Just Us, Dressed Up Nice

Bram —no but you have to start where it actually started, which is us getting yanked out of the hole, the dance floor hole, and we drag the whole — what was it, the Voidheart and the giant hand thing out with us—

Pip Scooby-Doo skedaddle.

Bram That was Johnny's line, "we Scooby-Doo skedaddled with the Voidheart," yeah, and now we're just standing in the middle of the gala with a monster made of hands—

Maeve Severed hands.

Pip Right but — okay, why does it have hands. Like why hands. What's it doing with the hands—

Maeve Echolocation.

Pip ...the hands hear?

Maeve It navigates by sound.

Pip That's worse. That's so much worse.

Bram And Benny and Argyle are both on the floor, prone, fatigued, all beat up, and Benny's wrapped in this — the silence aura thing, so no magic can happen near him, which—

Maeve Which you did to him.

Bram Which we did to him, yeah, that's the thing, Josh — the GM straight up went, why did you buff this guy with silence and invisibility and then all stand out in the open where you can't reach him.

Pip And nobody could even check, the — what's it, Pathbuilder was down.

Bram Pathbuilder was down! So nobody could look at their own sheet for like the first two rounds, it was beautiful chaos.

Pip So whose call was the silence Benny.

Bram That was Johnny, he owned it. But Anzu kind of defended it, it was a — what's the word, the metagaming thing—

Pip You don't want to act like you know the monster's gonna pop up.

Maeve Right.

Pip I mean. Sure. But also you've now Saran-wrapped your strongest guy in a no-spell bubble and walked away from him.

Bram I love and fear that man, by the way, Josh — he didn't group his hand tokens. Sixty-three of them, all loose, because he's a smart man.

Maeve Wasn't sixty-three.

Bram It was a lot of hands.

Pip It was hand-shaped, leave it.

Bram So initiative goes, and the Scale's there watching — Ralph, the Bishop guy—

Maeve Ralph's Bishop's. The cleric.

Bram Right, Ralph, and he chucks a spear and CRITS, forty-eight damage, and the spear like lights up with holy fire—

Pip Burns with holy light, the read-out said.

Bram Burns with holy light, and that's how we find out the hand thing's vulnerable to holy and it shuts off its regeneration, which is huge, because otherwise we're there all night.

Pip That's a good crit to find a weakness on. Lucky.

Maeve Lucky.

Bram And then Lance opens up — Lance the sniper, and I have to tell you his actual stat block, the name in the block, it just says "Jaws."

Pip Jaws?

Bram Jaws. With a little chomp animation.

Pip Why does the sniper—

Bram Don't know. Don't know! He's a great shot though.

Pip That feels like a melee name on a ranged guy. That's a — somebody mislabeled a token.

Maeve It's always something.

Bram And here's the moment, here's the actual moment — Grayson. Silven Grayson, who's still doing his whole innocent-healthcare-worker bit—

Pip The amber guy. White hair, slate eyes, very — he's a radio person, isn't he. Write it down. Everyone fancy is a radio person eventually.

Maeve He's Amber Call.

Pip Same energy.

Bram So Grayson casts this big vampire cone, the — Vampiric Exsanguination, and Argyle's standing right there holding the Voidheart out in the open, and the cone could catch Argyle, but Grayson rolls and chooses NOT to clip Argyle, he hits the hand instead to keep his cover—

Pip Because he can't be seen blasting the nice party.

Bram Right.

Pip So wait — was that brave of Argyle or was that dumb. Holding the heart out like that.

Bram It was brave!

Pip It was a bet. He bet Grayson wouldn't break cover to grab it.

Maeve And the dice agreed with him.

Pip The dice agreed. That's not bravery, that's — Grayson failed a diplomacy roll into being nice. Argyle just stood there and got lucky.

Bram He survived a dominating aura too, the bloodied-thing's aura, made the will save, took like — eleven spirit damage, nothing.

Pip See and that's so Argyle though, that's — he's standing in the open holding the cursed orb like, surely no one will do anything bad, I am simply a man with an orb.

Bram The self-litigating lawyer.

Pip Considers suicide at a handshake but holds the void cube in a firefight, sure.

Maeve That's the spell DC, by the way. Thirty-five.

Bram Right, the DC.

Maeve That's what scared everyone. His saves are at thirty-five.

