Session one of Whimsy's tabletop campaign ended with the dye still missing, a bread stall in pieces, and three different leads scattered across the dawn market in Puteoli — read it at The Feast of Neptune. Session two picks up in the same square, seconds later. 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 dust from the bread stall hasn't settled, and neither has the market. A market warden, Herennius, is shouldering through the gawkers toward the wreckage, asking in a voice meant to carry who's responsible for a stall going over two hours before the Feast's own procession passes this exact spot — he hasn't decided yet whether this is a joke he can wave off or a formal matter he has to write down. Secundus's own words didn't stay inside the three of you either: half the stallholders near enough to hear him crack caught the name Nitidus, and it's already doing the rounds of the nearer stalls as a question. Gaius hasn't moved from where he was standing, still watching Calpurnia the way a man watches someone who started a sentence and didn't finish it. By most reckonings there are five hours left before the procession forms — one less than there was.
Titus Minucius (pleb) as Rufus Calenus, Appius Severus (censor) as Calpurnia Vetiana, and Marcus Vatia (aedile) as Lucius Naevius each went after their own lead.
Rufus works the tavern crowd
Rufus sees Herennius coming before Herennius sees him, and every instinct from twenty years of standing in the wrong line at the wrong time tells him not to be the first face that warden finds. He angles off through the stalls he just helped knock over — "Bread-seller'll have her coin, I'm good for it, ask anyone!" — and heads for the dockside tavern instead, meaning to lean on men who owe him the kind of favor that doesn't need coin: who's seen Secundus this week, and where does a man like that hole up when he owes everybody.
Roll: Gratia 7, Rufus's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [1, 5] for a total of 7 (dice-log index 19). Meeting the difficulty exactly, under 3 clear, is a partial success: Rufus gets what he wanted, at a cost.
The tavern crowd talks. He walks away with the debt and the Nitidus connection confirmed in more detail, and the name of a place Secundus goes to ground when a creditor gets close — not a sighting of him this morning, and not where he is right now. The detour has a price of its own: more than one face in that tavern watched him walk straight past a warden's open question instead of answering it, which is exactly the kind of thing that gets back to Herennius before Rufus does.
Calpurnia reaches for Philotas
Calpurnia doesn't answer Gaius. She holds his look a moment — long enough that it isn't rude, short enough that it isn't a promise — and lets it go unanswered a little longer. A name said now, in front of a warden deciding whether to write this morning down, isn't a name anymore; it's a record, and she doesn't put her mark on a record she hasn't checked. Instead she drifts across the square to time her arrival at the fish stalls with Philotas's own — a clerk in the household of the trader she still isn't naming, who owes her a debt from a letter she once rewrote clean before his master ever saw the mess he'd made of it. "I need to see what's crossed your table this week," she tells him. "Not a copy. Not a telling. The page."
Roll: Ingenium 8, Calpurnia's modifier +2, her own choice of attribute — 2d6+2 came up [2, 2] for a total of 6 (dice-log index 20). Short of 8, a failure.
It isn't her asking that goes wrong — it's his answering. A steward making the morning rounds comes within earshot before Philotas can get anything into her hands at all; he breaks off mid-word and is gone toward the stalls he was already headed for. Calpurnia is left with no page, no confirmation, standing alone at the fish stalls with Gaius and, now, Herennius both still owed an answer she doesn't have.
Lucius reads the flour and calms the crowd
Lucius doesn't come up out of his crouch the way everyone else's heads come up — he comes up already looking at the ground, because the ground just told him something. Flour is everywhere from the wrecked stall, and through it, he's sure, one line of prints breaks clean away from the crowd, down the customs-dock road he walks every feast day. "The customs road!" he calls, once, pointing, for whoever's got legs free to run.
Roll: Ingenium 7, Lucius's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [1, 2] for a total of 4 (dice-log index 21). Short of 7, a failure: the read doesn't hold up to the confidence behind it. His shout is loud enough that a knot of bystanders peel off the wreck and surge down the customs-dock road themselves, trampling whatever finer trace was left in the flour before anyone can check his call against it — a loud public rush down one road is the only trace of this lead left now, not the quieter evidence that started it.
He doesn't chase it himself. Herennius is still closing on the wreckage, and under that, quieter but spreading faster, the market is talking itself into a bad omen — the dye gone, now a stall down, the morning of the Feast. That's the one Lucius turns to stand in front of, palm raised the way the priestess settles a crowd from the temple steps. "A stall went over because a man ran where he shouldn't have. That is not Neptune's hand in this market."
Roll: Gratia 7, Lucius's modifier +1 — 2d6+1 came up [5, 4] for a total of 10 (dice-log index 22). Clearing 7 by 3 or more is a full success, clean, no cost attached. The murmur breaks apart into ordinary market noise again. Whatever else this morning costs him, the market doesn't talk itself into panic on his watch — and his own unspent purification debt to the temple stands exactly where it stood before this roll.
Where the round ends
Five hours have not yet become four, but none of the morning's noise has quieted for it. Rufus has a hideout tip nobody's tested yet and a warden with one more reason to wonder where the big man vanished to. Calpurnia has nothing new to show for the one move she made, and Gaius and Herennius are both still waiting on a name she hasn't said. Lucius has settled the crowd cleanly — the one unambiguous win of the round — but he's also put a crowd running down the customs-dock road on the strength of a read nobody's confirmed, and the finer evidence that could have checked it is gone under their feet. Secundus himself is still out there, still moving, and nobody this round laid a hand on him, the dye, Nitidus, or the man Calpurnia still hasn't named.
Read about the campaign itself at Whimsy's table top campaign, or go back to Session One — The Feast of Neptune.