Calixtus III is dead and his Catalans are hunted through the Banchi. Capranica, the man this conclave was meant to crown, died four days before it opened, of the fever that has not left the city. Eighteen men are walled into two chapels in the Roman August; the French party has a fortune, a candidate and, by Friday night, a written pact sworn in the latrines — eleven voices, one short of a pope. What stands against it is a poor, gouty poet from Siena, a counter-meeting at dawn in the Dean's cell, and the newest, strangest instrument in the Church's electoral law: the accessio, by which a man may rise after the count and carry his voice, out loud, with everyone watching, to another's total.
Everything marked Documented is from the record — above all Pius II's own Commentarii and J. P. Adams' Sede Vacante 1458 dossier; the rest is inference wearing period dress, and the Sources & liberties note says exactly which is which. Historical mode replays the recorded papers wherever you do; the open mode, and every divergence, belongs to the model.