The Bridge Trolls – A Letter From Arkady (Episode 5)
Our group (four players plus myself) have often talked about switching out the GM responsibility. I run our games very openly, so there’s virtually nothing I have planned that isn’t out on the table for everybody to know, so there’s not really any reason that it has to be me acting as GM, and it would give somebody else a chance to sit on the non-dice-rolling side of the table.
We all had a busy week and three of our folks were unable to attend our weekly session. The remaining player offered to run a 1-on-1 game for me instead so I put together a Slide and we set our story a few months before our actual first episode, just after Rorik granted our crew license to work The Drop, so chronologically this is really Episode 1. This is the letter I wrote afterward to bring our other players up to speed on how my character was retconned into joining the crew.
Dramatis Personae
The Bridge Trolls, a crew of thieves with a reputation for both dealing with weird shit and being weird as shit. The Trolls took the Ghost Echos ability and nearly all of these scoundrels have the Ghostly ability of their playbook.
Alys – a Bridge Troll. A Leech specializing in drugs, wrecking stuff, and childlike glee.
Arkady – a Slide. The bastard offspring of a charming, shiftless Lampblack and the daughter of an Iruvian noble house who brought shame upon her family. Carries a grudge against both aristocracy of all stripes and Baszo’s crew specifically.
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To my esteemed colleagues, Tocker, Wyre, and Bricks:
I know that I have been long absent from the embrace of our little fraternity and likewise long overdue with an accounting of the events that so impressed our compatriot Alys that she fervently asserted that I am “our kind of crazy,” whatever that may mean. Herein I hope to remedy at least one of those debts.
Some four months ago, my tenuous association with the Lampblacks finally came to a close. I found myself at loose ends, open to fresh opportunities and in need of new direction. Though we had travelled in similar circles for quite some time, it was only upon learning of your troop’s recent territorial endowment from our late, lamented ward chief that I noted your number was, I must bluntly say, sorely lacking in the artistry of the salon and the parlor. You are, my cherished friends, a bunch of crazy thugs.
With this in mind, I set an appointment with our dear Alys and attempted to impress upon her the advantages that I can offer. As is her way, she was cautious and circumspect, so I offered her a bargain: “Come with me this very night,” I said, “And I will show you what I can do.” She was reluctant, but agreed.
I left our friend’s company and set out to find a task suitable for demonstrating my strengths. I paid a call to a certain barkeep of my acquaintance and was referred to a certain gentleman scholar who had recently had a bad turn at the gaming tables. I sought out this academic and heard from him his plight. He had, he relayed, been taken oddly and uncharacteristically with the gambling spirit one night recently and had been persuaded to throw into the kitty a journal of his researches.
You’ll understand, I’m sure, how very odd this is. Of what value to a gambler would be such a log? This I asked, and this he told to me: His work is no ordinary scholarship, but instead is a delving into the arcane and cabalistic. The details of his inquiries could be turned to dark purposes and would be of extreme interest to one with such a bent.
And what, you may wonder, would possess a man to risk such dangerous secrets, not to mention the most tangible, irreplaceable, fruits of his labors? Upon reflection, he noted that under ordinary circumstance, he would never buckle to such a suggestion. He believed that he had been alchemically compelled, and I was inclined to agree. He supplied me with all details available to him and we parted agreed that I would act on his behalf.
I visited the card room frequented by our new client, a room not unknown to me, and had words with the proprietress as well as the various staff. No single informant knew anything appreciable about the woman who had so taken advantage of our client, but taken all together I was able to assemble an intriguing impression. The villain of our piece, a Miss Naria Phin, has a gambling venue of her own, outside the environs of our fair city. Indeed, thanks to the patronage of the Hive, Miss Phin has established an exclusive sea-going gaming hall, and employs croupiers and card-dealers recruited in secret from around the city, each paid handsomely and transported to the ship by an ever-changing route, blindfolded and guarded.
This, as I’m sure you must agree, is far beyond the needs of even the most exclusive card room in the Empire. This smacks of darker purpose.
I collected myself and my assets and returned to engage with our combustible comrade. Together, we garbed ourselves in the guise of common card dealers and joined with several others at an unremarkable dock whose location had been quietly relayed to me. We gently displaced a pair of legitimate illicit employees and were, after a time, conveyed to the floating casino.
Let me tell you, my friends, never in my travels have I seen such a ship. While the massive Leviathan Hunting vessels are clad in steel, this craft was bottomed in glass! It shone like a jewel on the ink-dark ocean, with the glowing beacon of the lightning barriers of Duskwall distant on the horizon. Alys and I disappeared below decks and each departed to our tasks, she to the engine room and I to the cards.
