Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lylandra" data-source="post: 7315007" data-attributes="member: 6816692">Skeletons in the ClosetSession 18We manage to get a list of three known sculptors who are also adapt at working with ice. The first two turn out to be dead ends, although Auryn finds that one of the sculptors is working in a factory with less than ideal working conditions. It comes with no surprise that this factory was previously owned by Goodson and is now in the hands of Fordren Industries. As she finds several violations against already existing occupational safety standards, Auryn makes sure to write down every little detail and hand the list to the officials so they maybe send in an inspection team. The last sculptor, an artist named Janine who's working in her own atelier can confirm that she's been working on a statue that looked just like the “Elf constable” who's questioning her. She says that the statue was finished three days ago and that it got picked up by a pimply red-haired boy who was working for the art consortium of Flint. The transport carriage also bore a familiar logo as it belonged to no one else but Jules' transport company. We ask her about any further detail or strange coincidence that could be of interest. Janine replies that she did find it strange that the concept sketches for the statue looked very much like her own which is strange as she has no students and her teacher went out of business after the death of his wife. When we ask her for the name of her master, we are pretty surprised to hear that it is none other than Lord Byron, now better known as Lord Byron-Saxby, the husband of Lady Saxby who is said to never leave the Saxby estate on the Avery Isles.We thank Janine for her cooperation and decide to pay our dear friend Jules a visit. The businessman gives us a broad smile as soon as we ask him for assistance yet again. He mutters something like “life's been boring before I met you two on the train” while searching for the statue's transport documents. Jules says that the one who signed the contract is a certain Tyler Starke who we know to be the good-for-nothing-but trouble son of prosecutor Starke. Going by the transport protocol, the statue was delivered to the harbor where it was deployed onto the “Bride”, a small ferry boat. While we now have at least one suspect for our attempted murder case, we are not at all happy to have the son of one of our contacts involved. So we decide to pay prosecutor Starke a visit to inform him beforehand – after all, we don't wish that the good man is taken by surprise should we arrest his son. So we head to his office in Central and tell him about our case while leaving out the whole Vekeshi involvement. It turns out that Starke is not at all surprised by this development as his son has been delinquent before and everything turned much worse after he killed a member of the clergy in self defense. (It wasn't mentioned before, but during our very first team-forming adventure, we met Starke and his son who bragged to his friends about cutting “the old pervert” into pieces. Starke then told us that this may be his son's way of dealing with the attempted rape by said member of the clergy. Which is why he didn't intervene.) Starke then adds some details about why his son might have turned out the way he did. When he was a young prosecutor his wife was murdered by a thug and he tried to get the murderer locked up or executed. However, he made mistakes in the process and the culprit got away. Because of this he had sworn to never do the same mistake again and now always double- and triple checks his paperwork. Due to his mistake, he felt like his son lost all faith in the judicial system and started to despise him. He turned to spend more and more time with his godfather, Lord Byron. Which wasn't that bad, he thought, as he hoped that Byron could teach him art as a means to express his feelings. So it seems like our circle of suspects just grew by one Lord Byron. We ask Starke for an arrest and search warrant and then head to Starke's home. Unfortunately, Starke's housekeeper is only person present in the prosecutor's home. She's deaf on top of that, but seems satisfied that finally someone wants to take care of the little rascal Tyler. So she leads us to Tyler's room and lets us do all the searching we like. As we carefully examine every little inch of his room, we come across two explosive runes traps placed on his diary. We also find a mimic under his bed (so much for children fearing monsters...) and the crude making of the mimic makes us guess that Tyler maybe created this thing on his own. We also find remnants of an alchemy lab and decide to catch the mimic so no one gets hurt. (at least the mimic was able to lighten up Carlyle's mood a bit. The prospect of shocking Delft again is always tempting)Then we find a hidden safe containing unused Vekeshi avenger regalia and a cloak that could fit the scythe-wielding Vekeshi. As Auryn doesn't want Tyler to be a known Vekeshi, she decides to remove the items before any police officer may find them. Needless to say that Carlyle is not really happy about this approach.Next, we try to meet up with team 1 as they are the ones in charge with case Saxby and might have more information about her husband (mh, we see a pattern there). Unfortunately, they are on a mission right now as they try to find the missing husband of Lady Saxby who they originally intended to question today. Seems like we are out of luck, but we ask Delft to assign someone to keep watch on Janine's atelier. As we cannot get our hands on Lord Byron-Saxby, we try to at least find as many evidences that could be pointing to his connection to the Vekeshi as possible. Carlyle suggests that we familiarize ourselves with Byron's art style so we might recognize his works should we come across them. As we know from the art consortium that Byron got a lot of his works destroyed after his first wife's death, we assume that artworks which are private property might have survived. So Auryn heads to the former estate of Goodson on the Avery Isles as we know the late industrialist to be an art enthusiastic. Meanwhile, Carlyle pays visit to a local art gallery to search for Byron's sketches.  