RQG 61 - Skyships and Harlequins

## Content Warnings

Guns, physical violence, air travel, vomiting, death/grief/family tragedy (discussed)

## Summary

The party takes to the skies, finally making their way out of Paris! Tensions rise, Bertie learns to fly, and an important conversation is had.

## Synopsis

The party is on their way to Prague via airship. They’ve
just met the captain of the airship – a female gnome- who welcomes them aboard
the vessel. They all introduce themselves to her; upon Zolf introducing Wilde, her
face drops and she says that Wilde has to get off of her ship immediately. Wilde
says he’ll leave the ship if she lets the four of them stay on, but then tries
to ask if there’s any way she can let him stay. She pulls a gun from a holster
on her hip and levels it at his head (before moving it down to his crotch on
Bertie’s request).

Wilde asks for a moment to speak to the party and the
captain allows it; he tells them to not let the captain know that they’re under
a Meritocratic contract, and the party agrees. They decide to say they just ran
into him, and Wilde says that he’ll leave and find a way to Prague himself. He
shakes Hamid’s hand and Sasha tells him that the illusions he conjured impressed
her.

As he leaves, the captain kicks him and Wilde falls a decent distance,
hurting himself a little bit on the scaffolding before walking away. Hamid
leans on the rail of the ship and casts *message* to ask if there’s anything they should be watching out for. Wilde continues to walk away, but warns Hamid that the
captain is a separatist, and if she finds out that they’re with the Meritocrats she’ll probably kill them. He also warns that Prague is “complicated.”

After Wilde has left, the captain turns to Sasha and Bertie
and asks them to follow her – Sasha wants to fly the ship and watch the captain take off. The gnomes all get ready for takeoff as Zolf and Hamid wait on deck, while Sasha and Bertie are with the captain in the cockpit. As the ship takes off, Zolf looks very green and hits the deck, laying down flat. The boat sails off into the air and Hamid goes around to someone to ask where their rooms are. It’s a torrential downpour outside with lightning and thunder, so Hamid heads below deck to avoid getting wet. There’s loose equipment out in the hallways, and pipes and steam everywhere. He finds himself in an engine room with a load of gnomes, who yell at him to get out, and Hamid backtracks. Eventually he finds a room with bunk beds and hammocks and falls asleep. Zolf is still on the deck, very nauseous, and unable to go to sleep.

The gnomes on deck hand out guide lines to the party (sans
Hamid, since he is below decks)– the guide lines act as safety harnesses so they
can clip in to parts of the deck and wander without fear of falling off the
edge.

Back in the cockpit, the captain is explaining the mechanics
of the ship to Sasha and Bertie; Bertie doesn’t really understand, and Sasha hasn’t
heard a lot of it before, but the captain is very excited to share with them. The
captain gives control of the vessel over to Bertie, and Sasha starts panicking a
bit because, well, *Bertie,* and the boat pulls up above the clouds as they reach
the final part of the assent. Bertie gets a chance to fly and does an okay job;
the captain helps correct a bit as Bertie steers. Back on deck, Zolf gets more
nauseous.

Sasha gets a turn flying the airship, and then the captain
spins the wheel and the ship goes into a full barrel roll; Zolf is not a fan,
but Hamid stays asleep. Sasha, meanwhile, is having a wonderful time flying the
airship. It’s freezing on the ship, and as the boat reaches a steady level of
elevation the crew begin handing out cold weather gear; Bertie has his own furs
that he’s put on. One of the crew comes over at the captain’s call and takes
control of the vessel from Sasha.

The captain turns toward Sasha and in a flash pulls her gun,
leveling it straight at Sasha’s head and asking her why she was with Wilde. Sasha
says that they just ran into him, they didn’t know who he was, and that they’re
mercenaries from London with another job in Prague. The captain doesn’t believe
a word of it and presses the gun harder into Sasha’s head, edging her closer to
the edge of the vessel. Zolf’s nausea becomes manageable and he looks over,
seeing this, while Bertie draws his sword on the captain. She sees Bertie draw and
calls for the crew to come onto the deck, fully armed. Sasha continues to bluff
and Zolf comes over to help assist with the lie, saying that Wilde is Bertie’s
ex-lover; Bertie goes on about how much he hates Wilde while gnomes run onto
the deck, heavily armed.

