🌊 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: Six — three with a cost, two texture, one reach. One only fires if he sneaks. Rebuilt 2026-11-01 for motion: a clock, a man in the ice store, and Miri’s kid on the step.
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.

Three things push on him (Jack, 2026-11-01). The ice came off a boat this morning and is going: whatever he makes has to be out before the Speaker says the names at sundown, when the yard goes quiet and nobody will eat. The pepper crate has an owner, and he comes for it. And the kid on the step is Miri’s, who has not been fed since.

The opening

The opening line

You’re pouring.

Right away, to Marellius: DC 12 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 clock. Say it once, in beat one, through whoever is nearest: the Speaker comes at sundown, and after the names nobody eats. The ice store is the only cold in the house and it is losing. Everything he does from here is against that.

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.

The man in the door. The stove-in crate is not the house’s. It is a hand’s off the lost boat’s sister crew, stowed here for safekeeping, and he has come to take it back before the family notices it was ever theirs to lose. He finds a strange boy with his hands in his cargo. He is not cruel and he is not sober, and he wants his pepper. Marellius talks (Deception or Persuasion) or goes past him with the can (Athletics). Pick one and roll it. The DM plays the man; one line, then the roll.

Then roll Cook’s utensils for the making, against the clock.

Beat three — the step

He carries it out. The first spoon does not go to an adult: it goes to another kid, sitting where kids sit when the adults have taken the yard. The kid is Miri’s (Jack, 2026-11-01). Nobody has fed them since the boat. The player may not know that yet; the table will, if the DM has let the name be heard in beat one. 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 Miri’s own child exactly what she did to him, inside a week of losing her. Nobody in the yard can see that. Do not explain it — if the player says her name here, to the one person it would land on, 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 12	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.
Deception or Persuasion, or Athletics the man in the door	DC 12	He keeps the pepper and the man’s silence. Talked: the man lets him have it, and says nothing in the yard. Ran: he is past him and gone, and the man is too slow and too drunk to say whose boy that was.	The man follows him out into the yard with the crate under his arm, and when the pepper goes round it goes round as the man’s idea, told loudly. The thing still works. It is not his. If he ran, add: the can is half spilled, and the Cook’s utensils roll below is at disadvantage.
Cook’s utensils against the clock	DC 12	It comes out right — smooth, hard, cold, the pepper suspended through it instead of sitting at the bottom — and out before the names.	The ice is gone before it sets. He carries out slush, or he carries out nothing. If he serves it, it is sweet pepper cream in cups, and the yard drinks it before sundown, and nobody knows what it was supposed to be. If he waits for it to set, the Speaker is already speaking, and the can comes back the next morning untouched.
Persuasion before read-aloud 3	DC 10	Miri’s kid takes it on his say-so, and the laugh is theirs: the first thing they have eaten since the boat, from the one person in the yard who learned it from their mother.	The kid won’t touch it, and says why: that was her thing. Then 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 the one person it was for refused it, and he knows what he did wrong even if nobody else does.
Insight the reach	DC 15	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.

The pour and the sneak carry texture. The man, the clock and the spoon carry a cost. 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.