My Cousin Barry — Aldenheim

Day: 52

Summary

Arriving in Gildwater without Zero Infinity, the party quickly found a new ally in Spore and an immediate problem in the form of Cousin Barry's 500-gold wanted poster. Leads from the Pilot Lantern, the Ninth Spoke, Sir Kaelin, and an encounter with Hatter of Hearthmere pushed them toward the Mooring House and then the nearby stockade where Barry was being held. A deeply unconvincing disguise-based bluff somehow revealed the right location, and the night turned violent in a frozen cellar full of dead blue cloaks, escaped frost creatures, and repeated blasts of killing cold. The party won the rescue with faerie fire, Shelly's cannon, and Drok's finishing reach, only for Barry to insist publicly on his innocence and then privately confess the theft to Leo. By session's end Barry was hidden safely at the Hatter's shop, the party had rooms at the inn, and Leo was once again left introducing the whole mess in the usual way: My Cousin Barry.

Players

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Timeline

The party came ashore in Gildwater to discover that Zero Infinity was gone. Whatever had called to him during the descent through the locks had taken him off Jenny Be Good and into the riverside woods before morning, leaving Leo and Shelly to step into the harbor without their strange mechanical companion. On the dock they found Spore, a young wanderer with a mushroom-grown staff, a habit of saying strange things with total sincerity, and exactly the kind of harmless-seeming weirdness that gets adopted by adventurers almost immediately. The introduction was full of the sort of awkward conversational circling that only made the fit feel more correct. Within minutes the three were moving together through the harbor as if this had been the plan.

Their first stop was the Pilot Lantern, where the city posted the day’s practical truths without any concern for who might be embarrassed by them. There they found the thing that set the entire session in motion: a wanted poster for Cousin Barry, offering 500 gold for his return. Leo tore it down, confirmed for the others that yes, this deeply unfortunate clown was in fact his cousin, and then had to endure the obvious follow-up questions about how a face painter could possibly be worth that much money. The answers were not reassuring. Barry painted children’s faces, Leo made balloon animals, and everyone present found it easy to believe that Barry might have done something stupid enough to turn a birthday party into a criminal matter. Before they left the board, the party had already begun joking about the obvious solution: turn Barry in, collect the money, and then see what happened next.

From the Pilot Lantern they went to the Ninth Spoke, partly because Leo suspected Barry might be stupid enough to hide somewhere obvious and partly because the group wanted information with a side of mead. Sona Bell, the inn’s owner, gave them the useful part of the story. The Mooring Guild was hunting Barry, but only as collectors, not as the source of the grievance. The bounty itself came from Hearthmere, where jewelry had gone missing at a noble child’s birthday party while Barry was working there. A local drunkard added volume, confusion, and very little clarity, at one point getting so tangled in the idea of “Cousin Barry” that he briefly seemed to believe he might be the cousin himself. Even so, the conversation did its work. The Guild had taken an interest. Blue cloaks had been seen in good spirits the day before. And the trail now pointed firmly toward the Mooring House.

Only after that did Sir Kaelin return Drok to the party. To everyone but Drok, it read almost like an ordinary reunion in the street. For Drok alone, the truth was stranger: Kaelin had taken him from High Alden to Gildwater by way of the Marching Maps of Aldenheim, with no road and no visible effort worthy of the power involved. Once the party was together again, Kaelin gave Leo the blunt version of the news he had already started to piece together for himself: Barry was in trouble. He offered little else and vanished out of the conversation with the same maddening economy he always seemed to prefer.

Leo then tried to do the sensible thing and scout the Mooring House quietly. He put on a wig and glasses, affected the sort of confidence that only barely survives first contact with scrutiny, and walked the route while the others hung back. Along the way, Spore shared mushrooms from his staff, which did not make anyone more normal. Leo got his look inside the Mooring House and found a frustratingly ordinary front room: ledgers, captains, blue cloaks, traffic, business, and no sign of Barry. What he found outside instead was Hatter of Hearthmere, who attached himself to Leo’s bag and his general existence with the brisk certainty of a man who considers curiosity a profession. By the time the rest of the group came up, what had begun as reconnaissance had become a detour into hats, trades, demonstrations, and the Hatter’s refusal to behave like an ordinary passerby.

That detour turned into one of the session’s defining absurdities. Leo tried bargaining with the Hatter for something magical and discovered that the Hatter was perfectly happy to waste everyone’s time doing it beautifully. Billowing cloaks became billowing hats. Discussions of craft turned into offhand revelations about his greatest work. And when Leo returned to the group, they finally noticed that he still had Hat of Disguise in his bag from Session 5. From there the party did what the party was always going to do: they tested it immediately and irresponsibly. In quick succession the hat turned one wearer into something balloon-like, another into a shadow, and another into effects so unstable they only encouraged further experimentation. By the time Drok had been suggested as a wall, a watchman, and finally something close enough to a blue-cloaked Guild man to count as progress, the party had convinced itself that this was more than enough preparation for infiltration.

What followed at the Mooring House was one of the session’s great failures and one of its most useful. Leo and Drok went back posing as Guild men and walked into the front room with sheer momentum, improvised authority, and almost no shared story. Drok’s borrowed appearance did not hold with any confidence. Leo’s answers to the simplest follow-up questions about where they were from, which boat they had arrived on, and who exactly had sent them got worse every time he opened his mouth. The two projected all the authority of men who had committed to a bluff before agreeing on the details. The Guild men were not fooled for long, but the attempt still shook loose the one fact that mattered: Barry was being held in the stockade. The pair withdrew under suspicion, picked up a tail, and only escaped it by breaking line of sight and leaning once again on the hat’s deeply unreliable magic until Drok was less a convincing person than a giant walking shadow no one could sensibly explain.

