imp

— CARRIED —

• dagger (1d4)
• staff (1d4, two-handed)
• spellbook
• sample case, velvet-lined
• copper alembic, small
• smoked-glass spectacles
• iron rations, one week
• waterskin

— SPELLS —

MEMORISED Sleep

KNOWN Read Magic, Detect Magic, Sleep

— WHO THEY ARE —

Isolde spent nine years at the Collegium proving that dragon secretions are organised by the humour of the dragon — that a fire drake's spit and a grease dragon's grease are one substance in two tempers — and the Collegium spent nine years explaining that her samples were too old, too few, and too second-hand to prove anything. The paper was returned three times. The third time, the returning note misspelled her name. Cosima Vell walked into her lecture — uninvited, in riding clothes, eating an apple — listened for an hour, and offered her fresh samples from a living source and no committee. Isolde resigned the same week. She is aware that she has been purchased, that the samples will serve a commodity scheme, that Cosima regards her the way she regards the merchant's scale: a device for making numbers respectable. Isolde has decided she does not care. Nine years of care got her a misspelled name. She learned Draconic to read the old husbandry texts — there was a century when men kept dragons the way men keep bees, and the manuals survive, and nobody reads them because nobody believes them. Isolde believes them. The manuals say a grease dragon in her second century secretes most heavily in her sleep, and that the keepers harvested with long-handled ladles, barefoot, in silence. She has not mentioned the barefoot part to Durwin. She memorises Sleep and not the finding-spells, which surprises people who mistake her for a scholar. She is not a scholar anymore. She is the only person in this party who has read what the thing in the shrine can do, and she intends everyone, on both sides of the encounter, to be as calm as possible.

— AT THE TABLE —

• 2026-08-30 ·1 area · 12 events grease-buyers-b2
• 1 area · 1 events grease-buyers-b1

— WHAT THEY REMEMBER —

• 2026-08-30 · grease-buyers-b2 Foundry, shrine encounter 6: black grease trail entered from the south; it was laid in broad overlapping soft-bodied smears, thickest beyond the southern threshold, with no boots/claws/wheels. Four squat grease-slick spear carriers waited in the southern chamber. No obvious mechanisms, traps, valves, or leaks in foundry; vat cold solid iron. Durwin held the dry threshold; I cast Sleep, affecting 10 HD and dropping all four. They sleep 9 turns if undisturbed; my only memorised Sleep is expended. Keep party off the black grease and assess/capture/question sleepers without waking them if possible.