🌊 Fluid

Plant Your Feet

Cold open 13 · Haxami puts his sergeant on the ground in a Seeran drill yard, and is made a scout for it

At a Glance

Who’s in it: Haxami, playing his past self. Remper is played by Marellius’s player — Remper is their character in another campaign, and they bring him here as a second PC for the scene. Nonne and Trill are at the table and not in the scene; they watch.
When: House Seera’s militia, eastern Tohsa. A few years in, still in the line, before he was ever a scout. Young. Do not date it harder than that; the player rolls the sheet he has.
What has to be true first: Remper has had the line all season and has been teaching the blade wrong the whole time: plant your feet, meet it square, let the blade take it. Haxami has been watching the old hunters at the fence, who do not do that. Remper has noticed him watching.
The occasion: Morning drill. Remper picks him out to demonstrate on.
Runs: Five to ten minutes
Boxes: Four, numbered below.
Rolls: Three — two texture, one that decides what follows him to the scouts.
Reveals: Why Haxami became a scout. He was not chosen. He was posted, as a punishment, by a sergeant he had shown up in front of the line.

The one thing to know before running it

Remper goes down. That is fixed, and Marellius’s player is told so before anyone rolls. The roll is not whether; it is how it looked. Their job is to play a man who believes what he teaches — not cruel, not stupid, certain — and to describe his own fall when it comes.

And Remper is only a bad sergeant. He is not the commander who sells the party at the Bloodied Sands, and this scene owes the Sands nothing. If someone at the table decides he is, that is theirs to think and not yours to confirm. It is not true.

The opening

The opening line

You’re watching.

Right away, to Haxami: DC 10 Perception — how well he watches. Then read box 1.

Read-aloud 1 — the yard

The drill yard at the edge of the trees is packed earth gone hard as a floor, and the morning is cold enough that the breath of the line hangs in front of it. Hides are drying on the racks along the fence, and the smell of the tanning pits comes and goes with the wind. Sergeant Remper walks the line with a practice blade on his shoulder, saying the thing he said yesterday and the day before, the thing you have watched the old hunters at the fence never once do: plant your feet, meet it square, let the blade take it. He stops in front of you. He has been stopping in front of you all week.

Then, before Remper speaks: why him? DC 10 Insight — on a success Haxami knows it is not his turn. It is because of the fence.

Read this to Haxami’s player and to Remper’s. The other two are watching a memory, not sharing it. Then hand the line to Marellius’s player: Remper says what a sergeant says when he has picked a man out, in whatever voice Remper has in their other game.

What happens

Beat one — the sergeant and the man at the fence

Roll Insight before Remper opens his mouth. He has picked the elf because the elf watches the hunters instead of the sergeant, and he has been waiting all week for a morning to make the point. Whether Haxami knows that going in is the only thing the roll changes.

Brief for Remper’s player, said once, out loud, before the drill: he believes it. Plant and meet is how he was taught and how he has taught every line since, and nobody has ever put him on the ground for it. He is going to demonstrate on Haxami, and he expects Haxami’s feet to be where he told him to put them. Let them play the set-up as long as it is fun and no longer — a minute, the sergeant squaring up, the line gone quiet.

Beat two — the drill

Roll the Athletics contest now, Haxami against Remper, before the box. The fall is not on the dice. What the line saw is.

Read-aloud 2 — the fall

He comes on the way he said he would, square, all his weight behind it, expecting your feet to be where he told you to put them. They are not. You step off the line the way you have watched the hunters do it, and the blade goes past your ribs by a hand, and his weight goes with it. He is on the ground before the line has understood what it saw. The practice blade is still in his hand. Nobody laughs. Nobody moves at all.

If Haxami beat him by five or more, add: Then somebody at the far end of the line lets out a breath, and it is very nearly a word.

Otherwise, add: Then somebody says he slipped, and somebody else agrees, and you find that you are not sure yourself.

Give Remper’s player the fall. They describe how he goes down; the box says only that he does. Then hand them the next box to read against, because the getting up is theirs too.

