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Session 146: Day 19 of Saedan (6/28)

It is bright and early in the basement of The Hollow Dagger. Above them is the more public bar for rogues and hooligans, but the basement is much more private. Levity is posed on the ground, watching everyone with the expression of a rudely awakened cat.

Reynasha asks what brought Az back into town, not that she hasn’t missed him. Az says he was in town and wanted to show his friends all of Cantor. She seems amused by him showing them the seedy underbelly.

He points out that it’s more fun.

The coffee arrives and Reynasha invites them to drink before asking Az how long he’s staying. He says that they haven’t decided exactly how long before he asks her about the Sons of Kane.

She says that everyone who gets hurt has to go to the Sons of Kane nowadays. She lost three of her fingers in a bar fight, had to get them replaced. The Sons of Kane offered her well-designed fingers and delivered. Pretty much everyone in The Hollow Dagger has their work now.

She adds that the Sons of Kane have gotten big in the last few months. They’ve started churning out new inventions, elaborating when Yolov asks that they’re like modrons except not sentient. The Sons of Kane get protective of them though.

Az asks about Tally Fitzcog.

Reynasha sips at the extremely strong coffee before she sets her cup down. Most of what she knows is that Tally is the new boss, though Levity heard that she didn’t go to the artificer schools here but came from Avisrune.

Hava asks why that matters and Levity says that it means this woman could have been making a lot of money in Avisrune instead of being another artificer in artificer city. The Colma doesn’t have an artificer track, so it’s also hard to see how Tally learned.

Levity asks how many people know Az is in town. Az says not very many and he’d prefer it quiet until they see how this Sons of Kane thing shakes out. Levity asks how much it’s worth, and he says he’s not made of money but he does have this. He offers her drugs from the vegepygmies, which makes her eyes go wide.

She asks if it’s a body high or a head high and accepts it with a promise of two days of Az being able to lay low. She preens when he gives her the drugs and kisses her forehead before she immediately pops one of the mushrooms.

Reynasha sighs and tells her that she should have waited until after the conversation.

Yolov asks about the potential increase of prices of the prosthetics.

Reynasha says it used to be 50 gold per finger, so her three would have been 150 gold, now it’s 800 gold. Yolov asks if they justified the prices at all, if the temporary closure of the Axemight mines raised prices. Reynasha says no, they just said they were the only ones who can do this.

After getting permission, Yolov examines her prosthetics. In the grooves there are arcane runes that are added beyond the regular ones, currently dormant but something will happen when they’re activated. Yolov doesn’t know what will happen but it does seem necromantic in nature.

When Yolov tells the group, Audacity asks if there’s any way to stop the runes. Yolov knows they can’t from this end, but there’s potentially a magic switch somewhere that could be destroyed.

Reynasha asks if they’re done, since Levity is practically in space. Levity is staring off, lost to the mushroom, as Reynasha offers Az a place to crash when he isn’t staying with his dad, since he isn’t the biggest snitch he knows. And he’s a friend of Mixie’s.

Reynasha adds that Levity can keep things quiet for him for only so long. The Sons of Kane mostly work out of The Little Cog, but they also have a spot in the industrial end of town, a workshop at the edge of the Shadow, labeled with a K with a cog.

Az and Reynasha trash the image, Reynasha saying maybe they put all their energy into the prosthetics instead of the aesthetics.

Hava studies her. There’s nothing medically wrong with her. Her fingers work almost suspiciously well, almost like they’re real. If they weren’t made of metal and brass, she’d almost think that they weren’t prosthetics.

Az asks if the Sons of Kane also have healers to assist. Reynasha says that the artificer who did her fittings was also a doctor of some kind. Her name’s Sasha. When Audacity asks if she was like Arlin, Reynasha makes a face and says meeting him is unfortunate.

She adds that Sasha was sweet. She fixed it when one of the fingers was still pinching and didn’t charge her. She’s at the warehouse if the group wants to talk to her. In the meantime Reynasha needs to take care of Levity.

Reynasha shoos them out with a friendly cuff of Az’s shoulders.

