Cricket

Introduction

Sharn, City of Towers — Postwar 998 YK

Sharn rises through low clouds, its towers and skybridges humming with postwar ambition. The Last War ended two years ago, and the city has not stopped exhaling since — every spire is full of veterans, refugees, and people who decided that what they survived was not enough to live on.

In Clifftop, on the cheapest corridor available, a hand-painted sign reads:

TRIPLE A ADVENTURING AGENCY — Affordable. Available. Absolutely ready.

The middle A is larger than the other two.

Inside, Twelve Coins on a Cracked Desk

One desk. One corkboard of quest notices nobody has touched in weeks. Twelve gold pieces — 12 gp, the entire treasury of the Triple A Adventuring Agency — arranged in a careful line across the wood grain.

Rent is due in five days. She has counted them four times.

Pinned beneath the candle, in her own slanted handwriting, a note to herself:

"If no one walks in by Markday, we sell the desk."

The Door — Ajar

A flyer on the stair reads TRIPLE A ADVENTURING AGENCY — someone has crossed out HUMBLE and written DESPERATE in smaller letters underneath, in a different ink, with the kind of self-aware handwriting that knows it is funny and is doing it anyway.

Inside: cobwebs, a guttering candle, and a woman who nearly falls out of her chair when she hears you.

She has been rehearsing what to say for three days. None of it survives the first second.

Cricket leads with confidence she hasn't earned yet and bravado she can't quite sustain. Her default mode is a pitch — she performs the role of competent guild leader with such commitment that she sometimes convinces even herself. When things go wrong (which they do, constantly), she doesn't compose herself — she gets louder, more theatrical, then snaps back faster than anyone expects. The bravery and the idiocy are genuinely hard to tell apart. Underneath: a woman who has been told "no" by every person and every institution she ever asked for a chance. She built the Triple A because she needed a place that wouldn't reject her first. She gives the same chance to others — the unqualified, the desperate, the still-trying — because she knows what it costs to need it. She does not know how to be comforted gracefully. She deflects with jokes. The only real way in is getting past that deflection without her noticing. Born in Cyre before the Mourning. She enrolled in a magic academy with genuine ambition and discovered almost immediately she had more enthusiasm than talent. In her final exam she destroyed a priceless artifact, was expelled on the spot, and left holding a debt that has been chasing her ever since. She joined the military as the most practical option available. They assigned her to deck-scrubbing. She never saw combat. Her airship was hit when the Mourning struck — she survived; her entire country did not. She arrived in Sharn as a refugee with nothing stable except terrible luck and a refusal to be broken by it. Every guild rejected her. So she rented a building and opened her own. The Triple A Adventuring Agency is not just a business — it is proof of concept. If it works, so does she. Short brown hair, bright grey eyes, freckled fair skin. Scrappy lean build — durable rather than polished. Leather armor repaired too many times in too many places, worn the way armor looks after you've actually needed it. Her chaotic grin arrives before anything else; the worry underneath takes longer to find. She moves like someone who has learned to roll with impacts rather than avoid them. When something good happens, her face cannot hide it.