Back at the Hatter’s shop, the rest of the session briefly became a chamber play about trust, secrecy, and terrible planning. Spore was certain the Hatter was lying about the back room containing “nothing of note.” The Hatter, offended and amused in equal measure, finally answered that accusation by stepping into the back and returning almost immediately with Sir Kaelin, thereby proving that the back room contained at least one very inconveniently notable person. There Kaelin clarified the thing the party most needed to understand: he was not trying to protect Barry because Barry was innocent or valuable in his own right. He had warned them because Barry mattered to Leo. The Hatter then made clear that if they brought Barry back, the shop would serve as sanctuary. What came next was a long, gloriously unsteady planning session about how to free Barry. Options included a homunculus, a cannon, more disguises, using Spore as a fake prisoner, sneaking, blowing holes in doors, and combinations of all of the above. Shelly eventually committed to making a walking cannon, which immediately became the plan’s most comprehensible feature while still sounding completely absurd whenever anyone repeated it aloud.

The approach to the stockade was almost as disorganized as the planning. The party confirmed the front room looked empty and the real trouble lay below. Once they went in, that impression held. Upstairs showed only interrupted work, a chair pushed back too fast, a blue-trimmed cloak on a peg, and cold rising from the stairwell. Spore stayed above trying to look official in the least official way possible while the others made their way down. Below, the truth of the place revealed itself all at once. Barry was alive and locked in a cell, frightened but physically fine. Across from him were dead blue-cloaked men in another cell, which explained the emptiness above better than any ledger could have. Between the two waited the real threat: frost goblins and ice mephits loose in the corridor and already making serious progress toward turning the lockup into their own frozen den.

The cellar fight was cramped, cold, and full of the exact sort of bad spacing that makes simple heroics impossible. One of the first rushes into the corridor dropped a mephit quickly, but that only opened the way for more cold things to pour pressure onto the party. The goblins used bars, corners, and bowshots to make every approach awkward. The mephits kept filling the passage with frost breath. Barry shouted from behind his door and contributed almost nothing except urgency. Shelly’s walking cannon proved real enough to matter and strange enough to remain funny even in the middle of danger. Leo’s magic helped swing the fight, and faerie fire in particular gave the party the edge they needed against enemies that were otherwise too slippery and too well placed. Spore pushed into the close quarters with his staff, and Drok, finally free of the need to pretend to be anyone else, turned his reach and blades to much better use than any disguise had allowed. Even the final moments remained chaotic enough that Barry was nearly as endangered by friendly magic as by the creatures attacking his cell, but the party still came out ahead. The mephits kept blasting cold. Shelly kept advancing. And Drok ended up delivering the finishing blows that broke the cellar fight for good.

Once Barry was out, the mood changed from combat to damage control. Publicly, Barry stayed frightened, defensive, and adamant that he had done nothing wrong. Privately, once he and Leo had a moment apart, the truth came out with far less drama: yes, he had stolen the jewelry, and Leo had expected as much. The party brought him back to the Hatter’s shop, where the Hatter made good on his offer of sanctuary and then paid for the party’s rooms at the inn for the night. Kaelin, for his part, had made clear that this had never been about Barry’s innocence. It had been about Leo. By the time the session wound down, Barry was safe, Zero Infinity was still missing, and Leo was already back to introducing the entire exhausting problem in the old familiar way: my cousin Barry.

People Met

Spore - a strange young wanderer with a mushroom-grown staff, sincere manners, and the exact sort of energy that makes joining a party seem easier than explaining yourself
Sona Bell - practical owner of the Ninth Spoke, willing to share what she knew about Barry's bounty and the Mooring Guild so long as the conversation stayed at least loosely within the bounds of ordinary commerce
The local drunkard - heavily soaked in mead at the Ninth Spoke and not especially reliable, but still part of the chain of Barry-talk that kept the party moving in the right direction
Sir Kaelin - returned Drok to the party, warned Leo about Barry, and later clarified that his concern was not Barry's innocence but Barry's importance to Leo
Hatter of Hearthmere - impossible to meet casually, impossible to ignore once met, and willing by session's end to hide Barry in his shop and pay for the party's rooms
The blue-cloaked Mooring Guild men - harbor toughs who saw through Leo and Drok's bluff well enough to become suspicious, but not before giving away where Barry was being held

Items Found

No major new lasting loot - the session's most important object was Hat of Disguise, already picked up on the road to Gildwater and only truly noticed, tested, and put to use here during the Mooring House bluff

Unanswered Questions

Where did Zero Infinity go after leaving Jenny Be Good near the locks, and what exactly called him into the woods strongly enough to make him jump ship?
Why were Frost Goblins and Ice Mephits loose in Barry's stockade cellar at all, and what had happened there before the party arrived?
If Barry really did steal the jewelry, why did a simple birthday-party theft end with dead blue cloaks, frost creatures, and a hidden lockup gone bad?
How deep into Gildwater's business does the Mooring Guild actually reach, and what else are they moving through the harbor besides wanted fools and ordinary cargo?

Notes

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