The Bloody Hands [Tricube Solo] Episode 6: Sink or Swim, Part 1

The man speaks to himself. "Your name is Arden Ulet. I am Arden Ulet." He walks along the dark rock, a blood red river flowing at his right. Heading in a direction he considers "north" though no direction makes sense here. "I am Arden Ulet." He has been walking for hours.

For days.

For years.

For centuries.

Time is meaningless. Self is meaningless. The mountains and the rocks and the river is meaningless. This is a space between other spaces. He is no one. He cannot remember if he breathes. When did he last eat? When did he last sleep? Where did he start? Why did he start? "I am Arden Ulet."

The river is either a few feet across or a few miles across. Often in between. On the other side walks someone else. Even staring at the stranger, the man cannot form a mental image of what he is seeing besides the sense of a person much like himself only pale enough to seem like a bright light in the dark, red hue this place bathes itself inside. Does the stranger wear clothing? Is the stranger actually human or merely roughly human shaped? Is the stranger still pointing upstream? Any answer the man can give himself is fleeting. He gave up looking for longer than a glance some time ago, trusting the stranger to match him on the other side. 

Strange things flow and move in the river. Once the man was terrified of them. Now the man does not fear them. "I am Arden Ulet." The stranger once feared them but now the stranger also does not react to them. 

The man knows there was a point of coming here. There was a task. Something that drove into spending so much time here. Can he recall. "I am Arden Ulet." He remembers! He is seeking. He is trying to find out why others were brought here. What path they were forced to take. However, his goal has been foolish, because this is nowhere. [1]

This river is not where they are from. It is a gap between his world and theirs. To find theirs he has to go below. Into the water. The ichor. The river that is a mere trickle and an entire ocean. Deep beneath the surface you enter into their place. A giant womb containing a city larger than the horizon. An eldritch place where they breath and feed off the ichor of the womb, where they bring others to work and build. 

The surface is a distraction and all this time was wasted, but if he just pushes forward, pushes deep inside the ichor himself, he might just...

A rough shaking brings Arden back to the real world and the vision world fades away but is also mirrored here. He is on a boat and the water underneath is dark but it is actual water. The person shaking him is Jalmar. Jalmar Dax. The Wildkin looks concerned. Arden and Jalmar have spent years working together against The Bloody Hands. A quest that has no ending until Arden is ready to dive beneath those ichorous waves: an act that Jalmar cannot grasp or understand. 

"Arden, are you ok?" A question that Arden cannot answer fully. He can still smell the amniotic fluid of that other river and had Jalmar not brought him back, he might have dived in and been unable to find himself in time. Instead he just nods and gives a week smile. 

Jalmar looks nervous for more than just Arden's trip into the nightmare realm. The Wildkin has skin the color of old tree bark, hair like the shadows between leaves. Normally wearing clothing more suited to Hub's society, Jalmar has chosen Wildkin clothes for this mission. A mixture of bright colors and dark splotches. Designs that other Wildkin can spot but that creatures of the Wild cannot contemplate. He considers this a hunt. He was raised outside of the Veil and still can flow through the trees and the shadows as easily as he could in his old days, but he knows those with him are not so well trained to deal with the Outside. 

Behind Jalmar is Natalia Wilson, Jalmar's opposite in many ways. Her Hub style clothing dark and trim and out of place this far Outside the Veil. Hood pulled up with her red hair creeping out at the edges. Her eyes are closed as she chews on a piece of sweet river reed. Her legs jitter against the boat. She was born and raised in Hub and what some of the oldsters call Veilborn. Someone who never knew the Outside. Who never knew the world before a group of radical researchers found a way to push the Darkness back. 

Arden was young when the first Resonance Tower was sparked out in Hub and grew up watching how fast the old Empire tried to rebuild. His whole life since then has been dedicated to honoring his mother's legacy and her work on the early towers. As well has his father's legacy, a blacksmith who spent his final years shaping the gears that made the towers work. Back in Yarlkin, a Ulet still works on the component parts. Arden's brother, Josef.

