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BitD Unbroken Sun: Session 4 (Sublunary House)
In this session - last Saturday I believe, as of the penning of this message - our daring smuggler crew finished up their very first score and started into their very first downtime! That's right! My babies are moving up in the world, or at least diagonally! Just to think, just a few days ago they had just been a specialized crew of three with a little submersible bound together by fate and a single harrowing, unexpected event that changed their lives forever: well, now they're more bound! More harrowed! More changed! And more crew, actually.
Hats off to my players again for their excellent note file. Before we get back to the story, though, this seems like a good time as a GM to note something out of the narrative stream, which is that starting between session 3 and session 4 it occurred to me that my players might want to mechanically recruit Lucas Strangford-Knight as a cohort: basically an NPC part of the crew. The reason this appealed to me was that it was following the fiction rather than the typical constraints of a tabletop module or arc--to some extent, the storytelling foundations of tabletop were designed with something between the Western and the anime template Journey to the West in mind, with the idea of player characters that wander serially into the lives of groups and locations and disappear into the sunset after putting things right (or wrong) there, with perhaps a developing linear metaplot of recurring antagonists.
Characters after this model don't have constant allies, for reasons both genre-standard and pragmatic: it keeps the story focused on the original band of protagonists and their relationship, prevents the premise from altering in an unwanted way, and also means the GM doesn't end up playing a party member, effectively meaning that they're playing against their own obstacles in a PvE roleplay environment (and also having to helm even more story than they intended). There are actually a lot of good reasons for this.
They're not necessarily as organic in a game set in a walled city, though. To some extent Blades adjusts to this--it provides a pretty established cohort mechanic where PCs have the option to hire either "gangs" of multiple unskilled cronies or "experts" as employees, as part of growing their criminal operation in the "ambitious up-and-coming criminal enterprise" model of a Blades campaign. It still kind of works with the aforementioned basic RPG assumptions, though: the system's not designed for them to recruit people they meet or even allies, it's for essentially hiring random people off the Doskvol criminal job market. It still manages these side characters' level of presumed agency and relevance. In the case of the Turtle crew, there are several pressing in-story reasons why they're not interested in putting out an ad on Doskvol criminal Craigslist. As a result, I didn't think that much about the cohort mechanic previously.
And in truth, I also had some unconscious assumptions along the lines of that Journey to the West idea. Without getting into spoiler-land on the nature of Lucas's life and being and potential place in the story, I didn't have something railroaded sketched out for him, but I hadn't thought about the… in fact entirely organic possibility that he'd join them not just as an intermittent ally of some sort but as, well, a cohort. But while the crew (and their players) were stressing out about what to do with him--a wanted man with nowhere to go, essentially--it occurred to me that we were all assuming they had to offload him to wrap that up neatly.
So basically, I offered that they could secure him as a temporary/"unreliable" cohort just by proposing it to him and make a 4-step clock for figuring out more stable living arrangements for him (ie, a room, a low-lying cover in Doskvol) to get him as a crew addition. It meant giving him some fun adjective advantages/disadvantages--among them that he is listed as an Expert, technically, with type "Mariner*". Who wouldn't want a Mariner* for their smuggling outfit?
It took the pressure off some of the artificially bad options--as I said to everyone, I want to pursue the fiction where it's fun, not the assumptions of OOC premise.
So we went into this session with that in mind. In-character, that still ended up in a certain amount of indecision and stress, because there were more steps to go along that way: we'd left off with Nico dropping a note in the arranged dead drop to Roslyn requesting an in-person meeting rather than just a handoff of 'goods.'
At this point Nico goes home and verbalizes her thinking about Lucas in the form of a proposal that I absolutely have to quote.
Couldn't have said it better myself! The other two are more cautious, but on different points--Aphra's worried that he's helpless considering his frequently apathetic behavior in the past few days, Calida's interested in at least keeping him for a little longer or at least trying to help him get out of the city, which Aphra (reasonably) thinks is far easier said than done. Everyone agrees they don't want to endanger him willfully or give him to someone who has bad intentions for him; the remaining options still seem a little uneasy. They decide to ask him for his own preferences when he wakes up--surely he's got to have wishes of his own.
The trouble is that Lucas isn't really overflowing with preferences. He's not necessarily passive or out-of-it as Aphra fears, but he's got that pesky and damnable overpowering melancholy and unbudging detachment that has characterized him since his first appearance (which technically, given the situation, is still the appearance that he's in!), and moreover he sees a lot of the same uncertainties as they do.
