fractions rework

npc/assassins.md

@@ -17,7 +17,17 @@ They keep a codex, and they keep it like scripture:
 - **The seal.** Every kill is claimed openly under the guild's mark within a day. No innocent hangs for their work.
 - **The closing.** A sealed kill legally ends the blood-debt; retaliation is forbidden and the guild enforces the closing at its own expense. This is the clause that makes the city keep them.
 
-The guild's reputation *is* its currency, and for months that reputation has been bleeding. The **Order of Mending** has been taking side jobs — messy, ritualistic kills that undercut the market and mock everything the codex stands for. Bodies turn up carved open, hearts missing, symbols cut into floorboards. Worse, someone inside the House has been *cooperating*.
+The guild's reputation *is* its currency, and for months that reputation has been bleeding through a string of **robbed closings**. A sealed death is meant to end the grievance: no second blade, no looting, no punishment of the family. Instead, targets or their homes are being harvested beneath the House's seal. One corpse is opened for its heart; another is untouched but an heirloom mirror vanishes; a third survives the warning but loses every memory of a planar journey. Guards stop investigating because the House has already claimed the scene, and families naturally blame the assassins for whatever is missing. Worse, someone inside the House is selling the Order of Mending exactly the information needed to do it.
+
+Sevra has combined several different patterns into one plausible accusation: the Order bought a traitor, turned the contract archive into an acquisition list, and is responsible for the clean deaths whose souls cannot be found afterward. She is right about the contract thefts, ritual harvesting, and stolen relics. She is wrong about the missing souls; those belong to Thera's older, quieter work. The variety hides Thera beautifully.
+
+### The Attack the House Misunderstood (DM)
+
+Three weeks ago a bound Xarrul entered the House's inner archive using stolen voices and altered memories. The Order had not sent it to assassinate Sevra. Its task was to steal the **Severance Nail**, a black iron spike the House venerates as the weapon of its first sanctioned killing. In truth the Nail once pinned a planar breach shut and now powers the archive's oldest ward, **the Final Closure**.
+
+The Closure protects assassins against possession, charm, magical commands, tracking curses, and hostile pacts. Its principle is pure House doctrine: it does not wrestle with controlling magic; it finds the hand holding the chain and makes one exact cut. *Nothing enters the archive belonging to another master.* When Xarrul crossed the threshold, the ward automatically severed the Order's command binding. Most summoned creatures would then snap home. Xarrul shifted into the Border Ethereal at the instant of severance and caught itself there—uncontrolled, still present, and finally free.
+
+The witnesses saw it dissolve and assumed the Closure had banished it. Nothing obvious was stolen, although Xarrul learned what the Nail was and where it lay. The members in the tavern know only contradictory hearsay: familiar voices gave false orders, two custodians fought, three blades were found down, one bore a mark over the heart, and the creature vanished near the leadership corridor. Because they kill people for a living, they have interpreted an infiltration and theft as a failed assassination attempt. Even Sevra does not possess the whole account.
 
 Tonight, four named members are present, plus two unnamed blades.
 
@@ -70,11 +80,19 @@ Sevra is the senior *contract* blade present and the guild's institutional consc
 - Her blind spot is institutional pride: an accusation against one of the guild's *best* reads to her as slander until the evidence is procedural. **Win her with proof, not argument.**
 - Suspects Dace is the traitor but needs proof. Moving on a guild member without evidence breaks the code and fractures the House.
 
+### Grey Quay — Her Debt to the House
+
+Twelve years ago the merchant Vey Corren separately hired Sevra to kill a blackmailer and Orenn and Mags to recover his ledger. The teams met inside a Grey Quay warehouse and discovered Corren intended the fixers to deposit the ledger in an exterior fireproof safe, then lock and burn every witness inside. Orenn spotted the trigger; Mags cut a route through the adjoining building; Sevra remained behind long enough to sell their deaths. Together they came out behind Corren's waiting dock gang and closed the betrayal.
+
+Sevra later gave Corren's signet to Orenn as proof the debt was finished. He made it the bottle opener beneath the bar. Grey Quay taught Sevra that Mags returns for people when abandoning them would be profitable and that Orenn sees the mechanism beneath a polite arrangement. Orenn's murder is therefore personal—and a debt whose rightful target she cannot yet name, which is almost unbearable to her.
+
 ### What She Knows
 
 **Will share if players approach professionally (show competence, don't moralize):**
 - The brawl started because Kael confronted the cultists about a contract kill in the Merchant Quarter — a noble found dead with ritual marks. It was the guild's contract, paid for and accepted. Someone else did the kill.
-- The guild has a mole. Kills are being sold to outside buyers. Bodies are showing up wrong — missing parts, ritualistic damage.
+- The guild has a mole. Full contract dossiers are being sold: targets, possessions, warning schedules, assigned blades, and the window during which the House controls the scene.
+- The Merchant Quarter corpse is only the latest robbed closing. Other scenes lost relics, records, blood, or memories; a few perfectly clean kills left no soul for priests to call. Sevra believes the Order did all of it.
+- She has heard that a bound, Order-marked creature penetrated the inner House and attacked several blades. She was not present at the breach and believes the Final Closure destroyed it.
 - She didn't kill Orenn. The guild respected the rules. "Orenn was worth more alive to us than anyone in this room."
 