Natalia, though, is ten years younger and never knew those days before. She grew up her whole life walking under the shimmering sky of the Veil. Among flowers. 

She has dedicated her life to destroying the bits of rot remaining inside the Veil. Tearing down the old buildings. Routing the shadows from the old tunnels where people once hid. She joined the Order specifically to get training as a sapper but since her tenure with Arden and Jalmar has decided she wants to become a full Guardian. The first step in this process is Guardian in Potential. After a few successful missions, she'll upgrade to Guardian in Training. Then, after that, with Arden's blessing, she'll move to Junior Guardian. At that point, she'll be assigned a team of Senior Retainers in the way that Arden was assigned to work with Prenty and Jalmar. And then it is up to her. 

Even then, Arden knows her dream to this point is more behind-the-scenes in nature. A desk in Hub. Planning and plotting. Not out there, in the Outside. Where the Veilborn fear Darkness runs amok. Which it does. Just not always in the most obvious ways. 

"Here it is," Franco says. That's the fourth member of this current party. Franco Jones, a boatman. Senior Retainer rank. One of the best. He might not say much but when he does put the cigarette down and actually talks, it is about his family. Franco is dedicated to them and will fight hard to get back to them. He is also amazing at spotting little details and seeing threats and opportunities. [2]

After the last boat went missing along with the materials to make two Resonance Towers and its crew, the Order needs information. How did a boat with two Guardians, multiple technicians, a full crew, and three Retainers completely fail to show? 

Send Arden, they said. The man has gotten himself out of stranger scrapes. That and any stack of administrative punishments this assignment might represent. Arden and Jalmar and Natalia do not always play precisely by Order rules.

As they approach, a storm that has threatened to let loose for the past few hours does just that and rain washes away the afternoon. 

The "it" was the missing boat. The Vainglorious Shard. Roughly three times the size of the boat they are currently on. Equipped to the travel the River Regas and defend itself. Except it didn't. Jalmar suspects the crew got cocky. Taking the "vainglorious" a bit too literally. The boat shows signs of attack. Quite a bit of attack. [3]

In the continued downpour [4], they approach the boat with Jalmar and Kif, his monkey dog, taking point and Arden close behind. The plan is for Natalia in her "in Potential" role to stay back and protect the second boat though Franco is not the sort of boatman to go down without a fight. 

Arden and Jalmar move across the deck and then head down below, quietly calling out to the crew but holding back in case enemies are still aboard as well. No answer. Arden points at himself and then towards the captain's cabin and heads that way while Jalmar goes down into the hold. 

The cabin has been wrecked. The signs of a struggle are evident but besides that it was malicious. Who ever attacked this area was looking for something are just delighting in breaking stuff. The captain's desk is shattered. Paperwork is scattered. The captain's bed is missing a mattress. It would take a long time to sort through the mess but even then Arden spots something.

Picking it up, it is a half torn sheet of paper listing a time, some notes of the crew, and giving instructions on how to best catch the crew off guard. They attacked at night only an hour before the boat was set to land at Basinghall, the first of two locations. 

In the corner, mostly gone but still somewhat there, Arden notes a dark stain. Bloody ichor. The same as the river. The same as the handprints. It is them. 

Jalmar enters the room and Arden asks how bad it is. 

"Worse than you think."

"All the equipment gone or destroyed?"

"All the equipment intact and still packed away neatly." [5]

Shocked, Arden goes with Jalmar to explore and finds the beastmaster is telling the truth. By appearances, not a single piece of the Resonance Tower kits have been disturbed.

"They were after the people," says Arden as he flashes back to that time, now months ago, when he witnessed a room full of scared prisoners and a black candle flame. Their minds, their souls, drawn inside to that bloody river. Pulled down to that ancient, cyclopean city under the surface. He managed to pull only about half back that day and he got there when the ritual started. The Vainglorious has been missing for three days. 

