Session 14 Recap - The Piano Breaks

Justice, when it finally comes, won't look like a victory. It'll look like letting go.

The Executioner's reading from the top of Session 13 finally landed. By the end of the night, the mystery Mel had been dangling in front of the party for weeks — an inn that simply worked, in a city where nothing was supposed to — had an answer. It took a smashed piano to get there.

The Warehouse

After a short rest in the wreckage of the smugglers' den, the party kept searching and found a hidden passage behind a shoddily built wall: the smugglers' warehouse. Whatever had been moving through it, the smugglers hadn't been alone down there.

A protean abomination was waiting, and the fight started the moment the party crossed the threshold. It went straight for Rustar, enveloping him in the corner of the room and slamming him into unconsciousness before the rest of the party could react. They held the line and eventually brought it down.

Cold Food and a Wizard Upstairs

Back on the main floor, the food had finally arrived — long cold, but good enough that most of the party ate anyway. Drakzen wasn't convinced. Something about the meal didn't sit right with him, and he left it untouched.

With the basement quiet, the party turned their attention upstairs and found a guest room occupied by Osiris Chronolly, a wizard of the Amethyst Academy. He didn't believe them at first when they described the Inn as frozen in the hours before the meteor struck — but between what they'd seen and what he'd already suspected, he came around.

Osiris had been at the Inn for what he reckoned was months, investigating Miss Charlotte's impossible piano talent. His working theory: a Wish spell, somewhere in her history, though he had no idea how a tavern musician had ever gotten access to magic that powerful.

Anika Patel

Downstairs, a tavern patron the party hadn't noticed before turned out to be a paladin of the Silver Order — Anika Patel, who had no memory of the meteor strike at all, and whose sworn vow was simple: protect Miss Charlotte.

Suspecting Charlotte or her music was the anchor holding the Inn in its loop, the party tried a quiet approach first — a mage hand to disrupt her playing from across the room. It didn't stay quiet. The crowd turned ugly the instant the music faltered, and things escalated fast from there: Augustine hit Charlotte with thunderwave, knocking her back and tipping the piano over, and Six leveled a crossbow at her and threatened to pull the trigger.

Anika did not take it well. For a moment the whole tavern looked ready to turn on the party — until Six talked her down with a hard intimidation check, buying enough room to pull her into a back room and actually talk. On the way out, Augustine wedged the party's immovable rod into the piano's side, quietly making sure no one could stand it back up while the conversation happened.

Convincing Anika

In the back room, the party laid it out: the mismatched arrival dates, the frozen night, Osiris's own research backing them up. It took real deliberation — Anika didn't want to believe any of it — but between the timeline and Osiris's corroboration, she came around.

Back in the main room, Tough Luck smashed the piano to pieces.

The Loop Breaks

The illusion went with it. The pre-meteor Black Ivory Inn dissolved into the present day — the real Inn, as ruined as everything else in that part of the city.

In the wreckage, the party found the corpse of "Open" Mike Connolly — the man they'd spoken to the night before, in a version of the Inn that had stopped existing years ago. The tunnel beneath the basement, the one Mel had described as a back way into the inner city, had collapsed entirely. Whatever route it once offered is gone...for now.

Every present-day patron who'd been trapped in the loop thanked the party for freeing them. Anika Patel — no longer bound to a vigil that no longer made sense — gave them two parting gifts: a Bag of Holding and an Alchemy Jug.

The mystery Mel wouldn't stop hinting at, the one that reportedly kept the Queen of Thieves up at night, has an answer now. Whether that answer ever reaches her is a different question.

NPCs Encountered

• Osiris Chronolly — Amethyst Academy wizard, independently investigating Miss Charlotte's music since before the party arrived.
• Anika Patel — Silver Order paladin, freed from the loop and from her vow alongside everyone else.
• Miss Charlotte — the Inn's pianist. Whatever she truly was, the loop is broken now.
• "Open" Mike Connolly — found dead in the ruins. The man the party spoke with the night before had already been gone for years.

Loose Threads

• Osiris Chronolly's Wish theory — never fully confirmed. How Miss Charlotte accessed a spell of that level remains unanswered.
• Anika Patel — free of her vow for the first time since she can remember. Where she goes next is open.
• The collapsed tunnel — the smugglers' route into the inner city, gone. Any future route past the walls will have to be found elsewhere.
• The Queen of Thieves — still fascinated by an inn that "just worked." The truth is out; whether it reaches her is unknown.
• Aaron Grint — left behind at the Inn when the loop broke. His fate wasn't confirmed either way.

Next Session

The Black Ivory Inn's mystery is closed. What the party does with a Bag of Holding, an Alchemy Jug, and a dead end where their inner-city shortcut used to be is still an open question.