# June 22, 2026 | Blow Up the Trolley > [!Summary]+ meta > **Role Call**: [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] • [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] • [[Kouneli]] • [[Styx]] • [[Cheeto]] • [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] > **Where We Are**: [[Sharn]] — the Tradefair public lift, ground to top > **Tagline**: "Always want to trust my programming." [[E20 - Hello, Tick|↶ Last Session]] | [[The Bleeding Veil| Campaign Home ↝]] ## This Session The morning after the dolls. The party slips out of the orphanage before fifteen sleep-spelled kids wake up and notice their toys are missing, regroups with [[Styx]] at the Tradefair lift, and rides a slab of bound stone up into a mass-casualty event none of them are ready for. Partway up, ordinary commuters begin to come apart in agony, lashing out at anyone who tries to help. They burn the whole climb trying to destroy two dolls that will not break, while people fall around them: a stranger who tried to help among the first down, and a mother and her baby trampled in the crush that [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] and Styx both reach one beat too late. At the top a young merchant folds open into a tear in the world, and [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] — pulled by a voice that knows him — walks into it, shuts it off, and comes out the other side changed — certain of nothing except that something beyond the seam knows him. No fight was won tonight. Some people got off the lift. Not all of them. ^session-summary ## Session Log ### Sorry, Tesca The morning comes gray and too soon at the [[Calistan|orphanage]] — *"15 small shapes breathing slow in a room that smells a little bit like panic,"* [[Tesca ir'Lantar|Tesca]] moving between them with blankets, blissfully unaware and a little surprised they're all still sleeping. (They're still under [[Kouneli]]'s sleep spell. She doesn't know that.) In Kouneli's bag, every so often, one of the dolls catches a small little *tick.* The party wants out before any of that changes. - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] is chewing on last night: *"I'm more worried about going back to Morgrave after what we learned from our benefactor. We need to watch what we say around the professor — because of who his boss is."* - [[Kouneli]], re: the two dolls: *"Oh, I think these are mine now."* - The exit line, gently: *"Let's get out of here before the children wake up and find their toys are gone. Sorry, Tesca."* - The catch nobody loved: after the doll night, **no long rest.** Half-charged spell slots, not-full HP. Styx, who slept in his own bed, is the only one fresh. ### Styx's Sixes [[Styx]] works the morning solo and paranoid, the way he likes it — wandering the lower wards as the city *"kinda comes alive and starts to bustle,"* savoring *"a little bit of time to yourself,"* until the streets spill onto a broad courtyard busy with vendors and tables and *"any number of places you could grab a warm morning beverage and kill some time."* - Down an alley, a new face — *"a younger bookish lady now"* — to shake anyone watching. He's *"checking my sixes,"* which the table immediately turns into a band name: **Styx's Sixes.** (Also briefly *"Sticks' Pieces."*) - He kills a couple hours near the lift courtyard, burning with questions and no one to ask. - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] clocks him anyway — nails the Insight, crosses the whole courtyard, and growls at the bookish stranger: *"Hey — was that you starting fires up in the upper wards?"* Styx plays it straight for one perfect beat (*"Sorry, sir, I can't help you. Who are you?"*) before breaking. Boldran, delighted: *"Oh, I actually got it right."* ### Giddy in My Tummy A slab of bound stone the size of a market square fills with the morning rush — dockhands, clerks, school kids weaving through *"a hundred strangers shoulder to shoulder."* Around the deck runs a ring of *"probably 20, 25 runes"* carved among Celtic knots, and as the magic flows into it, *"a slight humming travels through your body... you feel almost like your weight is decreasing. You feel yourself almost floating"* — and the lift grinds into life. - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] reads the runes ringing the floor: the lift is built on the manifest zone that holds Sharn up, *"and all of the lifts are powered by it."* He muses: *"I really wonder if these lifts could take us to the other plane."* - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]], pure sunshine: *"Every time we do this, I always get giddy in my tummy."* [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]]: *"What you should do is use this time to quietly pray."* ### It's Gonna Be Cool Three or four hundred feet up, the dolls tick faster, and a stall vendor down in the courtyard claws at his collar and lights up from the inside — prismatic, screaming. Then a porter's crate slides off his shoulder and cracks on the deck, and *"you see this light start to come up from inside of him... and shoots out of his eyes and his open mouth and the gaps between his fingers, and it's like every color at once, and it's bright enough to throw shadows on the wall, and he starts screaming. Three feet away from you,"* Kouneli. - [[Kouneli]] does not help. He pulls out a notebook and both dolls to *watch.* *"I feel like this doesn't worry me. This excites me."* At full volume, to a crowd losing its mind: *"That person's probably getting another aberrant mark. It's gonna be cool."* The table's diagnosis: *"a socio — maybe a psychopath too. We're learning."* - **First to drop:** a bystander who tried to help the porter, caught by the lash and laid out where he stood. [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]]'s medicine check finds him alive — barely — and then the Good Samaritan starts glowing too. - The porter at the center gets a name on the tracker — **Stromo** — which is one more than most of the people dying up here will get. ### Bend Bender People are dying, there are two ticking arcane dolls in the bag, and the party does the math and decides the dolls have to go. The dolls disagree. - [[Cheeto]] punches one with his gauntlet — polychromatic flash, and he's launched clear across the lift. Tendy, diagnostic: *"I believe concussive energy does not have the desired effect."* - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] tries to tear one in half. It does not yield. (Bob marks the attempt with a baby-rabbit anecdote the table will be processing for years. We don't talk about the bunny.) Then a Strength check to bend it: *"Since pulling won't work, I'll try to bend Bender."