Chronicle: Session 1

We....met in jail.

Nothing practically has the tiny local jail as a house, she's in and out so often! She's in for stealing food for her tiny motley crew of runaways. AGAIN.

Faeleth made the mistake of stealing a noteworthy item from a well-known noble in a close-knit halfling town where everyone knows everyone and recognises everything. Especially that distinctive fancy bit of jewellery.

Hogar heard some drunk dude start making dwarf jokes in the local tavern and got very, um, brawly about it. To be fair, 'Lol, u scared you're gonna fall into the sky?' is pretty tasteless.

Spindleshanks wandered into town and didn't quite grasp that market stalls with food on need payment if you're going to start scarfing down the food.

So we all got taken before the court by a pretty chill little halfling guy called Alfred (Alf, to Nothing! She and him go way back) and we get just, the worst news. We're all being sentenced to Proper Jail Time, in a larger city, for like 6 months, which particularly sucks for Nothing because she's used to wrist-slaps and a free bed for the night.

(Holgar peers intensely at the magistrate and asks, "Aren't you the guy who started the fight last night?" - the magistrate looks EXCEEDINGLY flustered, whether or not it's true. Clearly he doesn't remember last night all that well himself.)

But just as the magistrate comes to bring down his gavel, a local nobledude bursts in (unusual!) demands to talk in the back room (very unusual!) and when they come out again...there's a Situation. The fancy district (actually just like, three houses) has a Big Nasty Lizard Problem.

So you know what? All this drama puts a spanner in the works a bit, so. Community service. That'll do. Go take care of the Big Nasty Lizards plaguing the noblefolk's plumbing, the magistrate says, and he'll call it even and hope never to see us in here again.

We do that!

Alf tries to make small talk with the folks who aren't Nothing, hear their story, and mainly gets met with Faeleth's "what's it to you?" wary recalcitrance and a very laconic explanation from Hogar.

We go into the sewers, and Alf...sort of hangs back, even though he was meant to chaperone us, because we've all got darkvision and he doesn't, and also Alf is clearly sort of bricking it about these lizards and would much rather leave us to it.

Hogar tries to yell at the lizards because searching the surrounds isn't yeilding much useful information! "Get out and fight, you scaley bastards!" comes out as a hungover mumble-shout. Faeleth takes some degree of pity and tries to save him the shame of that pathetic exclamation by joining in with the yelling, and the first natural 20 of the game results in just this amazing, compelling sharp command and they just scuttle on out.

We hear, just behind the scuttling, a very distinct THUD.

Roll initiative!

Lots of stabbing, blasting, and clubbing occurs. But not before Spindle drops a cloud of fog on the corridor, obscuring the lizards' view of us....and ours of them. (Nothing and Faeleth DO get in a sweet synchronised attack with their respective crossbows, though, and it's sick af. Nuth also drops her crossbow on the floor to switch out for daggers and through a minor miracle the crossbow reholsters itself and reloads.)

Welp.

The rest of the fight goes on in this horrible haze. Spindle's attempts to get in the fray are met almost exclusively with crushing failure - trying to slide between Holgar's legs all Indiana Jones nets Hogar a very unpleasant assfull of gnome face, and Spindle a very unpleasant facefull of dwarf ass. He does a lot of ineffective stabbing with a scimitar roughly the size of a kitchen knife. Nothing fires off a bunch of Eldritch Blasts that do a great job of blasting a crater in the wall but not a bunch else. Faeleth wrassles lizards without taking a lick of damage and shows them her real good stabs. Holgar rages (or gets minorly irritable) and delivers a very effective club blow to a lizard head. Spindle gets gnawed within an inch of his life, sinks to the floor crying, and Faeleth has to pick him up by the scruff of the neck and bodily dump him at the back of  the group to stop him from getting killed.

The fog is objectively the worst thing. This would not have happened without the fog.

When there's only one left, the final lizard turns to flee and is met in turn with the ONLY Eldritch Blast that meets its mark (thanks to the lizard finally exiting the fog cloud), one of Faeleth's thrown daggers, and...a dart, from Spindleshanks, that crits and straight up pins both of its perfectly intact eyeballs to the wall. He pockets those!!

Examination of the further sewer reveals a ceiling trapdoor (totes the cause of the thud!). Nothing pushes it, to no avail.