There's a little alarming exchange as they realize he's willing to just go on his own to deal with what he sees as his own problem--and while this is all perhaps mutually illuminating as to everyone as people probably, in a terribly uneasy way all around, it's not getting any further facts into the ring on the situation. At this point, everyone agrees Nico may as well check the dead drop.
Lucas, in an unusual show of interest, stops her on her way out to ask, stiffly, after word of his mother. Nico's aware that widespread news of Lucas's mother, if it existed, is not likely to be good news. All the same, she doesn't have it. She offers to keep an ear out; he tells her not to put herself to the trouble.
This is at a little homey teahouse in Charterhall with a wall of cubbies for mail and other items and maybe a lost and found, and a cubby for contacting Roslyn. Presumably she has an ally in someone who works here, or the owner, but it's impossible to say. Nico comes back here and finds, in the usual slot, a proper envelope this time: and within the envelope, a folded paper and a tiny key. The paper sports the address of a mailbox in Six Towers.
Curiouser and curiouser, obviously. Nico brings this all home, along with one of the wanted posters she's been procrastinating showing to Aphra, and delivers it all to the crew back in the grotto: "we have an invitation to a postbox," she says, while Aphra is both offended and relieved at the bad resemblance to her of the poster. There's an image of Lucas, too, but despite this being a known person who's presumably sat for a portrait before it doesn't look a whole lot more like him--it seems like he might not have been painted since he was about sixteen. The poster seems to think Aphra is an assassin and may have a partner in crime; Aphra is grumbling, of the sailor she resuscitated, "I do ONE nice thing for ONE person--"
The point is that they've got to check that postbox. Aphra (the wanted criminal) once again is left behind to 'keep an eye' on Lucas, and in her case continue her work, in fact partly on his own blood sample; Nico and Calida venture out.
Aphra does make conversation, sort of, or at least she talks--she's someone in the habit of half-narrating what she's doing out loud for the benefit of anyone in her lab, including right now, as she goes about her experiments. It's not precisely a conscious attempt at education or socializing but Lucas seems silently interested, and not terribly put off by the fact that it's his own biological matter she's experimenting on.
Calida and Nico find the address they're looking for not too far from their own, in a dusty and recently out-of-service mailbox with a box that matches the key. Within it is a single document, not rolled up or folded, standing up against the locker's side--a document Calida immediately knows to be a ghost contract, the type of magician's contract common in Doskvol for covenants between people willing to stake their lives and souls on not breaking their word. Both halves of a ghost contract are binding on pain of a terrible curse, if signed with a true (that is, lived-in) name. The contract is with "Roslyn Barrow." Roslyn means business, then.
The gist of the document is an invitation for the parties to meet at "Sublunary House," with a promise of safe guestright and passage to the four (all four spaces are provided, and must be signed for this to go into effect) guests and in turn a promise from them of silence on the location and contents of the house itself. This seems to be one of the ways that the Dimmer Sisters keep their notorious secrecy.
They mull over this and take it back. It's a tender of a genuine olive branch from Roslyn--people aren't typically invited to the house, and the tone is that this is the ultimatum she's offering as an acknowledgment of her own less-than-fair play in hiring them in the first place. Even so, it's creepy. None of them really desperately want to reveal their real names to Roslyn, especially Calida, even with the very high likelihood that Roslyn already knows them; it's just a very vulnerable position.
But they do. They sign their four names one after the other: CALIDA FARRIAN, APHRA CHESKY, BERENIKE DIAMOND, and then finally LUCAS STRANGFORD-KNIGHT. (He pauses, before he does, as though assessing whether this is accurate--as he has when asked also about his life experience, and his memories, like he's sorting through something very complicated.)
When he lifts pen from page he exclaims in surprise as they all feel the same sharp burn at the napes of their necks--and indeed they all now carry the same barely-visible scar, if you look closely. It looks like a character, a letter from an alphabet they don't know.
They don't, however, have a provided rendezvous. Lacking one, they make their way all, cautiously, to the usual dead drop teahouse in Charterhall: Lucas now wearing a nondescript coat and a hat they've found for him and pushing a wheelbarrow full of two crates of leviathan product (well, incrementally less now that Aphra's gone at one of them with a scalpel). It's not a long walk and they spend it trying not to look furtive or hunted: just three gentlewomen on a stroll with a workman following. Lucas, for his part, looks oddly and distractedly fascinated with the city. One way or another, he hasn't been here in quite a while.
