Chapter 10 Summary

Chapter 10

• Black-market access: Party intimidates a shady merchant → he leads them to a trapdoor into a hidden black-market room.
• Stock includes: trinkets, poisons, concoctions, thieves’ tools, glass-cutter gloves, dog pepper, etc.
• Party slides down ladder hyped as hell (“I am keen”).
• Gnifty’s pixie tea trip: Gnifty drinks tea from Zepphra (pixie) → intense, disturbing vision-trip.
• Sees vivid imagery of his birth + Halo.
• Comes out retraumatised and needs time to grieve.
• Downtime split: Everyone naps except Gnifty and Bugs.
• Bugs’ chaos arc: Bugs steals things and moves into the Romeo & Juliet rats’ home, claiming it.
• Shoves their romantic pictures into acid and basically declares squatter rights.
• Malakar lore drop: Gnifty talks with a strange lady who claims she birthed puppets and calls them her children.
• She tells Gnifty a story about Malakar’s origin, before he became the God of Dragons.
• Gambling montage: Party gambles away time.
• Siren approach: Beautiful singing outside → party suspects sirens.
• Grizzly: “I would like to fuck a mermaid.”
• Shrubbery: “How?”
• Compulsion hits: Fog rolls in—soft, fluffy cloud-fog hovering over the water. Ripples creep toward the ship.
• Grabby, Whiskers, and Bugs become entranced and lean dangerously over the edge.
• Rescues:
• Shrubbery wildshapes into a brown bear and physically pulls Whiskers away in a giant bear-hug.
• Grizzly uses a rope lasso to snag Grabby and yank him back.
• Inferno grabs Bugs and restrains them.
• Reveal + near-jump: A mermaid surfaces—beautiful to Grabby, terrifying to everyone else.
• Grabby nearly jumps in, but hears his mother’s voice: “Think before you act, Grabby!!”
• Combat: Multiple sirens emerge → battle begins.
• Sirens grab and rock the ship.
• Snapjaw’s entrance (fails): Snapjaw swings down on a rope like a legend… misses completely and falls into the water.
• More chaos tools:
• Gnifty shrinks Inferno.
• Snapjaw climbs back up.
• Zepphra casts magic to create a massive serpent noise (distraction/pressure move).
• Reward + arrival: Party receives 100 gold each and finally docks at Carhold.