 **Will trade for proof of the traitor's identity:**
@@ -121,7 +139,7 @@ If the players bring her **proof of the rot** (the soulcoin, a marked victim, Th
 
 Late twenties, handsome, easy smile. Sandy hair, bright eyes, the kind of face you'd trust to watch your drink. He's the assassin who doesn't look like an assassin — the one who gets close to targets through charm, not stealth. He's everyone's friend at the table and nobody's friend in truth.
 
-Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Order of Mending for six months. The cultists need fresh kills for ritual components — hearts still warm, blood drained into sanctified vessels. Dace provides the bodies and takes a cut on top of his guild pay. He doesn't believe in the cult's ideology — he just likes money, and he finds the moral panic about his sideline amusing.
+Dace has been selling complete guild dossiers to the Order of Mending for six months. The Order uses planned killings as cover to acquire whatever Phase Two requires: hearts and blood sometimes, but also planar relics, true-name records, unusual memories, and objects carried between worlds. Dace sells the target, possessions, warning schedule, assigned blade, and the quiet interval after the seal when no guard will question the scene. He doesn't believe in the Order's ideology—he just likes money, and finds the moral panic about his sideline amusing.
 
 **Key traits:**
 - The most likeable person in the room. Friendly, warm, buys drinks, makes jokes.
@@ -132,11 +150,11 @@ Dace has been selling guild contracts to the Order of Mending for six months. Th
 
 ### His Secret
 
-Dace has been meeting a Order of Mending contact in the tavern's private room to arrange deliveries. The sigil diagram scratched into the table was made during one of these meetings — the contact was Haddon, mapping the house's old summoner-work as part of the cult's study of this thin point. Dace didn't care what the diagram meant; he was there to negotiate prices.
+Dace has been meeting an Order of Mending contact in the tavern's private room to arrange deliveries. The sigil diagram scratched into the table was made during one of these meetings — the contact was Haddon, mapping the house's old summoner-work as part of the cult's study of this thin point. Dace didn't care what the diagram meant; he was there to negotiate prices.
 
 **Evidence linking Dace:**
 - DC 16 Insight during conversation: Something about his helpfulness is *too* practiced. He's performing.
-- Tallow (for a price) will confirm that Dace has been meeting "a scholar type" in the private room regularly.
+- [Haddon's journal](../prints/haddonuv-denik-harath.md) records Dace selling the complete Harath dossier, both payments, and their next private-room meeting. The field-sign beside the entry is Dace's; Sevra or Kael recognizes it automatically.
 - Kael, if asked privately, will say Dace was the last person to take a guild contract that ended up with ritual marks on the body. "He said he subcontracted the cleanup. Since when do we subcontract?"
 - The cultist pin found in the private room — Dace pockets things. A DC 14 Investigation of his person finds a **second cultist pin** hidden in his boot, kept as insurance.
 
@@ -198,6 +216,7 @@ Kael is loyal to the House with the fervour of someone who found a family after
 - Honest to a fault. He cannot and will not lie convincingly. If asked direct questions, he answers directly. This makes him the easiest assassin to talk to, despite his hostility.
 - He didn't kill Orenn. He's the most vocally angry about the death — killing on neutral ground violates everything he believes in.
 - **He idolises Thera.** She was kind to him when he was a nobody aspirant. He would take a blade for her without thinking. This is exactly why what she is will break him.
+- When Kael was a new blade, senior members treated him as disposable muscle and left him standing while they drank. Orenn silently put a hot meal in front of him. When someone objected that Kael was working, Orenn replied, *"Then he needs feeding more than you do."* Kael never forgot. Beneath his anger tonight is the knowledge that he started the brawl in which Orenn died: *"He kept this place safe from people like us. Then I made it unsafe."*
 
 ### What He Knows
 
@@ -233,6 +252,14 @@ Thera serves something older than the codex and beneath the city — a thing tha
 
 **Why she's here tonight:** to end Dace. His crude soul-butchery for the Order of Mending is dragging soul-death into public view — the one thing that could get people *looking*. She has already marked him and is deciding whether he dies or gets recruited. She is also quietly appalled by the cultists on principle: amateurs, desecrating something sacred for spell components.
 
+### Orenn and the Widow's Contract
+
+Years ago Thera warned a woman whose negligence had caused several deaths. The grievance was valid, but the target accepted responsibility: she confessed publicly, surrendered her property to the victims' families, and committed her remaining life to the care of a surviving child. The client concealed that settlement and still demanded death.
+
+Orenn uncovered the concealment and brought Thera the proof. She refused the kill. When the client sent ordinary killers after the widow, Orenn and Thera protected her together until the fraudulent continuation of the grievance could be closed. It convinced Orenn that Thera represented the best possible version of the House: a killer capable of valuing a life more than the opportunity to take it.
+
+Thera treasured his judgment because he understood precisely what she did and respected her anyway. She considers the Nether Inn one of the few places where her work was neither romanticized nor condemned. Orenn's murder genuinely offends and grieves her. If her soul-harvesting is exposed, invoking him lands where little else can—although she still believes she honours the mercy he admired. Mags does not permit that comfort: *"Don't use him to clean your hands."*
+
 ### The Tells
 
 - **The gestures.** A PC who watches her greet or part from someone — including the moment she "comforted" Dace earlier — may catch the doorframe-touch, the single turn of a coin on the table, the murmured word (DC 16 Perception; DC 14 Insight to sense it was deliberate, ritual, *rehearsed into the courtesy*). Meaningless now. Unforgettable later.