That's So Raven

The city let you in and immediately forgot you were there.

The families dispersed. The silver trumpets went back into their cases. Daughters were going to school somewhere and deals were being made somewhere else and it was over, the way things in a city are over — cleanly, without looking back. You stood in the middle of it and a man in a black robe walked up and explained the tax code.

He was a magister. He wore the city's authority the way the chaplain had worn the rite: it was the appropriate garment for the occasion. He was not unkind. He told you where the library was, and that the flying club was invite-only, and that there was a very good shop for rare materials in the Castle Ward, and that if you stayed longer than ten days you owed the city money. Falkor had shifted into something humanoid by this point — tall, dark, improbably handsome. The magister took no notice. Emmith stabled Sigrin at the city's edge; the hippogriff goes where told as long as the horses aren't visible.

The Castle Ward smelled like bread and argument. There were Walking Giants throughout the city — sixty-foot stone Guardians, all of them dormant now, propped in various poses of forgotten purpose. A few of them had vendors in their shadows.

The Font of Knowledge was between the Halls of Justice and a tower that nobody volunteered an explanation for. It was the kind of library where the ceiling was too high to see, and the shelves smelled like old certainty, and the cleric who greeted you — Jasper Adolphus, robed and helpful — had the particular energy of someone who had answered the same question ten thousand times and found it newly interesting each time. Lessie signed up for the free literacy class before the tour was finished. It was an afternoon class. It was for children. She signed up anyway.

The rest of you did research. Emmith found what there was to find about the Silmerhelve family: one of Waterdeep's noble houses, Sea Ward, and the correct approach is to wait until they extend an invitation. KeYs found fragments. Myths. Moist was pointed toward the stables guild in the shadow of the castle — the feeder organization for the exclusive aerial club, the High Eyrie, which is invite-only and administered by a noble house called House Belabrenta, which has a very long tradition of not letting people in unless it wants them there.

You ended up at the Yawning Portal.

It is a tavern built over a pit. The pit descends into the largest dungeon anyone who works there has ever heard of. There is a mechanism for lowering adventurers into it, and that evening, as you ate, a group of four — wizard, fighter, someone with a lute, a halfling cleric — were lowered in with the kind of nervous energy that means they've thought about this for years. The crowd cheered. The barmaid (Bonnie) said that many adventurers had passed through the Yawning Portal on their way to greatness, and all of them tried the ale.

Then someone sent AC a drink he hadn't ordered. Under the cup: Booth 27.

He smiled at the table in a way that could mean anything, and went upstairs.

Booth 27 had one candle and a curtain and a figure seated at the table who wore the emblem of AC's order. A soul coin waited on the table between them. There was a conversation — what was said in that booth did not come back to you in full — and then AC returned with a job.

There is a warehouse in the Sea Ward. It used to be run by a drow operation — Bregan D'aerthe, if you know the name. They were running things from the Underdark, the kind of things a city guard would prefer not to find. Someone tried to do something about it: a hired cleric put a curse on the place. The curse did not go where it was aimed. The drow guards are now driders. Half person, half spider. The warehouse has gotten more complicated, not less. The city hasn't solved it. Now someone wants the party to.

You keep what's inside, AC said. It's a fair job.

Emmith pointed out he hadn't asked how many there were.

An oversight, AC agreed.

You were in.

Next session: the Sea Ward. A warehouse full of driders. And a noble house in the same district that might have something to say about what you do with the place.