6/21 - Session 2 Notes

• It’s been a week since the funeral!

• Tek has a visitor! Lady Urqhart is there to see him.

• He calls Robin, who is at Vinny’s shitty dive bar in the Daggerways, and attempts to escape this issue by trumping to him and hiding in the bar with him.

• Rook gets visited by two messengers at the same time. One of them says that Lady Urqhart is here to see Tek but that Tek fled the estate. The other gives Rook a calling card that says “Lada Dara” on one side and “Fiona” on the other. 

• Lady Urqhart is trying to contact Orlando’s suitor, Olland, but Olland had said no, and to call Tekhetsio. Rook trumps Tek, Tek doesn’t answer.

• Dante is told that he has a visitor! Lord Monnath of Gannumol. Dante goes to visit him like a good kid even though he has no idea who they are. 

• Monnath is considering courting Lord Marco, Dante’s trump artist teacher, and would like some opinions on them. Dante leaves the room, screams into a pillow, and then comes back with tea. He listens to them talk as Kill Bill sirens on in the distance. He’s generally a very boring person and Dante really doesn’t like him. The second he’s gone, Dante books it to Marco to tell them not to marry this guy.

• Li has been working on a lot of Fashion Week stuff, with some matchmaking on the side. She’s also been doing a little bit of digging into the Serpent Inquisition.

• Severina pokes her head in and asks if Li has any… enemies that they don’t know about…? The kind that would send assassins? Li isn’t sure what’s going on - but they killed an intruder who had a venom blade and a picture of Li with them.

• Li investigates the body. They’re demon-y, but otherwise can’t be identified. The picture is a drawing of most of Li’s common forms. Li goes to talk to Winter about this.

• Back at the bar, Robin makes a blood fly to go listen in on some people who are whispering and looking at Tek.

• Rook goes to see Fiona. She’s wearing a veil, of course. Fiona was apparently bored, and came to talk to Rook about their Logrus mastery. Before they can get far, Rook gets a trump call from their Mr. Darcy--who updates them on the status of the Amber family. Nothing particularly incriminating has come up since the last time they talked.

• Tek continues to ignore Rook’s trump calls. Lady Urqhart excuses herself, sure that Rook will help track down Tek eventually.

• Dante talks to Marco and explains the situation, downplaying Lord Monnath as much as possible. Marco seems relieved that he’s dodged a bullet. Dante and Marco have some cute talk about marriage and Dante is delighted that he seems to have fixed everything.

• With that crisis averted, Dante goes to see if Rook needs anything, or if Rook and Fiona want to have lunch with him. Rook sends Dante to go make tiny, fancy sandwiches, and Fiona agrees to go ahead and have a color-coordinated lunch with one of Dante’s pink tea sets.

• Dante chats with Fiona and learns that they’re both Trump artists. She’s got a lovely wood case with a unicorn on it, and most of the cards inside have a unicorn on them. A few have a pentacle. Fiona shows them several cards depicting locations. The ones that Dante glimpses in the box look similar in art style to some of the House Bariman cards that the gang found on the last adventure. They also feel weird.

• Li arrives at the Hesseways. A servant lets her know that Winter has been skulking around somewhere, and that Dante is having lunch with Rook and Fiona.

• Li goes to join the lunch - and notices the case with the unicorn on it. Li talks politely with Fiona for a bit.

• Meanwhile, the people talking in the bar make a decision - one of them makes a beeline for Tek. Robin decides to get up and intercept him with a blood knife to his torso. Tek confirms that he doesn’t want to talk because their previous conversation had been plenty, and Robin takes out a few more guys headed for him before sending the last one out to be chased down and murdered.

• At the tea party, Dante asks Fiona if she has any siblings. She mentions she has a few also visiting Chaos. Eventually, Dante and Li leave to go talk among themselves, and Rook is left alone with Fiona.

• Li shows Dante the drawing of her they got off the assassin - and Dante doesn’t recognize them. Dante is very upset to hear about the assassination attempt. Dante updates Li on the Lady Urqhart situation.