"Did you make sure it was definitely a push trapdoor?" Faeleth asks, and Nothing manages only an ineloquent sputter of "Shut up??"

Holgar and Faeleth attempt to crowbar open the door in a very precarious ladder-climbing manoever that doesn't actually work. Alf comes down to check on us and tries to chivvy us out. The party refuses, claiming there's probably futher misdeed afoot that needs solving (and hey, didn't one of Nothing's kidfriends go missing? what if she's here!). Nothing feins obliging, hoping to whisper a new plan to the gang, but Spindle clambers up the pair still on the ladder and somehow - SOMEHOW - wrenches open the trapdoor enough to scramble on in.

(Oh, and when Alf initially comes in and meets the wall of fog, Spindle dispels it, revealing that he could have dismissed it all-a-bloody-long. To be fair, it WAS more fun that way!)

Alf gives up and leaves, muttering constantly about how he's done and can't be arsed with all this and he'll go see if Spindle's in the ABANDONED house in the morning. (He's...not sold with our claims.)

Spindle pushes the barrels off of the trapdoor that were holding it down, and let us up into a dusty and mostly empty room inside a fancy house that was clearly vacated in a hurry. Dusty footprints - two or three humanoid, and one dog - tell a very clear story of their enter and exit. Closing the trapdoor behind us, of course, creates a perfect double of the earlier THUD.

(Worth noting is that the DM mentioned that there are a lot of big ownerless dogs in town - Nothing knows them individually, has nicknames for them even - one with a floppy ear, one with a scar over its eye, she's as familiar with these big ol' benign street dogs as she is with her kidflock. They're pretty clearly some kind of Chekhov's Dogs.)

Faeleth sneakily nabs three coins she finds in a chest left behind while nobody else is looking. Picking the lock on the next door along reveals another room with sheet-covered furniture and a few stray semi-valuables (a minorly magical book, and a pair of stones of farspeech, belonging now to Nothing and the unlikely duo of Faeleth and Spindle respectively. Spindle tries to prank Faeleth into putting a stone to her ear so he can scream into it, it doesn't work. She tries to counter-prank. That doesn't work either).

Also, there's a letter. It says something about 'delivering the cargo tomorrow' and is signed 'Mr Hand'. Nothing knows that's the well-established nickname for the butler of the mayor - does so much for him he probably even wipes his arse for him, might as well be his hands, HAW HAW HAW. (Although it might also be his real name? Literally everyone calls him Hand. It's confusing.) She suggests camping out overnight for when the people hiding out here return, but the party points out the letter might not have been written yesterday, even if it is fresh-looking. To the manor!!

....To the manor was the plan, at least, but after a crafty exit from the window the party notice a tripwire in front of the front door. Whew, a close call!

Then Spindle decides to try and disarm it. Spindle, who is at 2HP after the lizard encounter, decidedly the most greivously wounded of the group.

Spindle fails to disarm it. BOOM.

And that is how the party ends up legging it down the street at top speed, Spindle first in Holgar's arms (until he trips over a pack of street dogs and drops him on the floor), then in Nothing's (until she, too, takes a tumble), and finally in Faeleth's as Nothing screams directions from behind her to help reach the town apocatharess and medic's house.

Faeleth tries to pick the lock of the unlocked door (when hammering on it and yelling from Nothing yeilds no answer) and Nothing drops Spindle AGAIN. This kid is literally on his last death saving throw and probably bleeding out in everyone's collective arms and the dice made passing him across result in him being dropped on the damn floor.

The door opens to reveal Moira, ancient apocatharess granny, deep asleep with a pipe in her hand and the room absolutely pungent with the halfling equivalent to that dank, dank weed. Nothing shakes Moira awake in a panic - "Got a real hurt kid here!" and after some minor hazy confusion Moira effortlessly waves a hand over the now securely picked up Spindle and he's good as new. He takes a grab at her pipe from his place in Nothing's arms, to which Moira gently admonishes, "You're a touch too young for that, dearie!"

She invites everyone to dinner - she was expecting guests, but they've not showed, and she's got stew on the stove. It smells delicious, and a rest sounds great, but the 'guests'...Nothing knows that Moira's regular dinner 'guests' are herself and the street kid flock, who wouldn't miss a hot meal for the world.

Oh no.