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As Heller returns, they hear him speaking with someone outside. His voice becomes audible gradually, and all they can make out is, “...finally got those special agents.”
“They sure don’t look like special agents,” another voice says.
“Exactly,” Heller says as he opens the door. “So don’t blow their cover.” He then shuts it swiftly behind himself and curses quietly. “OK,” he says after a beat, “Feet down.” He slaps at Pannych’s tabi, propped up on the table, with a thick folder as he walks around to the other side and drops it in the middle with a thump. He then arrays a number of papers before them, including crime scene reports, analyses, and a large map that he unfolds to cover about the middle half of the table.
Pannych says, “I appreciate the trust and all, but isn’t this a bit… sudden?”
“We don’t have time to lose.”
“No, I get that - but I mean we just walked in here, said we’re demigods, and you just open your books to us?”
“Oh.” Heller taps his specs, touching them for the first time with his left hand, and says, “You two are second level, but you have stats and gear well above that. ‘Demigods’ might be a bit of a stretch, but you’re certainly powerful - powerful enough to wipe this town off the map, if you put your minds to it. So I’m inclined to trust you, because I want you on our side.”
“Those aren’t Spectacles of Identification,” Phyr says. “Do you know quietcasting?”
Heller smiles and says, “That would be telling. Here’s where we’re at. Some books on necromancy went missing from the Magic Guild, so whoever’s doing this is an accomplished thief. On top of that,” he begins pointing at numbered dots on the map, “The pattern of attacks seemed random at first, but as the vic count has risen, it’s much scarier than that: whoever’s doing this is striking precisely at our blind spots, at times and places just outside our scrutiny.”
“They know how you operate,” Pannych says grimly.
“Precisely.”
“Inside job, you think,” Phyr suggests.
“Highly unlikely,” Heller says. “Yes, many in the City Guard would have the means to carry out these crimes, but not the motive or opportunity. Without going into detail, becoming a guard involves making it difficult for you to get away with crimes.”
“As it should be,” Pannych says with a nod.
“What about veterans, retirees, and public officials,” Vector asks.
“Again, highly unlikely. All those people’s financial welfare is directly tied to the city’s welfare with median metrics and floor-to-ceiling intervals.” The adventurers are confused by this, but Heller presses on. “Point being, this person is kicking us when we’re down, and the people you just named stand the most to lose from such disruptive actions right now - aside from the victims themselves and their loved ones, of course.”
“So who’s not being attacked,” Phyr asks.
“Yeah,” Vector says, “There’s thirty-odd dots all over the city, looks like over about three months - that seems a pretty wide spread. What demographic sectors aren’t being hit?”
“Good question,” Heller says with a nod. “No one in the Council of Elders has been taken, nor the City Guard, nor the very old or very young. Aside from that, everyone’s fair game: rich, poor, male, female, elf, dwarf, nothing else seems to matter.”
“So they’re able-bodied,” Phyr says, and Heller nods.
“What happens if someone from the guard or the council gets hit,” Vector asks.
“That would probably result in a curfew,” Heller says.
“So they’re not taking people who would make their job harder,” Pannych says.
“Right,” Heller agrees.
“Wait,” Pannych says, “Can you tell us more about High Priestess Morrigan’s involvement in all this?”
“She’s not involved,” Heller says flatly. “In fact, this is a direct threat to her bottom line. It’s not in her interests to sabotage the people supplying her, she’s just strong-arming to squeeze us all she can.”
“Yeah, but you said whoever’s doing this is ‘kicking when you’re down’ - first off, if she is who I think she is, then she’s very likely to do that. But second, the timing is awful suspicious.”
“We considered that,” Heller says, lowering his eyes. “But ruthless as she is, she’s actually supportive when she’s getting her way.”
“Huh,” Vector asks. “How so?”