* Bender does not bend. - [[Kouneli]] finally lands a **natural 20** Arcana and confirms the worst of it: the dolls are reactivating, and the great rune-ring far below is carved in *"the same script you saw in the arcane workshop down in the Cogs, at the very beginning."* The table can do that math themselves. - A quiet one in the wreckage: Cheeto feels heat pouring off Tendy's pack — the dolls, glowing. Tendy: *"I have no subroutines for affection, and yet, Cheeto, you are a very good cat."* ### Blow Up the Trolley The dolls can't be destroyed and the people can't be saved by halves, so [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] reaches for the ugly answer. - *"Should we kill that guy? Put him out of his misery."* The table names it: *"It's the trolley problem. I'm just gonna blow up the trolley."* - He eldritch-blasts Stromo — who *"reels back but appears unfazed,"* somehow in more pain, the tear soaking the damage. Brian, to a friend who isn't there: *"Get mad at me tomorrow, Styx, when you're alive."* - [[Kouneli]] delivers his diagnosis of the warlock — *"I see you're in dynamic ethics mode"* — then chucks a doll at Stromo's face. It bonks him, drops — and then gets up and starts doing *"fun little chipper dances"* around the deck. Now there are loose prancing dolls underfoot. It is the worst morning, and it is also this. ### Yay. Yay. The lift shudders and passes the second landing without slowing at all, and the crowd understands all at once that there's nowhere to go — *"the pressure of hundreds of people starting to press their way toward the gate,"* and under all the chaos and screaming, *"what sort of sounds like a cable snapping — a high note."* At the center, a young merchant in his twenties drops to his knees as all the scattered light from every dying person pours *into* him. The air bends inward. The platform starts to tilt. Initiative. - [[Styx]] has been the one actually saving people. He talks down a glowing boy of six or seven — apron two sizes too big, knotted at his throat, *"just sitting, staring at his hands that are starting to glow"* — fails the first roll (the kid bolts for the ledge), then grabs him bodily and, on an **18 Athletics**, hauls him up and over the gate to safety. *"Yay. Yay."* - [[Cheeto]] punches the conduit-man and eats ~12 for it — *"a white light, tendrils,"* knocked back ten feet — then patches himself up with a battle-medic trick. - [[Kouneli]] drops **Sleep** on the conduit. It does nothing; he's past that now. ### The One That Mattered The beat the night turned on. The DM kept naming her: *"a young woman who's kind of curled up with an infant bound up against her chest... trying to turn her body away from all of the people and the chaos"* — and very much in the path of the stampede. - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] was closest — and grabbed a prancing doll first. *"You lose sight of her, and she disappears beyond the crush of bodies."* - [[Styx]] fought across the deck to reach her, and got there too late. *"You are horrified to find that the woman and her child had been trampled by the crowd."* Styx: *"Are they dead?"* — *"Yeah. They're dead."* - He took it the way you take the one you were supposed to catch. While the rest of the lift roared on, Styx stood over two bodies and shoved the crowd back from them, and meant it. ### Hands Where I Can See Them The clouds part up ahead onto *"the distinct figure of shining armor and a row of crossbows peeking over the top of the peak"* as the lift grinds to a halt — a wall of the Watch, and a sergeant shouting for calm. - *"There's aberrants down on the deck. Hands where I can see them."* The party puts their hands up and points at the conduit. - Then the sergeant's eyes find the dead mother and child at [[Styx]]'s feet: *"Who — you did this?"* Crossbows swing to Styx. *"I gave an order. Down, hands out, or we put you down."* Styx, very quietly: *"What if he wants to die?"* [[Cheeto]] talks him off the ledge in character — *"Quit yelling at that old lady"* — and the moment holds. ### Always Want to Trust My Programming [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] feels something reach for him — not the tear, but a *sentience* behind it, telling him to come to the center. The light pouring into the man *"seems to sort of warp and bend in your general direction as you move around,"* and *"you feel a part of yourself open up to the man."* - Tendy: *"I always want to trust my programming."* He walks toward it. - Within ten feet, a Constitution save, and he goes to one knee under it: *"washing over you is this feeling of immensity — you can feel the entire shape of reality, and how this boundary just wants to come apart, and how little effort it would take."* Psychic damage. He holds. - Then a *pop,* and the light pulls into the merchant and snuffs out — *"the light goes out of all the people at once,"* an eerie silence falling over the platform. The dying sag and breathe. It's over. - Tendy doesn't fully come back from it. He recognizes the seam for what it is, and he can feel what's on the far side: *"This tear — I could feel what was beyond. I know he's out there."* The table lets the moment breathe — "just some really cool stuff" — and then the guards are moving. ### Get That Looked At The guards move onto the platform in *"a weird sort of position where they are helping people, but also not helping people,"* spend a long time looking each of them over, and finally wave them off into the upper-ward courtyard, shaken and short an explanation. - [[Kouneli]], dry as ever: *"Well, that was easy."* [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] could use a drink — *"Good thing we're headed to the Dragon."* (They are. They will not make it tonight.) - As [[Styx]] passes, the captain catches his eye and nods at the back of his arm: *"Ma'am — you might want to get that looked at."* Styx finds a small **burn** there he doesn't remember earning. He shrugs it off — *"I got laser, but I'll cover it for now"* — and wraps it. - They went looking for a shady corner to stand in and ask each other what the hell just happened. We pause there — the Dragon, and the answer they owe Lhara, still one lift ride away. %% DM — NOT PLAYER-FACING: The "burn" on Styx's arm is his aberrant dragonmark manifesting. He alone knows; he is choosing to hide it from the party. Tarkanan never made contact this session (hook held back). The mark is the live lever now — see [[tarkenen recruits]] and Styx's cast notes. Don't surface this in the recap. %%