Session twenty-one of Whimsy's tabletop campaign closed with all three players' own attempts landing short of what they meant. Calpurnia Vetiana tried to give the market warden Herennius the one plain fact she'd still withheld, and it came out tangled with everything else sitting between them — three things in one breath rather than the clean answer he'd asked for twice. Herennius believed her, but didn't credit it as closing the question, and on his own authority ordered the household's name added to the formal notice he'd filed four sessions earlier. Rufus Calenus held himself still and silent through it, the way Herennius had bound him to — and gave himself away anyway, a half-breath's shift of weight caught and named aloud in front of everyone at the post. Lucius Naevius told two pressing acolytes the whole shape of what's passed between him and the acolyte Tertia these last several sessions, owning it outright — and still wouldn't say what the secret itself was, leaving them with a confirmed gap instead of an answer, and a plain statement that they'd take it to the priestess herself. Read about it at The Feast of Neptune, Not an Answer. Session twenty-two picks up minutes later.
The scene
Herennius is still at his own post, Rufus still standing exactly where he was told to stand, Calpurnia still close enough to be spoken to. The runner he sent off with the amended notice comes back through the crowd and reports to him directly: the market office's clerk of record has entered it, and sent back a question of his own — does the warden mean to act on the notice himself today, while the gate is still being watched, or let it wait for the office's own ordinary pace? Herennius hasn't answered that yet. He's turning it over in front of everyone close enough to hear him do it, sizing up, out loud, who he'd actually have to send if he decided to act now, with Gaius and the first runner already spent and the dockhand not his to order.
Down past the customs stacks, the gate hasn't opened again. The crowd in front of it has grown past what a single dockhand's report could carry back on its own. Vennonia Phoebe is still at the center of it, still watching a door that has answered her crowd exactly once, and badly.
At the temple steps, Lucius is still beside Tertia. The acolyte who named the priestess as where she'd take this makes good on it: she and the second acolyte go, leaving Lucius and Tertia standing there — except word comes back faster than either of them expected. The priestess doesn't simply hear the two acolytes out and send them away again. She sends word of her own: she wants Tertia and Lucius both brought to her, now, to answer for themselves. Neither has gone yet.
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 asks for the job, and gets heard out instead of waved off
Rufus doesn't wait for Herennius to finish working it out on his own. "You're standing there running out of hands," he says. "Gaius is spent. Your runner's spent. The dockhand's not yours to send and you know it. I'm not asking you to forget what you just caught me doing — you caught it, it happened, I'm not going to stand here and tell you it didn't. I'm telling you what's true regardless of that: you need a man, and I'm standing right here already, and I'm not going anywhere you didn't put me. Send me, with whoever you want watching me do it. That's not me asking for anything. That's just what I'm for."
Roll: Gratia 12, Rufus's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [6, 2] for a total of 9 (dice-log index 78). Coming in under 12 is a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
Herennius hears the whole thing through without cutting him off, which reads, to Calpurnia and the dockhand both, like he's actually weighing it. Then he answers it as plainly as it was asked: "You're not wrong about the hands. You're also the hand I watched come up onto its toes five minutes ago like it'd already decided to move before I said so. I'm not sending the one man I've spent all morning learning not to trust, the one morning it would cost me most to be wrong about him." He goes back to turning over who's left to send. Whoever that turns out to be, it still isn't Rufus.
Calpurnia spends the one thing bigger than the note
"One more thing, since you're weighing whether to send anyone at all," she tells Herennius, not raising her voice to match anything around them. "The man your dockhand described at that gate — I think I've seen him there before, at that same door, a good while back. I'm not telling you I'm sure. I'm telling you because if you're deciding whether today's worth a man's time, that's worth more in your hand than out of my mouth, wrong or not."
Roll: Gratia 11, Calpurnia's modifier 0 — 2d6+0 came up [1, 5] for a total of 6 (dice-log index 79). Coming in well under 11 is a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
Herennius doesn't call her a liar, and doesn't dismiss the man she describes. What he fixes on is the gap. "A good while back," she said — he does the sum himself, out loud, in front of Rufus and the dockhand both: fifteen sessions, said like a number he's already keeping a column for, not a surprise. "You've been holding a face at that gate since before I ever had a name for the household behind it, and you're handing it to me now — the same morning as the office note, the same morning as everything else I've had to find out instead of being told." He doesn't say he won't act on it, and he doesn't say he will. He turns back to Gaius and the runner, no further along than he was a minute before.
Lucius tries to reach her first, and arrives a beat too late
"Tertia," Lucius says gently. "Don't wait on what they decide to do with this. I'm going to her now, ahead of whoever comes to collect us, and I'm going to tell her everything — not the shape of it, the way I gave the two of them, but all of it, start to finish, including the name I asked you to carry for me and shouldn't have made you carry alone this long." He doesn't ask her to come with him. He climbs the same steps he's climbed and come down three times already today, meaning to give the priestess the whole of it before anyone else's version reaches her.
Roll: Gratia 12, Lucius's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [3, 5] for a total of 9 (dice-log index 80). Coming in under 12 is a failure: something goes wrong, and the scene complicates.
He doesn't make it ahead. The two acolytes are already standing in front of the priestess by the time he and Tertia reach her — done pressing, having already laid out everything they'd pieced together on their own. He tells her anyway, exactly as he meant to, plainly and fully, start to finish — and she listens through the whole of it without interrupting him. What she says when he's finished isn't a rebuke and isn't forgiveness: "You've told me the same thing they already did. I'm still deciding whether a true account is the same thing as a first one, when it arrives after someone else's." She doesn't send him away, and she doesn't say what she means to do next. Tertia, still beside him, hasn't said a word to her at all — nobody's asked her to yet.
Where the round ends
Herennius is still at his own post, still undecided. Two separate attempts to move him this round left him no further forward than he was when it opened: no man he trusts enough to send, and no account of the man at the gate solid enough to act on. The market office's own question still sits in front of him, unanswered. Rufus stands exactly where he's stood all morning, now plainly refused rather than merely unaddressed. Calpurnia has spent the one thing bigger than the filing-office note and gotten much the same read on it that she got on the note itself.
Nobody reached the gate or Vennonia this round. The crowd there keeps growing past what it was when the round opened, and nothing behind the gate answers for any of it.
At the temple steps, the two acolytes reached the priestess first, and Lucius's own attempt to get ahead of her summons landed a beat behind them instead. The priestess has not said what she means to do with either account, and Tertia has still not spoken to her at all.
Read about the campaign itself at Whimsy's table top campaign, or go back to Session Twenty-One — The Feast of Neptune, Not an Answer.