The group splits at the top of the session: everyone else heads to the safehouse to rest, while Adrik peels off to check in at the guildhall.
The bounty on the board
Something feels off as Adrik approaches. Normally there’d be people up early and about their business — this is more than usual. A man is leaning against the corner of the guildhall. Two others are watching from nearby intersections. They haven’t made him yet.
Adrik plays drunk to justify stumbling up to the doors — he’s a guild member, but he still needs a reason to be seen going in. On the way he clocks a high-quality bounty drawing of Elijah posted on the board. He slips inside and grabs a quick nap before dawn.
Once Thrain is up, Adrik gets his attention and gives him the abridged version of last night’s escapades — nothing they can’t handle, but it might not hurt to lay low for a few days. Thrain’s oddly unbothered, attention elsewhere. In the last 24 hours, plenty of apprentices have been stopped and grilled about their compatriot Elijah. Whatever the bounty is, it’s high enough that Thrain hasn’t seen the Gilded Watch run tactics this aggressive in a long while. And no, Thrain’s not paying them anything right now — he’s got other troubles. Wtf.
On his way out to the Collegium, Adrik takes one more look at the board. There’s a small crowd — not unheard of, but bigger than usual — talking about how nice it’d be to cash in. The drawing itself is a remarkably good three-quarter profile of Elijah. Underneath it, a sketch of Fernie with her mechanical leg. Wanted for theft of clan property and desertion. 50 gold for information, 200 for delivery, wanted alive. Adrik studies it, planning to relay everything back to Elijah and Fernie.
Marisco, sure
Meanwhile, the rest of the party makes for the safehouse. There are more bounty notices scattered through the Lower Ward, defaced and torn — they don’t clock these specifically, but the bounty is clearly spreading. Cisco takes precautions, throwing one of Elijah’s spare cloaks over Fernie.
Lorien, still adrift from his 24-hour memory gap, is just kind of trusting everyone at this point — but he’s staring at each of them a little too long, a little too intently. Cisco snaps in his face to check if he’s good. Lorien asks where they’re even going — he doesn’t remember the Collegium. He doesn’t know a Professor YGOR either. He asks Cisco point-blank for his name, and it just doesn’t stick. “Yeah, Marisco, sure.”
They rest, wake, and head over to The Boutique.
Carl and Donut go shopping
The plaza’s quiet, but The Boutique is open for business. The Boutique Mistress is as crazy as ever and asks them to step into the light.
Elijah does, and her whole demeanor changes — turns out she’s not sizing him up for a bounty, she’s just into him. She drapes him in the disguise mid-tirade. The result is grotesque: his snout and dragonborn features forced into something human-esque. Elijah’s seething on the inside — he gets why it has to happen, but he can’t stand it. Lorien wonders aloud if Elijah has always looked this bad. Lorien and Cisco send good vibes his way; Elijah sends a withering glare directly back at Lorien. Cisco hypes him up despite his own misgivings — and against his better judgment, some part of Elijah starts to believe it. (Shoutout to those persuasion rolls.)
Satisfied with Elijah, she turns to Fernie. She runs through her whole spiel — Fernie’s finer qualities, the various species she could pass for — before announcing she’s done something “magnificent.”
It’s full miniature horse barding. Lil’ Sebastian-type shit. Cisco’s clapping in the background. Apparently it has some actual armoring benefits too, and there’s a saddle — purely ornamental, unfortunately. :pensive: Fernie handles the whole fitting suspiciously well, standing dead still through it — but it’s just cloth. Gotta drink like a horse and all that.
Both of them are now fully transformed: Elijah hideous, Fernie a small pony. She wants 60gp for the work; Elijah offers 50, and Cisco chips in the remaining 15gp of Tull’s stolen gold to close the gap. Before they leave, Cisco slips her an extra 5gp for her speed and discretion.
The disguises come with real properties:
- Elijah’s cloak grants advantage on stealth checks in urban environments.
