🌊 Fluid

The Beds at Dawn

Cold open 3 · Haxami meets Losam Ferrante on the mudflats below the quay, at the bottom of the tide

At a Glance

Who’s in it: Haxami, playing his past self. Nonne, Trill and Marellius are at the table and not in the scene — they watch it happen. Losam is yours.
When: Onda, under a month after Haxami arrived, before the strand. Dawn, the bottom of a spring tide. Do not date it harder than that.
What has to be true first: He has been walking the port at hours when nobody is about, learning it. This morning he went out on the mud to see the quay from the water side.
The occasion: Fate. Losam is out on his oyster beds alone, sleeves rolled, no one with him, and he has been there longer than Haxami has.
Runs: Five to ten minutes
Boxes: Four, numbered below.
Rolls: Four — two texture, two reach, which is the ceiling.
Reveals: How Haxami feels about the man who owns Onda, and one bed on the flats that is dying with nothing wrong with the water. Neither gets explained.

The one thing to know before running it

Losam is not performing. Everywhere else in Onda he is the wealthiest man in the port and behaves like it. Out here at the bottom of the tide he is a man with his hands in cold mud, and there is nobody to be rich at. That is the only version of him Haxami will ever meet without an audience, and it is why the scene is worth ten minutes.

And the bed is not explained. Not by Losam, who does not know, and not by you. It is a strange detail in a rich man’s morning, and it stays that way until the story reaches for it — see what it reveals.

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 flats

The tide is all the way out, and the port behind you is still dark: the quay up on its posts, the oyster house shut. The mud comes up over your boots. Out on the flats the oyster beds run in low walls of stone and stake. One man is out there among them, bent over, sleeves rolled up, his coat hung on a post. He has been there a while. He has not looked up, but he knows you are there.

Then, before either of them speaks: what is this man doing out here alone? DC 12 Insight — on a success Haxami sees that he is not working. He is looking for something.

Read this to Haxami’s player. The other three are watching a memory, not sharing it. He came out here to map the port; he did not come out here to meet anyone, and it is worth a line from the player about what he was actually doing on the mud before dawn.

What happens

Beat one — two men who read people, and nobody to perform for

Losam speaks first, without straightening up, and what he says is a question about the tide, as though Haxami were a man who might know. Play him plain. Short sentences, no flourish, and he lets every one of Haxami’s answers sit a beat longer than is comfortable before he replies. He says very little and misses nothing, and the player should feel both.

Roll Insight before Haxami opens his mouth. What Losam is doing on the beds is the thing the scene turns on, and a man who reads rooms for a living should get one look at it first.

Then let them talk. Losam asks who he is. Haxami has a clerk’s answer ready, because he always does — and Losam listens to it all the way through, and nods, and asks a second question that the clerk’s answer did not cover. Roll Deception here. Do not tell the player what the roll was for.

Beat two — the turn

Read-aloud 2 — Losam, close

He straightens up. He is shorter and older than he looked from a distance. His hands are a working man’s hands, but there are rings on the post with his coat, and they are not cheap. He looks you over for a while. Then he says you talk like a clerk but walk like something else, that it is none of his business, and that he would like your opinion on something, since you are here and the tide will not be back for an hour.

He does not press. Whatever the Deception roll did, Losam says nothing more about it, ever. He has filed it. The scene moves on to the bed as though the question had been about the weather, and the player is left not knowing whether the mask held. That not-knowing is the point of the roll.

Beat three — the bed

He walks Haxami along the walls to one bed near the quay end, under the posts where the packets tie up. He does not explain on the way. Roll Investigation when they get there, then read the box.

Read-aloud 3 — the bed

The other beds are dark, the shells shut tight. This one is pale. The oysters lie open on the stones with nothing in them. He hands you one, and it weighs almost nothing. It is dry and clean inside, and there is no smell. The water in the channel beside it looks the same as everywhere else. He says there is nothing wrong with the water, and he says it like a man who has checked more than once.

Losam does not know what it is. He has had the bed lifted and relaid, the water tasted, the stakes changed. It keeps happening, on this bed and not the others, and it started some months back. He asks what a clerk makes of it, and he means the question — it is the first thing in the scene he has actually wanted from Haxami. Haxami has no answer, and whatever he says instead, Losam listens to all of it.

