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Session by the numbers2h 51m · 24,494 words
At the tableSilasElspethBru
Talk share
Silas
35%
Topher
33%
Elspeth
25%
Bru
6%
Talked aboutAstro ×10Lady Viper ×10Luna ×10
Superlatives
MVP: Silas — “Can I throw some cauldrons in its path? Yeah, I think it's part of my kit. What should I roll?”
Best joke: Silas — “Does champagne normally come in buckets? I was worried you were giving us like that bucket that people like spit into at wine tastings.”
Most chaotic: Bru — “I'm going to walk across the bar, like just on top of the bar and just walk across it to get over to him because that seems like the least resistance to me.”

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 lights hung just below the glass ceiling so their reflections read like 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 and Scarlet have turned in early, Leliana is resting her instrument, and Ohma is away on a pilgrimage. 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. The doorman — suddenly a good deal more Southern — opens the velvet rope for "Mr. Sanders."
  • 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 pigtails and all.

Silas and Elspeth are waved through on their second attempt.

The Colonel at the Bar​

Bru heads for the wine bar, listening in on conversations, until his passive perception tells him someone is watching him. It is Jasper, at the far end of the bar, wrestling with a coat in the coat closet. Bru hails him across the room and takes the shortest route: straight across the top of the bar, at goblin height, fully committed to the Colonel Sanders bit. On the way he tries to slip a pinch of dirt into each wine glass he passes. The sleight of hand comes up short, and the dirt goes all over the counter instead. One guest, oblivious, compliments how "grounded" the varietal is. The rest are revolted.

At the end of the bar Bru finds the problem: a coat hanger stuck behind Jasper's shoulder blades. Bru and Kevin wrestle it free. Jasper, grateful, offers a private VIP room in the back with food and drinks.

Silas Hangs Above Denlin's Table​

Elspeth hears him before she sees him. Denlin — the man who framed her for cheating, got her thrown off the circuit, and is almost certainly running something terrible through his orphanage — is at the table right behind her, dressed as the Bank of Greyport.

Elspeth ducks under a table.

His companions:

  • Councilwoman Sable Voss, a half-elf dressed as a Grecian statue, bored by everything but tomorrow's race
  • Alderman Thatch, an old man who has put very little effort into a brewery-monk costume

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 another win, and Sable will wave the flag.

The Private Room: Planning with Jasper​

They find Jasper asleep on the tatami mats of a screened private room in the back, tea and a bucket of champagne laid out. Once roused, he orders chicken-fried chicken, a huge Caesar salad, and a bowl of brown for Bru — which Bru has peppered until it is mostly pepper.

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 is Belspeth Booper, the dwarf racing under a name almost identical to Elspeth's.

The party's plan begins to crystallize: Bru — technically about eleven — and Silas will slip into the orphanage posing as orphans and gather intel; Elspeth is the muscle and the wheelman, and disguised as Belspeth she might even get into the factory as one of Denlin's drivers. The race tomorrow provides the window — Denlin will be trackside and distracted.

The racing papers track the drivers live, and they place Belspeth at a restaurant just down the street: the Checkered Rest.

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 — Belspeth Booper where hers is Elspeth Cooper. The parallel is too precise to dismiss as coincidence.

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, Belspeth and Cringe wait at the curb for their ride. Silas spots it weaving through traffic toward them — a Mercedes-Benz repainted in the livery of Denlin's team. He throws a dagger at the approaching vehicle. Roll: 18. The car flips. Then explodes. Comprehensively.

Silas slips back into the dark.

The Bru-gatti​

Bru has been managing logistics. He deploys the pocket village and pulls out the party's stolen Bugatti. The real car sent for Belspeth carried her team's decals, so Bru uses illusion to copy them onto the Bugatti — almost exact, but with the party's own names slipped in where the sponsors' should be. Cringe is puzzled that this isn't their usual car, but it has the decals, so he shrugs and tells Belspeth to get in.

With no sign of their real car, Belspeth and Cringe climb into the Bru-gatti, and Silas and Elspeth pile in after them.

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. Belspeth is unmoved.

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. He is f**ing up these kids for life."*

Silas reaches for the concert recording stones he swears he had running during Denlin's conversation, meaning to play it back for her. They hold nothing of it. The party has no recording.

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.

It cannot be a coincidence: 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.

Elspeth 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 team, she learns, is third of five, and Denlin finishes fourth. Elspeth's verdict:

"Sounds like you have no skill."

Then 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. If the orphans are all this loyal to Denlin, an uprising from inside is off the table. The plan changes: Silas and Bru still slip into the orphanage as orphans, but Elspeth and whoever else is available will come in alongside real child-welfare agents from Jasper's contacts — in an "undercover division" of their own — and pack the violescence up as "evidence." Waking the dozing Jasper, they get him to agree to call his contacts.

On Jasper's suggestion, they lay Belspeth and Cringe beside the wreckage of the exploded Mercedes, so it looks as if 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, promising to meet the party with the authorities at Denlin's place in the morning.

The group then carries an exhausted Jasper back to the orphanage building and sets him in an armchair. He is asleep on his feet.

Elspeth circles back to the wreckage. Investigation check: 15. It takes her a long time, but she finds a single strand of Belspeth's hair. She pockets it carefully.

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, relayed psychically to the group word for word. 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.

  • 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.

  • Silas's Insight read on Jasper — 30 — is the session's most important roll that no one will remember. Jasper 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 — even if he sleeps through part of it.

  • 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 across a wine bar. 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, and positions. 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. 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 relayed every word of it to the party as it happened.