Heller sighs heavily before beginning. “Months and months ago, not long after the High Queen and King - gods rest their souls - disappeared, she arrived with her forces and did a pretty thorough economic analysis of our situation. After raiding our stores, she told us what our output and upkeep would be, in her estimation, which was actually rather close to reality - she’s not stupid. But then she demanded that all our mana output beyond what’s required to keep the city running be given to her. That means not one potion dropped on the floor, no relief for the guards after a bandit raid, no extra fuel to go on counter-raids of our own. We were basically ordered to keep our lights on and our bellies full, and the rest was hers.
“Now, accidents happen. Potions get dropped anyway. Equipment fails. When we were short for a pickup one time, she came here personally to find out what happened - one of the hospital batteries had to be recharged after a big bandit raid, which have been getting larger since we can’t take the fight to them, so we red-lined a condenser to make up the difference but it broke down. She got it repaired and ordered us to communicate such issues to her in future - petitioning for relief hadn’t seemed an option before - and then she found out who was responsible for redlining the condenser, and publicly executed him for threatening her take.”
Phyr and Vector lean back and suck air in through their teeth. Pannych only narrows her eyes. “After she lectured us on the importance of working together for the glory of the One True God, someone in the crowd asked how we were supposed to run our hospitals while the bandit raids are getting larger and her quota stays the same. She said something like, ‘Then I’ll relieve you of your hospitals to ease the burden’.” Heller shudders at the memory.
“Yeah,” Pannych snarls, “That’s her, all right.”
“Who,” Vector asks.
Phyr says, “Ceena’s her mother.”
“No way,” Heller says, “You’re a Morrigan, too?”
“Is there any way these attacks could possibly be retaliation for shortfalls,” Pannych asks, ignoring the question.
“There have been no shortfalls,” Heller says, shaking his head. “We’ve made quota every time, and we’ve never red-lined another condenser. We’ve just been keeping things together with band-aids and bubblegum to avoid another of her ‘solutions,’ and reporting any equipment issues to her as they arise, and she has ‘generously’ sent her people to fix them. But we still need to hit the same quota, so bit by bit, we’re being bled dry as the slightest thing going wrong causes a problem we can’t really recover from - death by a thousand cuts.”
“Any correlation between those fixes and the attacks,” Vector asks.
“Not that we can see.”
“I think you’re right that she’s not involved,” Pannych says. “And let’s say your Internal Affairs are airtight. What about the Council of Elders? It seems like one of them would be in the best position to carry out the attacks as they’ve been done, regardless of what there is to lose.”
“You’re not wrong,” Heller says with exaggerated care. “But investigating the council without any material evidence is politically problematic.”
“Welp, guess there’s nothing we can do,” Phyr says, brushing his hands as if wiping them clean of the situation. “Say, think you could tell us who they are and where they live, so we know who we definitely shouldn’t stake out the next few nights?”
Heller gives a sly grin and says, “Sure thing.”
Back at the Cactus Blossom, the adventurers pay for another night and hole up in their room to make a plan. Phyr spreads his map out on the table in the room, having plotted the sites and dates of the murders on it. Pannych studies the map while Phyr squares away his gear. Vector says, “How come you made your mother one of the Influences?”
“She’s not my mother,” Pannych says, “She just has her name.”
“OK, but still: why?”
She sighs and looks up from the map. “Because one of my deepest fears is becoming her. She’s fine when things are going her way - but she’s also very controlling, and any deviation from her plan is met with… a disproportionate reaction.”
“Like destroying a hospital so it doesn’t impact your extortion of a city?”
“Look, I don’t want to talk about it. Can we please focus on the serial killer?”
“Sure, sorry.” Vector and Pannych both look back to the map.
Phyr chuckles, and Pannych asks, “What’s so funny?”
“You know how I know you’re a girl,” he says. Pannych shrugs. “Because no guy I know is worried about becoming his mother.”
“OK, speaking of moving on, this person is basically doing what I would do if I wanted to get away with serial murder.”
“Is that… something you think about a lot,” Vector asks uneasily.
