plantation's sugar crushing rollers.
• According to his manservant Batubenga, Miguel returned to the plantation from from his last sketching trip with a large sack containing a bulky object. The sack is found, and is the object revealed to be a heavy, discolored silver tureen of Turkish manufacture. 

With a bad feeling about the last two pieces of information, the pirates and their guides set off in the dark for the de Flores plantation, which sits atop a steep hill to the north. Scouting reveals the layout of its buildings as follows:

The would-be rescuers creep up to the ruined plantation under the cover of the low scudding clouds into which the top of the hill protrudes, and begin to explore:

1. The entire plantation bears a cloying, sweet smell - as if sugar sap is currently being processed, even through the de Flores family are said to have fled around twenty years ago
2. A thrown torch reveals nothing at the bottom of the dark, silent quarry just below the plantation
3. The large, three-story stone hacienda is abandoned and shows signs of having been partially and hurriedly packed up. In the main bedroom, Eve finds a pair of ornamental Turkish scimitars suggests a link to Miguel's looted coffee urn
4. As Red Knife leads the group out of the hacienda, he is fired on from a garita by a sniper with a powerful rifle! The group takes cover at the base of the staircase leading  up to the garita, where Tshilobu saves Joe from stepping onto tripwire linked to a musket on the stairs. The two of them attempt without success to talk down their attacker - Victorio, the Spanish overseer who accompanied Miguel, who is raving about "hungry ghosts" somewhere above them. Victorio finally tries to kill them with a grenado that instead fatally collapses the tower around him.
5. Investigating the church, João and Guillaume find two of the missing slaves, including João's mother Pungu. She tells them that Miguel is in the crypt below, that he has been there all week, and that every night he has been taking one of the slaves away from their camp in the nearby warehouse in chains. That person is never seen again.
6. Pungu blames Maria, missing the spirit medium, for providing Miguel with forbidden knowledge regarding the appeasement of evil spirits
7. In the partly-collapsed warehouse, Maria is found frozen within a partially-completed veve, reaching for her fallen cornmeal pouch. Red Knife tosses the pouch closer to her, and she completes the veve before falling into a trance and addressing them in a deep male voice as "Papa Legba".
8. According to Maria/Papa Legba, the boy Miguel has called up the "hungry ghosts" by bringing his greed for wealth onto the deserted plantation. This greed has brought together a blood curse of the slaves who died here, and an incantation of revenge associated with Turkish plunder held as trophies by the de Flores family, to create a legion of vengeful specters. 
9. Legba wishes to prevent harm to his "horse", Maria, and so will tell the pirates what they need to do to break the connection before more blood is spilled: they must ceremonially reassemble the shattered bodies of the long-dead slaves and thereby break the conjoined curse. He tells them that what they seek can be found in the giant sugar-sap cauldron in the cookhouse at the plantation's highest point.

As Guillaume and the others approach the giant copper cauldron in the deserted cookhouse, a roiling tide of syrupy-smelling white fog spills from it, mixing with the low cloud to severely limit their vision. At the same time, shadowy figures spring from all around them to attack with rending bony claws.

Red Knife, João, and Joe enter into desperate close-quarters battle with the figures, receiving multiple wounds but also striking down a handful of the figures. Tshilobu readies his ammunition bag as an improvised grenado, but is unable to get the others to gather together so that he can throw it safely. Guillaume springs up to the cauldron and, blind in the heavy fog, reaches down into it instead to find that it is filled with hundreds of finger bones. He scoops these into his medical bag even as Red Knife is struck a terrible blow and Joe, trying to free himself from a claw, wounds himself deeply with his own axe.

Luckily for the pirates, it is at this moment that João determines the attackers' weakness: although their bodies seem insubstantial, or at least hard to hit in the blinding fog, their ever-grasping hands are solid and vulnerable. The pirates use this information to protect themselves as they carry their stricken friends with them to the gravesites of the plantation's slave village. There, Maria/Legba awaits near a freshly dug grave; when Guillaume pours the fingerbones into it, the fog momentarily thickens to complete opacity and then lifts. The grave is filled with earth, the shadowy figures are nowhere to be seen, and Maria lies nearby in a deep sleep.

A few hours later, the pirates' wagon returns to the Lopez plantation. On it are the rescued (and now freed) slaves; young Miguel, bruised and bound in chains; Red Knife and Joe, deeply wounded and leaking blood into their bandages; and, under a rough tarpaulin looted from the de Flores warehouse, a substantial haul of Turkish silver. What next for the crew of the Fortune's Folly? Only time will tell...

On to Session 4!