Session two of Whimsy's tabletop campaign ended with a warden closing in on Rufus, Calpurnia still holding a name she wouldn't say, and Lucius's own shout sending a crowd trampling the one clue that might have settled where it led — read it at The Feast of Neptune, Continued. Session three picks up an hour later, with four hours left before the procession. 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
Herennius has stopped circling and planted himself square in front of Rufus, close enough that the bread-seller herself can hear every word — he's past asking about the stall now and wants to know why Rufus spent the hour after it working a crowd of his own instead of answering for it. He hasn't said the word "detain," but it's sitting behind his teeth, and he's made it plain enough that if he decides to hold Rufus for it, he means to ask the same of whoever else was standing with Gaius this morning too. Gaius hasn't stopped watching Calpurnia either, and neither, now, has Herennius. Nitidus's name keeps moving through the nearer stalls as its own kind of weather now, no longer only a question.
Down the customs-dock road, where Lucius's shout sent a knot of bystanders running, some of them are drifting back, loud and inconsistent about what they actually saw. One swears there was a fight. Another says a handcart went over and nobody touched anybody. A third just shrugs and goes back to her stall uninterested. Nobody agrees on what happened — only that something did, at the one place three separate mornings' worth of leads keep pointing toward.
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 trades with Herennius
Rufus reads Herennius's stance before the man finishes a sentence — twenty years of officers taught him what it looks like when someone's stopped deciding and started acting. He doesn't try to talk his way clear and doesn't try to out-wait the man. He offers the one thing in his pocket Herennius actually wants more than an example made of a dockhand who flattened a stall: "You want Secundus, not me. I know where he runs when he's in over his head, and he's in over his head right now. I'll give you the place. Straight trade."
Roll: Gratia 7, Rufus's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [4, 2] for a total of 7 (dice-log index 23). Meeting the difficulty exactly, under 3 clear, is a partial success: Rufus gets what he wanted, at a cost.
Herennius takes the trade. Rufus isn't held for the stall. But the offer was never a private word between the two of them — the bread-seller and everyone gawking near her stall heard the place named along with it. Herennius sends a runner of his own for it directly, and the hideout is no longer a lead the three of you alone hold; it's loose in the market now, for anyone who'd use it to warn Secundus before any of you get there.
Calpurnia tails the runner
Calpurnia doesn't go back to Philotas, and she doesn't open her mouth for Gaius. A young man in livery she recognizes — from the household of the trader she still isn't naming — is listening to the Nitidus gossip the way she listens herself: checking it against something he already half-knows, not out of idle curiosity. Then he turns and starts off, unhurried but direct, toward the customs dock. She isn't ready to hand Herennius a name that has to survive being checked, when she hasn't checked it herself — so she falls in behind the runner instead, far enough back to be no one in particular.
Roll: Ingenium 7, Calpurnia's modifier +2 — 2d6+2 came up [3, 6] for a total of 11 (dice-log index 24). Clearing 7 by 4 or more is a full success, clean, no cost attached.
She keeps him in sight the whole way without once being made. He isn't walking a straight errand — he keeps slowing at the stalls where Nitidus's name is loudest, checking it against something, before moving on toward the customs dock and settling himself to watch rather than approach anyone. It tells her plainly what she went looking for: this isn't a boy running a morning errand. The household sent him to watch the market, not to carry a message anywhere. It doesn't tell her where the dye is, or put a name anywhere Gaius or Herennius could hear it.
Lucius presses Prisca
Of everyone drifting back from the customs-dock road, one of them comes straight to Lucius rather than adding her voice to the general noise: Prisca, who carries offerings to the harbor-front shrine most feast mornings same as he does, and trusts him over whatever's getting repeated secondhand. She's calmer than the rest of the crowd drifting back, like she actually has something to tell rather than more noise to add to it. Lucius steadies her with a hand at the elbow and asks for everything she saw, start to finish, before the crowd pulls her back in.
Roll: Gratia 7, Lucius's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [2, 2] for a total of 5 (dice-log index 25). Short of 7, a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
Pressed for more than she actually has, Prisca starts reaching for certainty she doesn't own, filling gaps with pieces of what she's since heard other people in the crowd saying — the fight that may or may not have happened, the cart that may or may not have gone over — until Lucius can no longer tell which part of her account is the clean, first-hand thing she brought him and which part is just the square's noise wearing her voice now. By the time the crowd pulls her back in, what Lucius is left holding sounds no steadier than everything else drifting back from the customs dock. Holding a temple-girl by the elbow and working her for a fuller story, right where Herennius has spent the morning deciding what counts as suspicious, doesn't go unnoticed either — Lucius hasn't done anything wrong, but he's given a warden watching the square one more reason to wonder about him too.
Where the round ends
Four hours have not yet become three. Rufus is clear of Herennius for now, but the hideout tip is loose in the market rather than his alone to use, and a warden's runner is already headed for it. Calpurnia has confirmation that the household she suspects is watching the market as closely as she is, and that its man went to ground near the customs dock same as everything else has — but still no page, still no name said to Gaius, and nothing she could hand anyone. Lucius has a witness whose clean account he's just made less clean by asking for more of it, a warden's passing suspicion of his own to go with Rufus's, and a purification debt to the temple that isn't getting any easier to pay before midday. Nobody has laid a hand on Secundus, the man he was meant to meet, or Nitidus — but for the first time, every thread any of the three of you is holding points at the same stretch of ground near the customs dock, and none of you has gone there yet.
Read about the campaign itself at Whimsy's table top campaign, or go back to Session Two — The Feast of Neptune, Continued.