The Retreat

The Retreat is an artificially-created oubliette and the primary lair of the Fiend known as the Red Haunt. The Retreat is the Fiend's principal research facility, but also serves as an arsenal, a cell complex for test subjects, and an all-around sanctuary where the Fiend can rest and relax.

Layout and Location

Both the Retreat's internal floor plan and its location in the Mists can be altered, as it was created and is still managed by the World Engine. The Red Haunt can open doors from her lair to any Domain whose borders are not closed, and which are not warded against such intrusion in another way. Currently, the Retreat's front door opens in the Blackchapel district of Paridon, but there are other doors.

Appearance

The Retreat has no real windows that might betray its nature; instead, enchanted portraits display a number of different locations.

The oubliette's winding corridors are panelled with oak and ash wood, and illuminated by servant candles. Ugly little statuettes, actually homunculi, are positioned in every corridor and room, providing their fiendish creator with up-to-date information on all the goings-on on the main level of her lair as soon as she mentally contacts them.

Various rooms show more individual traits, such as various guest rooms, the Shrine to Brightwell, the Gallery, Imogen's Library, Katia's Medical Theater, the Aquarium that houses Boyce's seal pod, and Clementine's "Playroom". A lower dungeon level devoted wholly to cells and storage, as well as the powerful World Engine, has walls, ceilings and floors of cold stone.

Inhabitants and Security

The oubliette's security is threefold.

• First, there is the swarm of homunculi monitoring the main level.
• Second, there are 'servant corridors' behind the walls of the main level, used by Lebendtod servants to move about. If so required, they can exit these passages and move into the main corridors.
• The World Engine has absolute control over time and space within the Retreat. If ordered not to let someone out (or in), there is no way for them to pass through the Retreat's doors (though the machine itself has noted it is possible to break through the walls and enter the dubious safety of the Mists).

Besides the various personas of the Red Haunt, the Retreat is 'home' to the World Engine, the aforementioned test subjects - creatures imprisoned on the lower level for purposes of training, experimentation, interrogation or persuasion - as well as a staff of Lebendtod servants, homunculi and other constructs, an odd man who professed to be the family butler when Victor Gagné was a 'guest' at the Retreat, and various 'permanent guests' like Boyce Vinctus.