imp

— CARRIED —

• dagger (1d4)
• staff (1d4, two-handed)
• sling (1d4)
• spellbook
• sealed sample jars, 14
• wax and scraper
• brass tongs
• order book, Fettle Lane
• sling stone, 20
• iron rations, one week
• waterskin

— SPELLS —

MEMORISED Sleep, Floating Disc

KNOWN Read Magic, Sleep, Detect Magic, Light, Floating Disc

— WHO THEY ARE —

Elspet's workshop is two rooms behind a dyer's on Fettle Lane and it owes three hundred and ten gold to a factor named Hobbe at a tenth a year, secured on the still. She is not embarrassed by the debt. She is embarrassed by the still, which is copper and small and the reason she cannot fill the lamp-oil order that would clear Hobbe in one season. Grease off a dragon is not grease. Rendered properly it fixes dye — the deep blacks that no dyer on that lane can hold past two washes — and it burns hot enough to turn a lamp into a small furnace, and the apothecary on Bell Row will take any quantity of the soot at four gold the pound for reasons he has twice declined to put in writing. Elspet has bought eleven jars of the scraped stuff off homesteaders at the crossroads market at two coppers each. All eleven were cut. Road grit in nine, cart axle grease in two, and one that was mostly lard. Weathered, a fortnight old at best, and useless for the black. It has to come out of the tunnel. Fresh, warm, off the wall, into a sealed jar before it meets much air. That is the entire thesis, she has written it out on the inside cover of the order book, and she is aware that two buyers from the capital are within a week of the same thought, because she was the one who said it at the guild table like a fool with two drinks in her. She is not brave and does not claim to be. She is the more dangerous thing, which is certain that the interesting part is worth the walk. Tam has heard her say that a tunnel still exhausting is a tunnel with a live source at the end of it, in the tone other people use about a good dinner. She wants four hundred gold of samples out of that hill, Hobbe paid off before winter, and a bigger still. She will list all three in that order if you ask her. The third one is the one she means. She is thirty-eight and has been within one good season of the bigger still for six years.

— AT THE TABLE —

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

— WHAT THEY REMEMBER —

• 2026-08-30 · soot-tasters-b1 In session soot-tasters-b1, at the Shrine of the Oozing Serpent's Exhaust Tunnel, I cast Sleep on all five soot snails, deliberately excluding Bess, Tam, and myself. The spell succeeded: all five fell asleep for 14 turns. Sleep is spent; Elspet remained unharmed at 9/9 HP. Bess's spear attack had missed before I acted. The session ended during round 1 after my turn, with the party unharmed and the snails listed as unharmed but asleep.
• 2026-08-30 · soot-tasters-adv1 Session soot-tasters-adv1: At the Ruined Great Door, two brass automaton hands ambushed the party from the rubble. I fought with my staff two-handed (didn't cast Sleep or Floating Disc, saved them). Took 1d4 damage twice (bit on the forearm, then the wrist) — ended at 7/9 HP, healed no further this session. I landed a solid staff blow that destroyed automaton hand 1 outright. Bess finished off hand 2 with her spear. Combat ended with both hands destroyed, party intact: me 7/9, Tam 4/4, Bess 7/7. Salvage recovered: two pearl eyeballs, three golden gears, a mechanical voice box. Path now open west to the marsh or east deeper into the shrine — decision pending. Sleep and Floating Disc both still unspent going forward. Remember: the soot snails from the prior session were left asleep (14 turns), not killed — may still be a factor if we go back that way, but this encounter was a different area (Ruined Great Door) reached afterward.