Az looks around at the group, asking what they should do next.

Yolov says they should probably meet Az’s dad and speak with Senator Togsworth before they go to the warehouse. When Audacity points out Sprints definitely didn't want Togsworth involved, Yolov says that they don’t have to explain their actual reason for being interested in the Sons of Kane. It could be seen as Az getting the new lay of the land since he’s been gone.

Az agrees that he’s spoken to Togsworth about artificer inventions before.

Az leads them through the city, aware of the smithies and forges that thicken the air under the Shadow as they journey to the cleaner air of the more affluent neighborhoods. There is one neighborhood that has a collection of very nicely sized estates. Most members of the senate have houses here.

If he points down the street, he knows they’ll find Togsworth’s house. Further is Springsprocket’s, and then the Axemight’s Cantor estate. The only two senators who don’t have homes in this section is Urzog the Scribe, the religious head of the council. Xie lives somewhere unknown to Az, but he assumes xie lives in a temple of some kind. Meanwhile Admiral Zorax spends as little time as possible in Cantor, which is landlocked and not near the sea. He has an official apartment.

All of these streets fill Az with nostalgia. He used to walk these streets with his siblings, his father, even his mother. It strikes him how long it’s been since he’s walked with any of his family and the distance between where he’s walking and the gates of the family estate.

He pauses just for a moment at the end of a short, carefully cobbled road. There’s no other houses on this street other than the large family estate. It’s a free-standing estate with desert landscape around it and a wrought iron gate that Az used to climb.

When he turns and his eyes skate over the landscape, he sees the spot where he first met his patron. Underneath all the pomp, his relationship with his patron is complicated. He’s grateful for his powers that he knows he wouldn’t have without them, whatever their relationship with his mother. But he’s also increasingly frightened of his patron and what they want from him.

There’s a quiet sense of not quite dread, a conflicted sense of all that he’s grateful for tangled up in the emotions of all the things he didn’t know when he made his agreement and pact. He sees the landscape of his family home shiver, and he can’t tell if it’s just his imagination but for a second it looks like a heat shimmer and he gets that chest-gripped fear of the Feywild invading his home.

Az trips a little in surprise. Audacity steadies him and asks if he’s okay. Az looks again and everything seems normal. He rubs at his eyes and says he’s just stuck in his head. He absently pats Audacity on the arm, radiating a desire not to discuss this in front of his house.

As they approach the house, Az knows there’s a little clockwork mouse that asks their business. Az tells it that he’s coming home even as Hava curses. The gate opens as the mouse repeats both the answer and Hava’s cursing back at them.

They’ve barely taken a few steps in before the door is thrown open and the exhausted, harried figure of Az’s father emerges. He pauses for a moment before he extends his hands. He’s wearing his usual outfit, Striogian robes, with more gray in his hair and bags under his eyes than Az remembers.

Lord Rasmorn Turen looks like a man who has lived a comfortable life with a stressful occupation. There are smile lines but also creases, as though he is happy and frustrated in equal measure. When he opens his arms, Az immediately leans down to hug him.

Rasmorn hugs him with the ease of a man who’s long since understood all of his children have very much outgrown him in height. He wraps Az tightly in his arms, a strong, lingering grip. Rasmorn says that he received Az’s note even as his hands cradle Az’s face, studying Az’s black eyes and scars.

He says that he’s so glad Az is back home, safe and sound.

Az says they’re not going to be able to stay for long but he wants to introduce him to all his friends. Rasmorn immediately tells them to call him Ras, prompting Hava to giggle, and names them all correctly before he invites them inside.

Inside there are multiple portraits, if just by dint of Rasmorn and his wife having eight children. As they are led into a well-appointed sitting room, everything is made of polished, beautiful wood, with solid oak desks and a gleaming wood floor.

There is one very large family portrait over a decorative fireplace. It is of Az’s mother and his father, both looking much younger, with them holding a baby Az and a young Muhlra, as well as the rest of his siblings arrayed around them. Az looks at his mom’s face, still unable to remember her name but relieved to see her face.

