Coker — the GRIT line

The Character — Coker, Level 1

Exacid SCRAPPER — chitin-plated, built to walk into the thing everyone else walks away from.

• Species (Exacid): floors 4 / 1 / 1. Trait Shell (−1 to all physical damage, min 1). Natural attack Pincers (dmg 3, GRIT). Hivemind: yes.
• Type (SCRAPPER): +2 GRIT → 6. Skills Weapon Hold + Hard Yards.
• Array: +3 GRIT → 9, +2 WIT → 3, +1 MURK → 2.
• ¢hits: ¢50 → Hexikid shard (dmg 3, GRIT, Piercing) ¢25 → ¢25 left. The shard's Piercing edge bites briar where a club won't — the right buy for this mill.
• Items: snough torch · field dressing · (one slot free).
• Wounds: 0 · Murk Clock: 0 · XP: 0
• Wound thresholds (half starting, rounding up): GRIT ≤5 · WIT ≤2 · MURK ≤1.

Route chosen: the GRIT line — Gritstone Clough (A5) → the mill → down the Sluice Tunnel (for Brent's notes) → sever the node at the Millstone Chamber. Her axis, start to finish.

A1 — Dunford Arms · Murk 1

Marta the edge-contact briefs Coker for free: the gnawmard colony was active two murkneets back, and the briar has come up through the millstone floor — thornwork thick as a man's arm where the survey shows clear stone. Coker buys the Hexikid shard, banks her ¢25, and goes. A scratcher watches from the roof, facing the mill road. (Stats full — no rest needed.)

A2 — Open Fell · Murk 2 — the fork

Three ways to the mill. Coker reads the ground before committing — a settlement-edge read, no Clock cost.

Read the ground (2d6 + WIT 3 vs Default 8): R1 = 3 → 6. FOKED. Nothing the route descriptions didn't already tell her.

No matter — she knows her axis. Two gnawmards watch from the waymark stone, alert, oriented on the mill. She takes the line straight up: the Gritstone Clough.

A5 — Gritstone Clough · Murk 2

A Hexikid lies road-sleeping across the broken track; the marker post is snapped outward — something large came down the clough recently. Coker hauls round it over the slumped peat.

Cross (2d6 + GRIT 9 vs Default 8): R2 = 7 → 16. CLEAN — over the hag and round the Hexikid, no cost.

This is what GRIT 9 is for. She tops out at the mill, drag-marks of the lost survey team in the peat ahead of her.

B — Dunford Mill Complex · Murk 3

Entering Murk 3+ — Clock 0 → 1. Reckoning (breaks ≤1): R3 = 11. Holds. Clock = 1.

Dyapnid disposition (2d6 + 3): R4 = 8 → 11 — Absent. The Xin-trained Dyapnids are deep in the upper structure; not a factor unless she climbs. She won't.

Zone: Outbuildings · Murk 2

Gnawmard colony (2d6): R5 = 2 → Silent. Gone or hiding. The briar has reached the outbuildings. (This would agitate the Dyapnids — but they're absent, so the penalty is moot. The silence is the real message: the thing below is spreading.)

A DPDC survey pack is pinned under a collapsed lintel.

Shift the lintel (2d6 + GRIT 9 vs Default 8): R6 = 9 → 18. CLEAN. It gives.

Inside: two field dressings, a dead transmitter, and survey notes reading nothing anomalous, dated three murkneets ago. Coker pockets one field dressing (now carrying two) and leaves the dead kit.

Zone: Main Mill · Murk 3

Dyapnids absent overhead; black thornwork through every joint of the millstone floor. Coker skips the amber-discharge read (MURK isn't her axis) and heads for the way down that passes the team — the Sluice Tunnel.

Zone: Sluice Tunnel · Murk 4

Entering Murk 4+ — Clock 1 → 2. Reckoning (breaks ≤2): R7 = 6. Holds. Clock = 2.

The roof's down in two places, briar threaded through the rubble; GRIT checks here are at −1. Coker forces the choke point — and the Hexikid shard's Piercing edge (+1) cancels the tunnel's −1.

