7th Sea · Session of 17 January 2026
In which a prisoner requests better lodgings, a nun knows entirely too much, a syringe changes hands, and blood opens a door that should have stayed shut.
The Yellow Lady's price is set: Inquisitor Emilio Crespo — shot at the ball, spirited away to a cliff monastery, and now being slowly poisoned so that he dies a hero of his wounds. Rescue him, and she will say where Schattenbruch is. Verdugo has already made his position clear, in his way — a stroll behind the church, past three assassins with HERETIC carved into them. Otto makes his own position clearer still: "It's just a sword, Axel. No sword is worth a man's life." And, at the door: "I'll not have you haunting me from beyond."
Sake, and a map drawn five minutes before the party arrived. The monastery is built into a cliff "like spider nest" — one iron gate, real monks singing over an Inquisition interrogation house. "Questions, important — not for answer, for pain. Pain first, then question, then answer. Sometimes, just pain." The old monks cut a hidden stair up the cliff from a roof tower; Kodai will wait at the top with a wagon. Beyond that: "It's not my plan, it's your plan. If your plan not work, you die."
The plan: ride in the front gate as Inquisition soldiers delivering a prisoner. Yvette commands — she speaks Castilian. Diego and Axel flank in tabards, Axel under strict orders to stay silent. Grigori wears the manacles — Kodai's casting note: "someone who not know how to shut mouth." Kharkov and Henryk climb the cliff for overwatch.
Yvette bluffs as Lady Maria Santiago, Capitana, accent perfect — "by order of the Cardinal, let us pass." A guard eating an apple asks the prisoner, just curious, what he did. Grigori begins, brightly, "I'm here to rescue them—" and Yvette runs him over before the sentence can finish killing everyone. Inside the walls, Diego dismounts the prisoner, unlocks one manacle, asks "Do you forgive me?" — and punches him bloody. A prisoner without injuries is a disguise with a hole in it. Grigori, spitting: "I'm used to it."
At the clerk's ledger the disguise nearly dies twice more: there is no record of any Ussuran prisoner, and Crespo is held under the Captain's strict orders — no one sees him, no one says his name. Grigori chooses this moment to ask, in Théan, "Can I get a room with a window?" A slap, a Disarming Smile, and the party walks on.
Down the cell corridor — chanting monks, iron doors, screaming, a cell whose every brick is written over with equations — Grigori walks into a wall of dread and looks for Rupret, who is uncharacteristically quiet. From behind a grate, a cracked voice says his name. A woman a thousand years old in the rags of a habit pulls her hands out of her own manacles, crosses to the door, and breathes: "Oh, prophet." Eyes white, foam at the mouth. Rupret knows her — "a mad nun who seems to know a little bit more and a little bit too much. That's why she's here." And then, helpfully: "Maybe they have a cell here for you, Grigori. You could sit right next to her and the two of you could prophetise through the vents. You, the rats, the girl — oh, how romantic."
Through the viewing port of the right cell: Crespo on his knees, a shadow of himself — and over him a man in Inquisitor's black, tapping a syringe in the lantern light, a bandolier of little corked vials across his chest. Yvette tries the latch. A hidden side door slides open, and out comes a man bigger than Kharkov: "You've got the wrong room. That's the wrong prisoner. And you're talking to the wrong captain."
The fight is ugly and close. The captain hurls Yvette bodily into Diego; Axel's spear-lunge goes through his hip and he stays standing; a metal gauntlet answers into Axel's face. A smoke flask shatters. Grigori comes away with the keyring; someone puts one of the Poisoner's own syringes into the captain's back, which only makes him slower; and the Poisoner slips through a concealed hatch and is gone. Then Yvette cuts herself, opens a portal, and drags Emilio through it by main strength — keep your eyes shut, no matter what you hear — with Grigori stumbling after. Diego finishes the captain with a lunge through the back. Axel locks the door, and drops the leering desk clerk with one Eisen gauntlet on the way out.
Bells — "there's jerk bells, and then there's bad bells. This is a bad bell." On the roof, six guards and an Inquisitor with a hidden derringer: "There's nowhere to go. There's nowhere to run." From the clifftop, Kharkov — prone, Henryk feeding him reloads — puts a single shot through the man, who drops straight back down the trapdoor he came out of. The party runs the tower and the hidden stair under covering fire and makes the wagon, Kodai swearing in Khitan the whole way.
The rescue worked, and Emilio is dying anyway — a poison out of Kemet, beyond the doctor's medicine. Yvette portals back for Ilsa, a Dramatic Wound per trip, Axel taking one of them onto himself. And when her cut hand can no longer open the way:
"It has to be your blood." — "Not this time. Trust me — cut me."
Ilsa's verdict is past Hexen craft: only fey magic can save Crespo now. And the party knows exactly one fey — the bear smelled it on Inquisitor Cardinal Modesto Mejía at the ball. Kodai drains his cup: "You know the Fae in San Cristóbal? Let's go. You and me."
Diego ran under the GM's hand tonight (his player was passing a kidney stone, which the table agreed was very in-character) — and still punched a friend for realism, monologued a rooftop into submission, and put the killing lunge through a captain's back.
As We Left It
Riding through the dark toward the private chambers
of an Inquisitor Cardinal who is not a man.
What could go wrong?