TNU Play Report 16: Some Time Passes

The party spends a month in the Thickets Collaboration, pursuing various ends.

Hant leverages the printing press to make a valuable new contact. Ensi (they/them) is considered the local expert on the machines, and spends much of their time overseeing their use. Hant approaches them under the pretense of volunteering at these tasks, and in fairness to him he does spend time and effort doing so. His real goal however is to try to discover the origins of the books he has been tasked with destroying. Over the course of a number of conversations, he learns from Ensi the particulars of how expensive and available the materials to make a book of that sort are, and he picks up that prior to the ousting of the royalists, there had been a group of people using the press here with particularly expensive materials — Ensi speculates that these were paid for by whatever royal wealth had escaped in the hands of loyalists. The people involved likely fled to the Valley Collaboration (0807), the new bastion of Royalist sentiment in the wild.

Almuund looks into a reliable doctor. He finds one in Dr. Platt, a physician exiled for providing supplies to dissidents in Catage, who continues to ply his trade here in the Collaboration — though he does hope that he will be allowed back into the walled city, to see his family again. His studiously practiced skills make that slightly more likely than average.
Almuund additionally receives a letter inviting him to a talk over dinner about his financial woes. He owes 270 coins in tithes to his cult, and the party’s charity with the printing press leaves him short what he needs to pay that off. When he arrives at the nondescript house, a nondescript man invites him in and explains that he is the representative of an interested party who cares about artifacts, antiquities, and oddities. He would be willing to pay the remainder of the tithe if Almuund promises that the next time the party bring an anchor back to the Collaboration, his employer can have an in depth look at it before it is passed on to Nougat. Almuund accepts. What could go wrong?

Akela is visited by Coordinator Amaya, and asks her to follow her on an errand. Amaya is delivering candles to the graves of lost loved ones, as part of a long-observed festival of renewing relationships. She has one grave in particular to show Akela: that of her partner Serafina, who used to use the assumed identity Cyrus Fayette, which was a name Akela was told to seek out for help getting back on her feet in the wild. Amaya had feared that someone asking about “Cyrus” in the current collaboration was an infiltrator who meant ill, but having seen Akela’s efforts since then has decided to be more open. It turns out that while Akela only experienced five years of imprisonment in the Wall of Catage, the revolution she fought in happened fifty years ago. She is concerned by this new knowledge.
She is also concerned that when Parzival died, there was no particular sign of Miss Marlowe. She hires a bounty hunter to report on any signs of the whereabouts of the missing woman. Word on the street is that Mr. Brunswick gets the job done, and by the end of the month he has news for Akela: the approximate location of Matilde and Miss Marlowe’s game of lethal cat and mouse. Mr. Brunswick offers to finish the job for an extra fee. Akela says no, maybe later.
Akela’s spends her free time visiting her horse, and speaking to Vashti, who has been caring for it. Vashti says that the horse, despite being made of paint, seems to be otherwise a normal and well trained beast. Vashti expresses an interest in the nightmares — she likes horses and she hasn’t used her axe for much in a long time.

To the north, the Occult-Futurists send more balloons. They have seen the great compass and must determine how best to instrumentalize it. The band that initially found it are ecstatic — they have won some reprieve from their other duties.

Runalt thinks long and hard, and gestures to his attendants. They dutifully shuffle through his palace, and into a deep cellar. Portraits are piled high here, hundreds of images of their king, each regal and resplendent, each masterfully painted with detail that required years of practice and study. The servants pick one up, and ascend a number of stairs. They emerge into daylight. They cross a road, startling a traveling transcendentalist. They walk into the dense woodlands, threading their way through brambles and vines in spite of their bulky cargo. They find their destination, clear moss from the soil, and plant their cargo. A latticework of wood begins to spread.