When the crew of the Greasy Spoon fled Splinter's Bend, they were not exactly an army. Wickett and Gorlog ran a food wagon pulled by a giant badger named Ledger, a creature of sardonic dignity who considered his companions idiots and was devoted to them absolutely. Into their escape tumbled Sanji, a satyr monk barely two months into the wider world, and Skrit, a kobold paladin with no given name who had simply been in the wrong market square at the wrong time. What they left behind them were green flames burning on a cobblestone side street, a publicly humiliated constable named Barnaby Plum, and the wrath of the Vance family, who effectively owned the town. The bounty Plum put on them — five hundred gold, backed by Vance money far beyond his personal means — would follow them down every road they traveled.

The first night out, Plum's tracking hounds found their camp in the King's Forest before dawn. The party handled it gently, feeding the dogs, destroying the magical amulet that had led them there, and sending them home with a handwritten note of unknown contents attached to the last departing dog. An Ettin blocking the logging road — two heads named Gorg and Borg with violently incompatible dietary preferences — was placated by Gorlog's improvised cookery. By mid-morning they were through the gates of Waymoot, a logging town whose economy had been quietly strangled. Three competing taverns had been driven out by a man named Silas, proprietor of the Cupped Axe, who also happened to be Constable Plum's cousin and the son of Elder Vance, the patriarch behind all of it. Silas recognized the party within minutes and quoted their bounty to their faces.

Waymoot had deeper problems than bad food and worse politics. The logging operations had been shut down for weeks by an ankheg infestation in the trenches, and the foreman, Kaelin, hired the party to clear it in exchange for a Writ of Provisioning that would give them some legal cover on the King's Road. They cleared the trenches, and Skrit crawled into the burrow tunnels and found what he was looking for: turnip mash mixed into the mud, consistent with rumors that Silas had been deliberately baiting the creatures into the area to sabotage Kaelin and buy the logging rights cheaply. While Gorlog and Wickett rode out with the loggers, Skrit and Sanji broke into the Cupped Axe and found the evidence to prove it — a payment ledger in Silas's locked desk confirming regular payments to Barnaby Plum to keep competing supply caravans out of Waymoot, alongside three bottles of Splinter's Bend Reserve and, wrapped carefully in cloth, the aged tuna that had gone missing from the Greasy Spoon's larder.

On the logging road, Silas had set a trap. A man named Julian Pendergast appeared in a white pavilion tent presenting himself as Senior Auditor for the Royal Order of the Gilded Ladle, his assistants in oversized clean aprons moving with military precision. The Greasy Spoon passed its audit — through quick thinking, a counterbalanced damaged wheel, and Gorlog's plating — and Pendergast awarded his seal of compliance. Then the assistants dropped their aprons and leveled spears. What followed was chaotic: Pendergast, revealed as a genuinely formidable combatant who fought on the party's side against Silas's thugs until Skrit soiled his robes, Sanji deliberately touched his clothes to see what would happen, and things deteriorated from there. Silas himself made one cowardly swing from the treeline, missed, and fled into the King's Forest without answering when his own men called for him. When it was over, a Kingsguard named Harold had arrived with a dozen loggers and was sorting through the wreckage. Wickett placed Silas's name in the open air for Harold to hear. Skrit handed Harold the ledger. Harold, a man stationed in Waymoot as punishment for suspected gambling in Waterdeep, who had a wife and three children he wanted to go home to, swore on his oath of service to investigate and punish everyone named in it — Silas Vance, Constable Barnaby Plum, Elder Vance of Splinter's Bend — and stamped the Greasy Spoon's writ to grant them free passage on the King's Road. He gave them a letter of introduction to the head of the Kingsguard at Thornwall Fords. Then he went back to Waymoot to do his job.

The road east brought a new problem almost immediately. West of Thornwall Fords, at their evening campfire, a tall man in dark green leathers stepped out of the treeline holding their wanted poster. Desmond Cray, who styled himself the Gourmand, was a high-end bounty hunter who had been listening for some time. He offered a choice: culinary trivia or collection. They passed the test. He burned the poster and warned them the Vance family's reach was extensive, that a Vance rafting party had been spotted upriver, and that in his professional assessment the party was probably going to get themselves killed. He departed saying he should have just killed them.