Roslyn is waiting for them in front of the building with a carriage and coachman, looking much as she usually does. She underreacts, as she tends to--looking quizzically amused at the form of this handoff, Lucas and his wheelbarrow and the crates. The coachman loads everything up as the four of them get in, followed by Roslyn, and then in the curtained carriage they're off.
She is not appropriately repentant in any particular way, but that just seems to be how she is, as a woman-of-business and apparent magician. They're driven a little lengthily, maybe to avoid any tailing and maybe just because of traffic, and as they bump along Roslyn takes a little, flimsy spirit mask with a lorgnette stick from her handbag and studies Lucas through it. If she's impressed at all, it definitely doesn't show.
They're driven around the edge of Charterhall, through Charhollow, even through part of Crow's Foot and Silkshore, and it becomes obvious that where they're going is Barrowcleft, a place they haven't been since the night with the gates. They're headed in much the same direction as they took to get there. The city spreads out into the bleak spaces and large empty properties of barren, melancholy Barrowcleft; by the time that the carriage turns onto a private road, they're not far at all from the lightning tower where the three of them tried to look into the gates of death. They could probably walk to it. This is a very old part of the city: Six Towers has the reputation for age, because of its ostentatious wear and ruin, but Barrowcleft is very, very old.
The property they're taken to has the look of having been a farm once: maybe it was too inefficient to power, or irrigate, or the soil and weather just turned against it. It's a dusty place and the carriage comes along a long driveway approaching the house on the property, before stopping somewhat short of it to unload passengers and cargo. It's a dusty road, a dusty property, and the five of them walk up to Sublunary House.
This is an old, shabby place, something that would make a very large three-story farmhouse or a rather tiny town manor. When they come in after Roslyn, though, they find it's much better-upkept on the inside, though cluttered-feeling in a grandmotherly kind of way: too much decor, with no sense of matching or lines, just samplers and paintings and lace collected at too high a density for the parlor it's in. A young maid, Myra, is lounging within: she barely looks up, wondering if the guests are here for "Miss Luella." They are not. Roslyn sends her off, with a note of reprimand, to fetch Lady Lorelai, and then leaves them alone for the time being.
The place is not actively creepy, certainly not from decor alone. Calida can tell without actively attuning that there's an unusual ghost presence here, but what 'here' means precisely in this house is not entirely clear. Decor-wise there's a lot of landscapes, quite a few cats. They sit awkwardly in the provided antique chairs, especially Lucas who is a little bigger than the intended chair occupant, until Roslyn comes back and smiles that aloof mysterious smile and douses the lights but for one lamp, and retreats into the shadows.
And--soon enough--they're joined by another stranger. This one is an elderly woman, her gait and motions make clear: dressed well in an outdated way that would be stately at a funeral, but not as the widow; moving carefully but surely; and heavily veiled in a way that obscures her features.
Lucas is instantly on his feet, out of years of ingrained custom that a man doesn't sit when a lady is walking; Nico and Calida rise as well, followed by a hasty Aphra. Lady Lorelai, uncomfortably, is completely silent: she just faces Lucas with a longer-than-usual stare that feels even longer.
Then she reaches out a hand, veined and mottled a little with age. It's steady all the same: she makes a strange gesture like she's offering something to Lucas, palm up. His breathing is audible, and a little faster than calm. Hers is also. After a moment she withdraws her hand and makes her way out, at the same considered pace.
They're rejoined by Roslyn, who may have been out of the room and may just have been in a darkened corner; she begins to relight the lamps. They're not being hurried out by any means--now that their business is concluded, they're just guests, and the world can wait for them to finish their cucumber sandwiches and tea. As Roslyn's on the last lamp, however, she glances back at Lucas: “You’re free to go, you know. But in the case that you miss the company of the Old Earth, you’re welcome to pay us a call.”
