Saltwater in the Gut, Lightning in the Blade

Fresh off being toasted as “heroes of Arimachi,” Dicer, Vash, and Khord tried to enjoy their winnings—golden wheat kernels that spent like coin and promised stranger uses besides. A hangover cure and a hard lesson in Arimachi’s shadow economy followed: Gally slid them “Reverso,” mocked the Whitewater Worship as fools, and sold Dicer his first coffee beans—no kiss discount, no regrets. At Tink Cha’s Saucery they stocked up on dangerous help (a free refined henbane draught and muscle-boosting brew) and even turned a dead blink squirrel into “rare” merchandise with a little magical salesmanship. Then greed found a seam: the party singled out a Whitewater monk’s belt—Dicer’s Suggestion peeled the wearer away, Khord’s thunderous menace froze the others in place, and Vash finally popped the clasp—only for the monk’s belly to balloon with seawater and burst in the street, turning a petty theft into a public, salt-stinking horror. When the surviving brothers ran to warn Mustaf Delos, the chase became chaos: a Veil Flower made one pursuer vanish and a shouted “ghost!” stampeded the crowd, but the heat followed them all the way to the Three-Eyed Fish—where Vash shot a monk in the leg rather than surrender the prize.

They fled through the portal with stolen belt and stolen breath, landing in the Astral drift of the Loot Tavern under Granny Weathertax’s hard stare: “watch your tongue, watch your guns.” On the bridge, Dicer seized Vash by the neck and demanded, “What the fuck was that?” while Khord delivered the night’s bleakest punchline—“We typically burn them and then bring them back… We don't usually make their stomach explode into piles of goo”—until the three of them, chastened, agreed to stop escalating violence for trinkets. Inside, Lutisha traded strong drink for a carefully edited tale, and Dicer made sure the story stayed heroic and vague—no Prism, no visions—while learning that Olivia had been wreaking ravenous havoc in Comfort Inc’s spaces. The belt itself stayed stubbornly unknown in Lutisha’s hands, and the party’s stomachs sank for a different reason: in the rush to escape, they’d left Arimachi without collecting the rest of Humperdink’s client Mulch payment—an oversight that became a running wound as Dicer spat, “We almost died, and we forgot the fucking money.”

With Arimachi too hot to revisit openly, the Loot Tavern became a workshop and war room. Humperdink showed off Olivia’s new tricks—“sit, eat, and drop it, which not always good time”—and tried to sell them an Identify scroll they couldn’t afford, while the raccoonish Gear-crafter mocked their unpaid heroics and promised to turn Vash’s ice goo into three Ice Bullets, then casually bragged, “I've crushed up diamond and snorted it to make my insides glittery,” as he sourced a proper Diamond for Khord. The night’s true triumph came in craft: they bought a base axe and watched Dicer lean into the strange alchemy of monster parts and willpower—rolling high, exhaling “Oh, thank god,” and forging the Pain Blinder Axe with a lightning-warding boon that made it feel like more than a weapon, like a promise kept for a friend not even at the table. Before they left, they finally went to Peepers and rebuilt the vision they’d been dodging: wasteland, gray-green obelisk, red lightning, a cloaked figure bleeding power into stone—and a crescent-feather mark tied to the Raven Queen and the Shadowfell. That lore turned their dread into direction, while their practical problem sharpened into a plan: return for the missing 1,500 gp, but disguised and hunting their forgetful patron by his mushrooms. And when the belt’s temptation rose again, Vash finally chose caution—“Let me put the belt in the bag so no one sees it”—and buried the Unidentified Belt in the Bag of Holding as the session closed on a dangerous, deliberate resolve to go back into the town they’d fled as monk-killers.