#pep rambles

Okay okay okay, so, what I think is going to happen is this: Clay’s sister is a park of the Tomb Takers, and his plot arc will braid into Molly’s rez. Like, they have to go fight the Tomb Takers so they head back to Shitty Creek Run and they pass Molly’s grave. There’s a beautiful bush that grows some kind of leaf that makes Clay laugh and smile with delight and start harvesting with glee, which totally confuses the rest of the Nein. But along with that, they find an empty grave. Molly’s body is gone. A victim of grave robbery or perhaps it is the lingering hope in the back of everyone’s brain. Molly had come back before, right? Jester’s the one to bring it up over the fire after they move on. Clay’s doing something to the leaves that involves chewing them and spreading them on wooden planks to dry before the fire, and Jester’s talking about how Molly’s come back before, right? What’s to say that he can’t do it again? So they continue on the nest day, Clay’s leaf planks strapped to the edge of the cart to dry in the sun and he’s humming a song, cheerful as a bird, and they get to what used to be Shitty Creek Run. 

It’s a heaping pile of ash. 

There’s a handful of survivors and they talk of a purple demon flanked by a black tabaxi and a pink haired firbolg woman who kinda looks like the stoner in the cart and everyone just goes “what the fuck Clay” and he says “yeah the sister that fucked up my knee? She’s that one.” And then in order to get Molly back they have to fight Clay’s own big sister and she ends up surrendering in the end, rather than die, so Clay takes the chance to go back home to his graveyard to be his sister’s keeper for a while and Molly rejoins the Nein. 

Sources: We know that Clay has issues with some of his family members and that he had a violent sister that he had issues with who had given him a chronic injury in the past. We also know the Tomb Takers were operating in the same area, around the time the blight of the forest started presumably, and they tried to do something very dumb with Molly that involved raising the dead or channeling the dead, some darkass necromancy shit.