The Orphanage
The Orphanage has three rooms. Its only enter/exit door is a stable-door to the kitchen. Directly in front is a shelf for shoes, brushes and for brooms to lean on. A fireplace in the far wall to the left, past a table, shelves of jars, chests of foods. A stable-door to the right leading to the general room.
Above the general room up a set of stairs which can be described equally as accurately as a ladder, is the children bedroom. This room is full of bunk-beds three cots tall, a small window and a large window, a, eaves high overhead containing cobwebs and spiders. If any child complains about the spiders they are reprimanded thats he spiders are better than the rats. In this way the children are encouraged to be more terrified of rats than they are of spiders. There are no rats in the building.
The Orphanage is run by the local coven of witches who run several other facilities in the village, including a second-hand items shop and a potions shop. The witches are generally mean, cruel, bitter, controlling, narcissistic old crones, with the exception of Maryllis who runs the potions store. Maryllis is young, beautiful, tender-hearted, kind and is a very repressed nymphomaniac. She is said to have elven blood, the source of her magical powers. This is not so far from the truth.
The Orphans are set to work doing all the horrible but necessary jobs required for the coven to turn a tidy profit and to keep the children out of trouble. They are ruled by fear. Occasionally one of the children will disappear, sometimes the same day as one of the witches mysteriously acquires a new rat for the rat cage, a large facility kept at the back of one of the cottages, a necessity for the feeding of the village cats. Of course the village is overrun by cats. Occasionally one of the children will disappear having managed to escape and set out into the world of their own devices. Occasionally the children are taken to the market wharf to be sold aboard the ships as cabin-boys or scullion-maids.