On that eerie note, we move our crew from score--now complete!--to downtime, and all the phases in that. We actually embarked upon some of that downtime within this session, covering payoff, entanglements, and the first couple of weeks of downtime actions: as a GM I've ruled that the PCs will be getting 3 downtime actions apiece as a baseline rather than 2, since I came upon this modification in Friends at the Table's Partizan season (where they're playing another Forged in the Dark system, Beam Saber, that employs 3 actions) and thought it was a great idea and prevents one of my worries about the default Blades system, which is that it pits mechanical incentives or necessities (vices, heat, assets, etc.) against player-motivated story pursuit (longterm projects). As we're finding out, it's not hard to integrate everything into the advancement of the story if you're interested in roleplaying out downtime, but I want my players to feel free to investigate, build, invent, and anything else.
However, I feel that recounting 9 downtime activities is something that's going to require some discussion of mechanics, and also is going to look weird sort of split between two session writeups that also have play in them. For the interests of coherency, and also making this writeup readable, I'm planning to do a single downtime writeup this time (call it a 4.5) before the next score's beginning, which is in fact happening next session.
Here's one thing, though: they did finally get to find out what that pre-Cataclysmic document was that they were getting as a bonus. (Calida, previously the most interested in this, had actually completely forgotten it was on the table in all the subsequent ruckus.) They'll have to hand it off to their friends in the Unbroken Sun pretty soon, but they're now in possession of what appears to be a libretto: an old copy of a libretto for an opera called The Bull Dancers.
Sounds normal, right.
Hats off to my players again for their excellent note file. Before we get back to the story, though, this seems like a good time as a GM to note something out of the narrative stream, which is that starting between session 3 and session 4 it occurred to me that my players might want to mechanically recruit Lucas Strangford-Knight as a cohort: basically an NPC part of the crew. The reason this appealed to me was that it was following the fiction rather than the typical constraints of a tabletop module or arc--to some extent, the storytelling foundations of tabletop were designed with something between the Western and the anime template Journey to the West in mind, with the idea of player characters that wander serially into the lives of groups and locations and disappear into the sunset after putting things right (or wrong) there, with perhaps a developing linear metaplot of recurring antagonists.
Characters after this model don't have constant allies, for reasons both genre-standard and pragmatic: it keeps the story focused on the original band of protagonists and their relationship, prevents the premise from altering in an unwanted way, and also means the GM doesn't end up playing a party member, effectively meaning that they're playing against their own obstacles in a PvE roleplay environment (and also having to helm even more story than they intended). There are actually a lot of good reasons for this.
They're not necessarily as organic in a game set in a walled city, though. To some extent Blades adjusts to this--it provides a pretty established cohort mechanic where PCs have the option to hire either "gangs" of multiple unskilled cronies or "experts" as employees, as part of growing their criminal operation in the "ambitious up-and-coming criminal enterprise" model of a Blades campaign. It still kind of works with the aforementioned basic RPG assumptions, though: the system's not designed for them to recruit people they meet or even allies, it's for essentially hiring random people off the Doskvol criminal job market. It still manages these side characters' level of presumed agency and relevance. In the case of the Turtle crew, there are several pressing in-story reasons why they're not interested in putting out an ad on Doskvol criminal Craigslist. As a result, I didn't think that much about the cohort mechanic previously.
And in truth, I also had some unconscious assumptions along the lines of that Journey to the West idea. Without getting into spoiler-land on the nature of Lucas's life and being and potential place in the story, I didn't have something railroaded sketched out for him, but I hadn't thought about the… in fact entirely organic possibility that he'd join them not just as an intermittent ally of some sort but as, well, a cohort. But while the crew (and their players) were stressing out about what to do with him--a wanted man with nowhere to go, essentially--it occurred to me that we were all assuming they had to offload him to wrap that up neatly.
So basically, I offered that they could secure him as a temporary/"unreliable" cohort just by proposing it to him and make a 4-step clock for figuring out more stable living arrangements for him (ie, a room, a low-lying cover in Doskvol) to get him as a crew addition. It meant giving him some fun adjective advantages/disadvantages--among them that he is listed as an Expert, technically, with type "Mariner*". Who wouldn't want a Mariner* for their smuggling outfit?
It took the pressure off some of the artificially bad options--as I said to everyone, I want to pursue the fiction where it's fun, not the assumptions of OOC premise.
So we went into this session with that in mind. In-character, that still ended up in a certain amount of indecision and stress, because there were more steps to go along that way: we'd left off with Nico dropping a note in the arranged dead drop to Roslyn requesting an in-person meeting rather than just a handoff of 'goods.'
