Session thirty-five of Whimsy's tabletop campaign closed with three failed rolls of its own. Rufus Calenus didn't talk this time: he put himself bodily between the gate and the hands from Vennonia Phoebe's crowd pressed flat against it, and the push of it landed wrong both ways at once — it drove one already-pressed hand hard into the wood instead of clearing it, and a seam low on the gate's left leaf gave 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, and nobody standing close enough to see whose weight did it mistook it for the gate failing on its own. In the clerk of record's own office, an outside scribe told Calpurnia Vetiana that the hand that signed the chit isn't hers — but that it's a trained one, the kind that keeps somebody's own records for a living. When she asked to see it with her own eyes, the clerk took it back from the scribe's fingers before it could cross the desk to her, and said nothing about why: a fourth mark in the room, beside the praenomen, the blocked question, and the asking that became one more thing to weigh. At the temple steps, Tertia reappeared in the doorway that swallowed her, and Lucius Naevius turned to the offerings count rather than read anything into it — and the count is what failed him: three tallies, three different numbers, no clean answer for what the morning cost the temple. Read about it at The Feast of Neptune, The Gate Answers. Session thirty-six picks up minutes later.
The scene
The crack hasn't gone unheard on the other side of the gate. A voice comes through the wood — not opening it, not even the gap it gave the household runner five rounds ago — calling for the warden by name: the household wants Herennius, and wants him to see what's been done to its gate, and by whom. At the post, Herennius hears it, and starts toward the gate himself, the two office's men and the watcher a few steps behind him.
In the clerk of record's own office, his own man is back from the post and reports, plainly, in front of Calpurnia: the warden says his formal notice carries nothing beyond the household's own bare word. The clerk hears it without comment. Then he does the first thing he's done with the chit since taking it back: he lays the chit down on his desk beside the manifest — the one with the unexplained mark beside Calpurnia's own signature — the two pages side by side, and looks from one to the other. He hasn't said what he sees.
At the temple steps, Tertia comes the rest of the way out of the doorway and onto the top step, a wax tablet held against her chest. She speaks for the first time since Lucius asked her, three rounds ago, whether she was leaving, and it's an answer to exactly that, in her own time and no one else's: "I wasn't leaving." Then she waits.
The warden who once refused to send Rufus to this gate is walking toward it himself now — to a crack in the wood, a crowd that watched whose weight made it, and a household calling out from behind the gate to tell its own side first.
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 comes off the gate, and it reads as leaving
Rufus feels the crack through his coat and the voice through the wood, and he knows exactly what that voice is doing, "because he's done it himself all morning: getting its account to the man first." He doesn't have a better way to say it than plain. He never has. "And the one thing worse than saying it plain one more time is letting a shut door say it for him." So he comes off the wood, hands open and loose where everyone can see them, to meet Herennius halfway before the warden can reach the gate. Walking off the one spot he's held all morning, in front of a crowd that could read it as running, is a test of nerve before it's anything else.
Roll: Firmitas 13, Rufus's modifier -1 — 2d6-1 came up [5, 5] for a total of 9 (dice-log index 119). Coming in under 13 by four is a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
The hands stay open the whole way. It's the pace that goes. The first step off the wood becomes a long stride, then something near a trot toward the warden, his back to a cracked seam and a voice still calling about it. From inside the crowd it looks like a big man getting clear of the thing he just broke before anyone can stand him next to it. Somebody near the front says so out loud — "There he goes" — and nobody contradicts it. The crowd itself holds where it is, watching the warden come. Nobody follows Rufus, and nobody steps up to the gap he left at the wood.
Rufus says it to Herennius's face, and the gate says it with him
He reaches Herennius halfway, the two office's men and the watcher a step behind, and says it the only way he has: "That was me. My weight, my back, the left leaf, low down. I was trying to get their hands off it, and I got one shoved into it instead and the seam went. I'm not walking away from it and I'm not dressing it up. You'll hear their side through that door in a breath, so hear mine first, to your face, same as I've given you everything else today."
