❖ Turn 2
I’d like to descend and intercede - speaking as one of them Vorthog explains Krah is a servant of a close friend and you just sent him home after he helped you with some charity work - the collar was left at home as to not invite confusion as to his real owner. Offer 2 GP to each of the guards for the inconvenience, I should have escorted him back myself.
Scene One: The Copper Ghetto, Street Level
The rope is already in your pack. You tie it to the ironwork chimney-brace and go down hand-over-hand, three storeys of yellow brick rough against your palms, robes knotted at the knee. You leave the pamphlets wedged in a gap between chimney stones — recoverable later. You hit the alley cobbles soft, loosen the rope’s tail, and walk around the corner at an unhurried slug-man’s pace, the staff clicking.
The constables see you before you see their faces clearly. You feel the shift — the slight straightening, the hand moving away from the sword hilt. Whatever else you are tonight, you are what the Watch was built to serve.
CHA task — Deceive the Watch
Slug-Man [Species] group applies → positive double roll on CHA 13
Roll: 2d20 → 7 and 14 — take the 7
7 ≤ 13 — SUCCESS Quality: 7 (no matching pair)
No crit, no fumble.
Quality 7 is clean. Your voice, when it comes, is the High Tongue dressed in Common — the particular cadence slug-men use when addressing subordinates they have chosen, generously, to address at all.
“Ah. There you are.” You click your tongue at Krah-Moh as though mildly disappointed in a slow child. “I told Magistrate Uven I would see you home myself. I did not, and here we all are at an unreasonable hour.”
You turn to the constables and let a practised bureaucratic sigh escape your spiracle-gills. “My apologies, gentlemen. The Magistrate’s household staff sometimes forgets its documents. The collar is on a hook in the receiving-room — Krah has been known to scratch himself raw during long evenings of sorting letters. A habit.” You produce four gold pieces, two per palm, and offer them with the air of someone reimbursing a cab. “For the inconvenience of my inattention.”
The younger constable — the one with the ledger — closes it without writing anything. His partner, the sword-hand, turns one coin over twice, testing its weight. Neither is fully satisfied. The sword-hand looks at Krah-Moh for a long moment, as if hunting for something he can name. But a slug-man in the street at night offering gold and a plausible story is not a puzzle a Watch constable wants to solve before dawn.
“He’s all yours, then,” the sword-hand says. A statement, not a question. They take their lanterns east, toward the spice-factor district, without a backward glance.
The alley is quiet. The river-rot smell thickens in the pre-dawn air.
Krah-Moh stands motionless, watching you with the flat compound eyes of his kind. His ochre shell, you see now, is marked low on the left side — a white scar-line in the shape of a stylized wave. Not a house-mark. Something personal, or perhaps tribal. He does not bow, does not posture, does not perform relief. He simply looks at you, and waits.
He heard everything that was said in your cellar meeting tonight. He cannot tell you what he thought of it, not in any tongue you share. But he came, and he stayed too long, and now he owes you something that neither of you can name in a language the other speaks.
COIN UPDATE: 80 gp − 4 gp = 76 gp remaining
Pamphlets ×12 — secured on roof, retrievable
Dawn is perhaps an hour off. The canal quarter, where your scattered cell is regrouping, is twenty minutes north on foot. Your rope is still hanging off the dyewright’s chimney. And Krah-Moh has not moved.
You could go retrieve the rope and pamphlets, bringing him along — but that means leading a conspicuous crab-man back up a wall in a city that just noticed him. You could cut the rope loose and leave it — 1 gp lost, but speed gained. You could part ways here, send him off with a gesture toward the docks, and move north alone. Or you could simply take him with you to the canal quarter, slow gait and all, and figure out what connection — if any — you’ve just made.
What do you do?
◆ Vothrog HP 4/4 · Yellow City, Copper Ghetto alley · Watch withdrawn; Krah-Moh free and watching; dawn ~1 hr; pamphlets on rooftop; cell regrouping north
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