At Thornwall Fords, a plesiosaur had taken up residence in the Starwater River gravel beds, blocking the crossing, killing two Kingsguard, and smashing three rafts. Captain Cynthia Stout, a shield dwarf commanding the local Kingsguard post, had thirty merchant wagons backed up at her gate. She offered the party payment, free passage, and a prime market stall in exchange for clearing the threat. What the party found at the river was a creature acting under duress — rope scars on its neck, fear in its eyes, a brand burned into its hide reading tally marks and antlers. A beast-handler named Tobias Grimm had been controlling it with a brass whistle, backed by hidden crossbowmen. Sanji rammed Grimm, recovered the whistle, and the plesiosaur went still. Skrit healed it with ten points of Lay on Hands and it made a small, quiet sound. Grimm escaped into the woods. One crossbowman was killed; the other fled. The party coaxed the plesiosaur a hundred yards downstream with pickles, the river crossing reopened, and thirty wagons began to move. The crew named her Pickles. She went to her deep pool and stayed.

That first stay in Thornwall Fords also brought a new crew member. Vaela, a Fire Genasi sorcerer, had stumbled onto their campfire and was welcomed in. She traveled with a scholarly book on mythical creatures written by her parents, the Mirethanes, and intended to prove it wrong. The plesiosaur was her first entry. Her parents, she had run from. What she had not yet escaped was their reach: the bounty hunters Callum and Petra appeared at the Thornwall Fords market and reported the Mirethanes had hired them to locate their daughter and confirm she was unharmed. After negotiation, Callum and Petra accepted Vaela's plesiosaur sketch for the Mirethanes' records, stated their task appeared complete, and left — but not before warning the party that three unlit rafts were coming downriver.

The warning was accurate. In the pre-dawn hours, those rafts hit Thornwall Fords in a coordinated strike: arsonists set the market stalls alight while a raft crew raided Stout's River Toll House, stole every piece of evidence she had collected — the whistle, a bloodied threat note from a Splinter's Bend guard, an order slip bearing a wax seal marked with what appeared to be a V — and abducted the guard she had posted on the strongbox. Gorlog organized a bucket brigade and saved the market. Pickles, wailing in distress toward the attackers from her pool, went silent when a strange distorted sound rang out — not the whistle, something else, source unknown — and then rose from the river on her own and chomped the man carrying the stolen whistle, Tobias Grimm, whom the party recognized only later as the same handler from the original plesiosaur encounter. Vaela finished him with a Firebolt. Wickett recovered the stolen evidence from Grimm's pockets during the fight and quietly re-pocketed the whistle when Stout emerged from concealment. Stout, who had pre-positioned an ambush of her own, handcuffed the two fleeing survivors. Combined with two more taken by Sanji on the first raft, she had four prisoners.

Interrogation on the riverbank identified the dead raider as Tobias Grimm, the mill's animal handler. More importantly, it produced a name: Kreel. The foreman at the Old Redwater Mill — the Vance network's staging point upriver on the Starwater, where market gossip said everything the Vances moved by water spent a night. Prisoners reacted with visible alarm when the name was spoken. Stout said twenty men worked there for pay and one worked for fear. She asked the party to go upriver and bring back her missing guard, Corporal Tam Brannick, whom she believed had been hauled north like cargo on the third raft. Mother Halda, an older woman at a market stall who could speak with animals, cast her daily spell and translated the party's full conversation with Pickles. The Starwater River was Pickles's home. The mill was the place where the ropes are. Other animals were held there in conditions like hers. She could not think clearly in that part of the river. When Vaela promised the party would destroy the ropes and free them, Pickles grabbed the tow ropes of both rafts on her own and pulled them upriver. Skrit laid the flattened whistle on the riverbank and Vaela melted it into the gravel in front of her. No more chains.

Pickles towed them until she could go no further — stopping short of the Old Redwater Mill at a point where, Ledger revealed in his cold-open narration, his own nose went completely dead. The water there smelled like nothing, which he described as the loudest smell there is for an animal. He had told nobody. The party continued on foot. Vaela walked into the mill compound alone as a distraction, persuading a sentry named Sela to take her in and find her a cot while the rest of the crew positioned themselves. Wickett crossed the corrugated metal roof in silence and crowbarred an entry hole. Sanji slipped along the wall to the water-side dock, found Corporal Brannick bound to cargo crates, cut his bonds without a word, and palmed her dagger to him. He had been taunting the guards through his entire captivity and continued without breaking stride.