Bram That's the thing, we all clocked it — these are level six, seven spells but the DC's thirty-five, so it's, Johnny said it, "much scarier than level six."

Pip A seven knows everything and a thirty-four knows nothing, but a thirty-five apparently dominates your soul.

Bram Ha—

Pip ...inverted dice don't even apply to the bad guys, that's not fair.

Bram So then Benny — Benny gets up, runs back in, re-silences himself AND Argyle on the way—

Maeve Which cuts off the casters again.

Bram —and double-slices the hand, and he crit-fails the will save, BUT, hero point, rerolls it, and turns the crit-fail into a crit-SUCCESS—

Pip From the bottom to the top.

Bram From the very bottom to the very top, clutch, and the table loses it.

Pip Okay see THAT's bravery. Benny earned his.

Bram And then Johnny — poor Johnny, he's got one attack spell, he loads it up, Sure Strike, a mythic die on it, the whole — and whiffs.

Pip Misses.

Bram Misses. And he goes, "I think that was a waste. What a bummer."

Maeve And then they told him it would've hit.

Bram They told him it would've hit! If he hadn't — agh, brutal.

Pip Wait would've hit how—

Maeve The mythic die. The number under it landed.

Pip Oh that's — oh no.

Bram Burned a hero point's worth of stuff, sort of, and the math says you connect, and you don't.

Pip His god really has ghosted him, huh.

Bram Ha—

Pip No I'm serious, that's — the radio god's right there, the all-knowing one, and he won't ask it the one real question, and now even the dice are—

Bram That's a different—

Pip It's all connected. Cursed man.

Bram Anyway Ralph finishes it, spear again, and then — this is the flourish — Argyle goes "yeah, I'm gonna bone shake him," casts Bone Shaker on the corpse, and physically chucks the body twenty-five feet back into the void portal so it can never get raised.

Pip Because Grayson was reaching for a scroll.

Bram Grayson was seen reaching for a scroll, yeah, probably to raise the hand thing as his own pet—

Maeve He put it back. Unused.

Bram Put the skull back in his robes, unused, just — pockets it, very quiet, very menacing.

Pip See and I love that Johnny burns the whole kit for a miss and then Argyle just YEETS a corpse and that's the cool moment of the round. That's the spotlight, gone.

Bram It is a little unfair.

Pip It's very Argyle. Whoever did the last cool thing is his favorite person, and this round HE did the last cool thing, so—

Maeve He's a fickle little man.

Pip Fickle little man.

Bram So combat's over, everybody heals up, and Argyle pulls Bishop aside, quietly, tells him Grayson was dominating a monster to make it attack people earlier in the night.

Pip And Bishop's like, cool, can't do anything with that.

Bram Pretty much, he goes, there's no evidence, it'll be — what'd he say—

Maeve "Difficult to litigate in terms of public opinion."

Bram Right.

Pip So what do we GAIN from snitching with no proof, that's my — like now Bishop just thinks you're paranoid.

Bram No, it's on the record now, it's in allied hands—

Pip It's in allied hands and unactionable. That's just gossip with a clipboard.

Maeve It's "be on your guard."

Pip That's all it is.

Bram And meanwhile Johnny's just standing there bleeding from the eyes and the nose, dried blood everywhere from the portal, like nobody's checked on him—

Pip Nobody. The man's hemorrhaging and they're doing politics.

Bram And the totem — the keystone totem updates as the portal shrinks, because the Voidheart's out now, and it reads, uh — nine days till the next tithe, cost is twenty-one, energy eighty.

Maeve Cost twenty-one. Energy eighty.

Pip And nine days is the clock.

Maeve Every nine days. Pay or the faction dies.

Pip Cheerful little ship.

Bram So then we — okay, we drive out to loot the Garrick place before Grayson can, the textiles one—

Maeve Garrick Textiles Fane.

Bram Garrick Textiles, the fabric one, it's a Concordia thing, and we get there and it's already crumbling, falling apart, and there's no fabric inside—

Pip The fabric's in the truck out back.

Bram It's all loaded in an eighteen-wheeler out back, yeah, and inside is the dying heart, the — Whirling in Rags.

Pip Great name.

Bram And Josh, after the giant-hand thing, goes — "from now on I have to give hearts shorter names because I can't have you all calling it something-glove."

Pip Something Glove. That's its band name now.

Maeve It's never Chuck either. They never name them Chuck when they should.

