50: The Wall Comes Down
April 17, 2026
Setting
Greyport. An orphanage lab deep in the building, then its lobby and loading bay, then back to the brownstone, then a racetrack somewhere in the city, then the police station. The session begins mid-combat and ends with a champagne-grabbing sprint past the podium.
Players Present
- Topher (DM)
- Taylor Ramsey as Silas Fairbanks — Halfling Rogue/Sorcerer, soon to be braced against the ceiling
- Justin Hale as Bru — Goblin Artificer, thunder cannon deployed
- Ali Leonard as Elspeth Cooper — Dwarf Artificer/Gunslinger, about to have a very busy morning
- Luke Neverisky as Leliana Goldspring — Human Bard, reliable in every crisis except the ones that require staying quiet
Olivia is offscreen for the lab sequence, absorbed in the journals and records in Denlin's office. Silas psychically suggests she also look for anything that leads to the Iron Claws.
Plot Events
Silas on the Ceiling
The session resumes exactly where the last one left: Leliana has given the game away, and a room full of Elspeth's faces has turned toward the door. Silas and Leliana are in the doorway of the Routine room. Elspeth, with Bru riding on her shoulders — still half-lost in his familiar's eyes — is coming at a run from the office down the hall.
In the room: four simulacra hooked into racing simulators, turning their steering wheels in unison; a fifth, finishing a sandwich, who looks up at Silas and says "We don't need no education" before walking toward him; young figures floating in growth tanks along the back wall; and the Doctor — the architect of this entire operation — in the middle of it all.
Silas Misty Steps to the ceiling and walks it upside down, keeping clear of the Elspeths. His first dagger would have hit, but a blurry magical shield turns it aside.
"You won't get away with this."
The Doctor draws a gun — and fires a fireball out of it. DC 17 Dexterity, 32 fire damage on a failed save. Silas slips half of it. The door catches fire.
Leliana tries to turn the Doctor into a pig. The Doctor rolls a 19 on her Wisdom save against DC 17. She holds her form.
Bru mounts his thunder cannon on Elspeth's shoulders. When artificers come together, apparently, they form a mech.
Elspeth reaches the doorway, draws her gun on the Doctor, and addresses the room — the simulacra, the children she can see — in the direct tone of someone who has been yelled at by enough officials to know how to cut through noise:
"Teens, we're here to rescue you. I don't know any of your names except Meera, but we're here to help."
Persuasion: 22. The sandwich-eater turns toward her, as if she can barely see:
"Hello, hello. Is anyone there? Is anyone there? Just nod if you can hear me... Is there anyone home?"
She gives her name as Elspeth, then sprints and dives at the doorway. Elspeth hugs her. She hugs back, tightly.
Silas throws again. This time the dagger passes through the shield: twenty-seven to hit, nine psychic damage, and the Doctor is vexed. With the advantage, and a boost from Leliana's Bardic Inspiration, the second dagger hits on a 22 — he runs across the ceiling over her head and drives it straight down.
"Dark Side of the Moon."
Twenty-nine sneak attack damage. Thirty-eight total. The Doctor is dead.
Another Brick in the Wall
The moment the Doctor goes down, something shifts in the simulacra. The ones in the simulators begin unhooking themselves from their crowns, methodically, like people waking up from a long dream.
They sing while they do it.
"We don't need no thought control."
Leliana casts hallucinatory terrain, turning the lab into a racetrack, complete with roaring fans and engines. Two of the simulacra stay focused and ignore it. Two are thrown, pausing mid-way through tearing off their gear.
Bru sends Crimson outside to scout. Perception 28 through the familiar's eyes: an old, slicked-out Cadillac trundling toward the orphanage from one direction, and three or four police cars from the other. He relays it psychically:
"Hey guys, we only have probably a couple of minutes before the police show up here, so we've got to make whatever we're doing snappy."
He recalls Crimson, opens his own eyes on a room turned racetrack, and tosses the cannon to Silas to serve as a shield.
Two of the simulacra curl into the fetal position. The other two push past Elspeth and Bru, making for the door. Elspeth reaches one with the Message cantrip — we're here to help, we're taking you to safety — and gets only:
"No. We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control."
