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48: The Other Cooper

April 3, 2026

Setting​

Greyport, evening. The party has VIP tickets to an event at the Gaines Bakery — a high-end solarium with a glass ceiling three stories above, hung with lights arranged into constellations, an indoor jungle pressing in from every side. Two helmeted performers work an EDM set at the center of the floor while guests in full formal dress move between champagne and conversation.

What Jasper described as a nice night out turns out to be something close to a gala. The party is decidedly not dressed for it.

Olivia, Leliana, Scarlet, and Ohma stay in early. Tonight belongs to Silas, Bru, and Elspeth.

Players Present​

  • Topher (DM) — also running Jasper and Belspeth Booper as NPCs
  • Taylor Ramsey as Silas Fairbanks — Halfling Rogue/Sorcerer, holder of the dragon orb
  • Justin Hale as Bru — Goblin Artificer, purveyor of Minor Illusions
  • Ali Leonard as Elspeth Cooper — Dwarf Artificer/Gunslinger, reluctant double

Plot Events​

Arriving Underdressed​

The Gaines Bakery solarium is running at a level no one warned them about. The guests have arrived dressed for a museum opening at minimum, a royal investiture at maximum. The party has arrived as themselves.

Improvised solutions are deployed immediately:

  • Bru casts Minor Illusion to wrap himself in the full appearance of Colonel Sanders — white suit, bolo tie, paper bucket implicit. He bluffs past the doorman with sufficient conviction that the doorman briefly questions whether he himself is underdressed.
  • Silas uses his Hat of Disguise to arrive as a crowned fast food monarch the group collectively titles the "Waffle King" — royal branding that does not quite match anything real.
  • Elspeth disguises herself as Wendy, red braids and all.

All three are waved through.

At the coat check, Bru spots Jasper struggling with a coat hanger that has become genuinely embedded in the back of his jacket. Bru helps him free it. Jasper, grateful, offers a private VIP room upstairs with food and a proper table.

The Colonel at the Bar​

While Jasper arranges the room, Bru takes a walk across the top of the bar — cutting through the crowd at goblin height, fully committed to the Colonel Sanders bit. A Minor Illusion attempt misfires mid-transit. A small amount of dirt redistributes itself into several nearby wine glasses. The guests closest to the bar receive complimentary second pours. No one says anything to the Colonel.

Silas Hangs Above Denlin's Table​

Elspeth catches it first: a voice she recognizes from a courtroom she was never supposed to be in. Denlin — the man who framed her, stripped her racing credentials, and is almost certainly running something terrible through his orphanage — is sitting twenty feet away at a corner table.

Elspeth steps behind a potted tree.

His companions:

  • Councilwoman Sable Voss, dressed as a Grecian statue, more interested in the racing news in her program than in the conversation around her
  • Alderman Thatch, dressed as a brewery monk, visibly agitated and not eating

Silas scales the wall and reaches the ceiling directly above their table. Stealth check: 23. He braces himself against the beams and opens a psychic relay to the group.

What he hears:

Thatch is anxious. Reports from the orphanage are surfacing in the wrong places — the conditions, the children coming out sick — and he warns Denlin that public attention is building.

Denlin is not concerned. He tells Thatch that as long as Unarch is on their side, they are protected. He produces a gift: a dwarven pocket watch with a glass face containing poison if broken. Thatch accepts it. The meeting is effectively over.

Across the table, Councilwoman Sable Voss has not followed any of this. She is focused on tomorrow's race and wants access to Denlin's garage to meet his current driver. She says plainly that she despises the Cooper family — finds them arrogant for trading on lineage — and considers the sport improved by Elspeth's absence.

The race is tomorrow. Denlin expects a win.

Silas's concert recording stones have been running throughout the conversation. He has everything.

The Private Room: Planning with Jasper​

Jasper meets them upstairs with a proper meal and the focused hospitality of someone who has been running a bakery long enough to know when a table needs feeding before it can think clearly.

The party lays out what they have learned. The picture that emerges is worse than they expected.

Denlin is running a violescence processing operation out of his orphanage — children working the crystal factory adjacent to the building, regularly getting sick from exposure. He has political cover through Alderman Thatch and, above Thatch, an entity called Unarch whose identity is not yet clear. His current racing driver, Belspeth Booper, grew up in the orphanage and remains entirely within his sphere.

She is currently having dinner at a nearby restaurant called the Checkered Rest.