Pip It's ALWAYS Chuck, that's the problem — anything we drag out the void ends up a Chuck.

Bram This one we didn't get to name, we killed it. So they send in Johnny and Benny to "gently speak to the heart"—

Pip The two highest kill counts.

Bram The two with the highest kill count, sent in to negotiate gently.

Pip That's — okay that's the joke of the whole night. "Go talk it down." It's Johnny and Benny. They do not talk things down.

Bram And the heart goes, "I am aware that all of my contractors are dead. So not good."

Maeve "So not good."

Pip Reading the room better than the party.

Bram And there was a whole debate, Benny wanted to ask it to go willingly, like surrender, and Argyle's just—

Pip Rip it out and dip.

Bram Rip it out and dip, yeah.

Pip Of course. Of course Argyle wants the clean kill, but he'll feel TERRIBLE about it after for legal reasons—

Bram Pro bono guilt.

Pip Pro bono guilt, exactly.

Bram So Johnny does double-speak, diversion, and Benny does a thievery check — thirty-six—

Maeve Thirty-six.

Bram —and plucks the core thread out like a little ball of yarn, and the heart dies instantly, and the whole Fane comes down, and everyone makes their reflex save to get out.

Pip And we got, what, nothing for it?

Bram Ten energy. Because Garrick couldn't even afford its own tithe.

Maeve Half energy for a kill. And it was a small heart.

Pip So we learned the rules at least — kill, leave, or claim.

Maeve Kill's half. Claim's full but you have to defend it.

Bram Right, and killing it from inside collapses the building, that's the new rule.

Pip That tracks.

Bram So then we haul the eighteen-wheeler of fabric all the way home, to the Strider undercroft, the base—

Pip We're hot rod people now.

Bram We're hot rod people now! And we get into the long economy bit, the heart-feeding bit, this is — Argyle's whole — okay so first we feed the little Garrick core into Eerie, our heart—

Maeve Eerie.

Bram And Eerie says the line, "I have no allegiance to others of my kind, my only allegiance is to you," very loyal, very ominous.

Pip For now.

Bram For now.

Pip It's a heart. They're all somebody's heart eventually.

Bram And then it's just — Argyle's dumping EVERYTHING in, just gleefully, he's going "no guys, I want it to go high, I want to buy something BIG"—

Pip Spreadsheet brain.

Bram And Anzu's doing his bit, the whole — don't bank too much energy or he's gonna be like one of those flies rubbing its little hands together—

Pip The fly. Rubbing the hands.

Maeve The more you put in, the more he can steal from you.

Pip That's the real concern, right, Anzu's actually making a point under the bit—

Bram He is, but Argyle doesn't hear it because he's busy throwing in — what was the list — a pickled demon tongue, the gingerbread house—

Pip NO. The gingerbread house is a war hero, you do not—

Bram We didn't eat it, we fed it to the heart—

Pip That's WORSE—

Bram A choker of elocution, a Symbol of Conflict, a crushing rune, the fortifying pebble, barghest fur, Ki-Rin blood—

Maeve And the demon tongue. Pickled.

Bram And the demon tongue, yeah.

Pip Johnny was gonna eat that gingerbread house, I know it. He was eyeing it.

Bram The rate's one energy per ten gold on magic items, that's the precedent now.

Maeve One per ten.

Bram And the big buy is the Siphon Array, costs forty, but it gives plus two energy on every future sacrifice forever, so it compounds—

Pip So Argyle gets his big purchase.

Bram He gets his big thing! And the other clever bit — the Voidheart, it's worth like forty energy if you feed the whole thing, or twenty if you keep part of it intact, and it's a magic-dampening item, so they feed in HALF and keep half to seed a future magic-negation project—

Maeve Against Grayson.

Bram Against Grayson and his thirty-five DCs, exactly, you want a way to shut his magic down later.

Pip Okay that's — that's actually smart. Half now, half toward dampening the radio guy. Who came up with that, that's not an Argyle plan.

Bram It was sort of a group—

Pip It's too patient for Argyle.

Maeve Anzu.

Pip Yeah. Yeah, that's Anzu.

Bram And the Siphon Array purchase comes with — they get a G-Wagon out of it, so now we're building a garage—

Pip A garage.

Bram A multi-purpose garage for the G-Wagon, and Argyle wants — oh, this is the head, the Ki-Rin head—

Pip The butterfly! Benny parried the hoof with a butterfly!

