Session seven of Whimsy's tabletop campaign ended with no hour left to spend counting: Lucius closed the last few strides to Calpurnia's side, and between them they pieced together, for the first time all morning, a shared read of what had just happened on the customs-dock stretch — one man walking away lighter, a household's man suddenly carrying something and taking it toward the warehouses instead. Calpurnia followed him there and marked a gate before he realized anyone was behind him at all; he turned at the threshold, found her, said nothing, and went through anyway. Rufus shoved through the crowd filling in behind a walking warden and reached the same ground Lucius was standing on — arriving in the same breath as Herennius himself, with no time to say a word to Lucius first — read it at The Feast of Neptune, No Time Left. Session eight picks up a few minutes later, with Herennius finally standing in front of two of the three of them in person. Every roll below ran through the campaign's scripted, seeded dice roller. The post gives each roll's expression, the dice that came up and the total, with its index in the dice log: a reference into a log kept privately.
The scene
The man who carried the dye out of the customs dock, Secundus, is gone — nobody standing on any stretch of ground this morning can swear which way he went. Herennius has arrived where Rufus and Lucius are standing, in the open, with a crowd of market onlookers drawn by his own walk across the square still filling in behind him. He hasn't sent for anyone and hasn't laid a hand on either man. He says what he came to say, plainly, in front of all of them: he wants the dye, or a name he can act on, or the two of them come with him to answer for this morning before whoever hears such things, the moment the feast's business is done. He is done asking twice. Calpurnia isn't with them. She is alone, a short way off, watching a shut gate in the warehouse district — the same gate the household's man carried his parcel through a few minutes ago. Nobody has come back out of it. Somewhere back toward the harbor, faint under the market's own noise, a horn sounds once. To a stranger it would be just another festival sound. To the three of them, seven rounds into this same morning, it is not nothing.
Titus Minucius (pleb) as Rufus Calenus, Appius Severus (censor) as Calpurnia Vetiana, and Marcus Vatia (aedile) as Lucius Naevius each reached for what was in front of them.
Lucius asks Herennius for the gap between the horns
Lucius knows that horn for exactly what it is before anyone near him has finished flinching at the noise — the first call, not the second, and he's never once, in all his years at the temple, known the gap between them to run long. He doesn't step back from Herennius the way a guilty man edges toward open ground. He steps in, close enough that the tremor in the warden's hand is no longer something he has to imagine, and asks him straight: "That horn was the first call. You've stood this ground as long as I've stood the temple steps, you know what the second one means as well as I do, and you know it hasn't sounded yet. I am not asking you to let anything go. I am asking you for the time between those two calls."
Roll: Gratia 9, Lucius's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [6, 5] for a total of 12 (dice-log index 36). Clearing 9 by 3 or more is a full success: clean, no cost attached.
It lands. Herennius doesn't say the words "you're free to go" — he isn't ready to say anything that generous — but something in him visibly sets down the urge to force the next five minutes right this second. He takes half a step back.
Rufus turns the crowd
In almost the same breath, Rufus turns his back on Herennius entirely and raises his voice at the crowd filling in behind the warden instead — dockworkers and stallholders he's hauled crates next to, lent coin to, covered for, since before the sun was up. "Tell this man straight — have either of us done one thing today worth him dragging us off for? You've seen more of my morning than he has. Say so, now, to his face."
Roll: Gratia 8, Rufus's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [6, 4] for a total of 11 (dice-log index 37). Clearing 8 by 3 or more is a full success: clean, no cost attached.
They don't hesitate and they don't mumble it — three or four voices answer at once, loud and specific, aimed straight at Herennius's face in public. Boxed in between Lucius's quiet appeal on one side and a crowd answering loudly on the other, Herennius doesn't detain either man. He says, once, that he still means to see this answered formally once the feast's business allows — and turns and walks back toward his own post. The second horn still hasn't sounded.
Calpurnia tries to reach Herennius
A short way off, Calpurnia doesn't linger at the gate. She's already paid for the last half-second of being seen, and a building is a thing someone else can walk to and look at without taking her word for anything. She fixes the gate's position in her mind and goes, quickly and plainly, back toward the ground where she left Lucius and Rufus, meaning to put what she's found in Herennius's hands before anyone else comes back out through that gate.
Roll: Gratia 9, Calpurnia's modifier 0 — 2d6 came up [2, 2] for a total of 4 (dice-log index 38). Coming in well under 9 is a failure: something goes wrong.
What she finds, by the time she's close enough to try, isn't a quiet man waiting on an answer — it's a crowd thick enough that Rufus's own shout drew half the square into it, and Herennius already turning to walk off through the middle of it rather than standing still for a clerk he's never been introduced to. Chasing a market warden down through a crush this size is exactly the kind of a second, clearer look she's spent seven rounds avoiding. She holds what she has. It goes nowhere this round.
Where the round ends
Herennius is walking back toward his own post, the threat of a formal reckoning still standing but no longer something he means to force this minute. Rufus and Lucius are still together, unmolested, with a crowd that was loud on their side for the first time all morning. Calpurnia is alone again, carrying something none of the other two know she has yet, with no clean way this round to hand it to anyone who could act on it. The dye itself is still unaccounted for, the robes are still undyed, and the second horn hasn't sounded — yet.
Read about the campaign itself at Whimsy's table top campaign, or go back to Session Seven — The Feast of Neptune, No Time Left.