🌊 Fluid

Try This

Cold open 10 · Marellius, a season into Deepwater Hold, at a wake for a boat that didn’t come back

At a Glance

Who’s in it: Marellius, playing his past self. Everyone else watches.
When: Deepwater Hold, one season after the family who took him in took him in. Long before the Academy, long before Onda.
The occasion: A neighbour’s ship did not come home. Munro and Rasha Tohan are hosting the wake in their own yard — they have the space and the surplus, and the dead are not theirs.
Runs: Five to ten minutes
Boxes: Four, numbered below. Box 2 has conditional adds.
Rolls: Five — four texture, one reach. One of them only fires if he sneaks.
Reveals: Where his cooking comes from, and who it was for.

The one thing to know before running it

Miri Sallow was a hand on the lost boat — not the cook, which is the point. Feeding the new boy was never her job. Her habit was holding out a spoon of whatever was going and saying try this, then watching his face. She is a week dead, and nobody in that yard knows she fed him.

Whether he tells anyone is the player’s to spend, in the moment. So is whether he does this in the open or slips off to do it. Do not decide either one for him.

The opening

The opening line

You’re pouring.

Right away, to Marellius: DC 10 Sleight of Hand — how well he pours. Then read box 1.

Read-aloud 1 — the yard

The trestles go up in the yard before the sun is all the way over the roof, and by noon there is more food on them than this house eats in a week. People come in through the gate the way they come into a church, and the smell that meets them is bread and hot fat and, underneath it, the flats at low tide. Somebody’s mother is laughing too loudly at the far end. Somebody’s father has not said a word since he came in. You have been in Deepwater Hold one season — nobody in this yard knows you have anything to be here for.

What happens

Beat one — a yard full of other people’s grief

He has a job if he wants one: carrying, pouring, taking things from people at the gate. Let him work or let him drift. What the beat is for is the position — a boy who is not yet theirs, at a funeral for people he is not allowed to be sad about, in a yard where every adult is busy.

The two of them are working, not hosting. Rasha is at the table and has been since before light; Munro is at the gate, because he is the one who knows what a lost boat costs and the men coming through it know he knows. Neither has time for the boy today, and neither of them is being unkind about it. Give each of them one line if the player goes to them, and no more.

The fork, and it is his: he goes to the ice store openly, or he goes when nobody is looking. Do not steer it. If he slips, roll Stealth as he goes.

Beat two — the ice store

Read-aloud 2 — the ice store

The ice store is the coldest dark in the house and it still smells of the sea the ice came out of. The cream is in its can where it has been since morning, sweating. Against the wall is a crate that came off a boat with one corner stove in, and the peppercorns have run out into the straw like shot — nobody has come back for them. You put one on your tongue because Miri would have. It is not sweet and it is not salt: it is heat, arriving late, and it keeps arriving after you have swallowed.

Conditional adds — use one

If he slipped off: Behind you the yard is a sound with a door between you and it, and not one person out there knows where you are.

If he is working in the open: The door stands open behind you and the whole yard can see you in it, and not one of them asks what you’re doing.

The pepper and the ice are both cargo — they are in that room because of what this family does for a living. He is not inventing from nothing; he is using the house he has been dropped into. Roll Cook’s utensils for the making.

Beat three — the step

He carries it out. The first spoon does not go to an adult, and it does not go to Miri’s people: it goes to another kid, sitting where kids sit when the adults have taken the yard. Roll Persuasion before the box — then read it.

Read-aloud 3 — the first spoon

The other kid is on the step, because the step is where you sit when the adults have taken the yard. You hold the spoon out before you’ve worked out how to explain it, and what comes out of you is Miri’s two words. They look at the spoon, then at you, and take it — sweet first, cold enough to hurt, and then the other thing coming up slow behind it. Their eyebrows go up, and they laugh, and it is the first laugh in that yard all day that anybody means.

He is doing to another child exactly what was done to him, inside a week of losing the woman who did it. Nobody in the yard can see that. Do not explain it — if the player says her name here, that is them spending it.

Beat four — the yard

Read-aloud 4 — the close

After that it goes the way food goes. The near end of the table wants to know what’s in it and the far end wants to know why it hasn’t come down there yet, and somebody says your name — not the boy, not the one they took in. Your name. For a while the yard sounds like the wrong thing, like a party, with the tide going out behind it and the berth still empty. Nobody stops it. When the can comes back to you scraped grey, it is warm from all the hands.

Then roll Insight — the last thing that happens, and the only roll that reaches out of the scene. If the parents are going to catch each other’s eye over the top of all this, it happens here, and he only half sees it.

What’s rolled

Marellius’s player rolls all of them, on the sheet in front of them — the character they have, however young the past self is. No roll decides whether any of this happened.

What	DC	Success carries	Failure carries
Sleight of Hand the opening line	DC 10	Not a drop on the trestles. Cups go into mourners’ hands full and nobody looks down to see who filled them; the new boy is invisible, which is what he wants. If it carries: a Dream Inspiration die.	He slops one over a mourner’s hand, and for a moment the yard looks at the new boy. Somebody says it’s all right. Nobody remembers his name. Nothing physical to carry.
Stealth only if he slips off	DC 10	He is simply gone and back. The ice store is his own business.	Somebody clocks him leaving. For twenty minutes at a funeral the people who took him in do not know where he is — and they never say a word about it, that day or after, which is its own kind of information.
Cook’s utensils	DC 12	It comes out right — smooth, hard, cold, the pepper suspended through it instead of sitting at the bottom.	Grainy, and already going soft at the edges when he carries it out. He serves it anyway. They eat it anyway. Nobody in that yard has ever had anything like it and nobody knows it was supposed to be better.
Persuasion before read-aloud 3	DC 10	The kid takes it on his say-so, and the laugh is theirs.	The kid won’t touch it, and an adult takes the first spoon instead — out of kindness to the boy holding it. It still works, it still goes round the yard. But it lands as something the town did for him rather than something he did for the town, and he knows the difference even if nobody else does.
Insight the reach	DC 13	He clocks it — that a bad day got carried, briefly, by a thing he made with his hands, and he takes that out of the scene with him. This is where the kitchen stops being a chore and becomes the craft he refuses to call lesser.	He doesn’t see it. It stays a thing that happened to him rather than a thing he did, and he works out what it meant years later, in someone else’s kitchen, in Onda.

Three of the four carry texture only. The one that reaches, reaches into who he became — not into what the present-day party knows.

What it reveals

Where the cooking came from, and that it was never about food. Canon has him as a genuinely good cook who does not treat the kitchen as the lesser craft. This is why: he learned, in one season, that a spoon held out to someone is how you tell them they are welcome — from a deckhand who had no reason to teach him and did it anyway, and who was dead within the year.

And that he was learning it from two directions at once — Rasha at the table at home, Miri with a spoon on the quay. Also on the table by the end of it: that the household who took him in feeds people who are not theirs, and that the town used his name, which is their name.

Still open

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

His age. Canon puts the adoption between five and thirteen and no further. Every box above works without a number; if you want one, box 1 is where it would go.

The lost boat’s name, and whose family it belonged to.

What Munro and Rasha are actually like. Canon fixes their names, their trade and the split between them — his boats, her table — and nothing else. Beat one gives each of them one line; what that line sounds like is yours.

Settled 8/17 — Munro and Rasha Tohan, and the name is theirs, given to him when they took him in. So beat four is not only the town using his name, it is the town using their name for him, in their own yard, for the first time. Play it as warmth, never as a speech — nobody in that yard would remark on it.