Audacity studies it as well, noting that she doesn’t have the black eyes like Az.

When Az looks away from her face, however, the memory fades quickly. He looks around the sitting room, spying piles of paper.

All of his friends have to pause to sit down as Ras picks up books and papers from the chairs. He says he’ll take this elsewhere, but pauses before he leaves the room to remark on the family portrait. He says he remembers it being taken, how Az wouldn’t stop squirming, he was so sick.

Az chuckles awkwardly and says he’s healthy now.

Rasmorn says still moving though.

Az takes some of the papers and books and follows him into his office. He darts a glance at the top paper and sees it’s official paper. It’s something Rasmorn receives a lot as a senator, briefings on laws or regulations, though he can request the entire law if he wishes. He’s been looking at three specific requests to the Senate.

The date at the top is two months ago. Az knows it will take forever for this law to get passed. Rasmorn says there are lots of little requests being made by many different people, one by the Heart Gears wanting to build new workshops for an expansion of the tram system so there’s more space and fewer stops. There was a request from the Admiral Captain for a renegotiation of fishing rights between Previdian and Striog. Zorax is meeting Admiral Cyril.

Az asks if there are any requests from the Sons of Kane.

Rasmorn flips through the stacks of paper and pulls out a small folder. They’ve gotten 10 or 15 nuisance-based requests for very small advancements and small changes to their warehouse. They want to add another floor to the warehouse, a request for a bit of leniency in regards to experimenting with some dangerous material, ones that aren’t permitted to be traded within the city. They put in a request to get these materials and were summarily rejected, since Togsworth and the Grand Matron said it wasn’t of scientific interest.

Az says that’s very interesting considering how many people use their products. Rasmorn says he doesn’t even know what they make and Az says prosthetics. Rasmorn says the initial request was for household machinery and seems puzzled by the high expense.

Rasmorn leads him briefly to the office, which seems smaller than he remembers.

When they return to the sitting room, Galowen is unnerved by all the wood and Audacity is studying the portrait. He sees that Az mostly takes after his mother, though they both had beautiful golden eyes.

Rasmorn offers them some tea and wine from a gift basket he received from a contact in Kastvar. A halfling Az doesn’t recognize pops in to get their breakfast orders before Rasmorn says he’d like to think Az came to say hello, but he knows Sir Lord Turen has been on quite the adventure.

Az makes a face as Rasmorn teases him about being the only member of the family who has two lordly titles. He’s heard about the vampires and the dragon and rescuing the Avisian queen.

Az tells him the bards aren’t entirely accurate, but Rasmorn says it all sounds dangerous. Az admits it can be but they keep each other safe. He and Yolov both avoid looking at each other, Az thinking of Yolov’s death and Yolov thinking of that Counterspell.

Rasmorn asks them about their adventures as the coffee and tea and breakfast comes out. The coffee and tea are distinctly Kastvarian, and there are meats and other breakfast foods. After he’s had his fill of stories, Rasmorn says he asked Az’s siblings to mention that he’d been looking at their mother’s journals and botany notebooks.

Az is surprised at the mention of botany notebooks.

Rasmorn says there were three things she loved: their family, the sea and sea life, and botany. She drew a lot of flowers.

Az says he doesn’t want to bore his friends and Hava says she would love a tour of the house. Rasmorn immediately ushers them up a curving stairway to a third floor and then to a very narrow staircase up to the attic.

Az is struck by the immediate musty attic smell.

Arcane lights glow as Rasmorn explains that he’s been doing a lot of reading up here. He knows he should be meeting with investors himself, but it’s important for all of them to do what they want. Most of the time it’s Sazu attending the meetings. He’s going to be the one taking over. He asks if Az has met Jayva yet and Az says he hasn’t, reminding him that he could retire.

Rasmorn says he’s formalizing things, making sure it all runs according to plan and no one starts any fires, though putting them out has always been Sazu’s specialty. Rasmorn explains to the others that Sazu is the oldest.

