The session opened with Ledger the badger delivering the cold-open recap straight to camera, narrating the party's split situation with wry precision and adding two things he had told nobody: right about where Pickles quit moving, his own nose quit too — the water down there smells like nothing, and for an animal like him nothing is the loudest smell there is — and that something big and sad was asleep standing up in the paddock with him, and something warm that 'ain't been born yet' was in there too, and he was the only one who knew it. Faith immediately corrected one detail of Ledger's account: Vaela had not gone inside to the cot at all. She asked the mill hands to let her sleep in the paddock with Ledger, and they allowed it — one guard stayed posted at the paddock and resealed the gate — after telling her the other animals were 'just a few of the foreman's pets.' She tucked a stuffed animal from her bag beside Ledger ('This is me. Remember me while you sleep'; he accepted it with a very odd look) and settled in beside him.

The rescue of Tam Brannick went sideways at once. Sanji's stealth was a 9 and Tam's a natural 1: his legs had gone to sleep from being bound, they buckled, Sanji's hooves clattered trying to hold him up, and he hit the ground shouting 'Pins and needles!' Both dock guards turned and saw them — then hesitated and argued with each other, and Sanji used the surprise round to scoop Tam up in her arms and sprint into the woods. It was the paddock guard who actually raised the alarm: he spotted 'a goat lady carrying a dude' across the far side of the paddock and shouted. Initiative went Sanji 24, Wickett 14, Skrit 12, Vaela 7. Out in the trees, Skrit had repositioned stealthily to the edge of the building and was cooking up a plan to lure the paddock guard into the woods and a hunting trap (never set), when Gorlog crashed through the underbrush on a stealth roll of 5 and drew the guard straight onto both of them. Rather than run, Skrit stepped out of the bushes with his pot lid and meat tenderizer, spent his Channel Divinity for +5 to persuasion for the next ten minutes, walked calmly up to the man and announced, 'We have you surrounded. Surrender immediately or pay the price' — a 26 on straight persuasion. Having just watched a goat woman carry a grown man past, heard movement in every direction, and now facing a cloaked kobold with kitchenware, the guard believed every word. Wickett, meanwhile, had been spotted sneaking up to the side of the barn but got up the wall anyway on his climbing speed, crossed the roof without a sound, and found only pinholes in the cheap corrugated roof to look through. Later he tossed a handful of ball bearings across the far side of the roof — a clatter that 'sounded shockingly like people on a roof' — and, under that noise, crowbarred a viewing hole into the metal (stealth 27). From there he saw no other animals inside: a working dockside warehouse, incoming and outgoing pallets, and outgoing barrels stamped with the antlers-and-tally brand.

The bluff snowballed. The weatherbeaten woman in charge stepped back out of the warehouse side door with a guard — the DM could not remember whether he had named her last session and said 'for sake of argument, we're going to call her Bertha' (she is the same woman recorded as Sela in Session 12). The frightened paddock guard told her they were surrounded, 'there are dozens of them,' and another reported, 'Miss Bertha, ma'am? The prisoner's gone.' She asked Skrit his business; he told her the party had come to free every one of her prisoners and shut the place down — persuasion again, 'close, shockingly.' Gorlog stood with his arms crossed holding a cast-iron skillet and a soup ladle and said 'yeah' aggressively enough to count as intimidation. One of her guards quietly slunk back around the corner; she clocked immediately that her backup had vanished, muttered 'I don't get paid enough for this shit,' and walked back into the warehouse with her bodyguard. Skrit chased her to the door — 'That's not how surrendering works. Get back out here!' — while Gorlog's second intimidation (a 19, with advantage) broke the lone remaining guard, who stripped off his weapons and hunted for something white to wave, ending up sockless and shoeless on one foot. In the woods, Tam suggested that he and Sanji swap who carried whom to cover more ground; the relay 'worked shockingly well,' and they made the tree edge unseen on a stealth 21.