In the casino proper, I found an odd scene. While the staff was alert and about their business, the many guests at the tables played like clockwork men, eyes glazed and brows drooping. Among them, the only gamblers alert, were Miss Naria Phin (described to me in extreme detail by our client) and two young ladies, clearly her confederates. I presented myself as a latecomer to the party, a drunk and a boor, and by my very boorishness I eluded their notice enough to eavesdrop upon their gossip. I gathered that they were passing the time until reaching a sufficient distance from the city to bring their plans to fruition. Their intention was some sort of summoning, and the notables at their tables were to be fuel for that dark work.
Soon thereafter, while miming my own stupor to evade attention, I was joined by our tinkering friend, still garbed as staff and so beneath the notice of Miss Phin and her allies. Alys related to me that at the stern of the ship she had found a second engine of some sort, quite unlike that responsible for driving the progression of the vessel. This was, she asserted, something much more diabolic. This was roundabouts the point that the ship’s motion ground to a halt. You may surmise quite correctly that our friend had been responsible for this development and quite proud of it.
To the dastardly Miss Phin, this clearly would not do, and she rapidly departed to investigate. Alys and I followed at a distance and when an opportunity presented itself, we took the license to deprive Miss Phin of her senses. We also deprived her quarters of some jewelry, sundry loose silver, and several very fine dresses. No journal was present, however.
Our next stopover was at the vessel’s strongroom. If you and I were going to secret a valuable notebook, that would be the safest place aboard, we reasoned. Though we ran into no further crew or staff, we had no luck in that place, unless you consider a large amount of loose coin lucky, which in point of fact I do.
We girded ourselves at this time, for we knew that if the required volume were anywhere aboard the craft, there remained only one possible place: the apparatus at the stern. We made our way to that vile device and found Miss Phin’s fellows there in the whipping rain and tossing surf, engaged in a ritual of dark purpose. They were discommoded by the absence of their leader, however, and consulted the very volume we sought in an attempt to compensate. As is my way (as you well know), I was struck by a Plan. I urged Alys to quickly don a gown taken from Phin and gave her my pistol. Keeping her behind me and thereby somewhat out of sight, we approached the pair to within a bare arm’s length, I with my hands aloft as if a captured prisoner. They were taken aback, thinking Alys their governor, and we pounced upon their hesitation.
I drew my second pistol and discharged it at one, but the ship bucked below us and my shot went wide. Alys, ever a gentle soul, could not bring herself to fire a weapon at a living soul, even an adversary bent upon our destruction, and instead launched her barrage at the summoning engine itself, blasting it to smoking, glowing wreckage. This just a moment too late, it seemed, for at that instant, a dozen yards-long black tentacles of a Leviathan erupted through the waves.
The exact details of the struggle thereafter are still difficult for me to recall, though certain details simply do not fade. A waterspout the height of three men conjured from the surface of the sea and cast like a child’s toy at Alys. Grappling over the book at the very brink with a beautiful girl turned to a madwoman in the lightning and spray. And finally, plunging with her into the black water, tangled in chains dangling from the shattered machine, tentacles lashing at us both.
I still do not know how I found my way back to the ship. Alys tells me that she contrived a lifeline from the mechanisms of the anchor lines and I must believe her. I will never forget sitting on the deck as the monster threatened the entire vessel and all aboard her, confronted by our own mortality. I reached deep within myself to that which is my deepest skill. “Ahoy friend,” I called to the beast. “Your quarrel, I believe, is with those ladies there.” Something passed between the creature and myself and it listened. Its vast arms snapped out and enveloped the summoners, dragging them off the deck and below the waves. It slipped out of sight.
Alys and I stole the ship’s boat and left for calmer, less populated waters. We left the ship behind us and made our way back to the city. Between us, we spread rumors and incited citizenry until we were sure that the Spirit Wardens and the populace alike would see to the apprehension of Naria Phin for unlawful arcanism and for the horrific crime of drawing a leviathan within bare eyeshot of the city harbors.
In any case, on that long, cold boat ride back to the dock, Alys extended the invitation to meet with you and your fellows as a potential cohort. I still consider myself fortunate that she joined me that night, for I have no doubt I would not have come out of the sea without her aid.
That, then, is the end of it. Though I am afraid it may not truly be an end, for I know that I was not whole when I came out of those waters. My hands were shredded by those chains that I clutched, and my blood poured out into the black sea. That beast beneath the waves has the taste of me, and I can feel it out there somewhere. I fear it can feel me as well.
I have nearly completed my business here in Iruvia. I was astonished to hear of Rorik’s death in Alys’ dispatch, and entirely un-astonished to hear of the reawakened hostility between the Sashes and the Lampblacks. I have no doubt that my old “friend” Baszo Baz is out for blood. I am eager to return and lend my hand to remedy the web of troubles plaguing our fellowship. I shall see you all soon.
I remain,
your faithful brother,
Arkady Ankhayat
