# June 15, 2026 | Hello, Tick > [!Summary]+ meta > **Role Call**: [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] • [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] • [[Kouneli]] • [[Styx]] • [[Cheeto]] • [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] > **Where We Are**: Lower Tavick's Landing → the Calistan orphanage, Lower Dura > **Tagline**: "There's something wrong with Tick. He's not talking anymore." [[E19 - Nothing Personal, It's Just Business|↶ Last Session]] | [[The Bleeding Veil| Campaign Home ↝]] ## This Session A slow-burn horror episode that comes home — literally. The night after the Cardamom Club, the party puzzles over the **MT** ring, suffers Sharn's public transit, and watches [[Styx]] get politely frozen out of his own informant. Then they get back to the orphanage and the floor tilts twice. First [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] learns that [[Tesca ir'Lantar|Tesca]] has been feeding the children on the Assessor's money — the same Assessor who tried to foreclose on the place in E1 — in exchange for *answers*. Then the clockwork dolls the party hauled back from the Cogs **wake up**, and the orphanage becomes a haunted house: marching toddlers, a doll cracking eggs into a boot, and a boy named **Pim** clutching a doll named **Tick**. ^session-summary ## Session Log ### Margaret Thatcher Post-fight, the party inspects the ruby ring looted off the changeling. [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] handles it with appropriate paranoia. - *"I want to Gandalf this. I pick it up with some tongs, and I want to look at it."* The DM honors the reference: *"You gaze into the fire and, much like Gandalf's experience, you don't see anything particularly magic about the ring. It looks like a ring."* - Gold band, polished ruby, the letters **MT** set inside the stone. The table, instantly: *"Margaret Thatcher?"* - [[Kouneli]] pockets it: *"My cursed item for me, but it's mine."* Detect magic deferred. (It will keep.) ### It's Like Taking a Plane The party realizes they've fought their way into the wrong peninsula entirely and now have to *get home,* which in Sharn is a genuine ordeal. - [[Cheeto]], rich tabaxi, lost as ever: *"I'm just a dumb cat. I don't know these neighborhoods."* - The DM on intercity travel: *"It's like taking a plane. There's a timetable you have to navigate. Think of it like a bunch of layovers."* — *"Unless you, like, go and rent an airship or something."* Most of a day to get back up top. - The table dresses the set for Lower Tavick's at night: *"the kind of place that has the sewers where the steam is always coming out, and the music has a lot of saxophone playing sad notes."* - The recurring needle: *"Cheeto, you're rich, right? Can you just tell your parents? You're not really a monk — this is a gap year thing, isn't it?"* ### My Name Is Molly [[Styx]] splits off solo to chase the payment situation at [[Veres Lark|Varis]]'s bar — sauntering in late, *"but lively, as it always is here at the place we both know"* — and gets shut down with total professionalism. - A beautiful tiefling is sitting in the back booth where you'd typically find Varis. Styx approaches — *"Hello, Varis—"* — and she cuts him off cold: *"Oh, you must be confused. My name is **Molly**,"* with an unmistakable under-the-table wave-off. - Styx, needing very little Insight: *"Did I get that the hand signal is a wave-off?"* The DM: *"It was a pretty obvious 'go away.'"* - He waits 45 minutes; Molly and her companion vanish through a back-room door. Styx goes home untouched. A clean dead end — but now there's a Molly, and a back room. ### Good Kitty The walk home takes an hour or two, the streets getting *"later and later and quieter and quieter"* until the crew crosses into Calistan and finds the orphanage with the common-room fire *"down to embers, and nobody there to greet you."* Along the way, [[Cheeto]] unloads an entire headcanon about how each of them parents. - The table rates everyone's inconspicuousness for the walk. [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] wins by not being organic — the *"subsystems in your brain that tell you, oh no, it's a creature"* just file him under *"no, that is what — a tree, sir. You don't need to look at that."* [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] self-assesses (*"I'm bad at this, by the way"*) and the table piles on: *"everything's creaky."* The DM's verdict on the group: *"You're not inconspicuous. You're also not conspicuous. You're just you, walking down the street."* - Cheeto's lore dump: the kids paint pastels all over Tendy's armor; *"Uncle Brian gets that one kid that just asks question after question after question, and he wouldn't know how to escape it."* And [[Styx]] is the children's absolute favorite who *"never actually comes, so they're always bummed out."* - Cheeto burns **Aid** on a few of them — *"the point was I used 8 on a few of you, so I'm done being weird"* — and basks when Boldran calls him a good cat. *"He called me a good cat."* ### Tesca Might Have an OnlyFans [[Tesca ir'Lantar|Tesca]] comes in with *"a tray full of roasted meat and vegetables... a really big meal for all of you"* and a big smile, sets a decanter of wine out on the counter, and — *"just let me know if you need anything"* — heads up to the children's sleeping quarters. It's wildly beyond what the orphanage can afford, and [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] gets suspicious. - Table theories on the budget surplus: *"I think Tesca might have an OnlyFans, guys"* and *"Maybe she's just really dumb with money."* - Boldran pulls her aside. The real answer is worse: *"The **Assessor** came by. And we didn't have the money. But he told me it would be okay if we just... kept an ear to the ground now and again on stuff for him."