The tally room door shudders with movement inside. Crates scrape over stone, and the ledger in Kynes’s hand answers with a hard gold pulse, bright as a warning bell.
Kynes
The seal is active. Someone is moving records.
Bren shifts beside him, watching the lintel. A thin seam of gold threads through the blue stone, then points, unmistakable, toward the latch.
Bren
They are trying to leave with something. Or hide it.
Kynes presses the ledger closer to the door. The pulse deepens, and a faint line of red script blooms under the wood, as if the building itself is naming the lie.
Kynes
Open the room. This is a bookkeeping matter now.
The door swings inward on a groan. Inside, clerks freeze amid overturned tally shelves and half-packed bundles. At the back wall, a hidden niche glows gold, marking the true cache that the ledger has found.
✓ Quest Accepted
Corner the supply broker with the incriminating goods
“I telekineticlly pin everyone and everything down in the room except Bren and myself.”
SUCCESS (Legendary Willpower, rolled +0)
Kynes thrusts his will through the room, and invisible force drops hard. Crates slam flat. Bundles buckle. Shelves shiver and stop.
The two clerks are pinned where they stand, one with a hand half-raised, the other twisted toward the cache. Their satchels and loose papers are caught in the same pressure, plastered to the floor.
Magistrate Clerk
Stop. That seal, that is official record, you cannot just...
Their protest dies under the weight of Kynes's magic. The hidden gold-lit niche stays open, bright on the back wall, and the ledger in his hand answers with a steadier pulse.
Magistrate Clerk 2
If the cache is taken, the broker will know. Too late, too late...
Bren does not move to strike. She scans the immobilized room, then the open niche, keeping herself clear of the pulse while Kynes holds everything else down.
Bren
They are boxed in. Take what matters before someone comes running.
“I seize the hidden cache and search the satchels as I demand the brokers name.”
SUCCESS (Legendary Willpower, rolled +0)
The room buckles under Kynes’s grip, and the hidden niche gives. A cache box slides free with a harsh scrape, spilling stamped slips, tally tags, and a split wax seal onto the boards.
Kynes
Tell me the broker’s name.
Kynes keeps the pressure on with one hand and hooks the satchels with the other, dragging them within reach. Papers fan open, and the magistrate’s signature stares up from the redacted ledgers.
Magistrate Clerk
I do not know the broker, only the quay mark. That is all we were given.
Bren shifts one step closer to the doorway, eyes hard on the hall beyond, while Kynes empties the first satchel. Inside are quay slips, cargo tallies, and a note pinned to a route marker naming the supply yard.
Magistrate Clerk 2
If you take those, the harbor turn will be on us by dusk.
The second satchel yields the last piece, a grease-stained token with the broker’s location scratched into it. The cache is in Kynes’s hands now, and the room goes very still around that name.
Identify the supply broker
Quest Complete
Corner the supply broker with the incriminating goods
New Gift: Broker-Cornering Arcane Insight
Quest Complete
Expose who profits from the magistrate’s bookkeeping scheme
New Gift: Magistrate-Corruption Insight
+ New Item Acquired
Cache box