35—Play on, play on.
The next morning, Kyreel and Indy follow the guard’s advice, and pay a call on the new captain of the guard. Captain Shella is a young woman, sincere and honorable, and she congratulates the adventurers on their timely intercession. She confesses that her guard is currently overworked with all of the festival traffic, and her duty roster is stretched to the point of breaking. She laments a series of recent unrelated disturbances, including a rash of robberies and a pair of murders. Kyreel offers to help without a moment’s hesitation, and Captain Shella gratefully accepts.
The murders took place in the Southspur district, a warehouse community peppered with shanty homes and a few less than desirable businesses. The guard has taken a defensive stance with regards to the recent problems, preferring instead to keep the festival running with its much-needed influx of coin and commerce. Any help the adventurers might render, she states, will be gratefully received.
“The irony of it all,” Indy says as they return to their rooms. “We certainly top the Ratik Most Wanted list, but we’ve just been conscripted as guards. After we solve these murders and restore Law and Order, do you think we should turn ourselves in?”
The duo make their way to Southspur, Ratik’s “troublesome district”, and are accosted along their way by a gaudily dressed fellow who warns the duo that he’ll brook no competition on his turf. Indy is completely baffled by the man’s hostility, but Kyreel understands his meaning.
“You are a pimp,” she states, “and you think we are also involved in your seedy trade. First, sir, I will have you know that should you cross swords with us, you can kiss your illicit career goodbye with the same peck that sends your life off, and second we are not selling flesh. We are adventurers, investigating a murder at the behest of Captain Shella herself.”
“Right,” the man says, as he runs his hand through his beard. “No trouble from Swagger Jack you’ll have missus. I should have known. You looked a little up-hill for this block, and he obviously swings his sword with the other hand, if you take my meanin’. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind.”
The pimp stares at the two of them. “No blood, no harm, I say.” After a thoughtful pause, he continues. “You might want to talk to Master Cerin of the Night Walkers. They run this district, and if anyone knows the inside of the secrets here, it’s him. Myself, I wish you luck. Murders are bad for my business.”
After the man returns to his slouch in a nearby doorway, Indy turns to Kyreel. “He thought I was a pimp? Me?” The duo walk toward the safe-house described by Swagger Jack, and Indy mutters “Cool.”
Kyreel notices that the diminuative pirate-cum-revolutionary adopts a slight limp and massages his beardless face in an offhanded manner. “Maybe I need a gold-handled shortspear,” Indy mutters to himself. “And a big hat.”
“Maybe you need to abandon this foolishness and keep your mind on your business,” Kyreel says.
“Maybe you need a lesson from the back of my hand, you keep runnin’ your yap, woman,” Indy says.
“Indianichus Winterborne Silverleaf! That will be quite enough! I’ll have none of this. You’re not a pirate, there is no ‘revolution’, Lady Evaleigh is not in love with you, and you are certainly not a pimp. By all that is and will be, you are favored by Ishlok Herself, is that not enough?”
Indy mutters “I just want to be popular,” as a lone tear runs down his cheek.
-----
The gang run by Master Cerin proves to be remarkably loose-lipped considering that their job description includes subterfuge and secrecy. Apparently, whatever has been preying on the street-folk in Southspur has these thieves frightened to go out at night, and Ollidamara knows how little daytime trade there is, even with the festival in full bloom.
Master Cerin shows the duo where the murders took place, all within a three-block radius, and tells them that whatever killed these people wasn’t human—the victims were shredded, as if by innumerable claws, and their blood was not found with the bodies the next morning.
A search of the area reveals a suspicious warehouse with a single un-boarded window on the second floor, and Indy’s keen eyes spot claw-marks running from the window to the ground.
The duo fortifies themselves with spells, and Indy climbs up to the second floor window for a close listen. He hears scrabbling noises, and a disturbing atonal muttering coming from within the building. He holds up one fist in the universal sign for a fight, and as Kyreel makes her way to the front door, he slips inside.