The party's plan begins to crystallize: Bru and Silas will infiltrate the orphanage disguised as orphans; Elspeth will coordinate a CPS-style raid with legitimate agents through Jasper's network; in the chaos, they steal the violescence. The race tomorrow provides the window — Denlin will be trackside and distracted.

A broader piece of context surfaces. Luna is not dormant — she is mostly dead. The party has recovered perhaps five percent of what she was. Violescence is what they need to bring her further back. Eldoran, by contrast, is accumulating violescence toward something catastrophic: another universe was already destroyed this way. The orphanage is not just a crime. It is a supply chain.

Silas rolls a 30 Insight on Jasper.

What he reads: Jasper is not duplicitous. He is a man who spent years doing work he believed was good — "hell units," diving into demon portals, fighting things that were unambiguously evil — and watched it curdle when Eldoran's forces started massacring ballrooms and burning villages. He is looking to the party for direction. He is ready to be led somewhere worth going.

"I feel like they lost their way a little bit... especially once they started this whole boom project and killing other gods. It's too much. But y'all are going to set things right."

He also keeps describing his work with the orphans in terms that make the party visibly uncomfortable.

"I take care of the orphan problem. Make sure they're not a problem anymore."

"You run an orphanage, Jasper. You don't 'take care of kids and make sure they're not a problem anymore.' You run an orphanage. Just say that."

The Move to the Checkered Rest​

The party relocates to the Checkered Rest, a restaurant a short walk from the bakery. Jasper knows the owner — Dolly, a stocky woman missing her left pinky — and secures them a covert balcony table with a clear sightline to the main floor below.

Below: Belspeth Booper and her manager, Cringe, finishing dinner.

Elspeth studies her from above. The resemblance is not subtle. The same build, the same face, a name that maps almost exactly — Bell Smith Booper where hers is Elspeth Cooper. The parallel is too precise to dismiss as coincidence. The DM does not suggest otherwise.

Silas establishes a cover: Jethro Killingsworth, racing biographer. He descends to the floor.

Jethro Killingsworth, Racing Biographer​

The pitch to Belspeth is that Killingsworth is writing her story — career arc, personal history, relationship with Denlin's team. A proper biography. He needs the full account.

Elspeth feeds him material through their connection: other drivers on the circuit, race statistics, Denlin's team results. Silas incorporates it into the conversation smoothly.

Performance check: 14. Not convincing enough. Cringe steps between them and demands payment for access to his driver. Silas shifts tactics: he insults Cringe directly, in front of Belspeth, noting that a manager who controls his driver's access to her own story is not really working in her interest.

The wedge does not open. They need a different approach.

Outside the restaurant, a car from Denlin's motor pool pulls up — the real vehicle dispatched to collect Belspeth and Cringe. Silas, already back in the shadows, throws a dagger at the approaching vehicle. Roll: 18. The car flips. Then explodes. Comprehensively.

Silas slips back into the dark.

The Brew Gotti​

Bru has been managing logistics. The party's stolen vehicle — the Bugatti stored in the pocket village, now deployed onto Greyport streets — has been dressed with illusion. The decals no longer read Denlin's team name; they read something close to the party's own names, slightly off-brand, just convincing enough. The vehicle is now presenting itself as Belspeth and Cringe's car service.

When their real car fails to appear, Belspeth and Cringe climb into the Brew Gotti.

Once the doors close and the car is moving, the nature of the situation becomes clear.

"Oh no. Is this a kidnapping? Oh no."

Cringe does not recover quickly enough. Silas knocks him out — non-lethal. He takes Cringe's sending stone off his unconscious body.

"All you had to do was say yes to the fing biography, you little s*."*

Belspeth's Story​

The conversation with Belspeth does not go the way any of them expected.

She is not hostile. She is not confused. She simply does not understand the problem.

She grew up in Denlin's orphanage. He named her when she arrived as a child. She has no memory of another name, another family, another life before the orphanage. Denlin is the only father she has ever known.

Her role in the racing operation: blocking driver. She finishes fifth every race to allow Denlin's car to finish fourth. Every race, same result. She does not experience this as exploitation. She experiences it as contribution.

"Every team has a lead driver and he's the best, so I help him so we can win."

The party tries a different angle. Elspeth's own racing record: first place for twenty years straight, without cheating.

"Sounds like you have no skill."

