Burning Post-Apocalyptic Rome

Ben did a writeup of our latest Burning Post-Apocalyptic Rome game, so I'm stealing it. Cyrus is my crippled blacksmith. Domitus is Amy's priest. We're both dirt poor and keep slipping into abject poverty, only to claw our way out. We started the session with a trait vote; Cyrus gained Damned, Domitus picked up Cynical.

"Domitus and Cyrus, no longer on speaking terms because Cyrus killed a (relatively) unarmed bandit, were enlisted by a widow named Maria to help get back her daughter Theodora, who had vanished after the arrival of mysterious, pale-skinned children at the ruins of the Mausoleum of Augustus. This coincided with the appearance of a strange and possibly malevolent comet in the sky. The two agreed to help, and were at first unable to catch any of the children lurking in town, or find any information from the children's leader (a young boy named Peter.) When Cyrus discovered that the children were trying to steal away his own daughter, he waited in her room and caught one, and the two men went back to the mausoleum to confront Peter a second time. Via a Duel of Wits, Domitus forced Peter to confess: he was not, as he believed, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ leading a band of twilight changelings to steal Rome's children, but was rather just a confused son of a northman leading a band of orphaned (or runaway) children fleeing a Longbeard horde. The pair told Peter that there was nothing but death and suffering (and possibly cannibalism) at the end of his Children's Crusade in Constantinople. Peter told them as well that the rest of his band of children was waiting for him at the abandoned Pantheon, so with the former messiah in tow, they traveled through the empty city of Rome to rescue Theodora. Cyrus, convinced he had been damned by his previous murder, was challenged at the Pantheon by a young boy who called him a demon, and by another who threatened to douse him with holy water - which, to the surprise of the pair, actually burned Cyrus' skin. Domitus realized right away that something wasn't right ("Holy water doesn't exist!") and the blacksmith Cyrus, after gritting his teeth (a good Steel test) ascertained that it was a sort of acid used for etching metal. They dragged the charlatans and Theodora back to the Via Taurinus the next morning, where Cyrus turned a ruined and gated lyceum into an orphanage for the new arrivals (50 kids being equal to a fourth of the total population of the isolated community) and Domitus, in return for a few gold solidi, warned the noblewoman Sophia Orvieto of the vast horde of Longbeards coming from the north."