“I’ve spent a lot of time alone with my thoughts. Sometimes it gets weird. Now, if we look at the dates and locations, this is basically a stick-&-move: pick a spot, then wait a few days and pick another spot far away. Except there’s just enough randomness to throw people off: sometimes a very close location is picked, and sometimes another attack happens the very next night. That means the guards have to keep looking over the whole city all the time, and can’t narrow down their search.”
“You’ve… really given this a lot of thought,” Vector says with growing discomfort.
“Yeah,” Phyr says, “And you call me the psycho.”
“Look, I don’t want to go around killing people!” Pannych lifts her hands from the table and stands straight to face them. “It’s just something I’ve thought about sometimes, when I hear about murderers making stupid mistakes, OK? Spend enough time locked in a basement, your mind’ll go to some fucked up places, all right? Can we move on?”
“OK, OK,” Vector says, “Sorry.”
“Thank you. Now: we’re gonna stand out if we just go around patrolling. So my thought is, I can stake out some of the nicer areas of town, see if anyone comes or goes mysteriously during the wee hours. You guys can pick some likely spots to chill in an alley or whatever, and see if anything suspicious happens.”
“I think I’ll still stick out if I’m chilling in an alley,” Phyr says.
“So take a bedsheet or something and try to look homeless,” Pannych says. “I’ll be able to move around somewhat freely without being seen, if I stay mostly on the rooftops. But you guys should probably stay put for the night.”
“Wait, what if we actually run into the perp,” Vector asks.
“Don’t engage,” Pannych says. “So far, the cops haven’t even gotten a look at them. So whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it quietly. And we don’t know what their capabilities are, so we need to be cautious about this. Ideally, we can advance the investigation by feeding Heller anything we learn, and then the cops can close in on them on their own. If they need backup from us, then great, we’ll get some fight XP on top of the quest XP.”
Phyr says, “And if he decides-”
“We don’t know it’s a he,” Pannych interrupts.
“Whatever, if one of us gets targeted, then we’ve got those speaking stones Heller gave us right before we headed out.”
“Yeah, and we’ll be fairly close, so it should be fairly easy to link up if there’s trouble,” Pannych says.
With a plan in place, they nap as best they can in the heat of the day. As the Sun begins to set, they prepare for their evening, and head out once it’s full dark.
Nothing happens for the first three nights. On the fourth, there’s another attack, but in a completely different area of town. The fifth night, Vector witnesses an attack, and the adventurers report to Detective Heller the following day, as soon as he’s available.
“So you actually saw it happen,” Heller asks once they’re alone in the interrogation room again.
“Yes,” Vector says, “But I didn’t see much.”
“Anything is better than nothing, at this point. Tell me exactly what happened, and don’t leave anything out.”
“Sure. I was wrapped in a bedsheet in an alcove behind a building, I could see a little bit of the street, but was pretty out of sight, myself. And I had eaten a bean burrito for lunch, which was a mistake, because I started farting up a storm.”
“OK, you can leave that part out,” Heller says with a wince of disgust.
“OK, you can leave that part out,” Heller says with a wince of disgust.
“No, that turned out to be important, because there wasn’t a lot of breeze in this spot. And someone came by in a hurry, but when he turned behind the building where I was, he backed up a bit because of the smell. And then I heard someone cast something, I couldn’t make out what, and this purple tendril of energy snagged the guy and took like this blue-green energy right out of him, and it was like the lights just went out. Then the same person cast Reanimate, it sounded like an old man and he had gotten closer, and the dead guy started glowing purple a little bit, especially around his eyes. Then I heard the old man real close, and he cast Portal on the wall - and then I could see him, kinda: he was wearing a light brown or an off-white robe, and his hood was up, so I couldn’t see his face. And when he walked by where I was sitting, he just turned his head away from me and went, ‘Eugh,’ and walked through the portal, and the zombie followed. Then the portal closed, and I think that burrito saved my life.”
