Session 12 Report: Maybe All Spiders are Fiends?

General Summary

The team reconvened in the morning at the SIDE office. Everyone discussed what they got up to after splitting up the night before while Shoke was still passed out in the conference room. Officers Brand and Gyrm shared their notes about the interviews they conducted at Factory 12, where Erth used to work. Gyrm also brought in some donuts from local donut store "Glazy for Donuts" - known for their excellent crullers - as a partial bribe for Turk, the resident lockpicking expert at NRPD HQ, so they could get into the lock box they found at Erth's apartment. Hearing this, Officer Ravawynn grabbed a donut, then her own lockpicking set, and deftly popped the lockbox open. Inside, they found:

by thouartodd

some money: 25 gp, 10 sp, 4 cp
a business card-like piece of paper with a logo that had a "C" in the center

No one could identify the origin of the logoed card, though they could determine it was professionally printed so at least had a bit of a lead to go on. After taking a look through the lockbox, Sergeant Hendricks briefed the team on the matters Captain Stagette had discussed with him:

potentially hiring an assistant to help out with the day-to-day correspondence and research tasks the team performs, and
their next case - a set of apparent disappearances of students from a local nightclub, The Nest

Ringing a bell, Brand and Gyrm referred to the concert poster they had also taken from Erth's house. The poster showed a closeup of a grinning half-elven-looking woman's face. She had short, flailing hair like multicolor tentacles and glasses with triskelions on them. The more the team tried to focus on the image, the more the glasses seemed to ever so slightly spin and change color. The concert appeared to have taken place a few days ago, on the night of the disappearances. The rest of the text on the poster read:

Roz's "The Witching Hour" Tour

THE NEST

Doors at 10, Cover: 1 gp

Dress to impress, no weapons

After the briefing, the team headed out into Central Market to check out The Nest. Unfortunately, being the morning, the nightclub was closed. Fortunately the sister bar of the club, The Raven, was open. They met the morning bartender, a young half-human half-elven-looking woman, who mentioned the club's manager, Peter Stane, would not be back to the club until later that night. With some light convincing, the officers persuaded her to let them in through the side door from The Raven which led behind one of the bars in the club.

The Nest

Getting down to business, Ravawyn started doing a sweep of the whole area for any traces of active or residual magic. She picked up a few things:

the walls gave off a sense of illusory magic
the speakers gave off a feel of metamagic

Studying them from a few angles and going through her study and knowledge of magic, she found the walls to have been enchanted with a form of illusory script while the speakers had been imbued with a twinned spell effect. The team poked around a few doors on the first floor, managing to open one of them but finding only a normal dressing room, then relocking it deftly with some expert lockpicking. Upstairs, they found another locked door, which Ravawyn easily opened as well. Once inside, Gyrm attempted to detect good & evil in the room, sensing something was off. Scanning the room, he noticed a glowing shape above a shelf at the side of the room where nothing appeared to be. He reached around at the top of the shelf when suddenly a large spider scurried away and out the door, its continued aura indicating it was what had been hiding on top of the shelf. The team all ran out into the hall, attempting unsuccessfully to stop the spider, until Gyrm made it out and used a spell to command it to stop. While it was frozen, Brand leapt up and in a single motion grabbed it and shoved it into a bag Ravawyn was holding out, which she immediately closed and tied off. Pretty sure it wasn't a normal spider, Gyrm attempted to communicate with it in Draconic and Infernal. When he spoke the latter, the spider briefly stopped squirming in the bag but just as quickly continued again. To prepare for later, team contacted dispatch to see if anyone at the precinct can talk to animals and learned that Telchar Wraithmail, a dwarf druid in the Major Crimes unit should be able to. Doing one last sweep of the room before they headed out, Gyrm grabbed a few papers from the desk top and drawer:

a schematic-like sketch of what Ravawyn was able to vaguely identify as some kind of music box used by DJs
one of many crumpled papers that turned out to be a love poem of questionable quality and appeared to have been written by Peter Stane