Bram With a butterfly, yeah, an actual butterfly—

Maeve Not a sword.

Pip Not a butterfly SWORD, that ruins it, just a butterfly. The little insect.

Bram So Argyle wants the Ki-Rin head mounted over the front door of the base, as a trophy—

Pip Of course he does.

Bram —and it's not preserved, it's just a raw elk-deer head, and he asks the twins, the — Anouk and Anaïs—

Maeve Anouk and Anaïs.

Bram —to preserve it, but Anzu keeps going, every time, "this thing has not been properly preserved, this is disgusting."

Pip And Johnny's like it's gonna be a rotting head!

Bram "It's gonna be a rotting head," yeah.

Pip So Argyle wants — what's his reasoning, he wants people to "just see the head"?

Bram People walk by, they just see the head.

Pip Everything Argyle likes is tyrant-coded. Mounting a rotting head over your door so the peasants see it on the way to work, that's — that's a guy with a head problem.

Bram And we're right next to the nervous rival factions, that's the thing, we're trying to be low-profile and we've got a spy tower, an eighteen-wheeler in the yard, and a rotting elk head—

Pip Low profile.

Bram And Johnny does the whole rumor-mill bit, he goes, "those four guys jumped into the magic hole, came out with a giant hand thing, and then walked away. No explanation."

Pip That's exactly what it looks like, though. That's just what happened.

Bram That IS what happened.

Pip We are the rumor.

Bram So then — okay, we invite all the allied factions over for a debrief, and the Protectorate doesn't respond, and Prime Meridian says they're not coming in person—

Maeve PM declined.

Bram PM declined, and so the party gets paranoid, cancels the whole meeting they themselves called, and drives across the entire Strider in the middle of the night to do a wellness check on the Protectorate—

Pip Why.

Bram Because they got nervous!

Pip No but — wait, the door thing. Berth four. Aut's whole — the unlock-the-door errand.

Bram "Sussy birth four," Benny said.

Pip Sussy berth four.

Maeve It's tangled up in it, maybe.

Pip That's the real why, isn't it. They're not actually worried about the Protectorate, they've got this secret Aut job rattling around—

Bram Maybe, the GM never said—

Pip The oath has a price they haven't found yet. I keep saying it. Johnny takes Aut's deal in the end.

Bram You keep saying it.

Pip And I'll be right.

Bram So we drive ALL the way over, Johnny does the talking, in sunglasses, at night—

Pip At night.

Bram At night, and the guard out front just says yeah, Yao and Tamara are fine, they're recovering, not taking visitors, and the sense-motive rolls confirm he's not lying.

Maeve He's telling the truth.

Bram He's telling the truth, so it was all for nothing, and Ichel goes, "that's it? we drove over here so you could talk to the security guard out front?"

Pip Brutal.

Bram And the GM as Ichel, "we're kind of just along for the entertainment at this point."

Pip I mean—

Bram And Argyle keeps going, on repeat, "checking on our comrade really isn't that crazy," "it's good diplomacy"—

Pip It is a little crazy, though.

Bram It's a tactical loss—

Pip NO. No, see, that's — that's exactly the totaled car all over again. "Tactical loss." That was a paranoid midnight road trip, Bram, that's not diplomacy—

Bram It's good to check on your—

Pip You called the meeting! YOU called it and then drove away from it to go stare at a guard booth! Your guy can't read a room, that's the—

Bram He reads the room, he just—

Maeve He litigates it.

Pip He litigates the room.

Bram Fine, fine. So the next morning, the real summit, everyone — some in person, PM and the Protectorate dialing in remote—

Pip Radio people.

Bram —and Johnny gives the debrief and rolls low on diplomacy, so everyone thinks we're hiding something—

Maeve And the reroll.

Bram Oh the reroll! He mythic-rerolls the bad roll and gets ANOTHER natural one.

Pip A double nat one.

Maeve Two.

Pip That's the curse. That's the inverted curse. A thirty-four knows nothing and a one knows — a one knows even less, somehow—

Bram The man is cursed.

Pip He's so cursed. Ghosted by his god, twice-nat-one'd, bleeding from the eyes—

Bram So because the debrief tanks, everyone's suspicious, and that's when the real math comes out — Mr. Flock points out the tithe ticked up to twenty-one—

Maeve Which means a shared pot.

