"Really? No, no...how could I leave the museum?" He trails off, looking lost for a moment, and then his eyes settle on the missing exhibits. "No. No. What if the thieves come back? I'd better be here to give them the old what-for, a dose of battle magic! I may be old, but I can still hold my own!" 

Lusilla is...skeptical. "Battle magic?"

"Yes...my memory isn't what it once was, my faculties are failing me...but at one time, my mind could cut like a diamond. I was a battle mage, one of the few who survived the battle of the Lost Chapel. But I'm an old man now, sometimes I set down my keys one moment, and the next, I can't remember where I've put them..."

"This is what happens to sorcerers. This old fella must have swapped his memory for spells and lost his marbles as the years went by."

"It didn't happen because of magic tricks. He went to war and saw lots of scary things. So scary that his memory ran away so it would never show him the bad things ever again." 

"You yourself are a mad little witch, that's why you're standing up for another of your sorcerous kind--ow!" he exclaims, as Lusilla yanks on his ear. 

"Yep, we do have a lot in common!" Ember smiles, either ignoring or not noticing Lusilla hissing dire imprecations to Ulbrig in her defense. "I've seen scary things, too. Except what he lost was his memory, and I...I...lost something else...I don't know what."

"So, this old fellow was at Lost Chapel. That his mind was damaged isn't surprising--what's surprising is that the old codger can still speak at all. In the entire history of the crusades, which aren't exactly uplifting, this is one of its bloodiest chapters. Some time ago, I wanted to know what became of the abandoned fortifications and estates the crusaders left behind. I read through the accounts of the Lost Chapel veterans--now that was a real bloodbath."

How sad. 

Lusilla dithers a little bit. On the one hand, it really would be safer for him at the Defender's Heart, if she could persuade him to come with them. 

On the other hand, the cultists have had plenty of opportunity to murder him already, and haven't taken it. And his remaining links to reality are all here. 

"Thank you for explaining," she settles on. 

He nods, absently, then turns and regards the disarray the room is in. "What a mess...everything will have to be cleaned up and laid out according to the inventory list," he laments, having apparently forgotten already that there are other people in the room with him. 

They continue searching the basement for a while longer, but don't find any more papers of significance. They do find a handful of things which are presumably the personal effects of cultists, either dead at the Defender's Heart or fled, and there's no reason to tell Woljif not to pocket any of those. 

On their way out, Lusilla stops to prestidigitate the cultists' graffiti off what remains of the walls of the museum. There's not a lot she can do about the structural integrity of the place, but fuck Baphomet's holy symbol and also that one extremely ominous ?summoning? circle. 

On the way back, in addition to running into a handful of unfriendlies and having to deal with that, Woljif manages to uncover a cache of bottles of miscellaneous booze that someone hid in an out-of-the-way cranny. 

"Nice," he says, admiring one of them. 

"That's some good stuff," Seelah allows, "but there's not that much of it. I still think the League of the Inspiring Cart did better." 

"The League of the Inspiring Cart?"

"Right, you weren't there--while we were out rescuing Thieflings and discovering a secret passage into the Grey Garrison, we also ran into some friends of mine--Jannah, Curl, and Elan. And they'd found a cart loaded with barrels of beer, and were taking it back to the Defender's Heart." 

"Oh, is that what that was about," Lusilla vaguely recalls. She'd been pretty absorbed in her work with the Storyteller, but she does remember a sudden uptick in the availability of beer, and a whole bunch of people being enthusiastic about that. "Good for them, then. Would you care to introduce me, later? Any friend of yours is a friend of mine." 

"Sure!"

They make it back to the Defender's Heart without significant further incident. Lusilla makes sure Woljif hands Anevia the bag of cultist correspondence, and then gets dragged off by Seelah to meet her friends, and ends up volunteering to help Elan see if he can retrieve a present for his fiancee that got left at a hastily-abandoned campsite. 

Anevia ends up cornering her a little later. 

"Right now, that knife the Storyteller directed you to is our best bet for fixing the Wardstone. If you've had any other leads, or there's anything we could do to give you a better chance, working with it, now would be a good time to say so." 

Lusilla contemplates this briefly and then shakes her head. 

"I mean, it's always possible we'll find more helpful survivors if we comb the city further, but I don't have any leads on any of those. Or any more supernatural wackiness to help with the Wardstone. I guess wearing the Aeon glasses might help? But we already have those."

"Alright. Beth and I have looked through those papers you brought us, and we think it's probably a good idea to strike sooner rather than later, before the demons regroup any more than they already have. Time is not on our side. Can everyone on your team be ready first thing tomorrow morning?" 

"Yyyyyyes, I believe so. If you mean any earlier than an hour past dawn, I'd have to ask Dànpiàn what spells she's already cast today, but she didn't come with us to the Tower of Estrod this time so it shouldn't be too many of them." 

"Ask her, but if it's possible I'd like to leave at dawn at the latest, since the demons won't be expecting us to strike that early."

Dànpiàn is not thrilled with this plan--if the demons don't expect them to attack before time for clerics to get their spells back, well, there's a reason for that--but she has not in fact used very many spells today; and of course she can use her single hex as many times per day as she has enemies to use it on. 

"I'm going to be cranky about it," she warns. 

"As long as the mission succeeds, nobody will begrudge you a little crankiness. And if it doesn't, we'll all be too dead to care."