# April 6, 2026 | Close Enough > [!Summary]+ meta > **Role Call**: [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] • [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] • [[Kouneli]] • [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] • [[Cheeto]] • [[Styx]] > **Where We Are**: Baldrin's Orphanage (Dura) → Bazaar of Dura → sky coach (definitely not a skybridge) → [[The Drunken Dragon]] (Clifftop) > **Tagline**: "We panicked and hired a cab." [[E12 - Are We the Baddies|↶ Last Session]] | [[The Bleeding Veil| Campaign Home ↝]] | [[E14 - Steady Questin'|Next Session ↝]] ## This Session The party wakes up at Baldrin's with the Idol already causing problems — the hearth is roaring, a kid named Miri is running a fever, and Styx's pack is hot enough to read by. They pay Tesca ten silver for a healer and head for The Drunken Dragon. A pickpocket brushes the pack in the Bazaar, burns his palm, and the Idol cooks off — six smoke mephits claw out of the everbright lanterns. [[Cheeto]] collects every status condition the fight has on offer. [[Kouneli]] eats a leg slash. The orichalcum from [[Drummond]]'s workshop wakes up mid-fight — gauntlet flaring, daggers humming, the rapier leaving afterimages. Three Sharn Watch officers arrive, and [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] talks the party out of being the suspects. Rattled, they hail a sky coach, bribe the pilot, discover mid-flight that the Idol is burning through Styx's pocket, and bail out over Clifftop on a Feather Fall only to realize they're in the wrong place afterall. ^session-summary ## Session Log ### Boldran's Getting Hot in Here The party wakes up in the common room. Someone has draped blankets over whoever passed out in the chairs. Someone else has already put a wet cloth on Miri's forehead. - The hearth is *roaring*. [[Tesca ir'Lantar|Tesca]] has banked it twice already. It keeps coming back. - [[Miri]] — the kid who fell asleep nearest [[Styx]]'s pack — has a fever. Nobody else is sick. Just the ones who slept close. - The Idol has started pulsing. Faint blue through the leather. Slow. Rhythmic. Like a sleeping animal. - [[Kouneli]] puts it together: Sharn is saturated with mixed arcane energy. In the Cogs the Idol was in its native Fernia bleed and stable. Up here it's agitated, and it's absorbing more, not less. - The party slips [[Tesca ir'Lantar|Tesca]] ten silver for a healer and gets Miri off the cot nearest the fireplace. [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] does not offer a second opinion. Growth. ### Pickpocket, Uniquely Poor Decision They cut through the Bazaar because the Bazaar is the fastest route to the lifts. Hindsight: great. - Candles softening on a chandler's display. Wax seals weeping on their own. Three colored liquids in an alchemist's display case starting to *bubble* as the party walks past. The alchemist stares. Everbright lanterns flicker on every post — not dying. *Surging.* - A street kid, twelve or thirteen, quick hands, makes a grab for [[Styx]]'s jacket. He gets one finger on the strap. - He *screams*. Not a shout — a scream. His palm is already blistering when he lets go. He bolts into the crowd. - The Idol *flares*. Cobblestones glow orange under [[Styx]]'s boots. A chestnut brazier goes blue-white. Three everbright lanterns burst in sequence — pop, pop, pop. - Six smoke-shapes claw out of the thin air above the market and shriek. The shriek sounds like a forge bellows being worked too hard. ### Six Mephits, One Bad Day for Cheeto The market empties around them. Canvas awnings catch. Vendors trample each other getting out. - [[Cheeto]] takes it all. Blinded. Poisoned. Prone. Hamstrung. If there was a condition to be collected, he collected it. - While *blinded* he throws a punch anyway. The gauntlet flares — a resonant hum on impact, heat and light running down the orichalcum plates. Max damage. He could not see the thing and he still took it apart. - [[Kouneli]] catches a leg slash and drops to something like twelve feet of movement. Wizards were not built for hamstrung. - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] notices the daggers on his belt vibrating. The orichalcum is *answering* the Idol — the weapons from [[Drummond]]'s workshop have woken up for the first time. They were inert in storage because there was no activation source. The Idol just provided one. - [[Styx]] draws the rapier and the point of impact flashes brilliant prismatic for a half-second. Nobody has time to figure out what any of this is; they're swinging. - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] keeps [[Cheeto]] upright through sheer stubbornness. Short rest later the leg comes back; the hamstring will want to be looked at. - The mephits die messy. Smoke bursts when they drop. The air is so thick the Watch smells it from two streets away. ### Victims, Not Suspects Three Sharn Watch officers push through the haze just as the last mephit dissipates into cinders. - The case against the party writes itself. [[Cheeto]] is on the ground. Ash-covered. Styx's pack is still radiating heat. A blistering child is hiding behind a cart two rows over. - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] does the talking. He goes hard on *they were attacked* — bubbling vials, the kid's hand, the mephits as consequence not cause. Solid delivery. - The officers buy enough of it to let the party walk. They take names. They take descriptions. They do not return the pack. - The Bazaar is wrecked. Fires getting put out behind them. Somewhere a broadsheets runner is already sprinting for the office. ### They Panicked and Hired a Cab The skybridge is a twenty-minute walk and feels exactly like the kind of exposed chokepoint where the next bad thing finds them. Nobody at the table has twenty more minutes of patience. - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] flags down a sky coach — a leather-seated cabin strapped between two harnessed skyrays. - [[Kouneli]] bribes the captain ten gold to skip every stop between here and Menthis. The captain does not ask why. - Mid-flight, [[Styx]] starts taking fire damage *through his pocket*. Three points. Then three more. The Idol is burning its way out of the jacket. - Somebody — [[Cheeto]], probably — dumps a waterskin into the pocket. It hisses. A cloud of steam fills the cabin. The Idol stops burning. For now. - The captain glances back. Decides not to ask. ### Featherfall Out Halfway to Menthis the coach banks over Clifftop and [[Kouneli]] makes an executive decision. - *"We're getting off here."* - He casts Feather Fall. Six adventurers vault the rail of a moving flying vehicle over a ward that was not on the flight plan. - They drift down over [[The Drunken Dragon|the Drunken Dragon]]'s courtyard like six pieces of very stubborn laundry. - The coach captain, ten gold richer, does not stop. ### Wrong Tavern, Right Face The common room is dim. Familiar. Old whiskey and boiled nothing. - [[Hascal d’Ghallanda|Hascal]] is behind the bar like he's been waiting for them, because he has been waiting for them. There is a rat on the counter beside his elbow. It scurries up his shoulder, says something nobody else can hear, and is gone before [[Styx]] can track it. - [[Styx]] has seen a rat like that before. E7. The one that spoke on behalf of [[Chandra]]. *Her new family.* Same kind of rat. Different handler. - [[Hascal d’Ghallanda|Hascal]], mild as milk, pulling a glass down off the shelf: *"[[Lhara]] would like to know why you're here instead of at Morgrave."* - Nobody has a good answer. - He pours a round nobody ordered. On his way past he leans in and taps two fingers against the pocket holding the Idol. - The common room cools by ten degrees. The heat shimmer stops. The pulse slows. Styx feels the pack go from *hot* to *warm*. - Nobody asks how. Hascal does not explain. - And that's where the session ends — six adventurers parked in the wrong tavern, a client expecting them somewhere else, and a halfling bartender who knows more than he's saying.