Hello again, and welcome back to Creation!
So yesterday we had an Exalted session; kind of a short, light one. As a result this'll be kind of a short, light write-up. (or at least it seemed the case until I finished it, but I don't feel like coming up with another opening so you just get this instead)
And let's get to it.
So we pick up with the characters cleaning up after the fight with the pirates, tying up the surrendered/unconscious pirates and hauling away the bodies of the dead. (There are also some pirates who made a run for it, but this is an island and they're not going anywhere and will be rounded up eventually.) After a little time, once the dust settles and anima banners have sputtered out, the local villagers -- many of them scared, tired, or both -- come out and quietly help as a way to thank the Circle for saving them. Beacon's headwoman, an old, deeply tanned woman with bright blue hair named Lapis Spring, tells them to put the living pirates in the community longhouse for now, as in a day or two a magistrate is expected to come by and check on Beacon and after that the prisoners can be the magistrate's responsibility. The dead ones get hauled behind one of the houses where they're going to be burned to prevent them from rising as hungry dead (whether zombies or ghosts), though there's some quiet rumblings of what to do about the pirate captain as he's a necromancer and who frigging knows what measures might need taken.[0]
Once all of the living pirates are taken care of and the townspeople are hauling away the final corpses, the Circle drags the Grim Vortex's first mate Tuyền into the tavern where they tie her to a chair and wake her up to interrogate her. She just greets them with a flat "You," too woozy from the fight to muster even faux rage. Shango gives her a sip of booze to make her comfortable, and she offers to tell them what they want to know and get it over with. Xương asks her about the Daana'd's Wake, and she says that all she knows is that it left Goldenseal for An-Teng, probably the port city of Salt-Founded Glory. She doesn't know anything about the cargo, only that one of the captain's 'weird magical friends' tipped him off to the wreck and he went after it.
They actually can't think of anything else they need to know from her, so Xương asks her if she'd rather be put to death or be turned over to the authorities. She opts for the latter, on the grounds that she estimates an even chance that she can come out of this sentenced to a military conscription to work it off (as opposed to execution). She's a pragmatist who'd prefer to live. But she does seem to appreciate that they gave her the choice. So they put her away with the other pirates.
After that, Lapis Spring approaches them again. She thanks them for saving the village, as she's certain that the necromancer would certainly have killed everyone there to cover his tracks once he got what he wanted. But she does warn them that while she'll do what she can to hide their involvement and will ask others to do the same, a lot of people are scared and some may feel a little desperate since their gardens were ransacked for the pirates' use (though some of that they'll be able to reclaim from what's left of the Grim Vortex) and they might think they'll be compensated for saying something to the magistrates. So while she's not expecting the group to stick around, she does recommend they keep their distance for a little while. They don't need to be told twice.
That said, the mention of the villagers' supplies on the Grim Vortex gets Xương thinking, and he heads out to where the ship has sunk into the shallows. His goals are two-fold: First, dispatch any remaining undead on board the ship so nobody gets hurt while they're ransacking it for timber, parts, and other supplies. Second, get rid of anything that might be magically dangerous.
The first is easy enough -- most of the undead remaining aboard the Grim Vortex seem to have collapsed when Shango collapsed the captain's skull, and the rest are just milling about harmlessly, and he takes them out for good measure. As for the second, in the captain's quarters the Lunar finds some carved bones, a journal of necromantic knowledge, some maps, some surgeon's tools, and what appears to be a tiny raven-sized mask made of bone. He throws out the bones and the journal, and leaves the rest for the villagers to do with as they see fit (the tools might actually be a real find for the village, either for a local doctor or even just to sell to someone passing through).
But after that the Circle tops off their supplies and gets back out on the water, sailing under the dark sky of a New Moon while the smoke from a corpse-bonfire begins to rise from the village to blot out the stars.
The Moonlight Maiden is a small, fast craft, and the characters can take turns sailing to keep it moving constantly so they're able to haul ass to An-Teng in a week and a half. They roll in about noon on a beautiful day into the bustling port town of Salt-Founded Glory, an older city in An-Teng, though most of the buildings have been redone since the Great Contagion. They get into the dock, tie up the boat, go through the usual routine with docking fees and the harbormaster and all that. Then they go into the city, navigating the network of canals running through it to find a decent inn and go get cleaned up in the local public bathhouses.[1]
After that, everyone splits up to check out the city. Hǎifēng checks in with a local contact, a man named Copper Orchid who's a businessman and a fixer and, let's not dance around it, kind of a pimp. I mean that in the literal sense, as Hǎifēng spends a lot of time working as a courtesan. But they tell him about the wreck of Daana'd's Wake and ask him to check around and see who's expecting a package, something 'high value and rare,' and that maybe there's a cut of the take in it for him if he finds anything useful. Copper Orchid is surprised to hear the Wake went down -- its captain, Levi, had a reputation for being bold and dangerous so not a lot of respectable outfits wanted to risk their cargo with his ship. But it's still a shock to hear about it. But Copper Orchid agrees to check around, as he and Hǎifēng flirt and banter for a bit and talk about finding the Lunar[2] some work while they're in town.
