# January 19, 2026 | High-Speed Low-Lives > [!Summary]+ meta >**Role Call**: [[Tendy]] • [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] • [[Styx]] • [[Cheeto]] • [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] • [[Kouneli]] >**Where We Are**: [[Sharn]] > **Tagline**: Soarsled rental: 5 gold. Mid-air jousting: priceless. Falling onto a stranger's sky coach: moderately traumatic. [[E5 - Lhara ex Machina|↶ Last Session]] |[[The Bleeding Veil| Campaign Home ↝]] ## This Session The party investigates the schema at the Iron Keel, where [[Kouneli]] discovers shifting Giant runes that resist translation. Morning brings a seemingly successful handoff to [[Garthen Daela|Professor Daela]]—until the [[Order of the Emerald Claw]] crashes through his window, stabs him, and makes off with the schema. What follows is a breakneck chase through [[Sharn]]'s skyways on soarsleds, complete with mid-air jousting, magical finger guns, and [[Kouneli]] getting shot off a skyraft onto a passing sky coach. The pursuit ends at a heavily fortified warehouse in [[Skyway]], where siege ballista convince the party that discretion might be the better part of valor. ^session-summary ### Session Log ### No keys, no problem The Iron Keel makes its first impression: a converted warehouse in [[Callestan]] leaning against its neighbor like a drunk friend, all exposed pipes and salvaged airship timber. - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] confidently haggles the innkeeper down to one gold per room—she's missing two fingers and radiates "I've seen some shit" energy—only to discover there are _no keys_ because _no locks_. The entire second floor is a lawless frontier of unlocked doors. - The party stumbles through room after room: a gnomish couple having a domestic dispute about "shipping logs" (definitely shady), a long-term tenant's tinker workshop, and finally two generic hostel rooms that'll do. - [[Bloody Spear]] offers their decoy cog as distraction bait, which the party accepts with the kind of confidence. ### [[Kouneli]]'s arcane all-nighter Back in the room, [[Kouneli]] breaks out the ritual components while everyone else divvies loot and tries not to touch the schema. - The dolls? Magical but harmless—just creepy clockwork toys. [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] considers them for the orphanage kids (after appropriate curse-checking, because he's a responsible monk-dad). - The scroll case radiates abjuration magic—it's literally just a really good Tupperware for the blueprints inside, which are covered in diagrams and runes that mean absolutely nothing to anyone. - The schema itself is _weird_: inert, no magical aura, but the Giant runes keep shifting and sinking like they're swimming through the metal. Even [[Kouneli]]'s Giant fluency can't crack the archaic dialect. He spends the night sketching everything he can before calling it. ### Professor [[Garthen Daela]] has a bad morning 6:15 AM, sky coaches just starting their routes. The party heads to [[Crystal Bridges]] with pockets jingling and [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] carrying the decoy schema like a badge of honor. - The professor greets them in his nightgown, examines the schema for five solid minutes of muttering ("yes, yes, that's what I expected to see"), and cheerfully pays up—100 gold pieces, split with [[Bloody Spear]] who gets a slightly heavier bag for the decoy schema (the party definitely notices). - [[Cheeto]] tries to sell one of the creepy dolls. [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] whispers it's worth way more than 5 gold. [[Kouneli]] (correctly) whispers that in [[Sharn]], another mechanical trinket is worth exactly jack shit. The professor buys it for 5 gold like he's doing [[Cheeto]] a favor. - The party's literally skipping down the street, daydreaming about what to spend their newfound wealth on, when they hear glass breaking and a man _screaming_. ### Meet [[Order of the Emerald Claw|the CLAW]] The party rounds the corner to see five hooded figures jumping out of the professor's window—one carrying something heavy and cloth-covered. - Professor [[Garthen Daela|Daela]], still in his _nightgown_, throws himself bodily at the guy with the package. Both hit the ground. The schema tumbles free. - Another Emerald Claw operative calmly covers it back up, then _stabs the professor in the stomach_ while making eye contact with the party. - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] immediately casts Spare the Dying because letting the quest-giver bleed out is bad