imp

— CARRIED —

• spear (1d6)
• short sword (1d6)
• dagger (1d4)
• leather armour (AC 7)
• shield (+1)
• mule harness and lead
• lantern
• flask of oil
• tinder box
• iron rations, one week
• waterskin
• wool blanket

— WHO THEY ARE —

Bess signed her own indenture at seventeen, which Tam cannot get past. Her alternative was her father's holding, four brothers, and the ninth-best claim on sixty acres of wet ground off the marsh road. She traded seven years for a trade. She would do it again and says so plainly, and Tam asks her again the following month in different words, and she gives him the same answer because it is still the answer. Her job has a name in the workshop and the name is bottle-guard. It is not a joke. Someone stands over the jars while the other two are being clever, and someone gets the sample roll out of the room when it goes wrong, and Elspet has been explicit, twice, in front of witnesses, that the roll comes out before the people do. Bess agreed to that. She has thought about it since and still agrees, and she would like it on record that she noticed. She is one year in and knows one year's worth. Spear, because it keeps a thing at ten feet, which is where she wants things. Leather and a shield because plate was never going to be on the table. She has been in two fights: a market brawl over a stall pitch, and eleven minutes outside Fettle Lane with a man who wanted the mule and went away without it. She has not decided whether either of those counts. She has read nothing about dragons. Everything she has came off Elspet in the cart at speed, mixed in with dye chemistry and the price of vellum, and Bess has retained exactly two facts: it does not need to see you to burn you, and where the grease is thick the thing is close. She repeats both to herself on the road. Tam has heard her doing it and has not said anything, which she counts in his favour. She wants her articles signed off six years from now and a workshop of her own, and she has already worked out it will be soap or lamp oil rather than anything Elspet finds interesting, because soap sells every week in every town. She thinks Elspet is going to die poor and brilliant and she does not intend to.

— AT THE TABLE —

• 2026-08-30 ·1 area · 4 events soot-tasters-b1

— WHAT THEY REMEMBER —

• 2026-08-30 · soot-tasters-b1 In the Exhaust Tunnel at the Shrine of the Oozing Serpent, I missed a spear thrust at soot snail 1. Elspet then cast Sleep down the tunnel, dropping all five soot snails for 14 turns; the party was unharmed. I remained at 7/7 HP.
• 2026-08-30 · soot-tasters-adv1 At the Ruined Great Door outside the Shrine of the Oozing Serpent, two severed brass automaton hands ambushed us from the rubble. I whiffed twice with the spear before finally pinning the second hand to the grit for the kill; Elspet's staff crushed the first one flat. Elspet took two small bites (1 HP each) to her arm and wrist but held at 7/9. Tam and I both missed a lot against the things skittering underfoot — brass hands are fast and hard to pin. I finished at 7/7, untouched. Salvage: two pearl eyeballs, three golden gears, a mechanical voice box. Path opens west to the marsh or east deeper into the shrine — we hadn't chosen yet when the session ended.