The Collectors Try to Stop the Leak

The ledger goblin talked too much. One of Moe Dimoggio's collectors decided to correct that problem with violence, beating him for giving outsiders more information than they should have. It was the kind of moment that made New Goblin City's rules very clear: knowledge had owners, and the wrong goblin could be punished for sharing it. Elmyra threatened to roast the collector. Morgan tried Blindness and Deafness. Hugo dropped Darkness over the bridge. The party's negotiation collapsed into spellwork, intimidation, and the kind of moral mess Jonah had already been worried about. The collectors were cruel, but they were also part of a city the party did not understand yet. Stopping them meant making noise in someone else's criminal infrastructure. Then one of them ran. Vic threw a disadvantaged javelin after the fleeing collector and killed him before he could warn the rest of New Goblin City. The alarm did not get out, at least not that way. The price was another body on the bridge, one surviving ledger goblin, and a party that had just chosen secrecy by force.