# May 18, 2026 | Rat Has Excellent Penmanship > [!Summary]+ meta > **Role Call**: [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] • [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] • [[Kouneli]] • [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] • [[Cheeto]] • [[Styx]] > **Where We Are**: [[The Drunken Dragon]] → [[Clifftop Guild|Clifftop]] → the Rusty Anchor → toward the Cardamom Club > **Tagline**: "The rat has excellent penmanship." [[E16 - Asking for a Friend|↶ Last Session]] | [[The Bleeding Veil| Campaign Home ↝]] ## This Session A detective episode. The party has a missing handler, a silent guild, and a stack of loose thread from three days of downtime — so for once they decide to *pull* on it instead of waiting for the next fire. [[Kouneli]] connects the dots between a Colossus researcher named **Stefan Faurious** and the Provost who shares his name. The crew forges a gloriously stupid letter to test whether [[Lhara]] ever actually answered to [[Clifftop Guild|Clifftop]], confirms the guild has gone quiet from the inside, and follows a tip from [[Varis]] — couriered by a rat with better handwriting than most of them — to a former [[Order of the Emerald Claw|Emerald Claw]] drop at the Rusty Anchor. They find it emptied, save for a single copper coin scratched with three vertical lines. [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] recognizes the mark. With a second tip naming a dead drop Lhara checks every moonrise, they head for the Cardamom Club. ^session-summary ## Session Log ### Ron Swanson at a Party Evening at [[The Drunken Dragon]]. [[Hascal d'Ghallanda|Hascal]] has the usual round poured before anyone orders it, which is either hospitality or surveillance. - Hascal, philosophical as ever: *"Yeah. Well. Life's a dance. You learn as you go."* - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] meditates on the room and reports *"a sense of foreboding... an unease in the aura surrounding"* the place. The table: *"That seemed pretty obvious."* - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] continues to be the warforged equivalent of *Ron Swanson at a party* — present, immovable, having a perfectly fine time saying nothing. - Standing order on the tavern, restated for the record: **don't trust it.** A rat once talked to Hascal. The good vibes are exactly the problem. ### Spy Level [[Kouneli]] debriefs three days in the Morgrave stacks, which is to say he monologues, beautifully. - *"I barely left the library, and it was amazing."* The Colossus program, the planar weirdness, all of it — and a research assistant named **Stefan Faurious**, surname-matched to **Provost [[Nigel Faurious]]**. - On the greenhouse "lamia": *"That wasn't a lamia... it's a girl Sphinx, and apparently it's been there a long time."* ([[Flamewind]], older than the faculty, watching the watchers.) - Kouneli assesses his own tradecraft: *"I'm spy level on this. Nobody's gonna know."* (Narrator: people would, in fact, know.) - The distrust gets said out loud, flatly: *"I don't trust Lhara — as I once did."* And worse: *"Are we even working for them?"* - [[Styx]], defending his evidence board from peer review: *"It's my serial killer notebook. Leave me the [expletive] alone."* ### Risk It for the Biscuit The plan: forge an urgent letter to a senior Clifftop official, courier it in, and watch what the guild does — proof, one way or the other, of whether Lhara was ever really theirs. - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]], delighted by logistics: *"Does everybody have a calligraphy set? That's fantastic."* - The letter's contents are where the operation immediately stops being professional. Sample correspondence: *"Your pregnancy test has come back..."* and, the all-timer, *"Yes, your illithid herpes is contagious. Do not sleep around."* - Brian rolls the forgery; Kouneli **Helps** and stacks **Guidance** on top. The DM, reading the result: *"It would have been a 17... this would fool me."* Good enough to fool the forger is good enough to fool the guild. - *"We have to risk it for the biscuit."* Thesis statement of the entire night. ### Foot to Tail A budget sleepover that doubles as evidence review. - Kouneli offers his floor with the least appealing pitch imaginable: *"You'd be foot to tail."