On the orphanage: the children who work the crystal factory regularly get sick. Belspeth is aware of this. She does not connect it to the violescence exposure. She believes the facility is a good place — that Denlin cares for the children there.

Silas does not believe she is lying.

"He is brainwashing these kids for life."

Elspeth believes she was raised to believe the orphanage is safe. She believes Belspeth has no framework for evaluating the situation she was born into because Denlin built that framework himself — including the name she answers to.

The DM is clear: the resemblance between Belspeth Booper and Elspeth Cooper is not accidental. Denlin named this child when she arrived. She has no memory of anything before that.

Ali on the Arrangement​

Elspeth does not let the racing record go.

"I was first for twenty years straight and I didn't cheat at all."

Belspeth's response, delivered without malice:

"Sounds like you have no skill."

Then, quietly, Elspeth on Denlin:

"This isn't Ricky Bobby — you should always be fighting for your own race."

Belspeth defends the arrangement. She is loyal to the only family she knows. The party files this away. They do not push harder tonight.

Staging the Exit​

The party does not know what to do with Belspeth yet.

They leave her and Cringe near the wreckage of the exploded Mercedes, staging the scene to suggest both were knocked out in the blast. The burning vehicle tells the story on its own. Jasper calls the hospital and lets the authorities collect the injured. Then he departs.

The group carries an exhausted Jasper back to the orphanage building and sets him in an armchair. He falls asleep mid-sentence.

"All I'm hearing is everything went according to plan."

Before the party leaves the wreckage site, Elspeth circles back. Investigation check: 15. She finds a single strand of hair from Belspeth among the debris. She pockets it carefully.

"I wanted to murder her so many times tonight... I'm like, I hope I'm not related to this girl."

Two candidates for a DNA kit: Chalk Rock, the young dwarf detective who is, by general consensus, exactly the kind of person to have the Cooper family's genetic records already on file. And Lady Viper, whose snake previously showed an inexplicable affection for Elspeth — taken by the party as a good omen for that relationship.

The orphanage raid goes next. The party has a week before Eldoran.

Notable Character Moments​

  • Silas's ceiling eavesdrop is the session's intelligence coup — stealth 23, psychic relay, recording stones running the entire time. The name Unarch enters the picture without a face attached yet, but the implication is clear: Denlin's operation has protection above the political tier. The tapes have everything.

  • Elspeth studying Belspeth from the balcony above is the session's quietest beat. Recognizing your own face on a stranger across a crowded restaurant, and having absolutely no framework for what that means. The hair collected at the wreckage site is not impulsive — it is methodical. Elspeth is preparing herself for the answer before she has it.

  • Belspeth herself is the session's most unsettling presence. She is not a villain. She is a person who was handed a name, a role, and a family by a man who needed a blocking driver, and she has never had reason to question any of it. The party's instinct to protect her and their instinct to be furious at her exist simultaneously without resolution.

  • Jasper's Insight read — 30 — is the session's most important roll that no one will remember. He is not a liability. He is a man who needs the party to be right about what they're doing so that he can believe the same thing. The briefing gives him that. He falls asleep in his armchair having heard a plan that sounds, to him, like everything going according to plan.

  • Bru's Colonel Sanders functions precisely as well as it needs to — which is to say it gets him through the door and distributes some dirt into a few wine glasses. This is a net positive.

Themes​

  • Doubles and originals: Belspeth is not just a physical mirror of Elspeth — she is a version of Elspeth raised without the record, the family, or any context for what her abilities mean. Whether she is a copy, a relative, or something deliberately constructed, the question of what Denlin built her to be sits underneath every exchange the party has with her.
  • The machinery of protection: Denlin's operation layers cover at every level — Alderman Thatch at the political tier, Unarch somewhere above that, Belspeth herself as emotional insulation. The orphanage is not simply a crime. It is a closed system designed to look, from the inside, like a home.
  • Evidence before action: Almost nothing in this session resolves through confrontation. The party watches, listens, documents, and positions. The recording stones are already running. The DNA kit is already in motion. When they move on the orphanage, they will move with documentation and coordination rather than improvisation.

Session MVP​

Silas — For the ceiling eavesdrop and the foresight to have the recording stones already running. The intelligence from Denlin's table — Unarch, Thatch's corruption, the violescence smuggling operation, Sable Voss's contempt for the Cooper name — is the foundation everything else gets built on. He got all of it on tape.