At this point Nico goes home and verbalizes her thinking about Lucas in the form of a proposal that I absolutely have to quote.
NICO: Sepulchre. Ossuary. [great work Nico! Incredible!] I have, on reflection, a proposal. We discussed the possibility of allowing him to stay with us and make his own way or generally wait until he had some idea of his wishes. I’m uncomfortable with this proposal because I don’t know he has a clear path forward, and there are dangers involved. However, we could consider a more permanent arrangement. He’s not of much use to us right now because of the state of security in the city, but eventually the fleet will have to depart, and at that point he’s only extremely recognizable. Of course much of what we do is covert; he’s strong, he’s a strapping young man, he recovers supernaturally quickly, he owes us his life-- these are advantages in an employee. I am open to discussing that with him if your reservations about our arrangement with the Dimmer Sisters persist. This is a collaborative venture. I don’t want to make any decisions unilaterally.
Couldn't have said it better myself! The other two are more cautious, but on different points--Aphra's worried that he's helpless considering his frequently apathetic behavior in the past few days, Calida's interested in at least keeping him for a little longer or at least trying to help him get out of the city, which Aphra (reasonably) thinks is far easier said than done. Everyone agrees they don't want to endanger him willfully or give him to someone who has bad intentions for him; the remaining options still seem a little uneasy. They decide to ask him for his own preferences when he wakes up--surely he's got to have wishes of his own.
The trouble is that Lucas isn't really overflowing with preferences. He's not necessarily passive or out-of-it as Aphra fears, but he's got that pesky and damnable overpowering melancholy and unbudging detachment that has characterized him since his first appearance (which technically, given the situation, is still the appearance that he's in!), and moreover he sees a lot of the same uncertainties as they do.
L looks at each of us almost like he’s attaching his mental notes of what you’ve said in this conversation to each of us. Strangely methodical. L: I owe all three of you a tremendous debt. You don’t have to make some kind of bargain to get some kind of--favor--you can get out of me. But I can’t see a way that I wouldn’t pose you all a tremendous danger in your company. However, that ship might have already sailed. [deep annoyance at bad pun]
Nico/Aphra simultaneously: yes.
L: I’m willing to meet with these people. I have no reason to believe they wish me well or ill, but I don’t want to make this harder than it has to be.
There's a little alarming exchange as they realize he's willing to just go on his own to deal with what he sees as his own problem--and while this is all perhaps mutually illuminating as to everyone as people probably, in a terribly uneasy way all around, it's not getting any further facts into the ring on the situation. At this point, everyone agrees Nico may as well check the dead drop.
Lucas, in an unusual show of interest, stops her on her way out to ask, stiffly, after word of his mother. Nico's aware that widespread news of Lucas's mother, if it existed, is not likely to be good news. All the same, she doesn't have it. She offers to keep an ear out; he tells her not to put herself to the trouble.
This is at a little homey teahouse in Charterhall with a wall of cubbies for mail and other items and maybe a lost and found, and a cubby for contacting Roslyn. Presumably she has an ally in someone who works here, or the owner, but it's impossible to say. Nico comes back here and finds, in the usual slot, a proper envelope this time: and within the envelope, a folded paper and a tiny key. The paper sports the address of a mailbox in Six Towers.
Curiouser and curiouser, obviously. Nico brings this all home, along with one of the wanted posters she's been procrastinating showing to Aphra, and delivers it all to the crew back in the grotto: "we have an invitation to a postbox," she says, while Aphra is both offended and relieved at the bad resemblance to her of the poster. There's an image of Lucas, too, but despite this being a known person who's presumably sat for a portrait before it doesn't look a whole lot more like him--it seems like he might not have been painted since he was about sixteen. The poster seems to think Aphra is an assassin and may have a partner in crime; Aphra is grumbling, of the sailor she resuscitated, "I do ONE nice thing for ONE person--"
The point is that they've got to check that postbox. Aphra (the wanted criminal) once again is left behind to 'keep an eye' on Lucas, and in her case continue her work, in fact partly on his own blood sample; Nico and Calida venture out.
Aphra does make conversation, sort of, or at least she talks--she's someone in the habit of half-narrating what she's doing out loud for the benefit of anyone in her lab, including right now, as she goes about her experiments. It's not precisely a conscious attempt at education or socializing but Lucas seems silently interested, and not terribly put off by the fact that it's his own biological matter she's experimenting on.