So she grabs them both at the doorframe — Athletics 18 with disadvantage — one by the foot, one by the shirt, with the first still wrapped around her. The one hugging her whispers:
"When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye, and I looked, but it was gone. I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown. The dream is gone."
Elspeth, holding a gun and a goblin, does not pull away.
Silas adds a sticky web from the wand of web Elspeth gave him for his birthday. The room is a controlled disaster.
The Vats
Silas skitters across the ceiling to the growth tanks. Perception: 21.
What he finds is worse than anyone expected.
Children — real children, at varying stages — covered by a fungus-like substance that is congealing over them slowly from the legs upward. A young girl with laugh lines around her eyes is covered only to the legs. A boy is covered to the waist. In one tank, it is already halfway over the face. They are being made, gradually, into copies of Elspeth.
The simulacra racing in the simulators. The children in the vats. The Doctor. The full picture assembles.
Silas relays it to the group.
Command
Leliana upcasts Command — "Relax" — on the three simulacra Elspeth is holding. Two fail their Wisdom saves. The one caught by the foot shakes it off, pulls free, and sprints down the hallway.
Bru, who knows exactly what these children fear, casts a minor illusion of the masked School Master rounding the corner at the end of the hallway:
"Hey teacher, leave those keys alone."
The fleeing simulacrum freezes.
Leliana talks to her from within earshot:
"Don't you want to be amongst your friends? It's awful lonely and scary out there in the hallway by yourself."
Persuasion: 30. The words don't sink in at first. Leliana keeps talking. Slowly the girl shakes her head, looks around, passes a hand through the illusion, and turns back.
"What's going on? Can you help me?" "I feel like I'm a different person."
At the lab door she balks — she doesn't want to be in that room anymore — so the party decides to take everyone down to the lobby, where the police will arrive anyway. She looks at Elspeth.
"I know your face. You're the racer. I don't remember anymore. I feel itchy."
Jasper Arrives
The party gets the simulacra down to the lobby. Elspeth locks the lab door behind them — a simple twist of the knob, a "baby lock" — with the children in the tanks still inside. The label on the door reads Routine.
Other children start coming out of their bunks. Leliana recruits Thomas to help corral everyone.
At the front door, Elspeth finds Jasper, red with rage, shouting at the guard:
"I know what you're doing in there and we're going to save these goddamn kids."
The guard runs off to call his boss. Jasper rips the front door off its hinges. Behind him: police officers, medical staff, and a detective in a fedora and a long coat, chewing gum.
Leliana moves through the arriving medics, helping triage (Medicine: 21). One child, carrying a bad infection, is afraid of being in trouble:
"I hope I do well enough to be in the race." "Denlin's the best racer there ever was."
Elspeth speaks with the lead detective directly. When the detective notices that the simulacra's faces look a lot like hers, Elspeth explains:
"My grandma's Olivia Cooper. Don't know if you know her."
The detective does — retired detective Olivia Cooper, from High Forge — which makes this Elspeth Cooper. Elspeth lays it out: Denlin framed her last year to push her out of racing, and his lab upstairs has been using the violescence the orphans process to turn children into copies of her, to win races. She mentions the children still in the tubes, the locked lab, the School Master they knocked out, and the Doctor they killed, in self-defense, while she was throwing fireballs. She conceals Silas and Bru's presence — it was just her and Leliana — with a Deception of 21 using Flash of Genius.
The murder complicates things. The detective asks Elspeth and Leliana to stay in town and come by the station later that day. Elspeth agrees, and points out Thomas, who might know the other children's names:
"He's a really good kid. He's just never been outside the orphanage. He's only had gruel. He's never had a hot dog. And I will say that."
Then the Cadillac pulls up, and out of it steps Denlin.
"Hey, what are you doing in here? You can't be here!"
The detective informs him that he has been using child labor to process violescence, a known carcinogen, and will need to come in for questioning.
"Oh, you can't do that, I got a race today!"
The detective's Miranda addendum:
"If you annoy me too much, I'm going to kick your ass."
