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49: Leave Those Kids Alone

April 10, 2026

Setting​

Greyport, late night. The Denlin Orphanage is a converted factory — large smoke-stained brick, three stories, located in a factory district. Dormitory wings flank a sterile central hallway. The stairwell up to the third floor is guarded more by routine than by presence. The building smells like industrial cleaner and institutional food.

The party has one night before the race. Denlin is at an afterparty, or believes he is. Jasper is asleep in his armchair and is expected to arrive with caseworkers in the morning. The window is open, if narrow.

Players Present​

  • Topher (DM) — also running Jasper and the School Master as NPCs
  • Taylor Ramsey as Silas Fairbanks — Halfling Rogue/Sorcerer, holder of the dragon orb
  • Justin Hale as Bru — Goblin Artificer, purveyor of firecrackers and familiars
  • Ali Leonard as Elspeth Cooper — Dwarf Artificer/Gunslinger
  • Luke Neverisky as Leliana Goldspring — Human Bard (welcome back to the full party)
  • Ellis Taylor as Olivia Cooper — Dwarf Paladin, retired detective

Plot Events​

Drawing Denlin's Men Away​

Before the party approaches the building, Silas uses the sending stone taken from Cringe to place a call to Denlin. He poses as Cringe.

Performance check: 21.

The performance is convincing. Silas tells Denlin that Belspeth Booper has gone completely off the rails at the afterparty — drunk, dancing on tables, throwing people across the bar. He layers in escalating helplessness: she is too strong, she will not listen, he needs reinforcements.

"She's completely out of control, boss. She is overpowering me. Every time I try to get her down from the table, she just lifts me up and throws me across the bar."

Denlin dispatches a man named Lonnie McGavin to handle it. The orphanage security is now lighter than it was an hour ago.

The Smoke Family​

The party pulls their vehicle off the main road and approaches on foot. Hats of Disguise are distributed. The cover story: Olivia is a haggard washerwoman delivering orphans in the middle of the night because she can no longer care for them.

The orphan surname, they learn, is Smoke — a convention for children surrendered to state care in this district. The party adopts it.

  • Bru becomes Brown Smoke
  • Silas becomes Gray Smoke
  • Elspeth becomes Pansy Smoke

The children are small, dirty, and visibly miserable. The disguises hold.

"And this one's a goblin. You can abuse the s** out of this one. He won't die, trust me."*

The guard at the front has no obvious reason to question the delivery. But two guard hounds lunge at the party from behind a dumpster before anyone can speak.

The Hound​

Bru reacts. Firebolt: attack roll 26, 13 fire damage. The first hound drops without a whimper. The second reaches the party as initiative begins — then the scene shifts, because Silas immediately plays the moment.

He throws himself into the helpless orphan act with full commitment — grabbing at the guard's sleeve, crying, asking whether there will be porridge and where they will sleep. Deception: 32. The guard's attention goes to the grieving children in front of him, not to the small burning dog.

Olivia, meanwhile, tries a different strategy. She haggles. She insists on speaking to a manager. She wants more than two copper per child. The guard's hand moves toward his sending stone.

Olivia backs down, accepts the two copper, and circles the building to find another way in. Leliana offers to make her invisible once she clears the sightline.

The guard waves the orphans inside.

"If you do good and you listen well, you might learn to be a race car driver."

Silas, already filing this away:

"I'm going to kill the s** out of this guy later."*

The School Master​

Inside, the children are handed off from the doorman to the School Master — a tall masked woman in a long dress, carrying a clipboard. She introduces herself by routine: clean the floors before bed. If you are obedient, you will eventually become a race car driver. That is the reward.

The dormitory wing is a converted factory corridor: six rooms, three per side, brick walls painted institutional white. Silas activates an audio recorder as he walks, capturing the School Master's voice.

In one of the dormitories, Leliana investigates a mattress and finds a message written in red: "escape before 15." She relays it through the party's psychic link.

Elspeth, using the alias Pansy, makes contact with a small red-haired girl named Poppy.

"Make sure you listen. Otherwise they'll be very mean to you. They'll keep you in the room. And they say if you don't listen, you won't get to be a race car driver."

When Silas asks about befriending the building's rats, and Elspeth asks what happens to children who don't want to race, the School Master produces a horse whip. Silas takes 4 damage. Elspeth takes 3. She leaves them with the mops and a boy named Thomas to supervise.

Thomas​

Thomas is approximately eleven or twelve years old. He has been at the school for roughly twelve years, which accounts for most of his conscious memory.

He fills in what the party hasn't been able to find anywhere else.

The children's daily schedule involves mopping floors in the morning and refining violescence in the afternoon. After those lessons, children feel stronger and faster. The sessions are presented as a privilege.

What happens when children age out at fifteen: they are taken to the third floor. They do not come back.

His best friend was a girl named Mera — long brown hair, brown eyes, possibly a gnome, always shared her food. She was taken upstairs some time ago. He has not seen her since.

A woman named Dr. Vasela runs the third floor when Denlin isn't present. She presents as kind. Thomas's assessment is clear and unbothered:

"I think she's the worst of them all."

The weekly shipments to the second floor are labeled as grain. Thomas knows they are violescence. There are also crates marked as candy — taffy, specifically, branded Sweet Tooth. He does not recommend stealing it.

"They cut your hands off."

He speculates, carefully, that the race car driver prize has only ever gone to one person — the woman on the poster outside. He wonders, out loud, whether that person might be Mera under a different name.

Climbing to the Third Floor​

Silas and Olivia break from the mopping group and move toward the upper stairwell. Olivia's armor announces her presence on the stairs before she reaches the landing. Stealth: 14. The School Master, somewhere below, hears it.

