Two children and one adult man (Cara, Sean and Adam Ryan respectively) have been killed on a squatter farm at the edge of the bush and their bodies taken.
Mary Ryan, the mother of the family, survived, and described a man like Jack attempting to move her at an undetermined point during or after the attack.
A convict called Sally Jane Towler was apparently taken hostage by the killer to slow pursuit by Jack, an incident he no longer remembers. Miss Towler's whereabouts are unknown.
Two redcoats and a professional manhunter were dispatched to attend the incident after the local group who had taken off in pursuit of the killer - Jack Duggan, Thomas Daniels, latterly Brigitte d'Anjou and James Gill - were not heard from after a week.
The soldiers/hunter arrived to find everyone at d'Anjou's tavern and Cleary's farm going about their buisness with no memory whatsoever of the past eleven days.
Jack Duggan and Brigitte d'Anjou were thus shocked by the murder site, though they found some more recent corpses of sheep, missing their heads.
The Calder Expedition is thus overdue by two weeks, not two days.
A ritual site with English writing, strange stick-glyphs, sheepless heads and human remains was found on the borders of Cleary's land.
Janey, the 'natural' who lives with the Clearys, describes the ritual as having been practiced by a 'bad man' whom she hid from, and having caused everyone she knew to enter a semi-comotose state.
Janey has since returned to the ritual site twice, once to disrupt the remains when the Bad Man had left and place a dangerous object she describes as a 'shael' out of reach, once when Margaret Cleary dropping a jug frightened her into thinking the bewitchment might be returning and further measures needed.
The redcoats' questioning of Jack Duggan turned up no useable information.
A search of Thomas Daniels' room turned up a stick glyph, a notebook roughly recording events from the unremembered eleven days in Thomas' shorthand, and the field journal of Alexander Calder himself, suggesting Daniels knows what happened to the lost expedition.
The redcoat sergeant has made inroads on reading said diary.
The 'shael' stone fragment has been left covered up and shoved aside at the ritual site.
The Calder expedition passed through an area where a scene of witches slaughtering a family in an unknown ritual repeated itself: the convict ex-vicar and geologist Bowen and Lewry, a sergeant of the MacLeod's Highlanders, witnessed the entirety of said ritual.
Calder observed these men to have suffered considerable psychological harm, most noticeable in their irrational reactions to rocks similar to those present among the witches.
Calder reported that one of the rocks present at the witch-ritual was apparently broken up at the end of the vision and had possibly been hollow.
Calder considered his party to have been mazed by an unknown entity or entities, and noted the occasional presence of either uncanny animals or hallucinations.
Of the expedition members it seems Budyirikaranga left (or tried to, since he has not been seen or heard from since); Cadlow was literally lost; Lewry committed suicide; Bowen and Mollingsbrooke fell, jumped or were hurled off a cliff; and something happened to Calder either further down that cliff or near the creek that left his diary splattered with blood.
It is hypothesised that the collection of rocks observed by the expedition are the eggs of an unknown entity of considerable power: the ancient witches may have created rituals to encourage the use of local nesting-grounds to tap the alien power for corrupted ends.
Following this hypothesis, the destruction of a nearly-hatched egg along with the cult may have created a sense of betrayal and/or hostility from the parent entities, one of which seemingly resides with its child-ghost in the nearby Dreaming.
Bowen doesn't actually seem to be dead; there is some evidence he has gathered up the corpses of the other expedition members, at least parts of the Ryan family and at least one horse for some unknown purpose.
Items of Possible Pertinence:
A fealty ring belonging to Adam Ryan was found on the remains of a hand at the ritual site, accounting for one missing body but not the rest.
Cut sticks from the ritual site had English letters carved on them.
Brigitte d'Anjou has lost her father's sword, but gained that of an English officer from somewhere.
Sergeant Wilkins has two young daughters in England and is not disposed to give any quarter to anyone who might harm someone that young.
Henry Cotton has apparently been digging weird holes in the night at some point.
Jack claims to have seen ghosts and/or invisible men.
Some components at the ritual site have hatched excessive amounts of insects and otherwise decayed remarkably since twig-glyphs were removed from their wrappings.
Tracking shows that Jack had been heading for the rough area of the ritual site from above when he collapsed near a burnt stump and was later dragged downhill by ?Bowen on his return from said ritual.
Brigitte has started to dream about her several-greats-Grandmother, the one that legend claims was secretly a giant snake.
Brigitte has woken from a dream of Grandmother Melusine seeing off an incomprehensable underground rival or threat to find herself digging in an area of sacred interest to the killer presumed to be Bowen.
Henry started to sleepwalk at the same time as Brigitte, the latter's distraction of the sentry allowing him to vanish straight into the bush.
The ghost, image, or echo of Jacob Cadlow, an apprentice surveyor with the Calder expedition, has shown him to have met his end fleeing blindly off a cliff.
This loop or vision can be partially interacted with, more interaction (or agitation on the part of the watchers) causing the time between repeats to shorten.
The sergeant really hates watching young men die when he can't do anything about it, and posits the loop as a threat or manipulation.
Cadlow called out something about a "speared man", an entity that seemingly caused his death and may have chased Henry away.
Ngarungadurung explained that this was an entity he had accidentally liberated from the Dreamtime whilst interacting with the witch ritual tableau.
Ngarungadurung and Murphy managed to catch the Speared Man and deprive him of the spear that connected him to the time and place, ending him; his substance collapsed.
The place the manifested malicious echo had broken Murphy's skin festered unnaturally fast until cut out.
Legends of woollymen in the area recently confirmed.
Gaining the ability to see markers set out by Bowen counteracts the strongly disorientating effects of whatever powers are in (under) the ground.
Madame d'Anjou theorises that elaborately delaying but not decisively ending pursuit, along with the careful placement of traps signal that Bowen wanted people to come to him at a certain time, presumably to be murdered.
Things Known by Individual Investigators:
~ {Private Messages} ~ This message was last edited by the GM at 15:05, Thu 28 Jan 2021.
