Session 4: Cohesion!

Secondmonth 11, 1579 -- Secondmonth 16, 1759

Sorern went back to the ship, to do some more investigations into the nature of the items they’d found. The others went down to the Twisted Fish, a dockside tavern they’d found, to do a bit of rumor gathering and figure out where to go next. They hung out there for a while, for a while, trading stories of their pasts. (Well, Sigrid and Captain Blank did, anyway. Rellik mostly just refused to answer their questions.)

Then they got to work. Sigrid went to Ea-Shamar, and got her to agree to let them help with the investigation into the murder of the human noble they’d heard about at the Twisted Fish. She learned that he was Kedlar Mevarin, apparently a sort of amateur historian, and that the guard suspected a connection between his murder and that of Sa-Follen, because both had involved crystal scorpion poison, a powerful paralytic agent.

Then they looked into the matter of the underground arena. They went to the Black Angle, where they’d heard that most of the people involved with the business hung out. Outside, they met James, the cabin boy from Captain Blank’s old ship, and learned from him that one of Blank’s shipmates, Mark, was possibly inside. They went in, met Mark, and he signed on with their crew.

Then they talked to the bartender, Tillienne, turned out to be the person who coordinated the arena, and from whom they learned that Rellik’s current mark, Baern, would be fighting in a match that very evening. (I’d clean up the syntax, but it, er, took me six hours to write that sentence.) Cer-Athane, a giant who Tillienne had been talking to, and who Tilliene said was the arena’s main go-to guy for magic, agreed to make a wisdom increasing gadget for Captain Blank.

Rellik asked Tillienne about poisons, and where to buy them, and after some thought she referred him to Gannen, an arena combatant, sitting at a table with another combatant, a verrik named Mazquar. Apparently, he used to use poison, or something. They talked to him for a bit (Mazquar didn’t really say much) and Rellik bought “something deadly.” (Also: Mazquar was also fighting that evening, against Baern.)

Rellik and Blank then devised an executed a plan whereby they tricked James into applying the poison to Mazquar’s sword by telling him that it was “sword polish” and getting him to pull the “annoying but not worth telling off” fan bit. Then Rellik and Captain Blank bet some money on the match, since they figured it was fairly certain that Mazquar was going to win. They hung out for a while, Sigrid got drunk (moral angst!), and then they all went down and watched the match. Mazquar won, Baern died.

They then sailed back to Rellik’s guild/thing’s mysterious island, where he reported his mission’s success and got a new mark: Mischa Mevarin. When they returned to Ao-Manasa, they learned (at the Twisted Fish) that another person had been murdered.

So Sigrid went back to Ea-Shamar, reported what she’d found out so far (not much), and learned that the person who’d been murdered, Dialle Westing, was also some kind of historian, and that Mischa Mevarin was Kedlar Mevarin’s daughter.

Meanwhile, Rellik and Captain Blank actually ran into Mischa (although they didn’t realize it at the time) who came up to Blank and handed him a note, apparently because she’d seen him talking to Gannen the other day. Blank, being a pirate, immediately read the note, discovered that it was a love letter of some sort, and that Gannen was referred to as “Gannen of the Yellow Rose” in the arena. (This being relevant because the two people murdered were found with a yellow rose.)

Sigrid met back up with them, and they delivered the letter to Gannen. They also interrogated him, sort of, and he denied having any particular involvement in the murders.

Sigrid then returned to Ea-Shamar, to tell her what they had learned about Gannen.