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Foreman's Hall
Payroll, Work Crews, and Records That Do Not Quite Add Up
A long meeting table occupies the center of the camp hall. One wall is covered with logging maps, crew assignments, and chalked production totals. The foreman's office beyond is cramped with ledgers and correspondence.
A wall clock has stopped at 2:17.
Most of the paperwork describes a legitimate logging operation. Reiver's Right truly cut timber, paid crews, maintained roads, and shipped lumber. The deception is hidden inside ordinary expenses and vague work assignments rather than a ledger labeled Secret Excavation.
A character who studies the books can attempt Society, Legal Lore, or Mercantile Lore DC 16.
Success: Repeated expenses appear under vague headings such as lower works, site stabilization, drainage, and retaining materials. They are large enough to represent a substantial ongoing project.
Critical Success: Several of those expenses pass through different companies using the same small hand-and-coin seal. The records were structured to conceal a common financial interest rather than simply simplify bookkeeping.
Characters who uncovered the old Subsurface Reservation at the Veridical Scriptorium immediately recognize why these entries matter.
If the party investigated Orvik Brasshand's missing surveyor, they find a survey folio signed by Halven Dorr. His last notes compare surface measurements with a set of unexplained readings taken along the bluff. Fine gray clay is pressed into the folio's binding—the same material Orvik found inside Halven's returned chronometer.
The stopped wall clock provides a second connection to Orvik's mystery: it reads exactly 2:17. This advances that thread but does not yet explain how Halven's chronometer returned to Macridi without him.