Mimic Inn

That old place....it always creeped me out. Now and then some of the lads decide to go there to party. They never come back.

— A brigand with a good sense of self preservation

The Mimic Inn is generally believed to be an inn under an enchantment that enables it to always be large enough to accomodate just one more guest. In reality, it is an extremely old Mimic, grown to enormous size, that has disguised itself as an entire inn. It has slowly grown over time, adding new rooms without anyone ever making an addition. To most passersby, it is nothing more than a roadside inn, other than the fact that it appears to have been built by someone who vastly overestimated the number of customers it would recieve.

History

The mimic that became the Inn was once a dungeon mimic like any other. But as it grew older and fed upon more and more people, it grew in size, from a chest to an door to an entire room. Eventually, it found the dungeon too cramped for its continued growth, and crept outside into the light of day. After spending several centuries as boulders, trees and so on, it grew to the size of a building. Having observed abandoned buildings here and there on the side of the road, and seen signs of occasional visitations by outlaws, plunderers and adventurers, it disguised itself as a dirty old inn, long abandoned by its keeper.

After feeding on no few bandits and scofflaws, couple of refugees came to it, and decided to take it over. They stepped inside, but instead of attempting to shatter ancient tables and chairs for firewood, they started cleaning the place up, polishing windows, straightening doors, dusting and so on. And it found it liked that. And, after all, the more they did, the more guests arrived, paid for a night's rest, and then disappeared. At first, the couple assumed they had just been early risers, but soon they grew suspicious, and began investigating. But as their investigation failed (having never considered a mimic inn as a possibility), they became upset, and prayed for the good people who stayed at the inn. And the mimic, finding its new keepers so upset, decided that the good people staying at the inn would be free to go. There would, after all, be plenty of bad people, people the innkeepers would be happy to never see again.

Thus it decided its course of action: from that day forth, it only consumed troublemakers and thieves, those who would not be missed, at least not by the innkeepers. These have provided it a steady source of food - not as much as consuming all the guests would be, but far more than it hoped to get as a tree, or a boulder, or a treasure chest in some monster-infested dungeon. The original innkeepers grew old and died, passing the inn on to their children. Centuries passed, with the inn growing slowly, adding new rooms on quiet nights, nights with few guests to hear and its keepers sleeping soundly. By now it is an inn of remarkable size, more befitting a major city than an empty roadside. And it is content - ever watchful of Adventurers who might hurt it, and ever on the lookout for a suitable meal, but content with its lot in life.

Running the Encounter

Night is falling as the party journeys through Asuria. In the distance, on the road ahead, they see an inn, rising from the gloom of twilight. A warm glow shines through the windows (of which there are many), a cheerful sound rises from the open doorway, comforting, inviting.

The inn is busy, with the owners now employing no less than three servers in addition to their son, who tends the stables. A score or more of guests sit around the common room, drinking, laughing, singing a song. One of the barmaids is dancing, leading the song, keeping everyone happy and distracted. An observant character might notice, near the door to the kitchen, the other two talking, one clearly upset. The owners look nervous.

Asking Around

If pressed for information, any of the staff might volunteer that somone's gone missing. The crying barmaid calls him by his first name, clearly she liked the missing man, was perhaps hoping to spend the night with him. They all say "it's happened" but aren't particularly willing to elaborate on what. If pressed further, they say something like "It shouldn't have happened, not to him" or "he was too good for it to happen to him." Conversely, most of the guests don't know him, and the two friends he came with lie about it - they figure he's slipped away, maybe to steal something or pull some prank. Either way, they don't have a clue what's really going on.

The truth, of course, is that the mimic ate him. Perhaps he was stealing stuff, maybe he was lying to the barmaid to get her to sleep with him, and boasted about it to someone in the common room. Maybe he just decided to carve a heart into a post with his and the barmaids name in it. If so, the carving is still there, but an investigating player might realize there's a drop of fresh mimic blood in the carving. Though they might think it's someone else's blood, maybe the victim's.

The staff don't know exactly what's going on. They know there's something weird about this place - troublesome guests suddenly disappear when they're off on their own. Nobody knows why, they all found it creepy when they first heard about it (whichever of the owners grew up here thought the monster under the bed got them, or something else technically true but also easily dismissed as childish fancy.) But it only ever happened to the guests they really didn't want to see again anyway, so it was fine. Until now. Now they don't know who's on the menu.

Investigating Further

If the adventurers want to look into it, drop hints about how the place is bigger than it used to be, but nobody who should know remembers ever having expanded the place. Maybe the owner that grew up there remembers there only being 3 floors as a kid, as opposed to 4 now, but forgot about it. Or a hall that "seems" longer in their old age than it was when they were young. It doesn't have any magical properties that can be detected through a spell designed to do so, or maybe a hint of transmutation magic, but in the way that something that can naturally transform itself would. A spell that detects life or monsters or anything like that, on the other hand, detects a very large life form all around them.

As the adventurers are exploring, the mimic is scared. It knows it can kill the party, or at least it thinks it can. It's also grown smart enough to realize that racking up the body count here is just going to encourage more of a response down the road. Eat the adventurers, the innkeepers will tell people, more investigators will come. Kill everyone who knows anything, and then people are going to wonder why a popular roadside inn that regularly has a number of guests is suddenly empty, abandoned. Keep killing, and eventually someone with an army will notice...etc. So it doesn't want a fight.

This probably ends with the adventurers (and their players) creeped out and confused, unable to find a good answer. Or maybe the mimic provides an answer - it coughs up a dropped broach or something near a windowsill - something that got snagged as he was climbing out the window. He just slipped off into the night, he's probably fine. Or something out there got him. Nothing weird about the inn after all, just a young man who wandered the wilderness at night and got got by a roving monster.