Nike Poltran Cavanaugh

Recommended reading: Vinna (no spoilers), Dino (up to 1st spoiler section)
Advised reading, but not necessary for understanding: Illia (no spoilers), Kurzec (no spoilers)

After Vinna, Dino, and Cav reach Aervrin, they join up with Illia, a young icend of certain political significance.  Cavanaugh feels the need to act like her bodyguard, which sets Illia on edge, since icends and volkin are not exactly known for amicable relations, but Cav seems oblivious to it.  As they journey, things seem a little "off" about the world around them: strangers suspect them, animals are hostile to them, and the weather feels eerie.  Vinna and Dino seem less aware of this, attributing it to a greater feeling of being out of place in a foreign territory.  But Cavanaugh and Illia have both been here before; could it just be the general tense feeling of being together as a traveling party?  It can't just be that, can it??

Cavanaugh is caught off guard by the atmosphere, and starts regularly messing up during battles.  For someone who declared herself a bodyguard, she's not doing great at it!  It becomes bad enough that the rest of the party checks in to make sure she's okay.  She isn't, and she can't hide it; she breaks down and confesses to them that the portal incident really is her fault, like she insinuated earlier.  She had taken interest in Vinna and Dino's story and their claims, but after having traveled with them, it's obvious it's not actually their fault, it's still hers!  She just took this opportunity to shift blame!

This, naturally, comes as a surprise, but Cavanaugh explains the basics: her family has a curse that makes them all terminally unlucky.  It can manifest in something as ordinarily embarrassing as tripping while all eyes are on them, or something as terrible as accidental death.  Because of this, her family is the butt of jokes in their hometown, and she has to work hard to try and defy expectations.  But the curse still happens, and misfortune befalls her no matter what she does!  Vina and Dino aren't exactly buying it, especially since Dino has a very clear curse curse.  It sounds to them like Cav's family might be a bit paranoid, and they're reading too much between the lines.

Cavanaugh protests!  It is a curse curse!  Her ancestor, Janus Rothac Cavanaugh, was the one to discover the basics of teleportation, and for tampering in the domain of the gods, his lineage was cursed with eternal misfortune!

...That's what her parents tell her, anyway.  The Cavanaugh name is simultaneously hailed and mocked in Magna Pyra for those two distinct things.  This stops Vinna for a bit; she had heard of the name Cavanaugh in her portal studies, but it's a common volk name, and didn't seem related.  But with this connection established...the idea of a curse of misfortune doesn't seem entirely absurd.  Still, Vinna presses her: why does she think she specifically caused the portal crisis?  Even if this curse was real, she and Dino are the ones to have ended up in a completely different continent this morning; it makes the most sense that the ones most related to the crisis are the ones that experienced a glitch.

That's the thing, Cav says.  She also experienced a portal glitch.  Heading to Shim-Dewrias for work, the portal stopped mid-transfer for her.  For a brief moment, she experienced total darkness and a feeling of dread.  She had enough time to wonder if her great ancestor experienced this when he first discovered teleportation...and suddenly she was at her destination.  It was a short enough moment to feel entirely hallucinatory, but then the portals being shut down and co-workers blaming her immediately after told her all she needed to know: this was her fault, her family curse.

That's finally enough to get Vinna to stop protesting.  She still believes she and Dino are involved in this, but...all three of them could all be involved in this, perhaps.  A pitch-black void in the middle of a portal transfer...what does it mean?