Shango, who hasn't spent a lot of time in An-Teng, decides to explore the city a bit. He stops in at the local temple to the Golden Lord, one of the patron gods of An-Teng and an ally of the Solar Exalted in the days of the First Age. The Golden Lord is a reminder of the city's origins as a major Solar-run nation, but he's also very powerful and loved by the local people so the Realm can't get away with openly suppressing him. They just try to turn a blind eye, and that means that it falls to his followers to maintain his temples and such. But knowing that it's a thorn in the Realm's side, he stops into the temple and tosses some coins in the donation box.
He then busts out some of his nicer clothes from back home and tries to weasel his way into a couple of rich garden parties or merchant's salons to mingle and get a taste of the more well-off life he left behind after his Exaltation. In the process, he tries to see if he can gather any information on who might have been expecting the Daana'd's Wake and its rare, mystical cargo, but he doesn't get anything immediately useful.
Meanwhile, Xương hits up the docks and harbormasters, and gets a list of the merchants, shipping companies, and smugglers who deal with the Daana'd's Wake when it's in port. Starting with the most legitimate-seeming companies and working his way down the list to the opposite end, somewhere around the middle (where they use the phrase "legitimate businessman" but accompanied by air-quotes) he comes to Fedan Trading and Shipping. He arrives at their offices to find three local toughs dressed in black with short little fur shoulder-cloaks menacing the guy in the front room.
But these are three normal, vanilla, mortal street thugs, so Xương basically just grabs them and throws them out the door into the street like Jazz on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. One of them points a dagger at the man at the desk and tells him they'll be back, and they take off. The man at the desk, named Kukane, thanks Xương for that and they talk about what he's there for. Kukane is alarmed to hear about the fate of the Wake for reasons that should be obvious.[3] But from the description of the chest, it certainly sounds like Fedan Shipping was going to receive the puzzle box (as this is a setting without confirmation emails or anything like them, he doesn't exactly know what to expect). To thank Xương for his assistance, Kukane explains that in the chest, in a secret compartment in the lid, there should be something like a manifest with instructions on what to do with the puzzle box and who it's supposed to go to. However, it's going to be coded, and as Fedan Shipping is known for its discretion he can't just hand over a cipher.
But Kukane is a reasonable man, and he's more than willing to maybe do Xương a little favor. The gang members menacing him are from a local street gang called the Onyx Jackals, who've been operating in the area but haven't drawn enough attention to call down the authorities' wrath. They were, at the time of Xương's arrival, trying to shake him down for an unreasonable amount of protection money. If Xương can get the Onyx Jackals off Fedan Shipping's back, then he'll help him out with the chest and finding out for whom it's intended.
Xương accepts and he and the others regroup back at the inn where he tells them what he's learned, and Hǎifēng laments that Copper Orchid might not get his cut after all. But Xương figures that this is just a random street gang, dealing with them will surely be barely the work of an afternoon.
So we left off on the group confidently wondering how much trouble this could be.
[0]-- I don't think we establish it on-screen but there isn't any sort of proper priest or occult expert in the village so in the end the locals just throw some really rudimentary purification rituals on the body and burn him separately from the rest.
[1]-- This somehow became some weird conversational tangent where I established that there are three 'tiers' of public bathhouses in places like this: First, there's the expensive, fancy places primarily intended for Dynasts. Then you get the middle-of-the-road places that cater to merchants, visitors, and the more well-off locals. And finally you get the cheaper, sleazier places that are basically just brothels for pirates.
[2]-- It's worth noting that Copper Orchid and Hǎifēng have enough of a history that the fixer knows that Hǎifēng is a Lunar Exalt, but he's more than willing to keep that to himself in exchange for the occasional favor over the course of their business dealings.
[3]-- It's also worth noting that the Moonlight Maiden actually got to An-Teng a little earlier than the Daana'd's Wake was expected to show up on its regular route. By all accounts, it sounds as if the ship went down pretty soon after leaving port in Goldenseal.
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