A Monk and a Kobold Walk Up to a Bar

between-session play by post featuring Rissa as gm of The Bows of Purgatory Gulch and Uatu as the player of Lee Chung

The saloon is not far away from Oat Livery at all. You head back up the hill and turn left into the main street, and you are already there. You can still see Jesse Devonshire pacing toward the chapel as you approach the steps to the saloon, his giant bee flitting far overhead. Jesse's shadow stretches out toward you on the packed dirt of Purgatory Gulch's main street.

You reach for the saloon door but realize that the scratched-up metal surface blocking your way is actually a door-sized shutter latched onto the frame, instead of being a proper set of two swinging saloon doors. The latches are manipulable on the outside. You could remove them with no problem. However, when you looked around to figure out what this contraption was, you also spotted a dust-covered sign on the "shutter" at about three feet above the porch:

Saloon Opens
4 Hours After Midday Meal
which now is NOT
You best git on
Inquiries: Deliver Note to Miss Roselli at School

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With no law-abiding alternative before him,
Lee Chung leads Chef
across the dirt street to the schoolhouse.

---

Class is in session. You can hear the teacher's voice, speaking a language you don't know, but you have heard often enough that you think you could learn it easily if you need to. The students are repeating phrases back, so this is probably a vocabulary review in progress.

The stairway in front and the front door itself are made of dried cactus wood, possibly saguaro. So is the trim on the windows. It is not polished to a shine like the sidewalk in front of Miss Melinda's Alchemy and Branding, but the wood has been sealed with something to make it easier to clean after a dust storm.

On one of the wood posts framing the little entry porch are two narrow boxes, one above the other, each with a slanted lid. The fine inscription on the upper box says, "To contact Schoolmarm during School Hours, please write note and insert in mailbox. Delivery may take 15 minutes." The top box contains four index card sized slates and, slotted into the inside of the lid, three pieces of chalk. The bottom box contains a faintly glowing marble, attached to the lid with jewelry wire prongs the way a gemstone gets mounted onto a ring, and below that the space inside the box is ridged to create slots for 2 slates to slide in and not touch each other or the sides.

Your apprentice is game to follow you anywhere you want to go, of course. He is mildly interested in the playground equipment within the western side of the schoolhouse lot. He cannot figure out what they are. He does not like written words, so he has been ignoring the signs.

Lee makes use of one of the slates:

When the next scheduled recess occurs, I would like a moment of your time to discuss a matter you might know of. - A visitor to this town, Lee Chung