🌊 Fluid

Nobody’s Responsibility

Cold open 1 · Nonne and Haxami, about a month before all this, on the Onda quay

At a Glance

Who’s in it: Nonne and Haxami, playing their past selves. Trill and Marellius are at the table and not in the scene — they watch it happen.
When: Onda quay, roughly a month before the campaign. Deliberately vague — do not date it harder than that.
What has to be true first: Both are already in Onda, and they know each other slightly — enough to be standing near one another, not enough to owe anything.
The occasion: Tam broke the seal on a jar of candied fruit off a consignment in Silas Sarn’s ledger. Silas has already hit him once and is not finished.
Runs: Five to ten minutes
Boxes: Four, numbered below. Boxes 2 and 3 are addressed to one player each.
Rolls: Five — three for Nonne, two for Haxami. Three texture, two reach, which is the ceiling.
Reveals: What Nonne is carrying and will not use, and what Haxami can do to a room. Neither gets said out loud.

The one thing to know before running it

Tam was not hungry. The jars are candied fruit in honey, sealed, packed in straw, in transit through Onda to somebody who can afford them. He broke one because he was never going to get another chance to find out what it tasted like — and the honey is on his hands and his mouth, so he is caught before anyone lays a finger on him. There is nothing to work out and nothing to deny. Everything after that is Silas choosing to keep going.

And the arithmetic is real, which is what makes him worse rather than better: one broken seal is a line Silas would have to explain to a counting-house across the strait. He is not defending property. He is defending a column.

The opening

The opening line

You’re hauling.

Right away, to Nonne alone: DC 10 Athletics — how well he hauls. Then read box 1 to both players.

Read-aloud 1 — the quay

The consignment came off at first light and has been standing in the sun since, small stoneware jars bedded in straw, and the whole crate smells of hot syrup through the sacking. The boy is against it with his collar in a man’s fist and honey drying on his chin, and he is not making any noise at all. Nobody on the quay has stopped walking. The man says something quiet, and then he hits him, and the sound of it is much smaller than you expect.

Then, before anybody moves: what is Haxami looking at? DC 12 Insight — on a success he has the lever already, and beat three is a man reading out a number he knows.

Read this to both players. Neither of them is anywhere in it — that is the point of the box. The quay is busy, it is broad daylight, and the reason nobody intervenes is not cruelty; it is that Tam is everyone’s errand and nobody’s responsibility, and everyone on that quay has somewhere to be.

What happens

Beat one — the two of them, three paces apart

They are both on the quay and they are not together. Whatever put them there is their own business — give each player one line of it if they want one, and do not make it a scene. What matters is that they can see each other seeing it.

Haxami reads it first, because that is what he does. The ledger is under Silas’s arm, the crate is not his, and the boy is worth less than the straw. Roll Insight here, before anyone moves — the question is not is this wrong but what is this man actually protecting, and the answer is the lever.

Nonne does not read anything. He is already walking. Do not ask him for a reason and do not let him give one — a grown man hitting a twelve-year-old is not a thing that goes through him on the way to being decided. Roll Athletics as he arrives.

Beat two — between them

Read-aloud 2 — Nonne only

You are in it before you have decided to be, and the man is looking up at you now instead of down at the boy, and he has not let go. He is talking. You can see that he is talking. What you can hear is your own blood, and underneath it something turning over slowly behind your ribs like a thing waking in a hold, and the quay going thin and far away at the edges. It would be so easy, and you do not know — you have never known — what would come out with it.

Then: does he go? If he does, DC 10 Athletics — on a failure there is contact, nothing is hurt, and beat two runs hotter.

He is winning when he stops. Silas has already let go of the collar; the boy is loose; one more sentence and it is over. And Nonne backs off from that, mid-word, for a reason nobody on the quay can see and he cannot explain to anyone standing there. Play the withdrawal as the hardest thing in the scene, because it is — the player is being asked to abandon a position they were about to win, and they should feel that.

Do not narrate what would have happened. Nothing did.

Beat three — Haxami takes it

He has had the whole of beat two to watch, and what he watched was two things: Silas, and the very large man who just stopped himself in front of forty people. He steps into the space Nonne vacated. Roll Persuasion.

Read-aloud 3 — Haxami only

You do not raise your voice, because raising it would put you in the same weather as him. You ask about the seal. You ask what the entry says, and whether it says one, and what the word for that is at the other end of the strait when a man cannot account for the difference — and you say it the way you would read him the tide table. Somewhere in the middle of it he stops looking at the boy, and his hand comes up off the crate to find the ledger, and you watch a man work out that the cheapest thing on this quay is the child.