Ravawyn manages to relock the office door after a couple tries, and the team headed back out through the side door behind the bar. On their way out, the team got the names of The Raven's manager, a dwarf named Stoe Mizen, and the person who's been working the night-shift lately, a human named James Carfo, whose shift starts at 9pm. Before heading back to the office, Ravawyn swings around to the back of the The Nest and notices another entrance into the basement of the club that they couldn't quite get into from the inside: a storm door with a fair number of dents in it and a brand new-looking padlock. A minute or so later, the brand new lock was picked and she made her way inside. She found herself in a hallway with two more locked doors, but decided to quite while she was ahead and come back with a warrant to be safe. She re-fastened the lock and the team headed back to HQ.

The Interrogation

Once back, the team went immediately to one of the interrogation rooms and trapped the spider in a jar. Officer Wraithmail joined briefly and attempted to speak to the spider and see what she could glean, but all she could tell was that it wasn't a normal spider and it either didn't want to communicate or didn't speak spider. After she left, Gyrm used his divine sense to verify for sure that the spider was in fact a fiend. Using some quick thinking and ingenuity, he opened flipped and opened the jar, then slipped some holy-water soaked paper underneath. The spider lightly tapped it with its foot, which sizzled visibly, then frantically tried to climb up and hold itself up in the jar. Some time later, after threats of more holy water, jar shaking, and heckling in infernal, the spider finally yelled back in infernal and started shouting expletives at the officers. From there Gyrm was able to question it further, learning it was contracted to stay hidden in Stane's office, to watch and report on anything that happened from who came and went to what they did. They learned of another motley crew who had also recently broken into Stane's office a few nights earlier. When pushed further on the name of who had contracted it, they confirmed it wasn't Stane but that the fiend wasn't able or willing to speak their name. They also learned that the spider strongly disliked being called a demon, saying devils were nothing like those fools. Suddenly, the spider started to rock in the jar and exploded out as a raven which flew around the room screaming curses until the team took it out and it poofed into black smoke. Tired from a day of breaking and entering and interrogating fiendish spiders, the team headed back to their office to begin their interviews for a new assistant.

The Interview

Captain Stagette had put together a set of internal candidates for the team to choose from, each worked at other precincts and had put their names in the hat for potential internal transfers. Seeing that Shoke had finally gotten up and went home from the conference room, they got started interviewing the candidates. Yurgin Janster. Yurgin was a middle aged halfling from Precinct OL-2 in Oldetown. He seemed smart and bookish but a bit floundery and didn't seem to vibe very well with the team. Tyralor Elseris. Tyralor was a young half-elf half human from Precinct GM-1 in Grand Market. She was very friendly but the team found her head to be a bit in the clouds and in the end not a good fit. Emily Aluqaryn. Emily was a middle aged gnome from Precinct WV-2 in West Village. She came on very strong, seemingly the most well connected of the candidates, giving off a very NRC local vibe. Ultimately the team found she maybe came on a little too strong and decided not to go with her either. Having exhausted the list of candidates from the captain, Brand and Gyrn mentioned they'd like to interview Mindy Chancer, the late-night-shift desk clerk at their own precinct. Mindy Chancer. Mindy was a human somewhere around her 60s who worked at NRPD HQ. Interviewing her, the team found she enjoyed research and reading and gave off a friendly, almost grandmotherly vibe. While she didn't initially apply for the role or any transfer, the team came to the conclusion that they needed her in the role and submitted a request to Captain Stagette. Once Stagette approved and Mindy accepted, the team gave her a list of her first assignments to look into over the next few days, with priority toward the warrants as they may take up to 24 hours to approve:

apply for a warrants to a few places of interest: The Nest, Selu's apartment, & RUGL dorms
research the "C" logo
find out what the difference is between demons & devils
find out what happens to fiends when they poof