Calida and Nico find the address they're looking for not too far from their own, in a dusty and recently out-of-service mailbox with a box that matches the key. Within it is a single document, not rolled up or folded, standing up against the locker's side--a document Calida immediately knows to be a ghost contract, the type of magician's contract common in Doskvol for covenants between people willing to stake their lives and souls on not breaking their word. Both halves of a ghost contract are binding on pain of a terrible curse, if signed with a true (that is, lived-in) name. The contract is with "Roslyn Barrow." Roslyn means business, then.
The gist of the document is an invitation for the parties to meet at "Sublunary House," with a promise of safe guestright and passage to the four (all four spaces are provided, and must be signed for this to go into effect) guests and in turn a promise from them of silence on the location and contents of the house itself. This seems to be one of the ways that the Dimmer Sisters keep their notorious secrecy.
As one day’s guestright I will come and go freely and unharmed from Sublunary House. I will not speak of its location or what lies within to anyone outside without the blessing of my host. Should I break my word, may my heart turn to poison and my bonds to ash.
Calida’s already told Nico it’s real. Nonetheless, N: It’s real?
C: Yeah.
N: You’re curious?
C: About what.
N: The house.
C: Yeah.
N, sighs: Me too.
C: let’s take it back and show it to Aphra.
They mull over this and take it back. It's a tender of a genuine olive branch from Roslyn--people aren't typically invited to the house, and the tone is that this is the ultimatum she's offering as an acknowledgment of her own less-than-fair play in hiring them in the first place. Even so, it's creepy. None of them really desperately want to reveal their real names to Roslyn, especially Calida, even with the very high likelihood that Roslyn already knows them; it's just a very vulnerable position.
But they do. They sign their four names one after the other: CALIDA FARRIAN, APHRA CHESKY, BERENIKE DIAMOND, and then finally LUCAS STRANGFORD-KNIGHT. (He pauses, before he does, as though assessing whether this is accurate--as he has when asked also about his life experience, and his memories, like he's sorting through something very complicated.)
When he lifts pen from page he exclaims in surprise as they all feel the same sharp burn at the napes of their necks--and indeed they all now carry the same barely-visible scar, if you look closely. It looks like a character, a letter from an alphabet they don't know.
They don't, however, have a provided rendezvous. Lacking one, they make their way all, cautiously, to the usual dead drop teahouse in Charterhall: Lucas now wearing a nondescript coat and a hat they've found for him and pushing a wheelbarrow full of two crates of leviathan product (well, incrementally less now that Aphra's gone at one of them with a scalpel). It's not a long walk and they spend it trying not to look furtive or hunted: just three gentlewomen on a stroll with a workman following. Lucas, for his part, looks oddly and distractedly fascinated with the city. One way or another, he hasn't been here in quite a while.
Roslyn is waiting for them in front of the building with a carriage and coachman, looking much as she usually does. She underreacts, as she tends to--looking quizzically amused at the form of this handoff, Lucas and his wheelbarrow and the crates. The coachman loads everything up as the four of them get in, followed by Roslyn, and then in the curtained carriage they're off.
She is not appropriately repentant in any particular way, but that just seems to be how she is, as a woman-of-business and apparent magician. They're driven a little lengthily, maybe to avoid any tailing and maybe just because of traffic, and as they bump along Roslyn takes a little, flimsy spirit mask with a lorgnette stick from her handbag and studies Lucas through it. If she's impressed at all, it definitely doesn't show.
“I see that we’ve put you to a certain amount of inconvenience with our request. I regret that this was the best method of carrying out the arrangement. It was necessary…”
N: I seem to remember you saying we would be charged with burglary.
R: It seems you won’t be charged with anything.
N: No thanks to you. Roslyn, may I ask you a question? Are we going to your mistresses’ house to… continue a conversation with you?
R: Lady Lorelai would like to lay eyes upon our guest, if nothing else. Beyond that, we can all discuss further.
C: stonily quiet
A: cheerfully quiet
They're driven around the edge of Charterhall, through Charhollow, even through part of Crow's Foot and Silkshore, and it becomes obvious that where they're going is Barrowcleft, a place they haven't been since the night with the gates. They're headed in much the same direction as they took to get there. The city spreads out into the bleak spaces and large empty properties of barren, melancholy Barrowcleft; by the time that the carriage turns onto a private road, they're not far at all from the lightning tower where the three of them tried to look into the gates of death. They could probably walk to it. This is a very old part of the city: Six Towers has the reputation for age, because of its ostentatious wear and ruin, but Barrowcleft is very, very old.