Whatever Jalmar goes to respond he stops as they hear a shout from the shore. Kif screeches and runs off ahead and the two men head back to the deck and the storm. Natalia is pointing. "SOMEONE UP THERE!" she shouts to be heard over the rain. Arden points to her and to Jalmar and gestures for them to follow and then he himself starts doing what he can to secure the boat. They can possibly get that last leg down Regas and complete this mission, though for him the parameters have now changed. 

A few minutes later Natalia and Jalmar return. They never could quite figure out who they were chasing - Jalmar thinking it might have been Wildkin and Natalia thinking it could have been a child - and were forced to call off the chase when they got to a large ravine with an old rickety rope bridge to the other side. They could just, in the fading light of the day and the flashes of lightning, make out what looks to be a long overgrown orchard of trees and the mysterious person, just a strange silhouette, going in between them. 

"It was too big a risk to continue," Natalia explains, "Even in daylight that bridge cannot be safe. Trust me, my job back in the order was figuring out when things were structurally sound." [6]

Arden takes this in as he finishes up locking the doors back, covering up some of the equipment, and generally any number of tasks he knows to be pointless. 

"Alright, we make for Basinghall. It'll be well after dark by the time we get there but we see if they have a boatwright and established riverfolk who can help get this equipment the rest of the way and secure it." 

MECHANICAL NOTES

1. Scene Card: Jack of Spades. Bad for the tertiary plot (for now we'll say that is Arden finding out why people were brought to the "river"). Six of Clubs: A scene about a task/activity. 9 of spades for the main scene task: Normal Craft. Arden gets double hits so punches through the malaise and recovers himself. Used the image oracle to get 1,2 --> "money bags" and 1,3 --> "footprints"
2. Name comes from the table. Rolled on some character elements and got Astute and Aloof. Chain smokes. Tilts his head. Subject of interests were Family and Relationships so he doubles down on that.
3. "How damaged is the boat?" 9 of Diamonds. So quite a bit. It could possible be repaired but it would take time. 
4. Scene had a shift. 7 of Clubs. About a task. King of Diamonds --> Good for the investigation. Then a joker leading to a new event.  Rolled on Wilderness got "miserable weather" and "shout". 
5. "Is any of the equipment still there?" King of Hearts. Not only is the equipment still there but it is all there and all in great order. It was not the equipment the attack was about.
6. This was actually a failed roll on the standard crafty challenge. I followed through the shout and then sort of backtracked to the stuff found on the boat. The failure is taken to mean that they could not find a way to continue the chase. I rolled some wilderness features and got Rope Bridge and Edible Fruits so it became a big enough rope bridge to cut off the chase and rather than a gentle garden went with an old orchard long abandoned and gone to wild growth.

DOUG'S NOTES

A strange, unfortunate coincidence happened while I was working on doing the solo roleplay portions of this episode: a truck got in a bad wreck and took out a power pole nearby. I have looked online but found no story about the driver or others and hope they are ok. I know it took a couple of hours for us to get power back so it might have been a notable one.

While playing in the fading light, it gave me some time to get a bit more nitpicky with details. So "the boatman" became Franco Jones and I rolled a few times to find out his vibe. The ship which was just going to be a couple of very quick clues so we could jump into Basinghall became a moment with a chase and a rope bridge over a giant ravine. I left myself some room about who did the shouting and why.

Technically, Josef Ulet was said to have "armed" the Guardians in the first episode. However, we are fairly deeply into the series now and there has never been a consistent "armament" element so I reallllly gently retconed that to building tech for the towers. Which is a form of "arming" in the fight back against The Dark. 

Note, this is going to be the first one where I try to play out a stack of scenes and then come back to fill in the details and flush out my notes combining my old style of playing "The Bloody Hands" with the new style of writing for this blog. It also means I can have content prepped for a few days ahead of time.

CREDITS and RESOURCES

The game used is Tricube Tales: "Guardians of the Shadow Frontier" and Tricubes Solo. There is very little additional content used but in principle two additional resources are

• Random Realities by Cezar Capacle
• Rory's Story Cubes

The art comes from the base game, from Pixabay, and is generated from Chat GPT4o/Dall-E. Additional edits and tweaks are made by myself.