Nothing here is explained. Do not let a player’s guess become a fact. If someone at the table says the casks, that is theirs to think and not yours to confirm.

Beat four — the close

Read-aloud 4 — the tide

He takes the shell back and drops it. The channel beside the bed has started to fill, and the water is already over the stones. He takes his coat off the post, puts his rings back on, and is the wealthiest man in Onda again. He says you will find him at the house, and that his wife will want to feed you. The way he says it, you are not finished. Then he walks back toward the quay ahead of you without looking round, and the water covers the pale bed behind you.

That is the end of it. Nothing is offered, nothing is asked for, and nobody says the word debt. Haxami walks back into the port knowing the man who owns it, which he did not an hour ago, and the man who owns it knows something about him too, which is a thing Haxami cannot check.

What’s rolled

Four, on the sheet in front of him — the character he has, a month younger. No roll decides whether they met, or what the bed is. They met. It is dying.

Who & what	DC	Success carries	Failure carries
Haxami — Perception the opening line	DC 10	He has the port from the water side before he notices the man on the beds: the quay’s posts, the oyster house doors, which walls of the beds are stone and which are stake. He saw Losam first. If it carries: a Dream Inspiration die.	He is watching the quay, not the flats, and the man among the beds is simply there when he looks down. Losam saw him first. Nothing physical to carry.
Haxami — Insight beat one, before he speaks	DC 12	He sees that Losam is not working; he is looking for something, and has been for a while. Haxami opens the conversation already knowing the rich man is worried, and plays it accordingly.	He reads it as a rich man’s hobby and opens like a clerk talking to a gentleman. Losam lets him, and the bed lands as a surprise instead of an answer.
Haxami — Deception the first reach — and do not say what it is for	DC 13	Losam files him as what he says he is: a clerk, useful, from somewhere else. When Haxami turns up in the Ferrantes’ story later, that is the man Losam thinks he is dealing with.	Losam knows. Not what Haxami is — only that he is not a clerk — and he says nothing, then or after. It is filed, and it has been filed since before the cooper died. The player is not told which way this went.
Haxami — Investigation the second reach, at the bed	DC 12	He carries the detail out. Light, dry, clean, no rot. It stays with him, and the day someone opens a cask that has gone the same way, he is the one at the table who has held this before.	He saw it and it went unremarked — a dead bed, a rich man’s puzzle, nothing more. The detail was there. Serrin, who has read this memory, holds it now, and Haxami does not.

Two reaches is the ceiling, and this scene spends both. The Deception roll changes what Losam knows in the present. The Investigation roll decides who is carrying the bed: Haxami, or the man in his dreams.

What it reveals

How Haxami feels about the man who owns Onda. Canon has him sort every person into player or pawn. Losam is the first man in the isles who reads him back, plainly, with nobody watching, and then asks for his help with a thing money has not fixed. What Haxami makes of that is his player’s to decide in the scene, and the cold open exists to make him decide it. Whatever he settles on, the family is not strangers to him when act one reaches them.

And that there is a bed on the flats dying with nothing wrong with the water. Under the quay, where the packets tie up, for some months now. Nobody at the table can know what it means, and nobody in the scene explains it.

Behind the screen

The bed is the first sign of layer 3: what rides in the casks does not stay in them, and the beds under the packet berths are taking the same thing the oak in Emil’s cellar took. The grey cask and the pale bed are one effect at two scales, and the party can hold both before anyone tells them they are the same. When a cask is opened in play, that is when this pays. Not before, and never out loud.

Neither of these is stated on the page and neither should be stated at the table. The scene shows a worried man and a dead bed and stops.

Still open

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

What Haxami was doing on the mud. Mapping the port is the shape of it; the player can give the line. It does not need to be interesting.

Whether Delta’s supper ever happens. Losam’s last line invites it. It is not written and does not need to be; if it fires, it is the family’s first scene in act one rather than a cold open.

How long after this the strand is. Weeks, not days. Do not fix it.

Whether Losam remembers the conversation the way Haxami does. Serrin has read this memory. Losam has only lived it.