March 29, 2026
19 Khordrak
The Pink Unicorn Inn
In the central Dastrux empire, the rains of winter passed to the sunshowers of spring. Dastrux City emptied itself into the Garth for a festival of athletics.
After long weeks of studying, exam day came. Each member of the Pink Unicorn Four had taken a week of review, and Aida had continued to meet with her tutor. The crew sat the exam, and then joined the festival.
In the Garth, Calloway’s camp had been joined by a steady trickle of soldiers dismissed from other legions. Now, with people flowing into the Garth, Calloway’s soldiers mingled extensively with civilians and loyalist soldiers for the first time.
Indeed, as the Pink Unicorn Four wandered the festival, Aida, Annais, and Oskraks came upon a brawl between a pair of Calloway’s soldiers and a pair of Palatine Guards. Both sides had dropped their weapons outside the ring and were fighting over some point of honor.
The Palatine handily knocked out the Calloway soldiers. As Aida offered them first aid, a merchant’s wife lingered and said that the camping soldiers should be decimated. Annais began to argue, and it became clear that the woman was an Imperial true believer. She saw the soldiers’ camp as an act of sedition and a personal threat against the Kaiser.
Later, Aida joined a hurdle race. She set a blistering pace, but still only just beat out the other top contender, a blue orc named Brugo. She drank with him and got to know him; he was covered in tattoos won in the orc games, but had never qualified for the great ballgames. He currently worked as a porter at the Garth meadery.
Aida returned to the other Pink Unicorn regulars, where she was approached by a well-dressed messenger who handed her a letter of introduction. She opened it on the spot, flustering him; the letter offered her a job if she showed up at a certain mansion the next day.
The Four proceeded to watch Brugo in a wrestling match against a huge human mercenary. The fight was close, and went on for a long time. They were joined in the stands by Adrian, the failed actor and fellow Pink Unicorn regular. He complained about his inability to land leading roles. Annais, reopening an old argument, told him to work his way up from smaller parts. Adrian rejected this, except for a brief time after Annais mentioned that she knew a noble house but before she mentioned that they were destitute. In frustration, Annais declared that she would find Adrian a job just to shut him up.
Aida had been ignoring the conversation, more interested in watching Brugo as his pants slipped lower and lower.
20 Khordrak
But as the Pink Unicorn regulars staggered home after midnight, she listened to Annais’s drunken raving about how Baudrain Sardou would make a great patron of the arts if he became emperor. Aida, Annais, and Adrian made a secret pact then, staying in the empty common room, to make Baudrain and Archbishop Oscine a double ticket for emperor. He wrote the compact on a greasy food wrapper, but as his hand shook Annais finished it for him, and unnoticed slipped an “and/or” between Baudrain and Oscine’s names. The three of them stamped the document with bloody thumbprints.
In the morning, Annais went to Eberlin Manor to meet with Barba. She proposed that House Eberlin patronize a new acting company. Barba reminded them that Eberlin had no spare funds to invest, but agreed to attach the house’s name to Annais’s company.
In the afternoon, Aida went to the interview, which proved to be in a manor owned by House Althann. The job was to deliver a parcel by night to the Giant-Killers, a mercenary company. The job would require secrecy and speed, as the employer would only be able to finalize the details of the package moments before Aida would depart. Aida agreed to the job.
Annais and Oskraks spent the afternoon drawing up a budget for a theater company. They wandered Collosea looking for cheap venues; Annais finally decided to look for an abandoned theater that could be bought and repaired.
That night, Aida appeared at a third location, disguised in servant’s clothing, and received the parcel. She ran along the marble wall of Knightswall, and on the roofs of Colossea she realized she was being followed. On the roof of the Basilica of the Virtues, at the edge of Colossea, she saw a huge figure waiting in ambush. She worked her way past him unseen, and heard her pursuers get into a fight with him.
She used a rope to rappel down the bluff to the docks. As she neared the bottom, a figure appeared at the top and began reeling her rope in. She dropped and caught herself on the rigging of a ship. She made her way across the mast until she was across the canal from the Giant-Killers’ ship.
She stole the rowboat from a ship on the near side and slipped across the river. As she approached her destination, a cloaked figure on a bridge fired a musket at her. She scrambled up and was met by two mercenaries on guard. They accepted the package and shot her assailant dead.