Heller finishes some notes he has been taking, then looks up to the adventurers. “OK, let’s see here - I’m almost certain that first spell you saw was Soul Steal, it manifests as a tendril. It’s a level 5 all-or-nothing spell that instantly kills anyone low enough, which poor Tommy definitely would have been. Now, Soul Steal and Reanimate are both necromancy spells - but Portal is spacetime magic, which means this guy has access to some cross-class spells. But the most important thing - you’re sure it was an old man, and you’re sure it was purple energy?”
“Yes, on both counts. I mean, it might have been violet or lavender, but it was in the purplish area - not red, not blue, but purple.”
Heller nods gravely and says, “All right. Only three people with purple energy could realistically carry this out: Master Clint, Elder Vitalloff, and Elder Randall.”
“We met Clint when we arrived,” Vector says, “And this definitely wasn’t him.”
“Well, Shay Vitalloff is a lady, and Stewart Randall is the Head Librarian of the-”
“Did you say his name is Stewart,” Phyr interrupts, looking daggers at Pannych.
“Yes.”
“Goddammit, Pannych, you name-reusing little shit!” Phyr looks back at Heller. “Well, he’s definitely your guy - the last necromancer we killed was named Stewart.”
Heller looks at him strangely and says, “That’s not-”
“Trust me,” Phyr says, raising a hand to silence the detective. “Stewart’s your guy, now it’s just a matter of proving it.”
“Well, I can’t just get a warrant because he’s got the same name as the last necromancer you killed - and an out-of-towner’s word won’t be enough to initiate an investigation into a city elder, no offense.”
“None taken,” Vector says.
“Good. So, thanks for helping so far, but I’m afraid we’re gonna need something more solid than that. Ideally, something we can show to a judge. But I have no idea how we’re gonna get something like that, if he’s just raising people on the spot and then portaling home.”
“Yeah, sounds like you got your work cut out for you,” Phyr says, rising to his feet. “Welp, guess that’s all we can do! Guess we better go home and find some way to occupy ourselves so we don’t do anything illegal for the rest of the day!”
“We are not breaking into a city elder’s house in the middle of the goddamn morning,” Pannych hisses once they’re out of earshot of the constabulary.
“Of course not,” says Phyr, “We’re walking right up to his front door and knocking, like a trio of perfectly obnoxious Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or whoever the right god is.”
“The gods are dead,” Vector reminds him.
“Whatever. Besides, I don’t know what you’re worried about - we know it’s the guy, and bad news as he is, they’ll be happier we got rid of him than madder we broke some laws to do it, and then we’ll be out of their hair and on our way to Hope’s End.”
“No, I’m with you on all that,” Pannych says, “Just not in broad fuckin’ daylight. We should wait until nightfall.”
“Eh, I’m with Phyr on this one,” Vector says. “We can get the drop on him in the middle of the day, especially now when people are resting to get out of the heat.”
Pannych considers this for a flustered moment, then says, “All right, you’ve convinced me.”
They arrive at Stewart Randall’s estate well into the heat of the day, when almost no one is out and about. The estate is about halfway from the center of the city to the Southeastern edge, close enough to what matters without being in the middle of the bustle or too near the outskirts. “Estate” is also a relative term - while palatial indeed when compared with the yurts that make up most residences, it is still a mudbrick building, although a very large and nice one. Rock gardens adorn the grounds, as well as some well-kept indigenous vegetation. A tall wrought-iron gate surrounds the perimeter.
Phyr approaches the gate and casts Shape Metal to pull it apart at the lock, as if he had the key. The adventurers walk at a leisurely pace, as if they own the place, not wanting to attract undue attention from the guards in their towers. When they reach the front door, made of imported oak varnished to a glossy sheen, Phyr bangs on it insistently. When there is no answer, he bangs louder and longer.