Denlin is handcuffed and driven away in a cop car. Elspeth waves.
Olivia, meanwhile, is discovered by the police still reading documents in the office ("I'm supposed to be here. I'm a detective, too") and is escorted home.
The Loading Bay
While Elspeth and Leliana handle the lobby, Silas and Bru slip away. They retrieve the portable hole from Denlin's office — its previous occupant, the School Master, already pulled out so she would not suffocate — and Silas walks the outside wall around to the second-floor loading bay.
The loading bay holds shipping containers. Bru's crowbar can't beat the padlocks, so Silas picks one — roll of 29 — and opens the first container.
Inside: stacks of wooden crates, and a sweet smell. They pry one open. Raw violescence chunks, packed in straw. Bru runs an Arcana check: 20. The material is reactive. Handling it loosely is inadvisable.
So they slide whole crates into the portable hole instead. The crates are bigger than either of them; three is all the hole will take. Sirens can be heard arriving out front.
For a fourth crate, Bru casts Rope Trick — which normally opens a doorway at the top of a rope hanging straight up. The trick is to make it open at the floor. Bru shrinks himself to Tiny with Enlarge/Reduce, and Silas holds him upside down at arm's length (Athletics 18) while he casts. The extradimensional portal opens at floor level, the crate goes in, and the whole thing can be dragged along behind them.
"This is our finest problem solving of the whole campaign."
They carry their haul a couple of blocks to an alley and set up the pocket village there to unload the rope trick before its hour runs out; the three crates in the portable hole stay there. Four crates secured. Denlin's supply chain has a hole in it.
Back at the Brownstone
The party makes it back to the brownstone late in the morning, very tired. Elspeth confesses that she told the police about the Doctor — Olivia always told her to cooperate with the police. Silas coaches her for the interview: emphasize the self-defense angle, and remember that he was never there.
Silas also finally gives Bru the piggyback ride he has been demanding. He lasts twelve minutes. Bru points out that he could simply have cast Reduce on himself. Bru resummons Kevin and gives him a very long hug.
A Visit to Zachary
The race is that afternoon. At the track, Denlin's garage is in a frantic state, but at least one car is being readied. In practice, Denlin's driver looks strong. Elspeth's brother Zachary, in the family Cooper garage, is running last.
Elspeth already knows, from the flashback races, what Zachary did to her: he swapped her registered racing crystal for an unregistered one, and that is what got her disqualified. He is the most personal piece of everything that has gone wrong in her racing career — more personal than Denlin, who is merely a villain. Zachary is family.
A cousin, Roger, tries to shoo her out; she points out that she is banned from racing, not from the garage. She finds Zachary yelling at his engineer that the balance is all wrong, that it's the stupid crystal, a bad crystal.
"Do you ever think that maybe you're just a bad driver?"
Zachary has heard she murdered someone last night, and he is telling Grandma. Olivia pops up to vouch — probably self-defense; "we murder lots of people now. We're heroes." When Zachary tells Elspeth she's too big for racing anyway, she asks if he just called her fat and punches him in the face.
He is wearing a helmet. She hurts herself as much as she hurts him.
She leaves. No one says goodbye.
On Silas's assessment of both Zachary and Denlin:
"They both go to elaborate evil schemes to achieve mediocre results."
The Denlin Gambit
With Denlin in police custody, his car has no driver.
Elspeth checks Belspeth Booper's roped-off garage first. Belspeth is drinking a cup of tea by her car, helmet off, while an engineer runs diagnostics. Elspeth sends her a message: they rescued all of her friends from the orphanage, where there were others being turned to look like her, to replace her. If she wants help, Elspeth is outside. If not, break a leg.
Then, right before race time, she disguises herself as Denlin. Deception: 20. The team receives her without hesitation — "Denlin, you're here! We heard you were in prison" — and she informs them that no bars can hold her. They speak to her in the careful, jargon-padded language of people who have learned to manage a fragile ego. She matches it perfectly. She tells the crew she wants no help from the second car: everyone for themselves.