The captain believes Bertie, but looks at Sasha, who runs
with it and talks about how disgusting they both are with their flirting, and the
captain buys it. She walks over to Zolf, pulls out her cutlass, and holds it
under his chin as he stands up. Her eyes flit to Zolf’s ring, grabs his hand
and glances at the ring before asking what chapter he’s with, and what suit he
is. Zolf, confused, says that it was his brother’s ring, and the captain asks the
name of his brother and his father, to which Zolf responds with Feryn and Hirald,
respectively. The captain laughs when she hears Hirald’s name and pulls the
cutlass away, suddenly in a much better mood. She invites Zolf to dinner and tells
him to invite his friends; confused and slightly concerned, Zolf follows along
with Sasha and Bertie.

Her quarters are sparse – nice looking, with a lot of shiny
equipment and gears covering the surfaces. She glances around and then knocks
the gears over onto the floor to make space on the table. A gnome goes down and
wakes Hamid up, brings him into the captain’s cabin as well, and the captain
makes some meaningless small talk with Sasha and Bertie while Zolf stares at
the ring. The food gets delivered and then the captain turns to Zolf, asking
what the Spades are doing in Paris. Zolf is confused, and the captain asks if
he maybe inherited the ring, since he doesn’t seem to know anything about it.

Zolf says his parents were miners in Somerset, and that he
got the ring from his brother. The captain says that she was sorry to hear
about his brother, and Zolf very quietly says he was too. Then, the captain
tosses the gold that they’d paid to get passage on the ship back to Hamid, says
that since they’re Spades, they don’t need to pay. Zolf asks what a Spade is
and the captain fills him in on the history of Zolf’s ring: there’s a special,
secret anti-Meritocratic group called the Harlequins, an order that both Zolf’s
brother and father were a part of. They assign themselves to different card
suits: hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. Zolf’s father and brother were,
according to the captain, Spades.

Sasha, at this point, remembers a conversation between Rakefine
and her tutor: she barely remembers it, but remembers Harlequins being
mentioned, although she doesn’t know the context. Bertie knows there used to be
a group called the Jesters in London, a sort-of libertarian society, but
understands that that isn’t a good connection. Zolf has no idea what ‘Harlequins’
means. The captain explains that Zolf’s father basically quit the Harlequins
– he was a very important strategist/tactician in the order but left and wanted
nothing to do with it. Feryn, on the other hand, was interested, and Hirald
didn’t forbid him from joining but also wasn’t a fan of it.

The captain then mentions Rakefine’s name, and Sasha chokes
on water and sputters a bit. Zolf picks up on it as well and mentions that
Gusset had said the same thing. The captain then recognizes Sasha, which Sasha
is not a fan of, and asks how Eldarion is doing, mentioning that she was a
looker. Sasha says they haven’t kept in touch. Zolf then turns to Hamid, asks
if he has any secret family members who might be connected, and Hamid says no.

Finally, they ask the captain what her name is, and she introduces herself as
Earhart, then asks what business they have in Prague. They say they’re
heading to the university and she tells them to avoid it because all the professors
there are stuck-up and annoying. Bertie blusters on about needing to speak with
a certain professor about stuff relevant to his sidequest, and mentions having
been in the papers. The episode closes on Amelia recognizing Bertie from Wilde’s
column, not the news about his adventure.

## Quotes

**Alex**: Hi guys, so this is kind of embarrassing, um, yeah. Turns out that I didn’t just get the episode number wrong on one episode, I got it wrong on two. So, when the episode starts and I say it’s episode 59, that, that’s wrong. You can just ignore that. Um…*long sigh*….my bad. Enjoy the episode.