The property they're taken to has the look of having been a farm once: maybe it was too inefficient to power, or irrigate, or the soil and weather just turned against it. It's a dusty place and the carriage comes along a long driveway approaching the house on the property, before stopping somewhat short of it to unload passengers and cargo. It's a dusty road, a dusty property, and the five of them walk up to Sublunary House.
This is an old, shabby place, something that would make a very large three-story farmhouse or a rather tiny town manor. When they come in after Roslyn, though, they find it's much better-upkept on the inside, though cluttered-feeling in a grandmotherly kind of way: too much decor, with no sense of matching or lines, just samplers and paintings and lace collected at too high a density for the parlor it's in. A young maid, Myra, is lounging within: she barely looks up, wondering if the guests are here for "Miss Luella." They are not. Roslyn sends her off, with a note of reprimand, to fetch Lady Lorelai, and then leaves them alone for the time being.
The place is not actively creepy, certainly not from decor alone. Calida can tell without actively attuning that there's an unusual ghost presence here, but what 'here' means precisely in this house is not entirely clear. Decor-wise there's a lot of landscapes, quite a few cats. They sit awkwardly in the provided antique chairs, especially Lucas who is a little bigger than the intended chair occupant, until Roslyn comes back and smiles that aloof mysterious smile and douses the lights but for one lamp, and retreats into the shadows.
And--soon enough--they're joined by another stranger. This one is an elderly woman, her gait and motions make clear: dressed well in an outdated way that would be stately at a funeral, but not as the widow; moving carefully but surely; and heavily veiled in a way that obscures her features.
Lucas is instantly on his feet, out of years of ingrained custom that a man doesn't sit when a lady is walking; Nico and Calida rise as well, followed by a hasty Aphra. Lady Lorelai, uncomfortably, is completely silent: she just faces Lucas with a longer-than-usual stare that feels even longer.
Then she reaches out a hand, veined and mottled a little with age. It's steady all the same: she makes a strange gesture like she's offering something to Lucas, palm up. His breathing is audible, and a little faster than calm. Hers is also. After a moment she withdraws her hand and makes her way out, at the same considered pace.
They're rejoined by Roslyn, who may have been out of the room and may just have been in a darkened corner; she begins to relight the lamps. They're not being hurried out by any means--now that their business is concluded, they're just guests, and the world can wait for them to finish their cucumber sandwiches and tea. As Roslyn's on the last lamp, however, she glances back at Lucas: “You’re free to go, you know. But in the case that you miss the company of the Old Earth, you’re welcome to pay us a call.”
On that eerie note, we move our crew from score--now complete!--to downtime, and all the phases in that. We actually embarked upon some of that downtime within this session, covering payoff, entanglements, and the first couple of weeks of downtime actions: as a GM I've ruled that the PCs will be getting 3 downtime actions apiece as a baseline rather than 2, since I came upon this modification in Friends at the Table's Partizan season (where they're playing another Forged in the Dark system, Beam Saber, that employs 3 actions) and thought it was a great idea and prevents one of my worries about the default Blades system, which is that it pits mechanical incentives or necessities (vices, heat, assets, etc.) against player-motivated story pursuit (longterm projects). As we're finding out, it's not hard to integrate everything into the advancement of the story if you're interested in roleplaying out downtime, but I want my players to feel free to investigate, build, invent, and anything else.
However, I feel that recounting 9 downtime activities is something that's going to require some discussion of mechanics, and also is going to look weird sort of split between two session writeups that also have play in them. For the interests of coherency, and also making this writeup readable, I'm planning to do a single downtime writeup this time (call it a 4.5) before the next score's beginning, which is in fact happening next session.
Here's one thing, though: they did finally get to find out what that pre-Cataclysmic document was that they were getting as a bonus. (Calida, previously the most interested in this, had actually completely forgotten it was on the table in all the subsequent ruckus.) They'll have to hand it off to their friends in the Unbroken Sun pretty soon, but they're now in possession of what appears to be a libretto: an old copy of a libretto for an opera called The Bull Dancers.
Sounds normal, right.