- Fernie’s barding gives advantage on Deception checks for close-inspection attempts to pass her off as a horse.
It’s tournament-grade horse armor, somehow fitted to a tiny horse — Fernie’s mechanical leg is completely hidden, and her wings are folded flat underneath. She could break through the armor with intent and it would repair itself; otherwise, it can be unbuckled to free her wings. Don’t let it catch fire, don’t submerge it, and don’t let anyone actually ride Fernie — any of that and it breaks. Lorien’s a little confused by all of this.
Reunion at the Collegium
On the way, the rest of the party finally clocks the disguises properly. Cisco reassures everyone it should get them through most general inspections. They regroup, and Adrik fills disguised Elijah and Fernie in: the guildhall is compromised.
Adrik asks what they should even be called. Henceforth, in disguise, Elijah is Carl and Fernie is Donut.
They join the Collegium line. Weapons get surrendered again on the way in — though Cisco manages to hide a dagger in one of the newly-acquired hidden pockets in his armor. Lorien finds a discarded note along the way, clearly meant to summon a test subject to an experiment office, but scratched out and rewritten as an ordinary office invitation.
Wandering the Collegium grounds, they somehow find their way back to YGOR’s place. His door is now littered with even more notes than before, including a new one: “If you are bringing the cube, do not bring it all the way inside.” Elijah hangs back with the cube while Cisco knocks and announces, simply, “Cube!”
YGOR answers in his usual butcher’s apron, fresh and non-fresh blood alike, holding three objects in two hands — which shouldn’t be possible, but it’s YGOR. He’s tweaking out about their return, then locks onto Lorien, noticing something’s different. “There is a gap in your timeline.” He asks Lorien point-blank if he knows who YGOR is. Lorien can’t answer. Satisfied that “Carl” is still carrying the cube, YGOR waves them all in.
The cube speaks
Inside, Lorien sits back down in the non-betraying chair so YGOR can examine his “specimen.” Lorien recounts what he remembers in broad, general swaths. YGOR has everyone give their names to Lorien one by one, testing whether anything sticks.
Nothing does — Lorien can’t even give back the fake name Carl. Cisco walks YGOR through the circumstances of the cube. YGOR calls the cube-bearer forward and paces a tight circle around Elijah. Cisco, mid-explanation, accidentally blows the cover by calling him Carl outright — and for some reason “Carl” is the only one who seems remotely concerned about any of this. YGOR has him set the cube down on a chalk drawing for the experiment. Nothing happens right away, but YGOR really, really pushes tea on everyone.
Elijah quietly tells Fernie not to touch or drink anything. Cisco asks for something stronger — there isn’t any. Adrik notices the tea is viscous and declines; YGOR takes one look, declares it spoiled, and throws the whole teapot over his shoulder. Everyone’s instructed to hold hands.
The cube, for the record, is now six inches per side — larger than it used to be. Apparently the power of friendship is what’s keeping them safe from its growing hum. Wtf is YGOR talking about???
YGOR slips into the circle and rotates the cube, revealing a single word engraved on each face: Counted, Recorded, Acknowledged, Witnessed, Remembered, Endured. He wants to study Lorien and the cube side by side to get at the root of his amnesia. It seems the cube didn’t erase Lorien’s memories so much as store them — though which face took them, and whether each face corresponds to a different flavor of amnesia, is unclear. Maybe it needs to be opened to get anything back out.
Cisco pulls out the manifest to ask whether the engraved words themselves could have been stolen from somewhere. Apparently that’s thinking too small.
The cube, YGOR makes clear, could be wielded as a real weapon in the wrong hands. Lorien lost a day of memories and every name he knew from barely touching it — what happens if that effect were focused and directed on purpose? Is it the only one of its kind? YGOR gets more serious than they’ve ever seen him. He isn’t sure, but he’s confident it’s rare. It’s starting to sound like they might need their weapons back — and maybe a way inside the cube itself.