1 Vampires, Hags and a whole lot of questions

We're gonna need a bigger Goat

The party regroups in their room and decides do go and buy supplies. They ask Yelena whether there's a merchant in town and she confirms, agreeing to show them the way to Bildrath's Mercantile, the only general wares store in town.

She excuses herself, and tells them that she needs to go and that staying outside for long times is not safe, but an insight check doesn't reveal any malicious intend from her side as she hurries back to the Blood of the Vine tavern. With nowhere else to go, the party enters the general goods store, where they meet Bildrath Cantemir and his nephew Parriwimple, who is stocking the shelves.

They quickly realize that the merchant charges exorbitant prices and consider not buying anything, but ask him about the last adventurer group that had been through here, which he confirms was two tendays ago. He recalls that they were five people, two dragonborn, two halflings and a female human cleric, who was wearing insignia that carried the symbol of Bahamut.

Despite his prices, Amethyst decides to buy a set of five throwing darts he has up for sale, and while they are making that transaction, the group can hear a bleating from outside and the merchant mutters under his breath "To the hells with that goat." As they inquire about the goat, he explains that he bought it a while ago and it's been devouring the hair off his head, and sells it to them for a price of 20 gold pieces.

Parriwimple shows them to the barn and hands over the goat - a large billy goat with straight, twisted horns - warning them that it has chewed through multiple ropes already. The question, whether the goat has a name is answered in the negative, and as is to be expected, the goat himself is no help when he is asked about his name without the help of speak with animals.

A wailing in the night

While standing outside of Bildrath's Mercantile with their newly acquired pet, the party can hear the echoes of a faint sobbing and moaning from a house down the road. Investigating the sound, the group reaches a small, two-story townhouse with boarded up windows, the front door of which appears to be barricaded or locked. When they call out, nobody replies and at first, they contemplate just walking away.

Before doing that, they decide to walk around the house to look for a potential entrance, finding a second door that Hush can easily pick open. Moments after they've stepped inside, the goat relieves itself on the floor, and Hush insists to wait outside the door with it while the others investigate the sound. Still apprehensively, the others follow the sobbing up the stairs and knock on the door that the sobs originate from. On the floor of the room sits a middle-aged woman, clutching a tattered doll, and wailing in deep sorrow.

The party gets her to calm down enough to get her to talk, and learn that her sixteen-year-old daughter Gertruda has run away from home about a tenday ago and that the child had never left the house before, to protect her from threats such as "The Devil Strahd" and hags. They agree to look for the girl, get a description of Gertruda - a 16-year-old girl with long black hair and blue eyes - and with the woman's consent take a blouse that belonged to the girl.

Coming back downstairs, they find Hush waiting with the goat outside and after learning the circumstances around the wailing coming from the house and agreeing that they should look for the child, the tabaxi comments that the animal definitely will need to be taught not to chew on everything, making an effort to keep the wet tip of their tail out of the goat's reach.

Not even in death may we leave

The party returns to the Blood of the Vine tavern and ask Yelena whether there's a place where they can securely house their goat, since they were told that it chews on rope. The barmaid offers the pig pen in the tavern's barn, showing the party where to find that, and suggests that it could be fed with scraps, but that they would have to pay two copper pieces per day that the goat is being cared for by the tavern.

The party agrees and afterwards head upstairs where Vaerys gets to re-summoning her familiar, Amethyst goes to train, Dragneel occupies his time with the spellbook that the party found and Hush spends the hour in silent prayer.

After summoning Syi, the imp exclaimed that they had not been sent back to the hells when they died, but rather been stuck in an incorporeal state and unable to reform until Vaerys called them again. The Warlock agrees to not leave them waiting that long again, before asking them to transform into a goat so that it would be possible to speak to the party's new pet.

During the conversation, the goat is again asked his name and reveals it to be Makloompah, and agrees not to relieve itself inside of houses anymore, but will rather nudge one of them to signal that it needs to go. It closes the conversation out by asking whether "the horned one" - referring to Vaerys - was related to him and Syi, which the imp neither confirms, nor denies.

Realizing that the familiar could also turn into other animals, Vaerys asks them to turn into a dog and lets them sniff Gertruda's shirt to try and pick up the girl's scent. While Syi does seem to be able to pick up the girl's smell, they can only lead the party back to the townhouse where the mother lives, and remark that her scent is just too faint for them to follow it properly, especially since there were other scents that covered it up: Mainly a distinct smell of "bad" fey and a stench of death.

After being assured that the imp couldn't track either the girl, nor the fay that seemed to travel the village's road regularly, the party returned to Bildrath's Mercantile to ask more questions, learning that the girl had not been seen by either Bildrath, or Parriwimple, that Barovia was part of the hold of castle Ravenloft, which is ruled by a vampire that the people call "The Devil Strahd". Syi also confirmed that both men were human.

Again, the party returned back to the tavern and had Syi, in their dog form, sniff the three women in the tavern, who all were confirmed to be human, the bartender, about whom Syi exclaimed that - while human - he had no soul, and Yelena, who was also confirmed to be "clean". In their room, Vaerys revealed that information to the others and they speculated how it could be that a person is walking around without a soul, something that not even the Warlock's familiar could explain.

I present thee with riddles three times three

Having asked the others for help, Dragneel took out the spellbook from the Durst manor to get their input on solving the riddles of the previous owners, and they quickly got to work. When they got riddles wrong, the book zapped them with an electric shock, but they were not barred from trying again, eventually solving all eight remaining riddles and revealing all of the spells in the spellbook.