The Lazy Cockatrice: Area-14: The Crown Suite

 The Lazy Cockatrice (Hex 0203)

Area-14: The Upper Corridor

This lavish suite features a king-sized bed, massive desk with pen, ink, quills, book-binding materials, hourglass, and several tapers. A planter of aromatic flowers, a comfortable chaise, full-length mirror, and wardrobe.

The current guest-in-residence is Lady Aria Hollystead, a wealthy courtier, and second wife to Baron Hollystead. She is a selfish, ill-tempered, spoiled, and while creative,  too lazy to actually complete a project. Her protector, Sir Ogden Lundt, resides in the room across the hall, and her lady-in-waiting and protégé are placed in the room next to her own.

Lady Aria is ruder and more impatient than usual thanks to being stuck at the Lazy Cockatrice for more days than she had bargained with, as the coachman Ostler Wayne has fallen ill.

What Lady Aria Wants

• To be flattered with courtly manners.
• To get out of "this hellhole" and on to her social engagements in Alliri
• To be treated tot he luxury and obedience to which she is accustomed.

What Lady Aria Does Not Want

• To be bothered with other people's problems.
• To mingle with commoners.
• To be spoken to with anything other than deference.

What Else?

• Lady Aria is famed for her beauty, musical talent, and artistic paintings, all of which are exaggerated: She is moderately attractive, plays passably, and rarely completes her artwork, which has great technique, but lacks flair.
• Lady Aria has been flattered and spoiled all her life. Calling her out on her egomania will either infuriate her or break her.
• Lady Aria has been put in charge of her husband's neice Gwendolyn (see Area 15) who is prettier, smarter, and more talented than herself. She resents this and is subtly, methodically psychologically abusing the girl in hopes of removing a potential rival at court.

In Deathtrap Lite, us the Aristocrat statistics, in AD&D treat her as a Normal Man. She carries an epee concealed in a parasol.

The rooms contents include six canvasses, half with incomplete landscapes, oil paints, brushes, rags, and pots for painting, a lute, five courtly outfits, 250gp worth of jewellery (she wears an additional 50gp worth and a signet ring), a box of expensive candies, her diary, a pen, palimpsest knife, coloured inks, calligraphy tools, sealing wax, the stamp of Hollystead, and several pieces of chalk in a device designed to create rule lines on parchment, and a stack of vapid correspondence detailing various bits of courtly gossip.