*10–11 January, 848 IE — Charterhall* The poison was already inside the [[Mortar and Pestle]]. Two doctored kegs from [[Stillman's Distillery]], carried past a nervous carter's worst lying, now sat waiting to be tapped in a tavern the [[Reclaimer's Circle]] treated as a second home. What the [[Old Town Echoes]] lacked was the one thing all their stolen paperwork could not give them: where [[Aldric Venn]] laid his head at night. So they scattered themselves across the rooftops and alley-mouths of the Alchemist Parish as the evening of the tenth drew down cold, and they watched, and they waited. ### The Long Watch Hours passed with nothing but the slow drift of bar-crowds and bureaucrats. To fill the empty stretch, [[Freakshow]] set up a three-card game a few blocks clear of their posts, less to win coin than to keep tongues loose. The talk he gathered was worth more than any purse. [[Oswin Rall]], who kept [[The Meridian]] and had long lent the Circle a quiet hand certifying their antiques, had gone uptown, gotten drunk, and complained loudly to anyone near that he had not been paid in an age. He was not alone in it. All across the parish, people who lived on the Circle's coin were grumbling the same complaint — the money had stopped, and loyalty was thinning with it. Meanwhile [[Crow]] slipped over to Camden Street with [[Watcher]] at his back, hunting a different sort of witness. In a dead-end alley he found one: the lingering shade of a middle-aged alchemist, his face torn apart by some long-ago blast, endlessly tapping his ruined head against the bricks at the alley's end and muttering at a wall he seemed to expect not to be there. Crow left Watcher out of sight of the thing and coaxed it into speech. When he offered the name Venn, the shade knew it at once — *Alder Venn, the smuggler, the antique man* — and named the house his people never left alone: **Number 16**. ### A Shot in the Dark By then the poison had found its mark. [[Fat Eddie]] came reeling out of the Mortar and Pestle's back, doubled over and grey-faced, and staggered a block before the sickness dropped him into an alley with his belt already loosened. [[Cam]] followed him in, dagger in hand, and waited out the worst of his misery before pressing the point: she wanted his boss, and she meant to have Eddie's help getting to him. Elsewhere along the street, other stricken souls broke and ran for the nearest dark corner — the tavern's evening draught claiming victim after victim. Then a rifle spoke from the third-floor window of Number 16. The shot came for Watcher's skull and missed it by the width of a turned head, spitting brick dust where his temple had been. Crow hauled him back into the dead-end alley, and with no other way out they simply walked through the wall — passing on the strength of [[Mistress Ash]]'s gift into a neighboring parlor full of card-playing drunks, tipping their hats, and letting themselves out the front door as though they had merely taken a wrong turn. From the alley floor, Fat Eddie named the marksman: **[[Steiner]]**, taken on by the old man for a fat retainer and a bounty on every Echo he could bring down — paid so richly, in truth, that he was near the only man in the Circle still drawing coin while the rest went weeks without their wages. ### Poop Kevin's Counsel They took Eddie underground, across the canal to their own side, and settled him in a stormwater dead-end where his complaints and his stench could do no harm. Disillusioned and unpaid, he talked freely enough: the Circle was coming apart at the seams, its true believers dwindling, its coin gone dry for everyone the old man had not chosen to favor. Cam dangled the offer of honest wages; Eddie, glaring, allowed that he might reconsider later. For now they paid [[Navid Oboroi]] to keep him locked in the safe room behind the [[Clerk St. Typesetters]], pressed a few eels into his hand for fresh clothes, and turned their minds to the harder problem: how to take Number 16. They talked it around every wall. Steiner could not be bought back — already paid, and stubbornly loyal to a contract if not to a man. Some floated leaning on the assassin through his young daughter, and the notion was put down as quickly as it was raised: a sure way to make an enemy for life, and a line most of them would not cross. In the end the answer came from above. No one guards a peaked roof. Loaded down with gas masks and [[Nyx]]'s vials of sleeping vapor, and armed with twenty-year-old blueprints [[Watcher]] pried from his records-clerk, they would come down through the roof in the dark and put the house to sleep before it ever knew they were there. ### The Roof Comes Down It began as flawlessly as any job the crew had ever run. They crossed the rooftops from two blocks off, found the ghostly seam where Number 16's roof had once stood open, and passed painlessly into the attic. Watcher led them down the stairs without a whisper. They cracked two doors at once and threw the gas — the master suite, where an old ruddy-skinned man of seventy slept the sleep of a retired smuggler, and the false nursery beside it, where Steiner sat awake at the window with his rifle amid a rack of guns, a sleeping Circle man on a cot, and a little girl bound hand and foot on a pallet of blankets. The vapor took them all. Cam opened Aldric Venn's throat where he lay and smothered the sound with a pillow, and the Reclaimer's Circle lost its head. [[Crow]] gathered up the child, and Cam tucked a note into her clothes: the contract was done, and the girl was Steiner's to keep. [[Watcher]] slipped a small purse of his own coin, wrapped in the silk that had bound her, into the assassin's coat — a wordless argument for cutting his losses. In Venn's private trophy room [[Boo]] lifted a small steel brooch stamped with five interlocking circles, the very sigil [[Cyril Lancaster]] had scrawled across his dying wall. And there Crow's luck ran out: he closed his hand on a withered bundle of sage that burned in the ghost field, and it tore a scream of blind agony out of him just as the death bell of Venn tolled across the district from the crematorium. Boo knocked the thing from his grip and wrapped it away. The house was waking now, shouts rising from below. Offered the choice to finish the Circle in blood or vanish as legends, they chose to vanish — dragging a stunned Crow back up through the trapdoor, seeding the stairs with sleeping gas, and fleeing across the rooftops to home, none the worse for wear save one badly rattled [[Eidolon]]. --- **System Notes** - [[Aldric Venn]] killed; his death bell tolled from Bellweather Crematorium. The [[Reclaimer's Circle]] is reduced to its last holdings, leaderless, and financially collapsing (most members unpaid for weeks; widespread discontent). Malus Thorne, their imprisoned second, remains in Iron Hook until February. - Formal run consequences — heat, entanglements, hold reduction, and downtime — were deferred by the GM to next session. - Crew earned +4 XP (fills the advancement bar, unlocking a crew upgrade; abilities/actions may now reach 3 dots). All player characters earned +2 XP. - Recovered: a steel brooch bearing the five-interlocking-circles sigil linked to [[Cyril Lancaster]]; and a dried sage bundle that radiates in the ghost field and inflicted psychic harm on [[Crow]] when touched. - [[Fat Eddie]] captured and held in the safe room behind [[Clerk St. Typesetters]] (paid from the crew kitty); given coin for new clothes. - Steiner's young daughter, held captive at Number 16, was freed; a note and coin were left for [[Steiner]]. - [[Eidolon]] reached maximum stress during the rooftop escape. [[2026-07-25-Transcript|Chatlog]] ![[Screenshot 2026-07-25 190628.png]]