The Silver Laid turns out to serve surprisingly good vegetable stew.
Watcher, Aldrich, Sly, Mabel and Thess play a game of Telemere Poker. It seems that in Telemere rules, at least one joker is included in the deck and counts as a wildcard of the appropriate colour.
Taboo subjects are skirted over such as the well-being of Jeremiah Stingelhelm and whether the highest face card is the King or the Emperor.
Thess has difficulty getting Sly to introduce themself.
Watcher does very well, winning several early hands and there's some unspoken suspicion that Shroud Paladins are probably good at cheating. Watcher makes up for this by moving stacks of coins around the table to even the odds. Aldrich goes out early but Watcher gives him a stack of her own coins to keep him in the game.
There is much discussion of the
expedition beyond the Embrace. Aldrich and Sly recount the distant nations and their beliefs about the Muses. Aldrich speaks of the ill-fated guerilla attack while Watcher is mostly concerned about whether or not the Silent Regent has been informed.
Sly disapproves of the neat stacks of coins around the table, preferring their own eroded pile, though they do approve of Thess' particular arrangement of coins. Watcher, meanwhile has built a small fortress out of her coins while Mabel has absentmindedly arranged her stacks into a circle.
After a while, Watcher's victory is looking assured. Sly and Aldrich are out and Thess has a short stack. Mabel takes a risk and goes all in against Watcher, taking the sizeable pot with triple sevens.
Mabel is the new favourite to win and Aldrich is up to deal. No one notices Aldrich fixing the deck to give Mabel the Joker and Watcher a deuce. Mabel wins with three aces.
It looks like it's all over until Watcher reveals a single Star that she'd secreted away. Mabel indulges her in a hand of heads up poker but is distracted by the sound of Sly having a profanity-laden conversation with their familiar outside the window. By general consensus, it's decided that Mabel is somehow the least worst person to check on them.
While Mabel reluctantly goes to speak with Sly, Watcher finds the second Joker and sets up a “poisoned chalice” game where one hand has both Jokers and the other has ordinary cards. When Mabel returns, she gives her the choice of which hand to choose. Mabel has no idea what's actually happening and, completely misremembering an entirely different logic problem, sticks with her first hand.
The two paladins play blind through the flop, turn and river until Watcher reveals her victory with the two wildcards and takes home the split pot of two Stars, along with the satisfaction of having outsmarted a Throne paladin.
While Mabel counts out the sizeable remainder of her winnings, Sly hints at some surprising revelations about her, confirming what Aldrich already suspected.
The evening culminates with a discussion about the number of legs on a crab, the bizarre theory that all Shroud paladins hide extra limbs about their person and some confusedly tentative accusations of heresy.