form. The professor, wheezing and clutching his abdomen, drops the faction name: "The Order of the Emerald Claw. They've been interfering with my research for _years_." - The operatives jump off the tower edge and feather fall to the street two levels below, sprinting toward the switching station. The chase is _on_. ### Soarsled or sore-sled [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] and [[Kouneli]] leap off the tower with Feather Fall. [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] Misty Steps down. Everyone else has to run like hell to catch up. - At the switching station, a helpful clerk offers soarsled rentals: one gold per hour, two-person skyrafts also available. [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] negotiates for a fast one (the clerk laughs and says the good ones aren't for "you folk"). - The party forks over five gold for four soarsleds and one skyraft. [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] pilots the raft with [[Kouneli]] holding on. Everyone else goes solo. - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] rolls a nat 20 on his gut-check and has the _time of his life_—like going from monastery floors to flying through [[Sharn]]'s skyways with these absolute lunatics. ### Aerial combat with the emphasis on _chaos_ 150 feet ahead, the Emerald Claw sky coach breaks into three soarsled escorts. Combat immediately becomes a three-dimensional nightmare. - [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]] channels his inner jousting champion, spearing an agent clean through the shoulder on a pass-by. The agent spirals off his sled and plummets (there's a magical bridge 100 feet down that catches him, but he's _out_). - [[Kouneli]] hits the captain with Mind Sliver. The captain retaliates. This becomes a pattern. - [[Styx]] finally lands a shortbow shot after several rounds of whiffing, catching another agent in the clavicle—action-movie style, the momentum just _stops_ him and he falls backward off his sled into the abyss. - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]]'s eldritch blasts light up another agent like a Christmas tree, sending them plummeting with electricity crackling across their robes. - A gnomish dirigible cuts across their path mid-chase. [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] _slingshots around it_ like he's doing a moon shot and gets advantage on his next attack. [[Styx]] crashes into the thing and misses an entire round of combat. ### [[Kouneli]] goes skydiving (unintentionally) The Emerald Claw captain, having lost his flail in a fumbled backswing, pulls out a light crossbow and focuses fire on the "soft target" who keeps mind-slivering him. - [[Kouneli]] takes a crossbow bolt to the chest, drops unconscious, and _falls off the skyraft_. - He lands on a sky coach 15 feet below—headed _south to Menthis Plateau_ in the opposite direction. - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]], being a warforged literally built for restoration and unable to abide seeing [[Kouneli]] damaged, immediately breaks off the chase and dives after him. Casts Spare the Dying from 15 feet away, then persuades the sky coach captain to slow down for a mid-air rescue. - [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]]: "Let me reclaim my friend. He fell dead and slowly awoken—that was all through me." The captain, reasonably rattled, agrees to slow down. - [[Kouneli]] wakes up screaming, which is fair. [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] hits him with Healing Word. They're now out of the fight, headed the wrong direction, trying to catch back up. ### [[Skyway]] is not thrilled to see you The remaining party closes in on the sky coach as it approaches a warehouse in the Azure district of [[Skyway]]—white marble, golden trim, _castles everywhere_, basically [[Sharn]]'s Mar-a-Lago in the clouds. - [[Brian d'Orien|Brian]] lights up the last Emerald Claw captain with an eldritch blast to the temple. The captain and his soarsled plummet out of the sky in a shower of sparks. - The sky coach starts decelerating toward a warehouse with a docking bay _just_ large enough for it to enter. - Two six-foot bolts scream past the party as warning shots. [[Boldran Evans|Boldran]], being an actual war veteran, immediately calculates the odds: following the sky coach into that killbox is a _terrible_ idea. - The party peels off and lands at ground level, ready to scout the warehouse on foot while [[Cyran Forge-Acolyte Unit 10-D|Tendy]] and [[Kouneli]] race to catch up from the opposite direction.