“Hang on, hang on, I’m coming,” an irritated voice shouts from inside. They hear it through one of the open windows. As the door unlocks and opens, Phyr readies his blaster. “Now what in the - hey!” Stewart Randall is a pale old man with white hair and loosely wrinkled skin, but he jumps back at the sight of the blaster as though he were half his age. Phyr pushes the door open with his free hand, and the others draw their weapons as they enter behind him.
“Hey there, Stewart! Guess what? The gig is up.” Stewart backs away urgently with hands raised as Phyr advances on him, his voice cheery but his face dark.
“What - what on Earth are you-”
“Don’t bother,” Vector says, training his rifle on the old man. “We know you’ve been making able-bodied zombies and portaling them back here. Show us what you’re working on, and this will be easy. Keep playing dumb, and we’ll waste you right here and sort through your shit ourselves.”
Stewart’s demeanor shifts from terrified old man to dignified statesman in the space of a heartbeat. As he straightens both his posture and his khaki cotton robe, he says calmly, “Very well. You seem sure of yourselves, so I won’t insult your intelligence - and I’ve no intention of dying to some meddlesome kids with the guts to bring a fight to me, knowing what I’m capable of. Right this way.” He turns on his heel and walks along the freshly waxed hardwood floor.
The adventurers are stunned silent for a moment - but just a moment. They compose themselves and follow him, weapons at the low ready. “I won’t bother telling you to put away your weapons,” Stewart calls over his shoulder, “But do try not to damage anything. I’ll want to come back here once this all blows over.” He leads them down some stairs to a large finished basement, complete with a bar, the magical equivalent of a stereo, and furniture upholstered in rich leather.
Phyr pulls out his trap detector, and it says in bright red letters that a trap is detected. As Stewart heads behind the bar and reaches for a lever, Phyr raises his blaster and says, “Not so fast. That’s a trap.”
Stewart’s composure falters for a moment, but he regains it quickly and says with a shrug, “Can’t blame a man for trying. Very well, follow me.” He leads them into an adjoining room with a pair of billiard tables, several dartboards, and a foosball table off in one corner. The wood paneled walls have large posters tacked up at various points, presumably to cover damage resulting from the nearby dartboards. There’s a kitten dangling from a clothesline saying, “Hang In There;” Raquel Welch in a fur bikini on a rocky landscape; a line drawing of a frog reaching to strangle a pelican from within its beak saying, “Never Give Up;” and various others of that nature.
“New construction,” Vector asks with a raised eyebrow. “Doesn’t really fit with the rest of your ‘desert rich guy’ chic.”
“Nothing gets past you, I see,” Stewart says tiredly as he pulls aside the poster of Raquel Welch to reveal an enormous hole in the wall. He leads them through a dark tunnel sloping gently downward, Vector’s rifle-mounted flashlight lighting up his back as they descend further underground. “I don’t expect anything so pedestrian as riches to persuade you,” the elder says absently as they walk, “But what about forgotten knowledge and ancient power?”
“The only power I’m interested in is power over my own mind,” Pannych says. “And something tells me you’re not in a position to give that.”
“Perhaps not,” he replies. “But the Glyph Crystal of Assumption could give you power over others’ minds.”
“Why would you share such power,” Vector asks, silencing Pannych with a hand on her shoulder before she can say something morally right but situationally wrong.
“Ha! Believe me, this is no philanthropic gesture. I simply have the presence of mind to recognize that half a loaf is better than life in prison.”
“Go on,” Phyr says, sounding intrigued, before hitting Pannych in the shoulder to get her attention and then mouthing silently to her, “Keep him talking, stupid.” Pannych rolls her eyes and makes a sweeping gesture with one hand as if to say, “Be my guest, asshole.”
As they cross from the dark tunnel through some shattered brickwork into a burial chamber lit by glowing stones, Stewart says, “Tell me, children: do you recognize this architecture from anywhere else in your travels?”
Vector looks around and says, “Yeah, we saw it below Fort Roguelike. What do you know about it?”