Bram A shared pot, about four hundred total, split across all the factions, so — here's the brutal part — as factions die, the tithe goes UP for everyone left.

Pip Oh that's nasty.

Bram It's nasty. So keeping the weak ones alive lowers your own bill.

Pip But the vultures—

Maeve The vultures converge on the falling ones.

Bram And Tas, from Prime Meridian, just says the quiet part — "it is obvious to me that at some point we will have to consider cutting away some members of the flock."

Pip Just says it.

Maeve Flat.

Pip While the party's tiptoeing around it, Tas just — names it. Who gets cut.

Bram And then Salvado, from Solari, the little shipping one, who's basically next on the chopping block, goes, "you guys, you wouldn't let me die, right?"

Pip Oh, Salvado.

Bram Salvado.

Pip That's — okay that's the gut-punch line of the night, that's worse than any of the combat.

Bram And Argyle, the WHOLE time, is just furiously doing four-hundred-divided-by-faction-count math in his head—

Pip Spreadsheet brain. Of course. Everyone's having a moment and he's doing long division.

Bram Kadou offers to build a magic-item detector if we give him a map, Paavo offers to scout ahead—

Maeve Paavo scouts.

Bram —and the travel math is wild, the journey to the wall is like four and a half months, fifteen cycles—

Maeve One void per six seconds.

Bram One void every six seconds, and you can fall like forty-eight hours behind the Strider and still catch up.

Pip And the only place to get fresh magic items is the — what, the Joker Worlds?

Maeve Excursions to the Joker Worlds. Yeah.

Bram Right, that's the only source.

Pip I was — I thought the items came from the hearts.

Maeve No.

Pip Huh. Okay.

Bram So then it's all negotiation to close out — the party pitches a faction merger, to share the tithe burden, and PM refuses to pool magic items—

Maeve PM won't pool items.

Bram PM won't pool, but they'll let us pay their tithe increase, and then we agree to absorb the two weak non-combat ones — Solari and Alkahest—

Pip So we DID save Salvado.

Bram We saved Salvado!

Pip Good. Good. He asked so nicely.

Bram We take in their people, take their hearts — Solari's heart is twenty energy, Alkahest's is thirty—

Maeve And claiming nets about twenty-five.

Bram —nets us about twenty-five, and we cede the empty territory over to the Protectorate, and we needle Radiant Arms—

Maeve Y'shael.

Bram Y'shael, into joining as a forward buffer base, the gun people—

Pip "Just a tap'll do ya."

Bram "Just a tap'll do ya," yeah, and Johnny rolls a thirty-five diplomacy to seal Radiant Arms and Ichel coming in—

Maeve Thirty-five. Finally.

Pip Off the double nat one to a thirty-five. The curse breaks at the worst possible — no, the best possible time.

Bram And Bishop says the nice thing, he goes, "you don't need to pay our tithe, we're fine paying the increase if it means you're keeping other groups safe, because they'd die otherwise."

Pip Aw.

Bram And Benny's whole take is, give them the full tithe anyway, even though we know they'd accept less, just to stay in their good graces—

Pip See but is that shrewd or is that just Argyle's spreadsheet talking us into bankrolling the entire ship—

Bram It's coalition-building—

Pip It's "just us." It's not justice, it's "just us," dressed up nice—

Bram It's generous!

Pip It's generous with the whole party's money, sure. We're now paying — what, PM's offset, Hildebrandt's offset—

Maeve Hildebrandt and Prime Meridian, yeah.

Pip We're paying for everybody. That's not an alliance, that's an allowance. Argyle's just adopted the entire flock.

Bram We're the hub now! We went from one faction to the center of the whole—

Pip We're the hub that pays everyone's bills. That's — that's not a hub, that's a—

Bram It locks in the coalition against Grayson's bloc, that's the point—

Pip At what recurring cost though, that's all I'm—

Bram A higher recurring tithe that we've pledged to offset, yes, but—

Pip "But." There's the but.

Maeve It pays off if nobody falls.

Pip And somebody always falls. Tas said so.

Bram ...okay but you have to admit, going in, dragging a hand monster out of a hole, and coming out the other end owning the whole alliance—

Pip Owning the debt of the whole alliance—

Bram —that's a good night. You had to be there.

Pip I was there.

Bram You had to be there more.

Maeve Don't mount the head.

Pip Don't mount the head.

Bram He's gonna mount the head.