* - Tesca, completely innocent: *"He just comes by and asks us questions now and again about stuff going on down here. It's never anything bad. I thought you'd be happy."* — the *"glowing smile of a young lady who thinks she has solved the puzzle."* - The gut-punch, for Boldran's player specifically: the Assessor is the man who tried to **foreclose on this orphanage back in E1**. Tesca has unknowingly turned the place into someone's listening post. *"I got some stuff to think about here."* ### The Book That Wasn't There Before A quiet mystery in the corner of the room. - [[Styx]] notices his bag is heavier than it should be: *"I pull out this new magical book... what the hell is this?"* He flips through — *"it's all magical"* — and then, being drunk, just puts it away. *"That was crazy. I don't know where this thing came from."* - Styx's plan for privacy: *"I go to the bathroom and pull it out like it's a cell phone."* The DM's price of admission: *"Roll stealth — to be the 13-year-old at the party that finds the Playboy."* Nobody knows where the book came from. (We're choosing to find out later.) ### Night of the Clockwork Dolls The centerpiece. [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] — who doesn't sleep — is mending crayons by the fire when the door to the sleeping quarters *"creaks open a few inches"* and a *"dry mechanical tick, tick, tick, tick"* starts up. The hallway beyond is pitch dark, and the ticking *"sounds like it's coming from every direction now that you're in the hallway"* — a sleeping dormitory left, another right, more rooms ahead. The dolls the party hauled back from the Cogs weeks ago have switched on. What follows is a room-by-room creep through a haunted orphanage. - **The dormitory:** four toddlers marching in perfect unison behind a ticking doll. Tendy casts **Identify** — a 60-second ritual — and the kids melt down screaming *"for a full minute"* while he reads. Result: *"seems harmless... just a magical clockwork toy."* The table: *"That's a white-boy robot."* - **The music room:** a doll cranking a music box, *"singing off-key"* (table, on cue: *"ring my bell"*). It's keeping the children asleep — pull it and they wake. - **The kitchen:** a doll standing on the table cracking eggs one at a time into a *boot* — ten or eleven shells deep — while a small child hands it eggs. Tendy's incident report: *"There's another child mechanically handing eggs to one of these toys."* The table assembles the genre by committee: *"Babes in Toyland."* *"I was thinking Problem Child or Gremlins."* *"Let's just mix all three."* - **The study:** a room *"organized"* wrong — objects stacked by size, lockboxes cantilevered off the wardrobe, *"a sense of post-ransackian organization."* And inside the wardrobe: **Pim**, a seven-year-old with *"moon eyes,"* clutching a doll *"with the steady but doomed defiance of a child who decides he will die before he gives up whatever thing he has."* ### Hello, Tick The horror turns out to be grief, not violence. Pim does *"that thing where a kid really starts to wind himself up... that silent scream that precedes the loud scream,"* and the party has *"maybe a couple of seconds to intervene."* - The doll's name is **Tick.** Via Brian's read on the boy: *"I only have my friend Tick, and I'm not gonna let anyone take my friend Tick."* - Pim, heartbroken: *"There's something wrong with Tick. He's not talking anymore. He would dance and sing and make omelets for us. He could do it all. But now he's not."* - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] kneels and talks the boy down — *"you can see his face kind of soften when you mention Tick's name."* As Tick passes into [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]]'s arms, the ticking *"slowly winds down... rattles to a stop."* Tendy, deadpan: *"Hello, Tick."* - The tell that matters: the dolls **only tick around the children, and go dead silent around Tendy.** Move six feet away and they start again. [[Kouneli]]'s theory, landing heavier than he means it: *"You are of the same ilk."* - Crowd control, meanwhile, is a war. [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] rolls persuasion on a loop to keep fifteen-odd *"wise, learned toddlers"* from full meltdown. *"Uncle Brian"* is forced to roll **at disadvantage** — *"he's got to overcome his inherent creepiness"* — and fails (*"I'm drunk, leave me alone"*). [[Kouneli]] finally just casts **Sleep** on the whole knot of them: *"they all fail, because they have little toddler Constitutions."* The entire orphanage drops. ### Of the Same Ilk The dolls get laid out on the common-room table like an evidence board: Tick sitting passively, one *"marching in circles on the table,"* one *"holding a boot full of eggs,"* and one *"still cranking on its music box and singing."* Under the light, Tendy and Kouneli figure out what they're actually holding. - Kouneli's Arcana on Tick turns up *"small reflections of almost invisible symbology... early symbols that adorned **Cannith warforged technology.**"* The same anachronistic marks were on the **Colossus** and the six-foot **homunculi** *"full of stabbiness"* from the workshop — except these dolls are *"more powerful than before."* - Triage: of the four dolls, **two are originals** (full arcane markings — Tick and the music-box doll) and **two are mundane copies.** Only the originals go quiet in Tendy's hands. - The plan: pocket the two originals for [[Garthen Daela|Professor Daela]], leave a mundane doll for the kids. The callback writes itself — *"Remember I tried to sell one of these dolls to the professor last time?"* - And there we pause: ~2 AM, no long rest, the children sleep-spelled into silence, two live warforged-tech dolls in the bag, and Kouneli's theory hanging in the air: Tendy is *of the same ilk.* We pick up here.