She straps in. Insight 20: the car's setup is ridiculous — a brake pedal tuned to granny-gentle — but underneath it is a very good car. She lines up fifth. Belspeth is sixth, right behind her.
The lights go out.
The Race
Round 1 — Driving check: 27. She picks up two positions. Denlin's car moves from fifth to third. Belspeth makes up one place.
Round 2 — 29. She dives late into the corner and overtakes into second. Belspeth, rolling the same 29, has climbed to fourth. The field is compressing.
Round 3 — 28 with Flash of Genius. She closes to the leader's rear bumper. Belspeth rises to third. The engineer, still addressing her as Denlin, reminds her that Belspeth is in range if they need her help. Elspeth can do it on her own.
Round 4 — 25. She sits on the leader's tail, and it's a coin flip whether she can make the move. Behind her, Belspeth has closed to within a tenth.
Round 5 — 31 with Flash of Genius. Belspeth also throws a 31. Elspeth dives late into the corner, overtakes, is overtaken back, and completes the move at the next corner — and Belspeth rides the move with her, coming through into second. The two of them are neck and neck into the final lap.
Final check: Natural 20. Belspeth's 31 falls one short.
Belspeth rides her the whole way, but Elspeth fends her off through every turn and wins by two tenths of a second. Over the radio, the crew chief:
"I don't know who you are, but I don't care. That was amazing."
"Thanks, bud. You really shouldn't be such a pushover, but you're a great crew chief."
She does a burnout, climbs out, and pulls off the helmet. It's Elspeth. In the stands, the only Denlin fan is his mother.
Elspeth leaves the car — she is already accused of one murder and doesn't need a car theft on top of it — runs past the podium, grabs the champagne, and calls to Belspeth that she was great, and that the police will be coming to talk to her. Belspeth — second place, just outrun by the woman whose name she was given, whose identity she was built to shadow — takes this in.
Then Elspeth keeps running, straight to the police station, for a long conversation that ends with don't worry about it. She tells them about Belspeth too, and that she will need to be un-brainwashed as well.
Notable Character Moments
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Silas's killing blow is pure tactical poetry — walking the ceiling upside down out of reach of every Elspeth in the room, then running across it over the Doctor's head and driving the dagger straight down with "Dark Side of the Moon" as the only announcement.
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Leliana in the hallway is the session's quietest success. No spell needed in the end — just patience, a well-timed illusion from Bru, and the recognition that a frightened child responds to gentleness. "I feel itchy" is the most human thing a simulacrum says all session. Leliana hears it as a person.
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Bru upside-down over the fourth crate is exactly what goblin artificers are for. Tiny size, inverted, extradimensional portal aimed down like a drain. Everyone else contributes violence or deception or persuasion. Bru contributes spatial reasoning that no one else would have reached.
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Elspeth and the simulacrum holding her shoulders and quoting Comfortably Numb — this is the scene that makes the whole orphanage plot matter. The simulacra were conditioned, trained, programmed. But whatever was done to them, the part of them that reaches for human contact is still there, reaching with Pink Floyd lyrics because that's what they were given, and reaching anyway.
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Elspeth's race is the session's final statement. She was stripped of her credentials, framed by her own brother, and replaced with a copy. She wins Denlin's race in Denlin's car in Denlin's name, and then takes off the helmet so everyone knows it.
Themes
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What conditioning leaves behind: The simulacra were built to race and to comply. What actually remains after the Doctor dies is something still reaching toward other people — through Pink Floyd lyrics, through embraces, through asking for help. The orphanage was designed to produce replacements. It produced people who want to be seen.
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The shape of revenge: Zachary gets a punch that hurts Elspeth more than him. Denlin gets arrested before the race. The real satisfaction comes later, on the track, when Elspeth takes everything he built in her name and wins with it. The elaborate evil scheme achieves a mediocre result. The career it was meant to bury wins the race.
Session MVP
Elspeth — For the full morning she put in before the race even started: locking the lab door, handling the detective, visiting her brother, scoping Belspeth's garage, infiltrating Denlin's team, and then winning the race from fifth on the grid. The crew chief is right. She doesn't know who she is. But it was amazing.