After sorting out this most recent urgent situation, by rescuing Bazile from the newly uncovered vault beneath, the party emerged to the Tolbert miners in a state of some excitement, because a “thing” had appeared in the sky while they were down there.
Emerging, they recognised the shape of Dillom’s “train carriage” hanging above Sham. Everyone else didn’t however, and so they were rushing towards it with a range of motivations and responses. Merchants rushed aboard cargo boats to bring things to trade, gawkers hopped aboard punts to go see the new thing and the more paranoid rushed across the lake with weapons in order to defend the town. Flying merchants aren’t unknown in Lone Maktesh, but they come at a comfortably routine schedule.
Knowing that Dillom was not a threat, but also wasn’t entirely diplomatically… capable, they got in a flat-bottomed skiff and whizzed across the lake to intervene before anyone got on the wrong side of Dillom.
Dillom was fortunately uninterested in talking to anyone he didn’t already have an established level of disdain for and was waiting for them to arrive.
He had brought along the belongings that the party had left in Tilt, along with the Tilt birds that Strabo brought to start a new livestock strain, and the saxophone that Del was bringing back to start a new musical revolution. He had a present from Vo-Hurrim too, a complex machine for Frist to use and a handful of passengers.
The passengers were:
Garsam: well, his name wasn’t Garsam when they met him, he’d been a Bartender in Tilt who worked as kind of a point of contact for newfound carps… but the second he set foot off the train he was recognised by Tilenda, an artist from Sham who had once been this fella’s girlfriend. The touching reunion was a good starting place for the reintegration of the carps as it was almost (Tilenda’s current boyfriend not withstanding) universally awwww-ed over. Garsam seemed dazed, but pleased and he’d been a lauded sculptor before a tiff with Tilenda sent him off in the huff.
Colsyn Passcard: Is a handsome fella who has lived in Tilt for a while but of course has no recollection of ever having come from Lone. And Lone doesn’t remember him either. Unlike the other two, no-one recognised him (yet), which he took with good grace. His plight elicited a fair amount of sympathy (and the Probies seemed like they were ready to whisk him away) but none more so than in Germain, who ended the night going home with the carp.
Deppo Coincatcher: An affable if slightly unctuous merchant. A carp who had gone (so he told them) from selling Tiltfowl feather firestarters for scraps to a multi-settlement trading magnate. It turns out that before leaving Lone he’d been Belfir, a no-account boatman who was generally not missed.
The last passenger was a man in a box. A big black synth or metal box. Maybe some sort of fancy stone. Dillom said the man paid to get to the storm-wracked town of Fortuna and so the box wouldn’t be unloaded here. Brogan and Germain (I think) both tried to get an idea of what might be going on inside the box but to no avail. When they made inquiries (of Deppo, pretty much the only person to have been there) about Fortuna, they learned that it is some sort of fruit producing town that had some sort of very recent trouble.
The town (once the weapon wielders had awkwardly hidden their spears and guns behind their backs) were in a jubilant mood and an impromptu celebration was whipped up, a giant communal paella-like festival with the lake’s rice, lil’ crawdad things, etc. They got the giant pan out and everything. Dillom… doesn’t do that kind of party… with humans. So he took to the lake to explore and satisfy something that had piqued his curiousity.
The fiesta, with the prodigal carps, the new Glawvian friends and the triumphantly returning party members, raged long into the night.
Frist discovered that the machine made cloth – a sort of fine sailcloth in a silvery colour – if the right combination of easily obtainable organic materials was fed into the machine. The cloth was excellent at insulating against temperature changes.
Dillom, meanwhile, discovered that the lake was absolutely amazing. The water was phenomenal and the size and flavour of the lake bugs was likewise tremendous. Dillom loved this lake. Loooooooved it. And that bothered him for reasons he couldn’t put a sucker on.
Del got his saxophone surreptitiously repaired, given that the town had a long-standing horror of horns, pipes and whistles. The luthier he took it to did his best to get it back in order as best as he could understand how it worked, with copper and some nice yol-horn inlaid pieces. In return, Del had to put the wind up some annoying customers of the luthier. And if there is one thing that Del is good at, it’s giving people the willies.
The party then had to choose their next step: they had an opportunity to get back out into The Valley with Dillom yet they also had evidence of non-Lonians accessing the tunnels that the Tolberts had hidden away.
In the end, the lure of the frontier was too much and by a narrow vote they decided to venture back out into the unknown.
