Session 1 covered the afternoon and evening of 24 Coldrise, 1714 PSF, in Argentum. It ran from the morning briefing before the Festival of Bells to the explosion of an Everfire Lamp in the festival plaza, and it put all five of the party in one place for the first time.
Synopsis
The Morning Briefing
Cassia Brightshield pulled Temerity away from breakfast to ask how she was finding her first weeks, then assigned her to shadow Iva at the Festival of Bells. The two of them were to hand out bells for the Bell Hunt.
The Festival
Hazel reached the festival grounds and spent her festival pass on six meat skewers and two turkey legs. Rhysaene asked Temerity and Iva for a bell, and they explained the Bell Hunt to her.
Luma came up out of the maintenance tunnels into a plaza packed with festival-goers. She took a bell from a Light Warden, looked it over and handed it back. Watching Rhysaene talk with the two Lanterns, she took her for a herbivore and went to buy apples, three of them, being unsure whether the horse half counted separately and wanting one for herself.
Hazel offered Rhysaene a turkey leg. Temerity saw Luma coming back with the apples and went over to warn her the offer might land badly. Luma saw the turkey leg, threw the apples aside and declared the matter settled. She asked whether she could paint Rhysaene, mentioned that she is a civil drafter who updates the city plans for the Archivists, and the two of them found that both painted. Rhysaene showed her the sign she had painted for Miri Wetherlite’s stall.
Iva, Temerity and Rhysaene each made a show of playing the Bell Hunt and then let children take their bells. Hazel made contact with Miles Quickstep, who told her to collect her reagents after six. She also fell into conversation with a heavily drunk old dwarf at a drinks tent, who showed her a coin he said was seventeen hundred years old and asked whether she believed it. When she said she did, he answered “stupid elf, what do you know?” and walked off.
Luma’s Warning
Luma told Rhysaene that the Everfire Lamp might explode, and would say little else. Rhysaene brought her to Iva and Temerity and pressed her to explain. Luma held back because she was not certain, and being wrong is the same as lying to her. She gave it up in pieces: coded symbols in the maintenance tunnels, directly beneath the lamp, and alarm spells she had set on both the secret door and the maintenance panel. She had been mapping all day and was not sure of the threat.
The Handoff and the Explosion
As six approached, Iva could not shake the others, so the whole party went with her to meet Miles Quickstep. Temerity cleared the space around the Everfire Lamp as a precaution.
Iva handed the child over to be smuggled out of the city. To prove to Miles that she was the contact he had been dealing with, she had to show him that she is a changeling, which left him knowing two of her faces. Luma watched the handoff, thought Miles the shadiest man she had ever seen, and took the child for Iva’s nephew.
At six exactly, Luma’s alarms went off: someone had opened both the secret door and the maintenance panel. The lamp did not simply burst. It erupted in a geyser sixty feet high and rained burning Everfire across the plaza, until emergency shutoffs closed it off almost at once.
The Response
The party went in separately. Luma ran through the fire pulling people clear and treating wounds. Hazel patched up an injured festival-goer, and put out a burning tree with magic without being seen. Rhysaene and Temerity shifted debris to reach people trapped beneath it, while Iva and Temerity ran the evacuation of the houses that had caught. Several stalls burned, Miri Wetherlite’s pastry stand among them. Nobody died.
Investigator Mave Dul arrived and took command of the scene, with a great many questions for Iva and Luma. She brought in two Vaultsmiths, who took Luma’s maintenance hatch key and her maps for the investigation, to be returned later. Rhysaene and Hazel were interviewed briefly by the Stone Shields and released. Once the five of them were back together, Rhysaene invited everyone out for a drink. The session ended at eight in the evening.