Session thirty-four of Whimsy's tabletop campaign closed with three failed rolls of its own. Rufus Calenus told Vennonia Phoebe's crowd the plain truth — that he'd put his own hands on the gate himself and gotten nothing from it — meaning the plainness of it to disarm her accusation, and it did the opposite: a couple of people peeled off from the crowd's own edge and started toward the gate itself, not toward him. Calpurnia Vetiana pressed the clerk of record to say plainly what he expected his own man's question to Herennius to show him; he wouldn't say, and told her instead, evenly, that a woman who needs to know what he's already decided before he's decided it is telling him something about herself whether she means to or not. At the temple steps, Lucius Naevius meant to let Tertia go cleanly, and the stillness cost him anyway: his hand found its way back to the strap of the offerings basket without his say-so, and a sound that might have become her name never made it past his own teeth. Read about it at The Feast of Neptune, Taken Wrong. Session thirty-five picks up minutes later.
The scene
The few people who peeled off from Vennonia's own crowd haven't stopped at the gate's edge. Hands are on it now — not forcing, not yet, just pressed flat against the wood and testing it the way Rufus's own hands tested it an hour ago — and more of the crowd is drifting that way to watch rather than staying fixed on Rufus himself. Vennonia hasn't called any of them back.
At the post, Herennius finally answers the clerk of record's own man, in front of the watcher and both office's men: the formal notice he filed carries nothing beyond the household's own bare word — no witness, no document, nothing gathered since that reaches any further than the name already sitting on the page. The watcher takes out his tablet a second time.
In the clerk of record's own office, the outside scribe sent for three rounds ago arrives in person and delivers his verdict on the chit, with Calpurnia standing right there to hear it: the hand that signed it out isn't hers — a stroke and a weight she doesn't make, the scribe says plainly — but it isn't a stranger's clumsy hand either. It's a trained one, the kind that keeps somebody's own records for a living, not a dockhand's scrawl borrowed for an afternoon. The clerk hasn't said yet what he makes of it.
At the temple steps, the doorway that swallowed Tertia a few minutes ago gives her back, at least this far: she's standing in it again, visible, neither stepping down onto the steps nor retreating back into the dark behind her.
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.
Rufus puts himself in the gap, and the gate answers before anyone else does
Rufus doesn't talk this time. He's tried plain words on this exact crowd once already today and watched them read backward — confirmation instead of denial — so he goes for the gap instead: bodily between the hands pressed flat on the wood and the wood itself, "back to the gate, facing the crowd instead of the door," and plants his boots.
Roll: Vis 14, Rufus's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [1, 3] for a total of 5 (dice-log index 116). Coming in under 14 by nine — the widest miss of the round — is a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
The hands already on the gate aren't gathered in one place a single body can cover by stepping into the middle of them, and getting his own back against the wood means shouldering past two or three people already touching it. The push of that lands wrong both ways at once: it drives one already-pressed hand hard into the wood instead of clearing it, and a seam low on the gate's left leaf gives with a crack loud enough to carry past the crowd's own edge — not open, but the first sound this gate has made answering contact all morning. Nobody standing close enough to see whose weight did it mistakes it for the gate failing on its own. "That's enough," Rufus says, and "Whatever's back there, it isn't yours to open with your hands either. Get clear of the door." True words, from a man who, for the second time today, has just put his own hands and weight on the one thing this crowd already suspects him of reaching for.
Calpurnia asks to read the hand herself, and the asking lands in an old groove
Calpurnia doesn't thank the scribe for the first half of what he's said. What catches her is the second half — a trained hand, the kind that keeps somebody's own accounts for a living — and she isn't going to take that secondhand when she could read it herself. "You've told me what it isn't," she says to the scribe, and then, before the clerk can decide on his own what to do with the rest of it: "Let me see it. Not to doubt you — to do what you just did, with my own eyes, the way I've asked to do with every other page that's touched my name today. If it's a trained hand, I may know it faster than either of you can guess at it from across a desk."
Roll: Ingenium 11, Calpurnia's modifier +2 — 2d6+2 came up [5, 3] for a total of 10 (dice-log index 117). Coming in under 11 by one is a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
The chit never reaches her hand. The clerk is the one who moves, taking it back from the scribe's own fingers before it can cross the desk toward her, and says nothing about why. Nobody in the room needs it explained twice: session thirty-one already taught this exact office what an offer to examine a hand herself sounds like coming from her, and asking to see one a second time, however much less she's asking for this time, lands in the same groove rather than a fresh one. A fourth mark now sits in the room, beside the praenomen, the blocked question, and the asking that became one more thing to weigh at round thirty-four — and this one found her despite her trying, for once, to ask for less than she wanted.
Lucius turns to the count, and the count won't close either
Lucius doesn't let the doorway decide anything for him. She moved back into view on her own, without him doing anything to bring her there, so he doesn't go to her and doesn't call out either. He sets to the offerings count instead, half-turned from the doorway, "not pointedly, not as a message of its own, just because the work is actually there and actually his."
Roll: Ingenium 11, Lucius's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [5, 3] for a total of 9 (dice-log index 118). Coming in under 11 by two is a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
It's the count itself that fails him, not the restraint. Something went over out of the basket at round twenty-nine, clattering down the temple steps, and round thirty-one's own sorting put the pieces back in order without ever settling what, if anything, didn't survive the fall. No amount of careful counting now resolves that. He runs the same stack through his hands three times and gets three numbers that don't agree with each other, let alone with what the temple's own record will expect back from him.
Where the round ends
Rufus is still at the gate, having put his own weight into the gap between the pressing hands and the wood — and watched the gate answer for the first time all morning with a cracked seam rather than an open door. Nothing this round decides whether that crack travels further, or whether the crowd presses harder now that it has.
Calpurnia is still in the clerk of record's own office, having asked to read the scribe's verdict with her own eyes and watched the clerk take it back out of reach before it crossed the desk to her. She still doesn't know what he makes of being handed a clean answer on the one question that was his to doubt her on.
At the temple steps, Lucius turned to the offerings count rather than read anything into Tertia's reappearance, and the count is what failed him — three tallies, three different numbers, no clean answer for what the morning cost the temple. Tertia is still in the doorway, neither coming the rest of the way out nor retreating.
Read about the campaign itself at Whimsy's table top campaign, or go back to Session Thirty-Four — The Feast of Neptune, Taken Wrong.