Suddenly, the dimly lit interior goes completely black, and the muttering rises in volume to an ear-bending crescendo of yelps and bloodthirsty wails. Several creatures claw at him from the darkness, and it is all he can do to flee toward the sound of Kyreel smashing in the front door, and calling down a flame strike on some unseen foe.
Had Indy realized that he was fleeing off the edge of a fifteen-foot riser, he might have reconsidered, but blinded by the magical darkness, he pitches headfirst over the edge, and into a gaggle of scorched humanoid bodies.
The eyeless creatures are feral humanoids and are covered with a strange sort of fur most like a spider’s bristles in look and feel. A round half-dozen more of the things are swarming from the riser, and lashing out at Kyreel with cat-like claws and protruding fangs.
But Kyreel was just voted The Wrong Cleric To F--k With by the Monsters Union Local 35, and she proves why, driving the beasts into Indy’s waiting sneak attacks, and smiting them head from shoulders with her mace. Divine might makes right most of the time, after all.
There is a minute of furious fighting, then as suddenly as it began, the warehouse is quiet, and the heroes are victorious.
But all is not yet well in Ratik. Secure in their victory, the duo is returning to Captain Shella to report when they are approached by a pair of shady-looking thugs who warn them not to “go poking their nose in their betters’ business.”
After beating the two thugs into a semi-conscious pleading submission, Kyreel concludes that the Warehouse fight was a red herring, and that the trouble in Ratik runs deeper than they know. Indy practices saying “what’s up, bitch?” to passers-by.
The pair returns to the Market, where several of the grateful stall owners are more than happy to tell the group about a series of strange happenings involving the city’s rat population. Perhaps there is some sort of Pied Piper at work-- if the mysterious figure’s goal is to unsettle the locals, he seems to have succeeded. An elderly dwarven matron and weaponsmith grants the duo an audience, owing to their status as heroes amongst the Marketplace stall-owners. When asked about rats, she suggests having a look at the city’s Bell Tower, long known to be a breeding place for the filthy rodents.
Further investigation also incriminates the city’s Bell Tower as the epicenter of some very un-ratlike rat behavior, and after sneaking into the place, Indy reports a half score of wererats haunting the place.
The heroes decide to climb the walls of the tower, and assault it from the top. The roof level leads into a web of rickety support beams and rope-work forming walkways high above the tower’s floor. Their rodent enemies lurk among the shadows and corners of the chaotic latticework, armed and ready for trouble. But a fireball from Indy undermines the wererat’s position, and before too much time has elapsed, their foes have all surrendered their liberty, or surrendered their lives.
“That’ll teach them to mess with one of my women,” Indy says as he pulls his spear out of a wererat’s body, now transforming back into its human form.
“If you don’t stop this pimp foolishness, I won’t cure you,” Kyreel says.
“Now look here, baby,” Indy says as he exaggeratedly widens his eyes. “You’ll do what you’re told, see? When I say cure light wounds, I get cure light wounds.”
“Oh, I don’t mean cure your wounds,” Kyreel says, picking up Indy’s arm, revealing a rat-bite. “I meant, the curse.”
“Curse!” Indy exclaims.
“Lycanthropy. You probably have it.”
“No! Not me! Not . . . Sweet Ratik Indy!”
“And you’d better learn to like eating human flesh, Indy, because I don’t remove curses from pimps, revolutionaries or pirates.”
“Human . . .flesh?”
“Wererats eat the privates first, Indy.”
“Eeew!”
“If you promise to cut out this pretending nonsense, I will remove your curse. But you must promise.”
After a moment of thought, as Indy scans the crotches of all the fallen wererats with a grimace on his face, he agrees. Kyreel also wrestles out of him a promise to abandon any notion of a romance between Lady Evaliegh and himself, and despite his most fervent wishes, he does so.