When the distraction attempts from the mopping crew fail — screams, thrown mop water, neither diverting her — Bru throws firecrackers at the School Master's feet. She turns on him. He recovers Kevin's gemstone in the confusion, then deploys Kevin — his small construct, reduced further via the Reduce spell — directly at the School Master. Kevin distracts her long enough to buy the others time.

Silas opens a window, deposits Olivia in the portable hole for safe transport, and uses his cloak's wall-walking ability to climb the exterior of the building, three floors up, to a darkened office window.

Inside: a large desk, a lamp, an empty room. The nameplate reads "Denlin."

Silas extrudes the portable hole through the wall to release Olivia. She begins working the bookcase.

What Olivia Finds​

Investigation on the bookcase: 24. Investigation on the desk: 23.

The filing system tells a story. Shipment manifests marked as grain, signed by Harbor Master Drees, routed through IC Couriers to an entity called Denlin Co — a nondescript LLC with no public footprint. The weights don't correspond to grain. The delivery schedule is weekly.

Denlin's personal journals fill in the margins. His father is pressuring him to close the orphanage and cut ties with someone named Sable Nyx — a different figure from Councilwoman Sable Voss, who attended the gala. Denlin owes debts to Sable Nyx. The orphanage cannot close.

A personal note: he suspects someone on his racing team is sabotaging his car in favor of a competitor. He is looking for a traitor. He does not know it is the party who blew up his vehicle outside the Checkered Rest.

One further entry: Denlin deliberately planted his jacket at a party to engineer his first meeting with a woman named Veronica. The romance was calculated from the first moment.

Silas picks every lock in the desk drawers. Roll: 27.

Before Olivia can finish processing what she has found, the door opens.

The School Master Falls​

The School Master enters the office.

Olivia, already in position, has placed the portable hole on the floor beside the desk. The School Master steps onto the wrong side of it. She drops in. Olivia is on her immediately. The School Master goes unconscious. They tie her up and keep her alive.

What Crimson Sees​

Downstairs, Bru is incapacitated but his familiar Crimson is not. He sends the small creature tailing the School Master before the party knows what room she was heading to.

Crimson locates a room on the third floor labeled "Routine." Through Crimson's eyes, Bru relays what he sees: a woman in a lab coat — Dr. Vasela — working at her station. The School Master, before being knocked out, had told her to be quiet. Dr. Vasela had replied without looking up:

"I can be here as long as I wish. That is what Den has told me. The work must continue."

The Routine Room​

Silas picks the lock to "Routine." Roll: 27.

The room contains four racing simulator machines, each powered by violescence. Submerged in tanks alongside the machines are naked, unconscious dwarven figures — one adult, three appearing to be teenagers. The adult figure resembles Elspeth.

Dr. Vasela moves between the tanks, administering conditioning through the simulators. Her prompts, delivered in the measured tones of someone who has done this many times:

"If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding."

"No dark sarcasm in the classroom."

The group processes what they are looking at. The theory assembles itself without anyone needing to say it aloud: Belspeth Booper, the blocking driver Denlin raised from infancy and named himself, is one of these. A product of this room. Built to race and to lose on command.

Leliana, standing in the doorway, looks at the tanks. She looks at Elspeth.

She shouts:

"Hey teacher, leave those kids alone!"

Every figure in every tank opens their eyes and turns toward the door.

The session ends.

Notable Character Moments​

  • Silas's sending stone gambit opens the session with the intelligence from the previous night already deployed — Lonnie McGavin is dispatched, the orphanage security is reduced, and the party walks in with a window already created. He then spends the session playing a weeping orphan while his recording stones run and his portable hole does most of the real work on the third floor.

  • Bru's composure under pressure carries the ground floor. The firecrackers buying time for the stairwell team, Kevin deployed as a living distraction, Crimson tailing the School Master through the building — Bru is incapacitated by the end and still running operations from the floor.

  • Thomas is the session's most important character who won't be in the credits. He is a child who has spent his entire life here, has watched his friends disappear, and answers questions with the flat precision of someone who stopped expecting things to change a long time ago. His description of Mera — the food she shared, the hair she had — lands without ceremony.

  • Elspeth recognizing herself in the tank is the session's quietest beat. The adult figure in the Routine room has her build, her face, a name someone else gave her. The hair sample collected from the Checkered Rest wreckage last session was not impulsive. It was the beginning of preparing for exactly this moment.

  • Leliana's Pink Floyd line ends the session on the most precarious possible note — the shout that breaks the stillness and brings every tank-figure to attention simultaneously. Luke Neverisky's return to the full party is announced, appropriately, with maximum consequence.

  • Olivia's Karen play at the front door — demanding a higher price per orphan, insisting on a manager, circling back for a service entrance — is both convincing cover and a scene of barely-contained fury from someone who spent a career putting people like Denlin away.

Themes​

  • The manufactured life: Belspeth Booper was named by Denlin when she arrived as an infant. The children in the Routine room are being conditioned to perform a role they have no framework for questioning. The orphanage is a closed loop: surrender, rename, condition, deploy. The party is standing inside the machinery.
  • Evidence and horror: The party's discipline in this session — running recorders, copying manifests, keeping the School Master alive — stands alongside what they find in the Routine room. Documentation does not make the tanks easier to look at.
  • The cost of staying quiet: Thomas has information and he shares it because someone finally asked. Poppy warned about the consequences of not listening. Mera disappeared at fifteen. The building has been doing this for years, and no one has come until tonight.

Session MVP​

Bru — For running intelligence operations from the ground floor while knocked down, deploying Kevin as a living decoy at exactly the right moment, and keeping Crimson in the building long enough to find the Routine room before the party had any reason to look for it. The session's most critical piece of information — that Dr. Vasela was already inside and the work was continuing — came through a familiar small enough to fit under a door.