Night Flight, Potion Rush Delivery

🌙 A Courier That Only Flies at Night

In Fenlow Gorge Country, a mountain land split by deep branching ravines, reaching even the next village over takes a full day on horseback along switchback roads. Cross the sky, though, and it takes a single night. The Blue Owl Apothecary opens at dusk and closes at dawn, and tonight as every night, its broom-riding couriers carry elixirs brewed under moonlight to patients on the far side of the valley. But the stronger the elixir, the worse its dawn-scatter: the instant it meets the morning sun, the potency scatters and it turns to plain water. On top of that, the night-ivy woven into the broom's core is a vine that falls asleep when the sun rises and loses its lift. Which is to say, every delivery slip in this job always comes with a deadline.

The Fastest Partner, the Most Stubborn Boss

You are a newly licensed courier. Your partner is the head courier, Romy Wechsel. A red-haired senior called the fastest in the gorges, an organizer who never skips the in-flight checklist. Quick with her mouth, quicker with her hands, and she never says "can't." The owner is an old woman and master apothecary, Dorothee Anselm. Anyone who fudges a dose or a deadline gets a lecture hotter than her hearth fire, but she is also the one who waits at the shop window every night for her couriers, whom she calls her chicks, to come home. She has a single iron rule: be on the ground half a bell before dawn, no exceptions. That rule has a reason twenty-nine years old.

⏳ How to Play This Story

When the bell at the front counter rings, a slip and a deadline arrive. Read the wind, choose your night wind-road, judge the temptation of a shortcut and the unexpected holdup, and deliver the medicine before dawn. Speed alone isn't the right answer. Force your way across a shear wind, or take the half-bell detour? Make a side trip for someone in trouble, or put the patient on the slip first? What you see at the house you deliver to, and what you bring back, is also up to you. Between deliveries there's shop inventory, herb prep, and dealings with the regular patients waiting for you. It's a story you can play as if living a life in the gorges at night.

Rules for Night Runs (from the notice at the Blue Owl's front counter)

One: the deadline on the slip is half a bell earlier than the deadline in the sky.
Two: when the shear wind howls, don't cross. Go around.
Three: a delivery isn't done until you've seen the patient's face.