• Meanwhile, with all the murder, Robin kills this dude, drags him into the alley, and rifles through his pockets. The man had no identifying features. 

• Tek, meanwhile, feels periodic tremors in the world around him that no one else seems to notice. He… waits for Robin to get back. Once he gets back, he confirms that Tek is the only one feeling it. They drink and wait it out for a while, but it doesn’t seem to get better.

• Rook and Fiona go to Rook’s Ways to talk a little more privately about the Logrus. Rook reveals that they know about the Pattern. The two of them needle back and forth for a while.

• Dante sics Valefor on the guy who came after Marco, because gosh darn it, Dante just wants him to have a bad day! Valefor asks what’s up with the whole dragon corpse, but Dante has no updates for him.

• Nothing seems to be changing with Tek. Robin gives Rook a call. Rook suggests that it’s a strange attunement to some sort of power source that’s not normal, or the scrutiny of something very, very powerful. Robin reveals that this is something happening to Tek, and Rook offers to help, sort of.

• Rook goes to talk to Dante in his Ways. Dante mentions the weird feeling of the Trump cards to Rook, as well as the similar art style. Dante comforts Rook as they start anxiety-floating.

• Robin delivers the information to Tek about what could be happening. Tek decides to go ahead and see Rook about it, but Robin and Tek finish their drinks first.

• Rook, meanwhile, snaps out of their anxiety and tells Dante that they think that the person who contacted them earlier through their mystery cards may have been the same person who drew the cards that Fiona has.

• Li comes through to Rook over trump, and updates them on the assassin situation.

• The whole family meets up in Dante’s ways to discuss and catch up on everything that’s happened. Tek brushes Rook off about Lady Urqhart and says he'll have something by the end of the day.

• Robin tries to pull Dante and Li out of the room so that Rook and Tek can have a private conversation.

• Rook and Tek talk about the mysterious tremor thing happening to Tek. Rook agrees to look at what’s going on with Tek, and Tek gets to hear about everything that Rook sees when they look. Rook goes full logrus sight on him and finds that, for some reason, some energy waves from Shadow are hitting one side of Tek instead of passing through him. The source leads straight back to the Logrus... And then Tek vanishes.

• Outside, Robin tries to set up something for Rook’s birthday party as a distraction. It’s a bad idea all around.

• Dante goes back to see what’s wrong in his Ways when he feels a disturbance in the Force. They trump Tek to see where he went - and find that he is floating between Shadow. Tek sees a dragon in the void right before he’s pulled back into Dante’s Ways.

• Tek spends some time trying to calm down. While he makes use of the scream pillow, Li gets a call from Winter saying that the poison on the assassin’s blade matches the poison that was used to kill Greer.

• They let Tek have a little bit of time to gather himself. Tek eventually asks Rook what they did, and they explain that he was feeling waves of Shadow energy coming off of the Logrus. When they tried to see if there was a particular part of the Logrus the waves were coming from, Tek vanished, pushed by the waves into the in-between place. They think that this may have something to do with Tek’s actual bloodline, but doesn’t know much more than that.

• Dante eventually takes Robin aside to talk birthdays, and shows him the present they plan on giving Rook. Robin’s heart explodes a little.

• Eventually, the group reconvenes. They decide to go poke around in the vault some more to see if they can get any more information about the cards they found or when the vault was created. They drain the vault, Rook pokes around a little, they maybe found a Shadow connected with it.

• And then Tek and Li go off to go investigate the dead body of the would-be assassin. After Tek sends the information through his various sources, they’re able to identify that the assassin was a zealot of the House of the Serpent.

• Robin goes and asks Yannick who pulled them out of Shadow after the bad news Shadow Storm that went down. Yannick tells them it was Greer. Robin leaves to go drink.

• Rook trumps Tek to tell him it's the end of the day. Time to get his answer for Lady Urqhart. After briefly collapsing under the weight of his sins,Tek is (amazingly, after all this) able to get a functional answer for them.

• The next morning, Rook talks to Lady Urqhart. It goes poorly.