Session 6

You pick up where the refinery fight left off, heading north with Bailey toward Blackhawk. Before you reach town, she lays out a few rules for life in Khan territory.

First, she repeats that you can keep the drugs and alcohol you're carrying, but you can't take them out, sell them, give them away, or use them while you're in Khan lands. Second, no proselytizing any faith or religion. Third, no buying or trading food outside the designated marketplace, and no selling food to any citizen or officer without clearance through it.

Asked about the food rule, Bailey explains that the Khans enforce strict calorie laws. Citizens aren't allowed to waste calories or overconsume, so there's enough for everyone.

It's the most civilized place you've seen since leaving the vault. The walls are built from recycled materials but well put together, with gatehouses and guard towers on either side. A residential district of pre-war buildings sits in various states of repair and ruin. A whole side of town belongs to the Khans, with yurts spread across it, a barracks compound, and officers' personal tents. Farmland surrounds the town and makes Keystone's fields look like a community garden.

Bailey brings you to the front of the guest house, which is about as close to a tavern as the Khans allow, with no alcohol. She hands you papers authorizing meals from the communal pile and lodging for the night. You debate exploring the town, but after the damage you took in the last fight, you head inside.

The guest house is a wide, quiet room. A service desk hands out food, water, and lodging. A few tables in one corner hold dice and board games, and a small, well-stocked library sits in another. People mill about doing quiet things.

You join a dice game between two citizens, hoping to get a feel for the town. Bishop wins the first round and loses the second, but it's enough to earn their trust. They gripe about local government the way even happy citizens do. When you ask whether they know Bailey, they don't react to the name. Two officers playing a board game nearby do. They perk up and start listening in.

The citizens start in on taxes, then one cuts the other off because of the officers. You read it as ordinary grumbling and not revolutionary talk. Once the officers seem to lose interest, one citizen leans in and whispers to ask whether you have anything to drink. You play it safe. "Of course not," he says. "That would be illegal, wouldn't it?" He seems a little disappointed.

You invite the officers to join a game once they finish theirs. The two citizens excuse themselves, since officers evidently don't mingle with regular citizens this way. The officers raise the buy-in. Bishop and Petra decide to push their luck, upping the ante for money, information, and the officer's own weapon. Petra nudges the dice with her telekinesis for Bishop. It turns out to be a good idea, because the officer was using loaded dice. He's flabbergasted that he lost, and his friend laughs at him. Bishop walks away with a nice revolver and a chance to ask about Blackhawk.

You ask about Bailey. She's a Scout, which is the fourth-highest rank among the Khans, though there are many Scouts and all hold equal rank. Scouts have absolute authority in Khan territory. They are judge, jury, and executioner, with no limits on what they can do. Her execution at the refinery suddenly makes more sense, and your wariness around her sets in firmer.

Before you turn in, Petra spots a couple in the corner whispering and giggling. The woman has a tan line where a wedding ring should be. It's just a curious detail for now.

You wake to bells ringing across town. Blackhawk is going into lockdown. In the lobby, a few other guests are being held, including the woman from the night before. All anyone knows is that a Khan officer's body has been found in the compost pile. The guard doesn't know the name, only that he was high-ranking.

Eventually Bailey strolls in with a chipper good morning, asking if you rested well and commenting on how good the morning feels. She recruits you for the investigation because you're some of the few people she knows for certain had nothing to do with it.

Bailey walks you to a nearby building, next to the compost pile, where the body has been laid out. The neck wound is obvious. On closer inspection, it's perfectly circular. There are a few scratches on the body, but you can tell they weren't made by a human. The body has been dead only since last night, with no signs of further decomposition.

Looking for tools, you find a set of pre-war automotive tools in the building. You use pliers and other tools to root around in the wound, much to Bailey's enjoyment. "Oh, that's neat." You find that the wound curves as it goes in, and you pull out a bit of blue-green powder you can't identify. Cheesesteak sniffs the pliers and screwdriver and gets only blood and copper. He wonders whether he should taste the powder, but the party agrees that would be a very bad idea, both because nobody knows what it is and because it would make you look insane.

You ask Bailey about the victim, Joh'ne Diaz. She knows only the basics. He has a wife, who lives in Sturgis and works in the Royal Court at the Great Khan's library.

Joh'ne's yurt has been ransacked. Petra takes a closer look at the desk and finds that, though a lot has been taken, a few documents slipped behind it. There are three, each a working document Joh'ne was keeping: one on the investigation into the death of a horse, one on a possible Dakota Confederation spy in Blackhawk, and one noting that a stash of alcohol was found at the Eastern Gate.