Inside the warehouse, Skrit walked in on three guards being shaken awake at the far end plus the two who had slipped in. His first persuasion was a natural 1 (a 12 with bonuses), but the DM granted advantage because of Wickett's roof noise and the reroll came up 23: the guard who had backed out first walked up and set down his only weapon, a mallet 'like you might use for driving old tent stakes,' and the weapons pile began. The sock-and-shoe guard wandered in asking whether the surrendering was supposed to happen in here. Gorlog walked in and stared them down. Then Sanji appeared behind the sockless guard shouting 'Yes, surrender!' — her sudden appearance as yet another member of the 'veritable army outside' gave Skrit +4 to persuasion for the duration of his Channel Divinity (Kyle: 'that means I have a plus 15 to my persuasion rolls right now') — and Tam materialized over her shoulder with a very soldierly 'Yeah, what she said.' Bertha ordered every guard inside to disarm, and they did. Skrit produced his one set of manacles, told the crew to bind each other with the warehouse rope, and rolled a natural 20 for a 35: the entire crew set about tying each other up, and Bertha held out her wrists for 'the manacles of shame.' As that landed, an unarmed man walked up from the back corner of the warehouse. The DM called it 'one of the weirdest interactions I've ever run.' Skrit, giddy, called his own party 'minions,' caught himself, and apologized profusely; Kyle noted out of character that Skrit has no key to those manacles, 'a problem later when we get them back to town' — his stated plan for the prisoners is to turn them over to the authorities in town.

Identifying Kreel took intimidation. When Wickett called down through his roof hole, 'Which one of you is Kreel?', everyone stared straight ahead. Sanji got in one bound guard's face — 'Who's Kreel?' — and on a 21 he wet himself and pointed to the far end of the line: 'He is. That's him. It's not me. It's the other guy.' Skrit's insight read him as completely truthful; the man at the end said only, 'No, you shouldn't get him,' and Wickett's insight found that unconvincing. The DM never said the name himself. Wickett climbed down via the mill wheel and came inside, the prisoners were lined against the wall with their weapons shoved aside, and Kreel was pulled out to watch while Gorlog took Wickett's crowbar to an outgoing barrel bearing the antlers-and-tally stamp. Inside was the pungent, faintly chemical, translucent, shimmery liquid the party had found in barrels after their first encounter with the plesiosaur — they still do not know what it is or does. Wickett dipped a pinky in it and held it to Kreel's face; Kreel did not react strongly, only that he did not want it. 'I'm only in charge of the outside of the crates. Never in charge of what's inside the crates,' he said. The barrels 'all go to different places'; he had no bill of lading — 'This is supply. We wait till a ship or a raft shows up that needs this particular piece of our inventory, and we load it up… We're just running a warehouse.' When the table pressed him on whose antler-and-tally brand it was (and asked openly whether it had ever been confirmed as the Vance brand), he would not name anyone: he looked them dead in the eye and said, 'You already know who they belong to.'

Vaela, meanwhile, had spent the whole commotion in 'full recon mode' in the paddock — mask over her freckled embers, dark clothes, her bedroll stuffed with hay as a decoy body, the posted guard hopelessly distracted by the chaos outside. She freed two rope-collared river otters (bribed with fish pickles, collars untied, shooed off — 'they run off'), nine cormorants in a tall cage with cords tied around their throats (one on the first round, the other eight on the next — 'she did grow up on the river, she would know knots'), and a chained brown bear, dead in the middle of fat bear week and 'chunky,' who accepted a salmon pickle and let her undo the clasp on a sleight of hand 15 before taking off into the woods. In the last run she found a nailed-shut, air-holed shipping crate under a tarp, stamped 'RS, Upriver, EV' and, in big letters, 'HANDLE WARM.' She pried it open with her dagger (a 17 on strength, at disadvantage): packed nearly to the top in the softest wool lay a leathery, warm egg the size of a beer keg, shifting slightly as if on its own. Bobby asked if it was a dragon egg; the DM did not say. 'Ledger, come here!' — and when the badger arrived she had him haul the whole crate out of the paddock, egg still inside ('I'm gonna be its mother'). With initiative over, she asked whether there were any more animals — no — and told the DM she and Ledger were grabbing their things and setting the stables on fire 'so they can't use anything anymore.' 'She's seen lots of animals tied up. She is not happy with anything.' A Sorcerous Burst of fire into the hay did it. The session ended on the DM's closing image: as the paddock, stables, and hay supply go up in flames, Vaela comes storming into the warehouse, hair blazing, one of the cormorants' throat cords in her hand, demanding 'Where is he?' — 'I did not expect you to torch the place.' No Ledger outro this time: 'I gotta figure out what just happened.'