QUEST: The Hacienda of the Jungle Spirits

Beyond Maravela, where the last fields end and the jungle closes its green fist around the land, there stands an abandoned hacienda.

No one remembers its builders.

No one remembers its dead.

The jungle remembers both.

On the cracked walls of the first building are signs: dots, bars, diamonds, old numbers scratched into plaster and stone. An Olmec riddle, waiting beneath dust, roots and years.

Its answer does not lie in one room.

 

The numbers lead farther into the hacienda.

There, in the second building, the riddle continues.

And at its end waits a mask.

They call it The Mask of the Jungle Spirits.

 

The old people of Maravela say that everything living is hungry. Man is hungry. The beast is hungry. The earth itself is hungry.

You take fruit from the branch.

You take meat from the animal.

You take grain from the soil.

And sooner or later, the jungle takes something back.

But the one who wears the mask is permitted, for a little while, to bargain with it.

A fruit becomes two.

A piece of meat becomes two.

The earth opens its hand.

Not forever.

The spirits are generous, but they are not fools.

 

They will grant their favour fifty times.

After that, the jungle closes its hand again.

And the mask becomes only a mask.

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OOC

The Mask of the Jungle Spirits is a Harvest Booster.

It is transferable and may be traded or given to another resident.

It provides 50 boosted harvests.

When harvesting food or meat, a boosted harvest gives double the normal result.

After 50 boosted harvests, the booster is exhausted.