The Porcelain Dolls: Session 17 (May 25 2016)
Aftermath for The Sash Stash Crash & Smash:
The Payout is 10 Coin worth of Trance Powder, but no actual cash. Heat is high, it was a fairly standard job, but killing was involved. For Entanglements, they had a choice (because of Slippery) of Demonic Notice or Flipped. They went with the former.
Downtimes:
Constance, Boots, and Gloves all dedicate actions to reducing the crew’s Heat, eventually managing to reduce it from 7 to 1.
Gloves follows upon the property owners in The Drop, and tracks down the last of the holdouts to a pub called the Old Rasp. He strikes up a conversation regarding the ongoing war, hinting that a fair amount of cheap real estate is likely to become available in the near future (most probably in Lampblacks territory). That gets them talking amongst themselves. This completes the crew’s project clock for gentrifying the area around The Drop. Mechanically, this raises the Quality of their Hunting Grounds by 1. They will start seeing the results of this in short order.
Constance goes to Six Towers to meet with Basran. He’s happy to see her, as business has been good lately. He’s able to buy 7 of the 10 Coin worth of Trance Powder, and the crew gets +2 Coin due to Basran being their luxury fence (technically, the job they pulled was a robbery, and not a burglary, but I ruled that it applies since we’ve established Trance Powder as a high-end drug). The resulting 9 Coin for very long immediately starts getting spent on extra actions.
Kamali goes to The Veil to indulge her Vice. Rolan allows her to do so (she is a paying customer after all), but insists she allow the Veil’s personal physician look at the bullet wound in Kamali’s shoulder. Kamali is exceedingly reluctant to allow anyone to touch her, even another woman, but eventually agrees when Rolan points out exactly how bad it will become if Kamali allows the wound to fester. The operation takes place while Kamali is unconscious, and she wakes up to find her shoulder bandaged, the bullet sitting in a glass of whiskey on the table, and some very detailed instructions on keeping the dressings clean. She also meets Alice, the woman whom Rolan has entrusted with the care of the workers at The Veil (healing clock has started). Kamali is extremely uncomfortable interacting with someone that she knows has touched her, especially while unconscious, but the doctor picks up on this, and quickly excuses herself.
Shade trains Prowess, and goes to visit Setarra. She mentions that Karstas was looking for him (or more accurately, his associate, “the tall one”). Shade makes a joke about a threeway, and Setarra warns him that he doesn’t want to go there. Shade reminds her that he doesn’t like to take no for an answer.
Kamali works with Shade to examine the information gained from Clermont’s safe. What they end up with at the end of it is a list of names of people loosely connected to Skovlan (mostly refugees), and an emergent pattern seems to indicate that the refugees are gearing up for a major offensive somewhere in the city, spurred into action by various racially motivated assaults.
Boots goes gambling, and overindulges. He gets lost for a bit, and will likely have an interesting story to tell when he resurfaces.
Constance calls a meeting. Kamali and Shade present their findings. The crew decides that they will need to go after another Claim. Going by the map, Informants is the next one up, if they want to claim Drug Dens at some point.
Notes:
There was a question of earning Rep if they did a job against a faction, but no one knew it was them. The answer to this is that the crew is reporting everything to The Crows (and giving them their cut), so that’s when the Rep is awarded. If the crew ever decides to pull a job without reporting it, they won’t earn the Rep (and if Lyssa finds out after the fact, they’ll have much bigger problems with worry about).
#dontmesswiththedolls
There was some additional setting/personal detail here. Boots felt awful that he’d wounded Kamali. He tried to be super-solicitous toward her, but he was chagrined at how obstinately aloof she was, even though she didn’t seem to hold a big grudge over the incident. When she finally did get treatment, he was relieved, and he asked her for the bullet. See, the Bluecoats have a tradition that Boots upholds: When there is a friendly-fire incident, you do your best to recover the bullet. The shooter melts it down and uses it to burn himself in the same spot as the victim’s wound. Sadly(?), Kamali would not allow this either. But this angst did not contribute to Boots’ overindulgence. That’s another story.