Squeeze the choke (2d6 + GRIT 9 −1 tunnel +1 Piercing vs Hard 11): R8 = 10 → 19. CLEAN — through, briar and all, no cost.

The omen. Past the choke, a Barghest stands in the rubble — a tall figure where no one is, then a flame on wet stone. It does not bar the way; it does not strike. A Barghest seen is a tragedy already arrived. Coker is a SCRAPPER and the Barghest fights on murk — so she reads it for the warning it is and walks past it. (No engagement; it attacks on MURK, and that's not a fight she came to have.)

Brent. The team leader, dead, chest and arms scored black where the thorns went in. His field notes, courier-wrapped:

The briar came up out of the millstone floor on the second murkneet… It's rooted in the node. Cut a length and it goes slack for a count of ten, then it feeds and comes back. Fire makes it flinch. Iron does nothing. The node is the thing keeping it alive.… Keeva and Darcas still in lower chamber.

There it is — the whole solution, paid for in Brent's blood: fire wards it, a cut buys a breath, and the node is the anchor. Kill the node, kill the briar. Coker lights her snough torch and goes down.

Zone: Millstone Chamber · Murk 5 — Boss

Entering Murk 5 — Clock 2 → 3. Reckoning (breaks ≤3): R9 = 10. Holds. Clock = 3.

Murk Event (d6): D1 = 2 — Soulprint bleed. A stranger's death-echo washes through her channel: lose 1 MURK (2 → 1). MURK 1 is at its half-mark — Wound (−1 to everything).

She crosses the threshold already bleeding a little. The node hangs amber and steady, the size of a cartwheel, two feet off the floor, the whole chamber grown to thornwork that runs back to it like roots to a taproot. Keeva is at the foot of the stair, spent but standing. Darcas is caught in the briar three feet from the node, scored bloody, not struggling any more.

The Final Encounter — Sever the node

The briar is a Boss (GRIT 7): it acts every round, lashes for Physical 3, and entangles. It does not need to be killed — it needs the node cut, on whichever axis you own. Coker owns GRIT, and she's holding fire and a Piercing blade.

Round 1 — snough torch (free round). The lit torch makes the briar recoil; it does not strike. Coker spends the round driving through the thornwork to the node, shard in hand.

Round 2 — torch smothered; the briar strikes.

Step 1 — Thorn lash (briar 2d6 + 7 vs Coker resist 2d6 + GRIT 9 −1 wound): briar R10 = 3 → 10; Coker R11 = 4 → 12. She beats it — no GRIT lost, not entangled. The chitin holds.

Step 2 — Sever the node (2d6 + GRIT 9 −1 wound +2 Piercing vs Severe 14): R12 = 7 → 7 + 9 − 1 + 2 = 17 vs 14. SUCCESS.

The shard finds the anchor-root in the densest briar and shears it. The amber light gutters and dies. Across the whole chamber the thornwork goes slack and grey in a single breath — and with the node dead, it cannot grow back.

Extraction, no further cost. Coker cuts Darcas free of the dead briar (no fight now) and gets Keeva up the stair. Both team members out alive.

Outcome — Full Contract

Keeva debriefs at the Arms. The node wasn't in the classification file because it isn't natural — it was placed, by something that knew the mill would be surveyed, and the briar was the trap it grew: a thing that holds, set to wait for a recovery team to come hauling the first body out. Coker brought two out instead.

DPDC payment: ¢160.

Final Tally

Advancement: Level 2 reached (per-session stat growth now 2). +1 stat-growth point banked from this session, to apply in downtime.

Headline: a clean GRIT run — Coker never lost a point of GRIT, took one MURK off a Murk Event, drew no Predation, and solved the scenario on her own axis exactly as the design promises: a strong arm, a Piercing blade, fire, and the node is the anchor. She walks out of her first job at Level 2 with both survivors and a Boss notch on the haft.

Companion logs: Cloughifen — the MURK line, clean · Black Moss — the MURK line, dead.