**Alex**: "For the rest of you, you start seeing—the burly Gnomes start coming up to you and basically explaining to you that there are guidelines, they, they hand you effectively harnesses or belts. For, for Bertie they just kinda look at you a bit nonplussed."
**Lydia**: "Do you they put one of the, like, Gnome-sized guidelines around each of his trunk-like legs?"
**Alex**: "Stop beating to me to my own punches!"
―The party is handed guidelines to clip onto the ship, in case of falling off.

**Lydia**: "Sasha could not believe that she might be in this position and not enjoying it?"
**Ben**: "Bertie ruins everything."
**Lydia**: "This might be one of the first times in her life she feels real dread and fear, about physical danger?"
―The captain gives Sasha and Bertie a chance to fly the ship upon takeoff.

**Alex**: "Do you have any relevant skills whatsoever?"
**Bertie**: "I have confidence!"
―Bertie attempts to fly the airship.

**Lydia**: "It's almost like it's been retrofitted..."
**Alex**: "Yeah..."
**Lydia**: "And by people that really enjoy the *look* of cogs and levers but not necessarily the function."
**Alex**: "Yeah... something to discuss later I think."
**Lydia**: "Like punks that like steam..."
―The ship is very steampunk.

**Zolf**: "Hang on a minute, what’s, what’s the problem."
**Sasha**: "She wants to know how we know Wilde. She doesn’t believe that we actually hate him as much as we do."
**Bertie**: "I definitely do. Let me count the ways for you, my captain, in which I hate Oscar Wilde."
**Zolf**: "Look, he’s Bertie’s ex-lover."
**Bertie**: "I want to cut off his skin!"
―The captain refuses to allow Wilde onto her ship.

"If you expect me to fear death, you’re going to be sorely disappointed."
―**Zolf**

**Alex**: "I will accelerate time a bit where Hamid, you're basically gently woken and led back to the captain's cabin."
**Bryn**: "*Fine*. I need my spells back I haven't had 8 hours!"
**Alex**: "Are you kidding me? It's a bright, sun shining day above the clouds!"
―The captain has summoned the party for dinner in her quarters.

**Earhart**: "I was sorry to hear about your brother. I’m sorry about that."
**Zolf (quietly)**: "Um, yeah, me too."
―Zolf learns that his father and brother were Harlequins.

"He quit! Sort of. He basically distanced himself from the whole thing. I heard your brother was interested and your dad didn’t tell him no. Your dad didn’t want anything to do with it, really. He was very important once in the day, but he kinda backed off from it. I mean, once the whole separatist thing set up, it was kind of dangerous to be linked, so he thought it best to just kinda cut that cord. It’s a shame, he’s a very, very smart man. I kind of regretted him ending up in mining, wasted on that. Amazing tactician, really amazing tactician."
―**Amelia Earhart, about Hirald Smith's involvement with the Harlequins**

"A whole chapter in *Sun Tzu*'s revised Art of War is just my face!"
―**Bertie**

**Bertie**: "Well, there is one particular faculty that I must tend to. I don’t know if you saw in the newspapers the tales of my adventures and the search for Hannibal’s tomb…"
**Earhart**: "You’re the one with the feather boa, aren’t you?!"
**Bertie**: "I am the one with—what?"
―Earhart recognises Bertie from Wilde's column.

## Dice rolls and Mechanics

Bertie makes a diplomacy roll: 13.

Sasha makes a disable device check: 13.

Sasha critically fails her bluff check to lie about how they
know Wilde.

Zolf makes a perception check to notice the captain pointing
a gun to Sasha’s head: 25.

Zolf makes a fort save to get over his airsickness: 18.

Zolf makes a perception check: 25.

Sasha makes a wisdom check to see if she knows anything
about the Harlequins: 15.

Bertie makes a knowledge history check: 18.

Sasha makes a bluff check: 25.