# December 29, 2025 | Down the Drain > [!Summary]+ meta > **Role Call**: [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] • [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] • [[areas/ttrpg/the bleeding veil/campaign resources/cast/Kouneli]] • [[Styx]] • [[Cheeto]] • [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] > **Where We Are**: [[Sharn]] > **Tagline**: Failure gets you hired. [[E2 - Sharn Chicken| ↶ Last Session]] | [[The Bleeding Veil| Campaign Home ↝]] ## This Session After spectacularly losing Sharn Chicken to the [[Deathsgate Guild]], [[Lhara]] descends to collect her new recruits and presents them with their first job: a [[House Deneith]] contract that mysteriously "fell out of a sky coach." The bounty leads them to [[Garthen Daela|Professor Daela]] in [[Crystal Bridge Ward]], where the eccentric academic hires them to retrieve an ancient schema from a buried [[House Cannith]] laboratory deep beneath [[Sharn]]. Following a harrowing sky coach plunge to the [[Cogs]], the party negotiates passage through [[Red Jackals|Red Jackal]] territory with [[Thi-Chaik]], their 10GP shifter guide. ^session-summary ### Session Log #### So you're saying there's a chance... [[Lhara]] floats down on Feather Fall looking way too smug about the party eating absolute shit during Sharn chicken. Turns out she recruited them specifically because they're _not_ heroes, which is either refreshing honesty or a sick burn. Possibly both. - She tries to deliver her prepared pitch about investigating strange bounties, but the party absolutely will not let her finish a sentence - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] is awkwardly congratulating the [[Deathsgate Guild]] winners like they're all friends now, [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] is running post-dive diagnostics like he didn't just plummet thousands of feet, and [[Styx]] is doing his best "suspicious loner in the corner" impression - [[Lhara]]'s eye twitches but she powers through: take this [[House Deneith]] contract that totally fell out of a sky coach, keep whatever you find, just report back when you're done - While all this is happening, brilliant polychromatic light flashes twice over the city and nobody can explain it, but [[Kouneli]] takes meticulous notes because of course he does #### Spooky shit in the middle wards Three hours of lifts up through [[Sharn]] reveal the city is having a rough week. The lower wards stay quiet during morning commute, but the middle wards are absolutely buzzing. - Another aberrant dragonmark manifested—that's the second one this week and people are BIG spooked - [[Styx]] does a quick costume change and works the crowd for intel: the marks are tied to Khyber, everyone thinks they're evil, general vibe is "oh god oh fuck" - Meanwhile the upper wards remain blissfully uninterested with everything happening below them, as is tradition #### [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] has definitely done mercenary work before The party makes their way to the Professor's office where a warforged butler greets them. He lets them into [[Garthen Daela|Professor Daela]]'s absolutely stuffed library office. [[Haras Kant]], the Brelish aristocrat bankrolling this expedition, is lurking in the corner like a bond villain. - The professor, being a reasonable academic, asks for their credentials - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] _immediately_ starts making shit up, citing "client privilege" for jobs that definitely never happened - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] actually provides their service record like a normal person while [[Styx]] reads the room and confirms the professor's genuinely passionate (not apparently evil, surprisingly) - The job: [[Sharn]] is built on top of like millennia of dead cities that got sealed up and built over, and the professor needs an ancient schema in a [[House Cannith]] lab that's been locked down since the War of the Mark - They pay is 50 gold each plus whatever else they can carry out, which honestly seems pretty good - [[Haras Kant]] physically flinches when [[Cogsgate]] gets mentioned and very firmly refuses to pay their lift fees, apparently that's where the budget ends #### YEET Back at the switching station, the warforged pilot hears where they're going, says exactly two words—"Buckle up"—and _immediately_ yanks the lever. - The sky coach goes into an honest-to-god nosedive, dropping thousands of feet in seconds - The [[Sharn]] natives think this is awesome, everyone else is having a bad religious experience - [[Cogsgate]] spreads out below: an industrial hellscape 300 feet underground with a massive warforged population, all of them covered in forge soot, roads sloping down into steadily building heat - They find their sewer entrance in an underground market, door opens easy, and then the smell absolutely clotheslines them #### The shifter is _probably_ legit After traveling some way into the sewers, a shifter materializes from the darkness—heavily muscled, yellow eyes, pointed teeth, no visible weapons but radiating vibes of a sort. - "This is [[Red Jackals|Red Jackal]] territory. Surely you have your guide secured?" Opens at 30 gold. - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] tries some intimidation about shaking tokens out of him and the shifter doesn't even blink, just drops to 10 gold - [[Styx]] examines him—guy's probably legit, and he's _very_ carefully avoiding actually saying he's a [[Red Jackals|Red Jackal]] himself, just that this is their turf - They settle on 10 gold and the shifter provides running commentary the entire walk: sewer politics, salvage operations, extensive lore about how rats are basically revered as divine down here #### Well that's not good They wind through tunnels to an abandoned water treatment facility. Everything's broken, rusted out, been dead for like 60-70 years. Big rat sculpture on the wall marking it as clan territory. - Sight lines are absolutely terrible throughout - Their guide, [[Thi-Chaik]] keeps chattering about treasure hunters and clan drama, but above the din [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] catches faint breathing sounds from above - He spots multiple scruffy figures hanging from the ceiling like the world's worst bats. The _moment_ he sees them, they drop