❖ Turn 3
Ask krah to wait somewhere inconspicuous while I quickly work to retrieve the rope and pamphlets, if its quicker to just get the pamphlets ill get those - then I will offer to escort krah wherever he wants to go, or offer him to stay with me as I head to the canal quarter.
Scene One: The Copper Ghetto — Before Dawn
You catch Krah-Moh’s compound eyes and hold them. Then you point — deliberate, unhurried — at a collapsed tea-warehouse doorway twenty feet down the alley, a pocket of shadow the Watch lanterns don’t reach. You mime someone standing still, arms at sides, waiting. You hold up one finger. One moment. You point at the roof above.
He watches you for two full seconds. Then he walks to the doorway and steps inside it and becomes difficult to see. Whether that is trust or simple tactical sense, you cannot tell.
The rope is still where you left it. Three storeys of yellow brick, rough and dry, and the hemp creaking faintly against the chimney iron. You go up.
STR check — climbing hand-over-hand with rope in place
No group applies
STR 9 — roll 1d20 → 6
6 ≤ 9 — SUCCESS Quality: 6
Clean enough. Slower than the descent — slug-men are not built for this — but the rope is solid and you find the rhythm. You haul yourself over the parapet with burning arms, collect the pamphlets from their chimney gap — all twelve, dry, undamaged — and coil the rope. The Yellow City spreads around you in the last of the dark: the God River a black ribbon, the Brahmin temples pale gold where their lamps still burn, and somewhere north the canal quarter’s low haze of cook-smoke and incense. The stars are going out.
Back down in under a minute. You untie the rope at the bottom and shoulder it.
Krah-Moh steps out of the warehouse shadow before you reach him. He has been watching the street.
You stand before him, pack settled, staff in hand, pamphlets tucked away. Dawn perhaps forty minutes off now. You point north — toward the canal quarter — and then gesture openly, an invitation: come with me if you want. Then you spread your hands and step aside, giving him the street: or go where you were going.
He considers this. The compound eyes are unreadable. Then he looks at your staff. Your plain robes. The spot where the pamphlets sit against your ribs. He cannot have understood the words you spoke in that cellar, but he heard tone, rhythm, response — the weeping, the held breath, the scattering feet.
Krah-Moh's decision
CHA check — offer of genuine choice (not coercion)
CHA 13 — no group applies clearly, plain roll
1d20 → 5
5 ≤ 13 — SUCCESS Quality: 5
He falls into step behind you. Not beside you — behind, half a pace, as a free man who has decided on a direction rather than a slave who has been pointed at one. When you slow at the first junction to find the Watch-free way north, he moves up beside you and takes the left fork without hesitation. He knows this quarter better than you do.
You follow his lead.
The canal quarter receives you just as the first grey seeps into the eastern sky. The smell changes: river water, boiled grain, the faint sweetness of fermenting something. Narrow houses on stilts lean over the water. Somewhere ahead, a door is cracked open — a candle guttering inside.
Your cell. Or what is left of it.
Three people step out as you approach: Selindi, a low-caste human woman who keeps the meeting records and speaks four languages; the brothers Dov and Pav, ex-dockworkers with burn-scarred forearms. They are watching Krah-Moh the way people watch weather they haven’t predicted.
Selindi looks at you. “Who is this?” Low voice, no hostility — but her eyes are doing arithmetic.
ROPE retrieved ✓ PAMPHLETS ×12 retrieved ✓
COIN: 76 gp HP: 4/4
Krah-Moh stands in the canal-light, making no move to explain himself, since he cannot. The choice of what to say — and how much — is yours.
What do you do?
◆ Vothrog HP 4/4 · Yellow City, Canal Quarter · Cell reunited; Krah-Moh present; Selindi wants an explanation
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