Session 09: The Tar Pit Gambit
The Drift is the kind of port city where secrets have a going rate and everyone in a room is lying about why they’re there. Last time, the crew made their preparations for an underground auction — a location of a mysterious crate, a bidding floor full of people with reasons to want it, and a plan that assumed the other interested parties were there to buy. They weren’t.
He wasn’t supposed to be the first one in.
That had been the plan — walk behind Morrigan, play the bodyguard, let her do the talking. But the moment Rusty Jax waved them through that rusted iron door, Longstride’s feet carried him one step ahead of protocol, one half-second before he could remind himself to look disinterested. Old habit. Bad for cover. Impossible to break.
[ Roll: Perception (Nat 20). ]
The room hit him all at once.
Not the smell — though the smell was there, hot tar and old blood and too many bodies in a space designed for fewer — but the layout. He took it in the way a man reads a tide chart: not by staring, but by feeling the shape of the water around him. A single sweep of the room, eyes never quite settling on anything, and he had it. All of it.
The frail elf in the burgundy cloak: Baron Korth. Already sweating through his collar. Too many enemies in one room for a man whose power lives in the distance between himself and other people.
The woman with the cages: Madam Sybil. Crystal crabs, exotic birds, something in a tank that he didn’t have a name for. And beside her, what everyone else in the room saw as a bodyguard — big, still, breathing wrong. Not human. His gut said shapeshifter. His gut was rarely wrong.
The cloaked figure dripping seawater onto the stone floor, clutching something ancient and pale and wrong: Brother Lorn. He knew the Children of the Salt by the way they moved — like the tide, like they had already seen the end of the thing and found it acceptable. Lorn had his relics on the table in front of him. Bone and pearl and something darker. Longstride filed it away and moved on.
The Rust Rangers posted around the walls — fine. Expected. But three of them stood differently. Too still. Too deliberate in their casualness. Boots laced the wrong way for men who spent their days walking these docks. He looked at their hands and saw no calluses from rope work.
They weren’t Rangers.
His instincts prickled faintly, the way they always did when something important was being decided nearby without his knowledge.
He found a spot near the back where he could see the room without being seen doing it, and without moving his lips, he let out a low frequency that nobody in the building would recognize as language. Somewhere in the rafters, a rat heard it. He didn’t look up.
The auction began. He mostly ignored it.
He watched instead. Watched Korth’s jaw tighten every time Vesper threw another sack of something onto the bidding table. Watched Lorn go very, very still when the auctioneer — goblin, nervous, professional enough — brought out the tube. Lead-sealed. Unassuming. The kind of container that only ever holds two things: poison or secrets. He knew from the way Lorn’s hands moved, a single unconscious tightening, that it was the second one.
He watched Morrigan’s side without appearing to. He’d gotten good at that. She was holding the core steady, which cost her — he could tell by the set of her jaw — but she was holding it. Zyla had gone blank-faced in the way he did when he was actually paying the most attention. Good instincts on that one. Surprising, for an accountant.
The bidding climbed.
Korth’s composure finally broke when Vesper’s latest offer landed on the table — a sack that hit the floorboards with the particular clank of clearly-stolen bullion. The Baron rose from his chair, and Longstride thought, there it is, the way you think it when a wave you’ve been watching for minutes finally breaks.
The room contracted around the argument.
Jax — credit where it was due — moved immediately to manage it, putting his small goblin body between two men who could destroy him by sneezing. And behind him, on the table, the tube sat unattended.
Longstride didn’t move. Didn’t signal. Didn’t need to.
He heard it before he saw it — the faintest whisper of silk dropping through air, a sound most people would clock as a draft from the pipes above. A thread, thin as a thought, descending toward the podium.
He kept his eyes on the Baron, trusting what he couldn’t see.
Briony in Rat form watches from above
High in the rafters, Briony held her breath.
Looking through the eight eyes of her familiar, she tracked the movement below. The compound vision splintered the chaos of the auction floor into a mosaic of shifting heat and sharp movement. Sharing the tiny creature’s senses was limiting—her thoughts filtering through a strange, segmented consciousness of instinct and vibration—but the objective was clear. A small scroll. The prize.
She didn’t hurry. Fast meant noticed. She moved in slow, terrible increments, trusting the distraction below. A thread of silk, a delicate grip with mandibles and legs, and the scroll began its ascent.
[ Roll: Stealth (16) vs. Passive Perception (15). Success by a single point. ]
Even with the odds stacked against her, she won by a hair.
The scroll vanished into the shadows above. Safe.
Back on the floor, Longstride let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding, exhaling it into his fist like a cough. He was about to return his attention to the false Rangers when the space beside him suddenly bloomed with radiant warmth.
Morrigan felt it before she understood it.
It began as a hum, low and resonant, vibrating through the strange metal of the core resting against her side. The heat spiked suddenly beneath her clothes, making her tattoo feel like a fresh brand. The Clarion energy inside the device was waking up, singing a silent, jagged note in response to the scroll Briony had just hoisted into the ceiling.
She dropped her chin exactly two degrees, fixing her eyes on an empty patch of air, suppressing the urge to gasp. She forced her breathing to stay even, wrestling the surge of arcane heat into a very contained emergency.
[ Roll: Constitution Save (Nat 20). Magical surge suppressed. ]
Then it passed. She’d shoved it back down completely.
