The bazaar holds its breath as Marin’s signal lands. The Guard steps in, blocking the lane, while traders and shoppers recoil from the center ring.
The Negotiator jerks against the closing hands, then freezes. His eyes find Tracy, wide with panic, and a hard image slams across the air, a buried facility tagged with the same strange symbols from her visions.
Tracy
A facility. Same symbols.
Marin turns toward the rising crowd, distracted by the shove and shout around her. The Guard tightens the hold, but the Negotiator still has one desperate second to reach for Tracy’s mind.
The Negotiator
Find it before they take me. North road. Under the old salt works. Please.
The image sharpens, a map fragment, rusted fencing, a sealed door marked in those same symbols. For Tracy, the trap in the bazaar is no longer the story. The buried place is.
✓ Quest Accepted
Secure the buried facility’s location
“I reach into the negotiator's mind to get all details regarding the buried place and the salt works.”
SUCCESS (Fair Telepathy, rolled +0)
Tracy
Salt works, north road, buried door. The symbols repeat through a tunnel lined with rusted fencing and a collapsed pump house.
Tracy lets the contact deepen and the image opens wider in her head, a map’s worth of detail spilling free before it can be hidden again.
The Negotiator
Not the bazaar, not now, please, they will kill me for this...
The pressure in the channel snaps. Tracy gets the route, the landmark, the warning about unstable ground, and the fact that the sealed entrance is half buried under brine-hardened stone.
But the search leaves a mark. The Negotiator goes slack in the Guard’s grip, nose bleeding, and several nearby shoppers turn hard-eyed toward Tracy.
Marin Tohinta
Enough. The man is done talking. Tracy, keep what you learned close.
Marin’s voice cuts the lane clean. The Guard tightens their hold, and the crowd swells one step closer, waiting to see whether the Negotiator gets dragged away or struck down.
Quest Complete
Secure the buried facility’s location