S2 E2: Crime Scene

General Summary

• The thumping noise was the sound of some sewer-dweller - a wild-eyed crazy (likely a drunk or vagabond) found to be licking a dead body - a dead Watchman, which makes it suddenly rather serious. The crazy shrieks something about the party taking his honey and wanting his honey, then attacks them viciously, though ultimately ineffectively; They put him down without great difficulty, though KC tried to keep him alive.
• Some kind of isopod-pillbug creature the size of a large frog skitters out of the body through the man's stomach after death, but it's much too fast for anyone to see where it went.
• They search through the bodies, and find several seemingly incriminating items on the watchman, whose name on his ID is Coyle Daine, married to Lissa Daine, with a home in the Green District. One item is a contrite love letter written in a looping purple ink from a woman named Orpha, suggesting he may be having an extramarital affair - not strictly illegal but certainly not the sort of family-strengthening behavior a Watchman is supposed to uphold.
• Likewise he carries a number of gambling chips - two from the Beggar's Dice, the label in the center immedeiately recognizable. Another has the mark of the Dragonfly casino, a floating barge docked at the Elven Quarter Pier; and two more that no one recognizes, with a beehive as their logo. Coyle appears to have been killed by a sharp wrenching of his neck, perhaps aided by the thick length of hooked chain still wrapped around his neck - six to eight feet of it, in fact.
• Wendell, who disappeared during the fight, returns while the bodies are being searched along with a number of Watchmen, one of which is a higher-ranking officer, a lieutenant from the 'Murders Department' a middle-aged male of indeterminate race named Slonsky - not quite goblin or gnome , something of both of races in his small, long-eared, inexpertly shaven and generally disheveled appearance. He carried a very handy light crystal and chews a black, unlit stub of tabacco.
• Slonsky asks a number of mundane questions about the scene, and many that the group can't readily answer - such as how the raving drunken vagabond could possibly have overpowered the guard, where the chain came from, and what the hell was he licking. He desperately wants to be able to say the vagabond killed the guard and was killed in return for it, closing the case much more neatly than running the party in for murder, when they clearly had neither means nor motive, but the truth is obviously something different than either - something that Eldara knows somehow ties back to the disappearance of her sister Adrina.
• Slonsky has just enough tired, jaded goodness in him to want to find the truth--or perhaps simply to help root out corruption within the ranks of the Watchmen-- to conditionally and temporarily deputize the party to assist in the investigation and gather information outside of the ranks of the City Watch, hopefully free from any insider's tampering with the evidence. He tells them to go talk to the wife, Lissa, and to follow up the leads at the Dragonfly and whatever gambling house the beehive coin came from.
• He also mentions the coincidence that the man was screaming about honey, that they saw some kind of creepy insect, and the poker chip has a beehive on it. They notice a dark-haired, fleshy-faced guard watching them a little too closely, and leave the guards to it to investigate the rest of the sewer, finding a wide bed and collection of sad personal items including a flat colorful stone that looks faintly familiar but not obvious, and a couple of keys.
• Wendell's odd behavior as Slonsky goes prompts the party to question him further; he says he knew the body would be here and that 'the good guys' were compelling him to frame the party for the killing of the guard, but his plan went awry (when his skill check rolls were for shit) and now he's scared because he owes over five thousand gold to the bookies - an impossible sum in a place where a hard days work usually results in a couple of gold pieces of payment.
• It's extremely hard to determine what if any of this story is actually true, though they recall Wendell volunteered to come looking and suggested that it was very easy to get into the sewers when they were out at the hand pump. His story never really adds up so the party decides to compel him to stick around with them, and he says once they get to the Dragonfly it should all make sense.
• While being thorough, they find a secret door, trapped on the outside (suggesting it was designed to be accessed from the other side, not from the sewer. Perplexingly, it leads to an extremely clean - or at least, clean-floored - family crypt for a family unfamiliar to anyone - House DeSauvigny, which might be an Optimate family but is not one of the 12 Exultant houses.
• They find various wooden caskets, a stairway leading to doors, opened by the two found keys - suggesting that perhaps in more lucid moments the vagabond had traveled that way. The second door lets out to a nondescript section of alleyway between the bookstore and the Fortune Teller shop; the bricks are old and weathered but the frame the metal door is inset into could be significantly older, made of weather-worn white marble.
• The group ends up at the restaurant eating a few sausages and drinking some glasses of beer with Slonsky, who mentions that he has a special fondness for Squalus because he himself was mistaken for one when paying a visit to the boarding house of the Sisterhood of Regrettable Fortune, following up a lead on an unrelated case. Unrelated it might be, but this is the third time the Sisterhood has been mentioned - Wendell said he saw one talking to a woman who might have been Adrina, in Lily Circle where the hand pump outside the Beggar's Dice is; They're commissioning KC to write a book; and now this. How meddlesome is one charity likely to be?
• Slonsky leaves them to it, telling them to meet him back at the beggar's dice if they have information, and if he's not there to ask at the main desk and he'll be summoned straightaway.

Report Date

12 Sep 2023

Primary Location

Orendarium, Capitol of the Realm