“Only that it’s where you die,” Stewart says, as some two dozen zombies emerge from coffins, dark corners, and other hiding places in the capacious burial chamber. They roll for turn order: Stewart goes first, then his zombies, followed by Pannych, Vector, and Phyr, who are all at a penalty due to the shock of the zombies’ numbers.
Stewart dashes off toward a far corner, then turns around to extend his hand and shouts, “Wall!” A curve of purple energy rises from the floor to protect him from all projectile attacks.
The zombies spend their turn orienting toward the adventurers and approaching - they are in various states of decay and not the most nimble, clearly relying on numbers rather than skill to overwhelm their enemies. None reach the adventurers this turn, but they move in close.
Pannych spots an opening between the press of advancing corpses, and leaps from gap to gap between them, staying just out of reach. One final leap places her within Stewart’s wall, but he has been ready for her and simply says, “Push,” which sends her flying backward. She hits the edge of a coffin and takes only 1 damage, but flips over the edge and lands inside with a pair of zombies over her.
Vector rushes to Pannych’s defense, shooting one zombie for 40 damage and knocking it over, then charging into the other one with his shoulder to knock it off-balance.
Phyr aims his blaster carefully over Stewart’s Wall and shoots, hitting the stonework wall behind and above him. Stewart takes 74 splash damage and is knocked to the floor, and a shower of hot stone shrapnel does an additional 12 damage. He then sprints through a gap in the zombies’ ranks, in a bid to split both their forces and Stewart’s attention.
Stewart is dazed from the massive damage he just took, and recovers from the shock, but is unable to move from the ground. He looks up and sees Vector standing over Pannych’s coffin, and casts, “Drain!” Vector takes 20 damage from the spell, and Stewart gains 20 health.
The zombies near Pannych and Vector move in to attack: two claw and bite at him for 5 damage each, and one makes it to Pannych and gets her for 6 damage. Three zombies make it to Phyr, only doing 2 damage apiece, but surrounding him as more close in.
Pannych kicks her legs up and over the zombie on top of her as she grabs him with one hand, sliding her torso out from under him and effectively reversing their positions to shove him face-first into the coffin she was just occupying. She slashes one-handed at the back of his knee with Hawkmoth, dealing 39 damage and disabling his left leg.
Vector leaps over the coffin to disengage the zombies surrounding him, then looks at Stewart. The necromancer is still behind his Wall, so Vector charges forward instead of aiming and firing, hip-checking a zombie to the ground on the way.
Phyr has three zombies on him and more closing in, so he fires his blaster at the ground behind him, taking 33 splash damage and dealing 75 to the five zombies nearest him. They all go flying in various directions - and Phyr lands just a couple yards from Stewart’s wall.
Stewart shakes off the daze and gets to his feet, casting another Drain on Vector for 20. The zombies recover and resume or continue their attack, closing in once again on Phyr and Vector, but fully swarming around Pannych: she takes four hits, for 24 total damage. She casts Hide, and finds herself in a hallway, with the sounds of battle coming from just around the corner ahead of her. She staggers around the corner just in time to see the end of the fight.
Vector continues his charge, shoulder-checking the elderly man into the stone wall with all his half-giant’s bulk for 18 damage, eliciting a grunt of pain. Then he scrapes his elbow and the butt of his rifle along the wall, shoving the necromancer along the wall to the ground, where he falls with his legs inside the wall and his torso outside.
Phyr gets up to one knee and says, “Hey, pal. Not bad,” then pulls the trigger. Stewart’s head and a good chunk of his shoulders explode in a hail of steaming gibbets, leaving his arms attached only by flaps of armpit skin.
The zombies fall limp as their master dies. Everyone takes a couple deep breaths. Then Stewart’s body begins to glow purple and rise from the ground, as a ghastly voice says in a deep rumbling tone, “You fool! By killing me, you ha-”
BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! “I said, ‘Not bad’ - I did not call for an encore!” Phyr spits on the corpse and holsters his blaster, and they all get 5 XP. Vector tosses off a couple Heal spells, and Phyr tops everyone up with his healing ray.