Then: what does Haxami say? DC 13 Persuasion — Tam walks either way. The roll decides whether Silas remembers a transaction or a humiliation.

Nothing is threatened and nothing is offered. Haxami does not defend Tam — he makes Tam the expensive option and lets Silas arrive at it himself, which is the only version Silas can walk away from without having lost. Tam goes. Nobody says he can.

Beat four — after

Read-aloud 4 — the close

The quay goes back to being a quay so fast it is as though somebody has closed a door. The crate gets its sacking pulled straight. Down at the end of the stones the boy has already stopped running and is watching from a bollard, and he does not come back and he does not go, and there is honey on him yet. The man with the ledger writes something, and then, before he goes, he looks at the two of you for slightly longer than he needs to.

Then roll Insight — Nonne’s, and it is the last thing that happens. Neither of them says a word to the other about any of it. They know each other slightly, and after this they still know each other slightly, which is its own kind of information about both of them.

What’s rolled

Three for Nonne and two for Haxami, on the sheets in front of them — the characters they have, a month younger. No roll decides whether Tam walks. He walks.

Who & what	DC	Success carries	Failure carries
Nonne — Athletics the opening line	DC 10	The crate comes off his shoulder square and quiet, and his hands are empty when the hit lands. If it carries: a Dream Inspiration die.	He is still under the load, halfway to the stack, when the hit lands, and the first thing he knows about it is the sound. If it carries: 1d4 damage on waking, and a thin white line across his shoulder where the crate’s iron strap caught. It never goes away.
Haxami — Insight beat one, before anyone moves	DC 12	He has the lever before he needs it: the ledger, not the fruit. Beat three is a man reading out a number he already knows.	He steps in without it and has to find it while he is talking. It still works — but he is improvising in front of Nonne, and one of the two people who saw him do this saw him do it the hard way.
Nonne — Athletics arriving	DC 10	He gets between them without touching anyone. Silas lets go of the collar because there is suddenly a wall where the boy was.	He arrives badly and there is contact — a shoulder, a forearm, the crate going back a hand’s width. Nobody is hurt and it changes nothing, except that now they are touching, and beat two runs hotter.
Haxami — Persuasion the reach	DC 13	Silas leaves it as a transaction. He remembers two men who cost him a morning, and gives them room ever after.	It still works — Tam still goes — but it lands as humiliation, in public, on a man whose whole standing is being trusted with other people’s numbers. He does not remember being out-argued. He remembers being made small, and he has been carrying it for a month.
Nonne — Insight the reach, and the last roll	DC 13	He clocks that he chose it. He stopped, and the world did not end, and somebody else finished it — the fear is a thing he steered rather than a thing that steered him, and he takes that out of the scene.	He files it as one more time he could not. It goes in with the ship. This is how the fear got as large as it is: not from what happened aboard, but from a month of small afternoons where he was the one who had to walk away.

Two reaches is the ceiling, and this scene spends both — deliberately, because they reach in opposite directions. Haxami’s failure changes what Silas Sarn is in the present. Nonne’s changes only what Nonne believes about himself, which is the difference between a hook and a wound.

What it reveals

That Nonne is carrying something, and that keeping it shut is work. Canon says he will not rage and that the fear is of the magic rather than the anger. The table has only ever seen the refusal from outside, as a man declining. Read-aloud 2 is the inside of it — and the scene shows him abort a position he was winning, in public, for a reason nobody watching could name. Nobody in the fiction understands what they saw. The table does.

And that Haxami can take a room off someone without raising his voice. Not persuasion and not a threat — he reprices the situation until the other man arrives at the answer himself and gets to keep his face. It is the kinetic stillness doing work, a month before anyone at that table met him.

Neither of these is stated on the page and neither should be stated at the table. The scene demonstrates them and stops. If a player says the quiet part out loud afterwards, that is theirs to spend.

Still open

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

Whose consignment it is. The jars are in transit through Onda and the fruit is not the point; the ledger is. But somebody owns them, and if that should be a name — a house, a boat, one of the sixteen — box 1 is where it goes.

What each of them was doing on the quay, and how they came to know each other slightly. One line each, and it does not need to be interesting.

Whether Tam remembers. He is on Who You Already Know, so a player may have taken look out for them at character creation — and this is the scene that would have earned it. He watched from the bollard and did not come back. Whether he knows their faces is worth deciding before session one rather than during it.

Considered and not used: Cordys. It was the obvious cargo — House Sai ships it, it is genuinely prized, and Trill’s people harvest it. It is not used here because canon deliberately leaves open what Cordys actually does, and a boy eating it off a quay would quietly settle that it is a foodstuff. Swap it in only on purpose.