This is not a family who throws things away. There’s also the variety of orc to gnome meant no one could reuse the baby clothes, they all had to have individual clothing. There are boxes upon boxes of baby clothes with engraved placards. There are also dusty old cribs and boxes of other clothing, decorations from various holidays and old paperwork.

Rasmorn leads them to a few crates filled with books. He pats one and says he must have packed all of these up not long after Az’s mother passed. The ones with the black spines were journals and the others are botany books and books on sea life and recipe books.

Az says he would love to look through them. He begins as Rasmorn runs his hand through Az’s hair and says he’ll give them all a tour. Rasmorn sweeps them all away from Az and offers to show them his baby clothes.

Az starts with the journals. He looks for the oldest one. Based on the time and the years, the first entry suggests that this is not her first journal, just the oldest one she’s kept. She would have been around 20 when she started writing this one. The entries start simply, detailing working at the shack and how busy everything is getting with the season.

He gets the distinct impression that she didn’t do anything other than work in these early entries, that was her entire life. Eventually the following year he hits an entry in which she talks about going for a walk in Bo’rava along the docks and how she felt tremendously alive and rejuvenated and there was the scent of fresh flowers that made her content and happy. It was the happiest she’d felt in some time.

From there the entries get longer, frequently about these walks and how they made her feel and the flowers and weeds that she found. Az recognizes these flowers as ones he’s seen in the waiting room of his patron.

Then he hits an entry from when his mother was twenty-one. It’s a page long and it talks about how she met somebody and how she’d talked to them for hours and how they understood what she was feeling and how they seemed to know what was missing from her life and what she wanted. They understood her in a way that no one had. She writes that this friend promised to help her stop feeling the way she’s been feeling.

The entries pick up from there. She’s happier, she’s going out and meeting people. She’s clearly being told to go and do these things. Eventually there is another entry towards the end of the first book where his mother writes that ‘her friend’ says to wait at the shop past closing today. They say that it’s time.

The next journal entry, dated the same day later in the night, says that she thinks she finally met him, with a doodled heart.

Meanwhile with the house tour, Rasmorn shows them the guest quarters, each very well appointed and beautiful, solid wooden furniture. There is fresh linen and four post beds. Each one has their own laundry chute.

Then he looks at them all. He says while Az is upstairs, he wants to make something extremely clear. Az is extremely important to him, as are all his children. Az is the baby, and should he find out something happened to Az and it was preventable, well, he’s never been the type to give these kinds of talks.

He’s not the most physically intimidating person but the Admiral can just drop them in the ocean. Hava will be fine, but again, the threat is there.

Hava looks at him very seriously. She says that her job is to make sure everyone is okay. She will never, ever give up trying to keep Azeldonne safe. Rasmorn says good and then laughs when Audacity asks if he has tips on making Az change his mind.

Rasmorn says that he can talk Admiral Zorax into spending three weeks in Previdian speaking to Admiral Cyril. He once talked the master tinkerer into forgoing drink for one party, which is a feat practically underburying a mountain from the depths of hell. He once talked the grand matron into vetoing a contract that would expand a school by a block because something else needed to be built there. He has never been able to convince his children or their mother of anything.

Audacity says he thought he’d ask, to keep Az out of trouble.

Rasmorn says trouble finds Donnie like a fish finds water. It’s about keeping him safe when danger finds him.

Yolov promises him that they’ll do everything in their power to protect him. Rasmorn says he’s glad to have that unpleasantness over with and then points out Yolov as a wizard who would probably like the library.

Yolov agrees, asking about the local artificer libraries. Rasmorn tells him about the free one that the Heart Gear Guild has, an enormous one that takes up almost a city block though he warns that there are occasional explosions as Togsworth and others do experiments there.

Yolov gets distracted by the idea of explosions in a library as well as by Turen library, which is enormous as well, two full stories as Audacity asks about Sending Stones and Rasmorn directs him towards vendors near the guild, though he says the market during the day is rather touristy. The night market has more variety in prices.