“So,” Pannych says, as they rest up after the fight. “Do we wanna keep going down?”
Phyr pulls out his trap detector again, and it shows green. “No traps. I mean, we may as well, right?”
They leave the burial chamber and travel down through the catacombs, traversing hallways and other burial chambers until at last they come to a larger chamber that has collapsed in upon itself. The magical lights in this room have gone out, but a steady green light pulses from the center of the room, where an excavation has clearly been taking place: crude stone tools with bone hafts have been dropped haphazardly, roughly centered around an exposed piece of a glowing green crystal jutting from a clumsily-excavated patch of igneous rock. The part they can see is roughly the size of a beach ball, but there’s no telling how big the whole thing is.
“Whoa,” Phyr says, approaching the crystal with an upraised hand.
“Hang on,” Pannych says, “We don’t know what that does.”
“So? The last weird rock I touched gave me superpowers.” He taps the pearl in his chestplate.
“Yeah, and this one might kill you,” Vector says. “We should check in with Heller, and probably Clint, before we do anything potentially stupid.”
“I think leaving the giant glowy crystal behind to play Mother May I is potentially stupid.”
“Noted,” Pannych says, “Now let’s go.”
On the way up, Phyr grabs the poster of Raquel Welch off the wall and rolls it up, saying, “You still owe me jungle babes - but this’ll do for now.”
A cursory search of the house reveals a strongbox, which the adventurers empty, and the additional funds (when distributed to put them all at equal totals) bring them all up to $12,000 each. Within an hour, they’ve returned with Master Clint and Detective Heller. As they pass through the tunnel in the newly-constructed game room, Heller says, “Well, this certainly hasn’t been approved by the council!” His sarcasm disappears when they reach the burial chamber and he recognizes every single corpse as a victim in the investigation.
They proceed down to the crystal excavation room, and Clint is just as lost as any of them. “I think he called it the Glyph Crystal of Assumption,” Pannych offers.
“Stars’ names,” Clint says softly. “This is beyond me. This is beyond any of us. Tell no one of this discovery - I must speak with the headmaster at once!” The adventurers each get 5 quest XP for concluding their investigation of the necromancer.
What follows is a boring couple days of debriefing and procedure that everyone would really prefer not to do, but helps them get in the city’s good graces for things like trusting them with infrastructure projects or doing favors related to cross-desert transportation.
Solving the necromancer problem gets the adventurers in front of the Council of Elders, and once the council hears of their desire to help the town and get to Hope’s End, an arrangement is swiftly banged out to trade the former for the latter. They are introduced to Warner Hobbes, a good-natured dwarf with sandstone-colored skin, stony grey hair, and water-green eyes, who runs a transportation service called Warner’s Wayfinding. He had just returned empty-handed from a large joint bandit raid, a last-ditch effort to claw their way out of desperate times - so the news of the necromancer’s defeat and heroic assistance puts an ear-to-ear smile on his face.
Over the next week, Phyr travels around the city: he recharges stills, buggies, and the mana batteries that serve as generators for various buildings; he is able to repair solar panels and mana condensers that need it; and with his professional-level Informedness and Crafting, combined with his Technical Intuition, he is able to recommend some improvements to various designs that will increase yield and efficiency.
During the same week, Pannych and Vector ride out on a bandit raid with Warner and a crew. They cover new ground this time, and hit paydirt, bringing back a considerable amount of money and a modest but sorely needed supply of mana potions. Phyr uses the bulk of them to keep doing his work, as his enchanted earring makes him more efficient than any of the city’s other technomancers. All told, the adventurers earn 40 experience points each for their endeavors, which gets Vector to level 8 and the others to level 3.
With eight days to go before the tournament, Warner and the adventurers make plans for the journey to Hope’s End. They pack their things and make ready to leave at dusk, planning to travel overnight and rest during the heat of the day.
To CONTINUE TO CHAPTER 12, click here.
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