* The DM honors the bit — *"a terribly uncomfortable night, just farting all over each other."* - Between the farts, they comb the looted papers: a warforged repair manifest (*"WF unit, designation unclear, chest plate scoring..."*) that reads uncomfortably close to Tendy's own lineage, and a technical sketchbook of two weapons sharing a single housing. ### Must Be Your First Day Brian sets out to drop in on old friends at the guild and immediately demonstrates why he needs a chaperone. - Hungover, he passes a Constitution check on the principle of *"hair of the dog — functional is what we call it,"* then rolls History to navigate and produces a **4 followed by a 2.** He gets lost in his own city. - A passing halfling, witnessing this: *"Must be your first day, huh?"* - At [[Clifftop Guild|Clifftop]] he lands the Persuasion and gets a crumb from the receptionist: *"She was in early yesterday. Didn't stay very long."* And an overheard mutter about a man who *"just wants to see one of the highest ranking officials in the guild."* The silence has a shape, and people are pressing on it. ### You Do Not Get a Meat Stick Stakeouts, in pairs, anchored by the worst-rated street meat in Sharn. - The skewer vendor's worldview: *"Every day above ground is a good day."* He confirms the foot traffic's been off — something about *"all the crazy flashing lights, or the fires."* - [[Styx]] attempts to charm a free skewer off the man on a clean Persuasion roll and is denied with prejudice: *"You do not get a meat stick."* ### Spider-Man, Spider-Man Kouneli tries to signal Styx across the stakeout with subtlety and surgical precision. He achieves neither. - He casts **Mage Hand** and rolls Sleight of Hand to tap Styx discreetly. He fumbles, and the spectral hand simply pokes Styx in the butt. - Immediate callback to *"the time Griffin shot him in the butthole."* A Spider-Man point is exchanged. The stakeout survives. - Then the rat arrives — a real one, carrying a rolled parchment. The DM, with genuine admiration: *"The rat has excellent penmanship."* Styx tips it a crumb of cheese, as one does. ### What the Rat Knew The note is the spine of the night — two tips, written in two hands, and a closing line that costs. - The top note (Varis's contact): *"Your armored friends pulled back from the Guild District last night... an outpost in Old Keep, some tavern called the Rusty Anchor. There was a regular drop mortared into the wall behind the privy — but that box was empty."* Plus a warning: *"new sharp eyes around the university."* - [[Varis]]'s own note: *"Lhara's been keeping different hours... three meetings outside the guild walls... a sealed message to Tavick's Landing, triple rate... she's been checking a dead drop almost every moonrise at the Cardamom Club in Lower Tavick's Landing, in the back alley."* - The closer, and the reason to take Varis seriously: *"That second one cost me a contact I'm rather fond of."* ### Fully Functional They take the Emerald Claw lead first — the Rusty Anchor, a tavern in Old Keep with twelve years of bad reputation and one very forward bartender. - Tendy disguises as a laborer, with a self-assessment for the ages: *"I will look rather simple. But I am well maintained."* - The bartender's menu: *"We got ales, and we got ales... I think we have ales."* Her closing pitch: *"More than one way to pay,"* and, to Tendy specifically, *"I'm pretty good at polishing things."* Tendy, unbothered and accurate: *"Fully functional."* - [[Styx]] searches the privy on a cursed **−1 Investigation**, finds the empty mortared drop box exactly as promised — then a *second* cavity behind it, holding **one tarnished copper coin scratched with three vertical lines.** ### Three Lines The coin is the hook the whole session was reaching for. - Tendy clocks the marking and stops the room: *"My friends, I think we have seen markings like this before."* Three vertical lines — outside the artificer's workshop, on the tall Colossus. - That's the thread tied off and the next one picked up. Varis's second tip is still warm: Lhara, a dead drop, every moonrise, a back alley that smells like cardamom. - They can't take her in a fight and they know it, so the move is to *watch.* The party sets off for Lower Tavick's Landing at dusk — and that's where we leave them, walking toward the Cardamom Club.