Roll: Gratia 13, Rufus's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [3, 3] for a total of 7 (dice-log index 120). Coming in under 13 by six — the widest miss of the round — is a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
The voice behind the gate doesn't wait a breath. While Rufus is still talking it calls again, louder, through the wood: it was the big one, his weight against the gate. So Herennius hears both at once, and they say the same thing. Rufus's account doesn't land first. It lands as a second voice agreeing with the household's. Herennius hears him out to the end without interrupting. Then he speaks, not to Rufus but to the watcher: "Write down that he said so." The watcher takes out his tablet a third time and writes it, in front of Rufus.
Then, quieter, with a jerk of his chin toward the seam, Rufus adds something for the warden alone. Nothing in Herennius's face says what he made of it. He walks past Rufus to the gate and stands at the cracked leaf, with the voice on the other side of the wood. He hasn't answered it yet.
Calpurnia reads without asking, and the reading is seen
Calpurnia doesn't ask. She has asked to see a page four times in this building today, "and every time the asking turned into the thing he weighed instead of the page itself." So she offers nothing this time. But he has laid the two pages out himself, side by side, in plain view, "and no rule in this office or any other says a clerk must close her eyes because the ink is upside down." She has read upside down across a counter for years. Does the chit's trained hand lift its stylus the way that small mark beside her signature lifts? "She knows that manifest better than he does. She wrote most of it." She keeps her hands folded and her face still, and reads what's on the desk.
Roll: Ingenium 13, Calpurnia's modifier +2 — 2d6+2 came up [3, 5] for a total of 10 (dice-log index 121). Coming in under 13 by three is a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
The distance beats her, not the inversion. The chit's signature is a full line of a trained hand. The mark beside her own signature is a few small strokes at the far edge of the page from where she stands. Upside down, she can follow the chit's stroke well enough. She can't get enough of the mark to set against it.
And the clerk sees where her eyes are. He doesn't say a word, and he doesn't take the pages away. He lays his palm flat over the chit and leaves it there, his own eyes still on the two pages. His man sees it, and so does the outside scribe. Nobody in the room needs it explained: she asked for nothing this time, and her looking was weighed anyway. That makes a fifth mark in the room, beside the praenomen, the blocked question, the asking, and the chit taken back from the scribe's fingers.
Lucius answers her
Lucius lets the three tallies go still in his hands. He doesn't look at the tablet against her chest, and he doesn't try to read what "I wasn't leaving" means. "He's spent the whole morning finding out what it costs when he tells her what her words or her silences mean before she has." But she answered the question he asked, and now she's waiting, and holding his tongue a second time would leave her answer hanging. So he turns to face the top step, the count lowered to his side.
Roll: Gratia 10, Lucius's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [5, 4] for a total of 10 (dice-log index 122). Meeting 10 exactly, by less than 3, is a partial success: he gets what he wanted, at a cost named on the spot.
What he says to her, he says low enough that it's only hers, and it stays between the two of them. Anyone watching from the foot of the steps would have seen him speak briefly, without stepping up toward her or reaching for her, and then stop. They'd have seen her nod once, and then say something short back to him, just as low. She doesn't come down, and she doesn't go back in. She stays on the top step with the tablet still held against her chest.
Where the round ends
Rufus has come off the gate and told the warden to his face that the crack was his weight. His nerve took him there too fast, and the crowd called it leaving. The household's voice reached Herennius in the same breath and said the same thing, and the warden's only answer was to have the watcher write down that Rufus said so. Herennius is at the gate now, and the voice is still on the other side of it.
Calpurnia is still across the desk from the clerk of record. She read the two pages upside down without a word, couldn't get enough of the mark to set against the chit, and watched the clerk lay his hand over it. He has said nothing, about the pages or about her.
At the temple steps, Lucius answered Tertia, and she answered him back. She is still on the top step, the tablet against her chest.
Read about the campaign itself at Whimsy's table top campaign, or go back to Session Thirty-Five — The Feast of Neptune, The Gate Answers.