Under the mattress, you find a grass-woven circle. Bailey recognizes it as a Grasswalker religious symbol, and she takes it with the same amused interest as everything else. It's a loose thread for now.

Cheesesteak looks for loose floorboards, though the place is a yurt and there are none. Along the way, he knocks over the trash can and finds ripped-up letters. A successful intelligence check lets you piece them together. They're spicy love letters from someone obviously female, though there's no name on them.

At the barracks, you spot Brian, the officer who lost the revolver the night before. You figure he won't open up with Bailey around, so the party splits. Silas, Birdie, and Zendaya go with Bailey to Joh'ne's administrative office. Bishop, Petra, and Cheesesteak stay to talk to Brian.

Brian. With some charisma, you get him talking. Joh'ne was having an affair with a married woman named Amanda. Brian won't air any dirty laundry, but he mentions that she and her husband live in a hut on the other side of town. He also says that since Joh'ne came back from living with the Grasswalkers for a few months, he's been much stricter and has run a lot of surprise inspections, looking for something. Petra asks whether loaded dice would be the kind of thing Joh'ne would care about. Brian, embarrassed, says it would mean extra latrine duty, nowhere near as serious as whatever Joh'ne was hunting for.

You ask about the dead horse. Brian is nervous at first, but with the horse already dead there's no reason to keep the mission secret. The Khans had finally gotten hold of a stallion that could breed. The Dakota Confederation had been very diligent about letting only mares and neutered males outside their compounds. The rumor going around is that the horse was poisoned.

He adds that Sumal and Joh'ne used to be good friends but have grown distant and avoided each other since Joh'ne got back from the Grasswalkers. The Grasswalker traders are still camped at the Eastern Gate, locked down with the rest of the town.

The office. Joh'ne's administrative logbook tracks the comings and goings and schedules of a variety of officers, in particular Sergeant Sumal O'hari. A few weeks back, he logged feeding times and pounds of corn, though not what was being fed. On the bookshelf, among pre-war books, are newer handwritten ones. Joh'ne, it turns out, served as a diplomatic ambassador to the Grasswalkers, and he wrote a thorough dossier on their culture, religion, how they live, and what they eat. You fail an insight check and miss that, near the end, the writing turns noticeably more sympathetic toward them.

You decide to talk to Amanda. You find her and her husband, Jacob, at their house, and you interview them separately.

Amanda is trying to hide how upset she is, and you come to understand that she's grieving Joh'ne. When you press her with the letters and what you know, she admits the affair. Joh'ne broke it off after he got back from the Grasswalkers. She was upset, but she still cared for him. She pleads with you not to tell her husband, because the two of them have been getting along much better lately. You agree to keep it quiet, for now, as leverage later. She also admits that Joh'ne tried to convert her to his new faith. He wanted to help enlighten her. She knows the Khanate's laws on faith, so she told him to stay quiet and never bring it up again.

You take Jacob outside, put Amanda back in the house, and encircle him to see whether he knew about the affair and might have acted out of jealousy. Under the stress, he proves simple and has a seizure. The party feels awkward and guilty, and leaves them be.

Sumal O'hari's yurt is well maintained and organized. His bookshelf holds pre-war textbooks. You check the dust to see which have been read recently, and a few, chemistry textbooks in particular, have been used most often. You find a pair of pants that vaguely smell of gasoline. Then you hack his terminal and learn that he's the local fuel depot manager. He's also been working on a document translating English into the Grasswalkers' version of Chinese. The last thing you find is a message sent to an anonymized address: "Our Eastern friends really enjoyed the harvest. They may be willing to join the family reunion." You work out that the harvest and the Eastern friends probably mean alcohol and the Grasswalkers, but the family reunion remains a mystery.

It isn't really a barn. It's a building converted to hide the horse. The smell is awful. The horse has been dead for about two weeks and is still lying there. Despite all the human footprints, Silas notices where the horse was rolling around when it was alive. You check the trough and find it filled only with hard feed corn. Birdie notes that corn isn't good horse food and asks whether that's all they fed it. Ethan, who was in charge of the horse, confirms that it is.

Birdie and Silas both realize, colic. A normal issue for a human baby but potentially lethal for a horse. It died due to being unable to properly digest the corn and getting a fatal case of it.