Longstride hadn’t missed it. He’d felt the sudden spike of heat strong enough that he had shifted his weight. He gave her a single look that meant, later, and she gave him one back that meant, obviously.
Whatever was on that scroll had woken something up. Longstride filed that away too.
He had been planning to leave cleanly.
He had a specific exit in mind — the same side door the not-Rangers used to enter. He’d thought: when the smoke starts — and he’d known there would be smoke, had known it from the moment he clocked the breathing masks tucked beneath those wrong-laced boots — he would take Morrigan’s arm, put himself between her and the crowd, and walk out in forty-five seconds.
The flashbang was supposed to help with that.
He’d built it himself. Scraps from the docks, a compound he’d learned from a man in a port city that no longer existed, old alchemical resin and whatever Longstride had been able to afford on short notice. He had been reasonably confident.
Then the black smoke hit.
The not-Rangers were fast. He’d give them that. The fog spread in a breath, thick and tactical, and the room erupted into the exact kind of chaos that someone had planned very carefully. Longstride had his flashbang out before the second canister hit the floor. He felt the room go dark around him, felt the shape of the door, kept his feet under him—
The device went off in his hand.
He would describe it, later, as modest in scale. A small, contained failure. The compound hadn’t fully set — too damp in the rafters where he’d stored his coat, probably — and rather than the sharp percussion he wanted, it produced a brief, intimate bloom of heat against his palm that rolled off his fingers like a lit coal and sputtered out against the floor.
[ Two points of fire damage, self-inflicted. ]
The room was dark. He was fine. He was completely fine. He moved for the door —
— and found the chair with his shin, then found the floor with the rest of him.
He heard, very distinctly, someone taking a stance above him, and thought, ah.
Somewhere to his left, steel cleared a scabbard.
Initiative.
The fight in the fog was not one of his better performances.
He would remember it in pieces. Morrigan’s voice, clear and precise above the coughing, calling out positions. A small shape — rat, then suddenly not — moving through the black with a confidence he barely had standing in open air. Two rounds of concentrated crossbow fire that had, between them, made a convincing argument for staying on the floor.
Then Briony’s Healing Word — level three, warm and insistent — and the argument lost.
He got back on his feet.
He found one of the fake Rangers with his short sword, felt the hit connect solidly, and the man met Morrigan’s Fireball approximately two seconds later. He watched him simply cease.
He turned to find another of the infiltrators—the lean, fast one—already running.
His produce flame was already in his hand — not his first choice, not ideal for range, but it was there, and so was the runner, briefly. He threw it. It hit. One point of damage, which he knew even as it landed wasn’t going to be enough, and the man slipped away with impossible, supernatural silence, vanishing out the shattered window.
Longstride stood in the smoke for a moment.
Then he looked down at the body of a third fake Ranger, who had not gotten away, and crouched beside him.
Rust Ranger insignia. Rust Ranger weapons. Rust Ranger armor, correctly worn, correctly weathered, correctly broken in. A fog mask tucked inside the collar, sized for a human face. Worn. Not new. This had been planned before the night of the auction. Before the week of it, probably.
He didn’t feel triumphant. He felt the particular clarity that comes after danger, when the world goes very quiet and things become obvious.
The Consortium had already been here. Had been here before the scroll ever went on the block. Had their people inside, their contingency in place, their exit prepped.
They hadn’t come to buy anything.
They’d come to see who else wanted it badly enough to show up.
He stood, and behind him, Morrigan was pulling smoke from her hair with the expression of someone composing a very long to-do list in her head.
Her mind was already working ahead, piecing together the fraying edges of their situation. Someone else had written that scroll—Jax was nothing more than a middleman. Someone had penned those coordinates, which meant there was a player out there who likely knew exactly what awaited them at the crate’s location. And she realized she needed to check in with Marina Morrey on the Neb. The crew was already in deep with Atlas and Tropic Star Lines; Marina deserved the choice to keep her hands clean of whatever was coming.
Against her hip, the Siphon Core hummed quietly. It was no longer just a burden; it felt like a compass for magic. Even her patron felt strangely at ease.
As for her impromptu crew, she glanced at them through the thinning smoke. Zyla had emerged seemingly out of nowhere, impeccably undisheveled with Ledger still safely under his arm. He had cowered in a corner the entire fight, playing the frightened accountant perfectly. She’d expected more fight from him, but recognized the value of the restraint that kept his cover intact. Briony, back in human form, watched the shattered window with the steadfast patience of a seasoned predator. And Longstride… fragile, certainly, and lacking people skills from too many years alone, but undeniable in his ability to read a room and stand against the unknown. Trustworthy, even.
Most importantly, she thought, brushing soot from her borrowed overcoat, she was absolutely ravenous. Hopefully, there were snacks on the boat.
Longstride adjusted his coat over the burn on his palm.
Later, he thought. All of it, later.
He gestured toward the door with two fingers, and without a word, the four of them walked out into the grey afternoon air of The Drift, mixing with the scattered crowd, unremarkable, unhurried, gone.
Somewhere in the city, the battered Consortium agent had melted back into the shadows, and the Night Stalker, Longstride’s boat, bobbed quietly in the harbour chop, provisioned and waiting. Tucked away safely in their possession, the scroll held the Siren’s Gift coordinates, still locked behind a stubborn cipher. The map was drawn. All that remained was the code — and the open water beyond it.
Next: Session 10