Thanks A Million

Jericho thoughts:
6-26-21
 
Alright! That's more like it! Now we’re suckin’ diesel. Okay, so we started off with a wee chat with the lot of a hundred mouths (nice lad), we tried checking out the spooky alley but didn’t find anything amiss in the ol’ umbra. Then called it there for the night.
 
Up in the mornin for a wee cup of tea at the Ground Up Cafe. Now, I won’t fib, I would’a been delira and excira to see Ramona there, but it wasn’t in the cards as it were.
 
After a little walk about I got a notification sayin’ a parcel was delivered, unsure what it was I cut the walk short and tried to see what the mystery package was. Turns out, it was the business license for Jericho and Sons, not a moment too soon either, we had a meeting with some lawyers shortly.
During the meeting with the lawyers things started to heat up a bit. Got a call from mi boyo Chip back at the pub, he’s tellin’ me all conspiratorially that there was a murder in the spooky alley and the Gardia were on their way to check it out. Unfortunately for us we weren’t able to get a jump on it on account’a the lawyers. They had a mighty fine gift that made up for the inconvenience though. We got a million dollars to start our business off on the right foot. When we were trying to take off and check out the ol’ alley we ran into someone else who was waiting for us.
 
That ol’ smug bastard Jude. We hash out the situation with Crimson and Clover, but I’m in a rush, so I tried to keep it short. Unfortunately, Jude and I both seem to be talkers so we don’t make it out of there too quick.
 
Cut to the murder in the alley. There’s a mess of activity when we get there, police, fire, ambulance, news, but it seems to be winding down we took too long to see the meat of it. Turns out it didn’t matter much, the news crews couldn’t get a word in edgewise from the Gardia we were just going to be playing the waiting game until they all cleared out.
 
To kill some time we all did a walk about and tried to look for things, O’l Barnaby was the only one to really get some info, and in an unlikely way. Didn’t know that man could talk with raccoons… anyway, he gleaned the direction that the murderer went and when everyone cleared out, we went off on the hunt. Before we took off, we took a look in the umbra and discovered an interesting site. We had just found a newly created Locus…. OF MURDER. Gotta clean that up somehow, but first, our assailant.
 
We made good time considering we were a couple hours behind our quarry, but we kept losing the trail. We eventually wound up finding ourselves at an ol’ biker bar called “The Empty Bucket” apparently being run by some vampires. Rufus took the lead on getting us out of the sticky wicket and I’ll be honest, his way with words brought a little tear to my eye, he must be learning something from me after all. He was able to figure out that we just missed our prey and just like that, we were back in pursuit.
 
The trail ran cold in the middle of a shanty town in No-na, it’s almost like our culprit just flew away… We knew we were tracking something unnatural or at least, a little bit off. We started to case the place when a single Gardia patrol showed up and started poking around. Me being worried about what they might find I decided to follow, I wasn’t being overtly in the way, so she must have decided trying to get me to piss off wasn’t worth it.
 
We found a body in the brush and she called for some backup… Great. She seemed to think her trail had run cold too cause we started back for the shanty town when all of a sudden I GET STABBED right out’a nowhere but I was quick enough to spin around and drop this big boy on his ass. Now… an unlikely thing happened after that, the body went limp, I caught a glimpse of some spirit or whatnot leaving and when I was watching it drift off, I noticed this patrol woman noticing it as well and we locked eyes, I caught a glimpse of something feral in those eyes, I hope I didn’t just meet a sister of Ramona...