Bailey is there, and the party fears she'll punish him. She slaps him on the back and says, "Oh well, we'll know next time." The Dakota Confederation spy theory is gone. The horse wasn't murdered. It died of incompetence.

You steer Bailey away by telling her to go talk to Amanda and Jacob, which gives you room to confront Sumal without her.

You find Sumal in the officers' lounge near the barracks and ask about his relationship with Joh'ne and what you found in his yurt. He's strategically calm and has a reasonable explanation for everything. He has the chemistry books because he manages the fuel depot. The gasoline is from refueling last night. As for an alibi, he was solo managing the fuel station. He calls the message an innocent note to a friend in Sturgis. When you ask about the anonymized address, he says it must be a computer glitch. You're very convinced, but he won't admit anything, and you decide you need physical evidence.

At the Eastern Gate, the Grasswalkers have two well-made tents of hide and woven grass. One is empty. The three traders are locked down in the other.

In the empty tent, the same circular woven-grass symbol you found under Joh'ne's mattress hangs from the center pole. You find parchment covered in a modified version of Chinese characters, and, deeper in, the one thing that feels out of place: an empty, closed pickle jar. When you open it, you're hit by the smell of very strong alcohol. The label, still partly visible, matches the sign on one of the run-down factories in town. You use Sumal's dictionary to translate the parchment, and it turns out to be Buddhist mantras.

The traders wear elegantly woven grass outfits, natural materials but far from crude. Two are healthy and wary of you. The third is under the weather, mumbling in his native language, sweating and shaking. He doesn't smell of alcohol, and you deduce he's going through withdrawal. They try to quiet him, but when you show him the pickle jar, he lights up until he realizes it's his own jar and it's empty.

They talk. For some time they had secret dealings with someone in town who always wore a mask. They would go to the pickle factory at night, knock on a door, and trade goods and information, sometimes even reports on what the Dakota Confederation and other Khans were doing. They never learned who it was.

You sneak up on the factory to see whether anyone is inside. It looks empty. Through his scope, Silas spots the faint glow of a computer terminal covered with a blanket. Inside, the first and second floors are cleared out. Your attempt to hack the terminal fails, but nothing happens. Then Zendaya uses her newfound matter-warping ability to open the basement door. She rolls a natural 20 and turns it into confetti.

The basement holds an elaborate distillation setup, large vats and flasks, powered by gasoline. Copper tubing lies everywhere. One piece in the corner has been recently wiped clean, but when you look closer, it still has blue-green verdigris on it and, on the inside, a small chunk of flesh. That's the murder weapon.

Petra photographs the scene, including the equipment, the pipe, and a patch of ground that looks recently cleaned. You go back to Sumal's yurt with new eyes and find, buried deep, the cloth used to wipe the pipe.

You confront Sumal. Petra adds some theatrics. She asks if he'd like to see an interesting photo and shows him the one she took after the football game in Session 3. Sumal, on guard but still a nerd, remembers hearing about those super mutants and starts nerding out. Then she says she has one more interesting photo. Almost forgetting his situation, he's excited to see it. It's the crime scene. You present the rag and the copper tube.

He drops the pretense immediately. What can he give you to let him go without telling Bailey, or at least give him a couple of hours' head start? You ask for his motive first.

Sumal supports the Great Khan's younger brother. He dislikes how the Great Khan and her father have "civilized" the Khans, and he romanticizes the old days of feared raiders. He wants to go back to that, not this bureaucratic management. His faction's plan was to get a portion of the Grasswalkers dependent on alcohol and establish diplomatic ties, so that when the "family reunion" comes, their coup and civil war, would have the Grasswalkers as allies. He regrets killing Joh'ne, because they were friends. They disagreed politically, and he values the future of his nation more than any friendship.

You debate leaving him in place as an inroad, in case the coup succeeds, and finding a different fall guy. After a lot of discussion, you decide you don't know that the younger brother would be better than the current leadership, and you fear he might be more twisted than what you see of the Khans now. You come very close to leaving him in place. Instead, you hogtie him and carry him to Bailey.

As you approach Amanda and Jacob's house with Sumal on your back, you hear what sounds like screaming. You rush in. The screams turn out to be forced, awkward laughter. Bailey is doing a stand-up routine, and she is very bad at comedy. The couple are so afraid of her that they laugh anyway.

Seeing Sumal tied up, Bailey exclaims, "Oh, how fun!" You explain the details and ask if you can be the ones to turn him in to the Great Khan herself. Bailey thinks that's a wonderful idea. The Great Khan, she exclaims, will love you.

Session Six ends there.