Beat three — getting up

Read-aloud 3 — the sergeant

He gets up without hurry, the way a man gets up who has decided that nothing happened, and he brushes the yard off his knees one at a time. He does not look at you. He looks at the line, and the line looks at the fence. Then he says the drill again from the top, plant your feet, meet it square, in exactly the voice he said it in before, and walks on down the line to the next man. He does not stop in front of you again.

Remper does not lose his temper, and he does not say a word about it, then or ever. Whatever the line thinks it saw, he knows exactly what happened, and Marellius’s player should play a man who has already decided what to do about it. The drill runs out. The day runs out. Nothing is said. Do not let the table fill the silence for him.

Beat four — the posting

Read-aloud 4 — the board

The board by the quartermaster’s door has a new sheet on it in the morning, and the line reads it before drill, in the order the line does everything. Your name is on it. Not with the line: under a heading you have to read twice, in a captain’s hand you do not know, and it says scouts, and it says the eastern trails, and it says today. Under the captain’s name there is a second name, the one who recommended the transfer, and the ink of that one is fresher than the rest. It is Remper’s.

That is the end of it. Nobody explains what the scouts are, or what the eastern trails are, or whether this is a punishment. Everyone at the table knows what being a scout will cost him, and he does not. Stop on the board.

What’s rolled

Three, on the sheet in front of him — the character he has, years younger. No roll decides whether Remper went down or whether Haxami was posted. He did. He was.

Who & what	DC	Success carries	Failure carries
Haxami — Perception the opening line	DC 10	He has it exactly: the old hunters at the fence never plant; they step off the line and let the blade go past. When Remper comes on in beat two, Haxami’s feet already know where to go. If it carries: a Dream Inspiration die.	He has seen that the hunters do it differently, not how. The step off the line in beat two comes from instinct, not study. Nothing physical to carry.
Haxami — Insight beat one, before Remper speaks	DC 10	He knows it is not his turn. Remper picked him because of the fence, and Haxami walks into the drill knowing it is personal — and can play the set-up that way.	He thinks it is his turn. The fall is the same; it is only a surprise to him too.
Haxami — Athletics contest beat two · Remper’s player rolls d20 + 3 against him	Beat him by 5	The line saw a recruit school his sergeant. The story gets to the scouts before he does, and the captain on the eastern trails has heard it by the time he reports. He arrives as somebody.	It looked like a stumble. Half the line thinks Remper tripped, and Haxami is not certain himself. He arrives at the scouts as a transfer and nothing else, and the only two men who know what happened in the yard are him and Remper.

Both are texture. Nothing here reaches into the present — the scene is a posting, and the posting happens either way.

What it reveals

Why Haxami became a scout. Canon has the honorable scout dying on the northeastern shores, sold by his commander. This is where the scout came from, and he was not chosen for it: he was posted, as a punishment, by a sergeant he had shown up in front of the line. What the scouts made of him after that is not this scene’s to say.

And that he was House Seera’s before he was House Ehn’s. 🔒 canon says he was a scout and that it ended on the northeastern shores; it does not say whose militia. This page says Seera’s. If that should be canon, the dossier needs the line — it is not edited here.

Behind the screen

Serrin has read this one like all the others, so he knows what nobody in Onda does: the man in the clerk’s greys was a Seeran soldier, and a good one. That is a fact in his pocket, not a scene. And the commander who sold the party — Aldous Rook, “Rook” to the scouts, named 2026-09-09 — stays unseen; this page does not spend him, and nothing here says the hand on the board is his.

Still open

Decide before you run it — none of these are invented here

How old he is. Young, and a few years in. Flavour, not maths.

The captain’s name, and what the eastern trails are. The box needs neither. If a player asks, the captain is a name and the trails are where the scouts go.

What Remper carries over. He is Marellius’s player’s character in another campaign. How much of that man walks into this yard is theirs to say, not the page’s.

Whether Remper comes back. Nothing after the board is written. He is not the seller; whether he is anything else is open.

How many years from the board to the Sands. Do not fix it.