The standoff was resolved by a kobold with a pot lid and a meat tenderizer. Skrit declared the compound surrounded — it was not — and the guards, beginning to fracture under Gorlog's intimidation and the very real possibility that the creature loose in the paddock was doing what it sounded like, began to fold. One stripped his weapons. One walked into the warehouse sockless to ask if he was supposed to surrender inside. When Brannick appeared over Sanji's shoulder and added his voice to the demand, it was over. Sela held out her wrists. Skrit has no key for the manacles. The entire crew was lined against the warehouse wall, bound with rope from their own shelves.

Vaela had already been in the paddock. She freed two river otters wearing rope collars, nine cormorants with cords tied around their throats, and a chained brown bear who accepted a salmon pickle and took off into the woods. In the last pen she found a nailed-shut crate stamped HANDLE WARM and RS, Upriver, EV, packed in the softest wool around an egg the size of a beer keg, warm, leathery, and shifting faintly as if on its own. She had Ledger haul it out. Then she burned the paddock, quietly and on purpose.

The bunkhouse workers, roughly twenty men who had slept through the surrender, woke to the fire and formed a brigade. Gorlog took command with a natural twenty and they contained the blaze. Three surrendered afterward. The other seventeen dropped their buckets and fled, along with the animal handlers. Vaela Misty Stepped after them shouting for the animal handler. Nobody answered.

Kreel, separated from the bound crew and questioned over an opened barrel, was the session's central voice. He insisted he only ran a staging warehouse — stuff comes in, stuff goes out. He said that all the animals belong to 'Old Man Vance' — Elder Vance — back in Splinter's Bend, who visits the mill every moon or two, has never sold one, and keeps them like a private zoo that charges nobody. Kreel reports directly to him. When the party described Pickles and the training whistles, Kreel's head drooped. He knew the whistles existed. He said their use was not supposed to happen, called it a lazy man's path, and began to explain the mechanism — a sedative they put in the — before his sentence ended. Skrit's Insight read him as truthful. He blamed the cords around the cormorants' beaks on a worker named Larry, who cannot tie a knot to save his life. He said the bear is penned because she cuts herself up whenever she gets loose. He urged someone to go after her. He gave contradictory accounts of the shimmery liquid in the branded barrels — that he did not know what it was, that it was very flammable and mostly shipped out, that it was like a medicine for the animals, not for people, that it helped keep them calm.

The liquid proved its nature when Sanji carried an open barrel to the burned paddock and Vaela hit it with Firebolt. A barely visible shimmery mist spread across the compound in seconds. The whole party but Gorlog was poisoned, and Skrit and Wickett collapsed; Sanji dragged Skrit and Vaela pulled Wickett to the breezy dock, where Sanji splashed water on them and both came round. Then Skrit poured a pot of river water into the burning barrel. It went up in a mushroom cloud, and the rest of the barrel became a fog too thick to see through that left everyone but Gorlog, Kreel and Sela paralyzed and poisoned. Gorlog was immune: the residue of the blight-kissed truffle oil he had been concentrating, which turned out to be the antidote. On Kreel's suggestion he moved through the fog blind, reviving Wickett, Sanji, Vaela and Skrit one by one with skin-applied doses — groping a prisoner, grabbing Sanji's tail and taking a ten-point punch for it along the way. When he refused to go looking for the guard, Wickett took the oil and revived Brannick himself, who had heard everything while lying paralyzed. Ledger, last and largest, needed four doses; about seven of the DM's roughly two dozen remain. Kreel and Sela were unaffected; the DM put that down to sheer exposure. Vaela's Detect Magic showed solid magic throughout the fog. The party debated burning the warehouse. They decided against it. They walked out, leaving Kreel, Sela, and the bound mill crew inside the thinning fog, taking the guard, the badger, and the egg crate with them, heading up the path toward the wagon as the session ended.

Where things stand: the Vance network is shaken but its center holds. Elder Vance — 'Old Man Vance' to Kreel — sits in Splinter's Bend, still unmet. Kreel reports to him and says the mill's animals are his, a private zoo that charges nobody. The river operation moving unidentified brine in branded barrels is still standing, and so is the warehouse, with its foreman left bound inside in a fog of thinning magic. Harold has a ledger and a sworn oath in Waymoot. Stout has four prisoners and an empty strongbox in Thornwall Fords. Brannick is free. Pickles is free. The plesiosaur's training whistle is melted into riverbank gravel. The egg crate is on the back of a giant badger headed toward a wagon, and Vaela has declared herself its mother. The party is walking out of the mist.