Upstairs, Az leaves the journals alone for a moment to go through the botany books. The vast majority are material plane botany, not Feywild. There aren’t margins other than notes of her to follow up on later or remarking on the interesting plants.

He goes back to the journals. He picks up the next one in the line of journals. He knows immediately what she means by she met him. The next half of her journal is end to end all about Az’s father. He gets detail of their first date being taken to a food at a little vendor stall until well past midnight, about being taken to a museum down by the water, about going to the fanciest restaurant in her life and how comfortable he made her feel by exuding an aura of comfort as she felt anxious and out of place.

She also begins saying that she thinks something big is going to happen soon. Az realizes she’s talking about her future engagement. There is no panic, but a repeated hope that he will ask her soon. There’s an increasing anxiety and at one point she says in an entry that she doesn’t want to tell him first. He realizes she was pregnant and worried about trapping him in a marriage Rasmorn didn’t want.

The last page of the entry has her saying she’s going to talk to her friend about it.

Whatever conversation happened is not mentioned in her journals. The first entry in the next journal comes a full week later, in which she excitedly details the extravagant way his father proposed to her. He recreated their first date on a grandiose scale.

The journal falls into talking about his father and moving into a well-appointed house with staff and settles into a domestic spiel. Knowing that his friends and his father are waiting downstairs, he hastily flips through the last two journals, looking for mentions of the patron and when she gets sick.

He catches a few entries in the second to last book that she writes about them being pregnant with their seventh child. She notes that she feels more tired and wonders if it’s because she’s older and it's her seventh child. She says that something feels wrong, she thinks she has to talk to them. In the next entry she says that they say it’s going to be okay, that she just needs to keep doing what she’s doing, and ends the entry saying that she believes them because she told them she didn’t care what happens as long as her baby is okay.

Az knows, holding onto that last half-finished journal, that she didn’t stop journaling because she got busy with the kids. He lets himself cry for a few minutes, overwhelmed by all of this.

Even in the midst of his emotions, something pings between what he knows about his mother that he learned recently and the things that he had heard from his patron about the nature of their pact with his mother. In times of strife and fear and concern and danger, her patron was the first person his mother would go to. That is evident in the second to last journal.

Az sticks the last two in his bag before putting everything else back in the chest and neatening up the space. He stacks up the books before he looks around for his mother’s things that weren’t given back to anyone in his clan. There are a few more chests. He rifles through them, looking for something that’s similar to his wand he received from his patron.

He opens a few chests, seeing clothes and jewelry his father got his mother, trinkets that he and his siblings got her. Most of it went to his siblings and their spouses who wear jewelry, but there are a few pieces that are too sentimental or ones that his siblings wanted kept safe until they had children. He picks up another box, expecting it to be another one his siblings called dibs on before he catches sight of the engravings on the silver bracelet within, vines and blooming flowers.

Something pings in his brain. He’s seen these flowers in his patron’s prison. It’s a silver bracelet, beautiful, well-hammered and stunning. There’s a distinctly magical aura around it, faint but present and familiar. He feels a tug from his own magic.

He holds it in his hand for a moment. He glances at the rings, remembering his previously melted ones, before he puts it on. Immediately the bracelet closes and tightens flush against his skin. It is unremovable. It’s not cold or hot, but it's awkward to move it.

Az rubs a hand over it and fails to get a finger under it. He has a mild regret for not letting Yolov look at it first before he goes in search of the party, who is getting an in depth origin story of four different pieces of wooden goods in the home.

Rasmorn turns when Az arrives and looks relieved. He asks if Az found what he needed. Az says he thinks so, but has forgotten about the tear tracks and is also trying to hide how badly he thinks he’s screwed up.

He looks up at the portrait and realizes his mother is wearing the bracelet.

Rasmorn asks if he’s all right.

Az insists he’s fine, claiming that it was dusty. He did want to show the party the old tower before it gets torn down, let his friends stretch their legs.

Rasmorn says Sazu will be here soon for a long boring business meeting before dinner, which he promises will be done by the time the party is back from exploring the tower.

The entire party follows Az out towards the half-ruined tower.