Auryn does find a statue of an elven woman in the estate which is currently being rebuilt into a hotel owned by none other than Lord Vantrys and it is easily among the best works she's ever seen. Carlyle gets his eyes on some impressive sketches which depict surreal visions of Srasama and a world in flames. He chats a bit with the gallery's curator, a fellow deva who lived as an Eladrin before his death. The two men talk a bit about their former lives (or what they remember of it) and are both glad that they could leave the horrors of war behind.(Guess who Carlyle never mentioned to Auryn... she's still totally oblivious that there is a former Eladrin in Flint who's been present during the Malice)After we meet up again, we go to visit the Saxby estate. As Carlyle is by now pretty known for his good eyes, he not only finds a small empty potion vial on the beach, but also a very well hidden secret compartment in one room where a Ragman costume is hidden. It seems like it hasn't been used for a decade or so though. (So... either the couple was into some really strange Ragman kink or Byron used the Ragman figure to commit crimes. Both thoughts are a bit disturbing.) We also find a well equipped, but pretty much plundered alchemy lab and a library containing books on magic where some tomes seem to be missing. One old diary of Byron reveals that the man has had a manic-depressive phase before marrying Saxby and we assume that this Lord might not be the most mentally stable individual. After our investigation, we ask for a second meeting with our Vekeshi contacts to discuss our findings. The Wolf confirms that Tyler Starke is the man behind the “Reaper” as she was present at his initiation. We also talk about our assumption that Lord Byron could be the man in the goat mask  as the mask shows signs of his art style. Carlyle guesses that Byron could hate Auryn for being among the agents who took his second wife from him. He muses that the RHC Chief could have been the Lord's last hope that there could be some sort of justice left in the world and now that she's been arrested Byron's world might come tumbling down. The Vekeshi see reason in our assumptions and decide to take from Goat and Reaper what they have once given to them. Auryn also insists that they should lose their memories of being Vekeshi as they  know at least her real identity. The Wolf also gives us a hint that Byron might own more than one  piece of land in Flint and that his family was once known for having mills and a hunting lodge. We thank her for her tips and promise to take care of the rest. As we still got preparations to do for our upcoming “mission to Ber”, we head back to the RHC to get some reading on foreign laws. There we realize that our HQ is under surveillance by some shady figures. We decide to memorize the spy's faces and rather stick to observation before we find out more about them.        When Auryn gets home this evening, she finds a new letter on her dinner table. To her shock, no one can tell how the letter got there as Flying Spark saw neither a messenger nor a burglar. What's even more disturbing is the fact that this one is trapped with explosive runes. As she doesn't know how to deal with traps, Auryn quickly summons Carlyle to her home who disarms the explosives in no time. In this letter, “Old Stag” orders his fellow Vekeshi to kill the mayor of North Shore and to not screw up this time. We inspect the dining room and come to the conclusion that someone must have teleported in there via dimension door or the like. Needless to say that Auryn is terrified by the thought that someone could just enter her private place unnoticed and place a deadly trap there. So she packs up some of her basic items and asks Carlyle whether he got a room to spare. While he seems a bit confused at first, Carlyle then quickly agrees to let his colleague move in as long as the two mad men are still out there. After all, his home (a former Vantrys estate he got as gift for his centuries-long service) is pretty spacious and has more than one guest room. (Not that Auryn would have objected to sleep on a sofa. Even if Carlyle wouldn't have her take the sofa. He's a gentleman with a ring of sustenance on top of that.)After Carlyle's morning routine, which includes commando training in the attic, we meet up in the kitchen for a cup of tea. We talk a bit about the unused rooms that seem to be in a pretty good condition despite having no real inhabitants and Carlyle confesses that he's just used to keep everything presentable as one should always expect unexpected visitors.Auryn thanks her colleague for his hospitality despite their recent differences which he brushes off as it it was no big deal. She then muses that having a butler like him would surely raise the expectations of the daughters of house Vantrys to unusually high levels and that they'd be most likely disappointed by their future husbands. While Carlyle realizes that her comment was meant as a joke, he becomes quiet and thoughtful for a moment. He then carefully agrees to her statement and adds that not every man of noble birth comes with a corresponding noble character or even good looks. Which leads Auryn to the thought that maybe some Vantrys daughters were dissatisfied or unhappy with their marriages and might have sought comfort with their former butler. A thought that never leaves her mouth though.</blockquote>

Verification