Session 86 - Unit B vs Kell Guild
This report for unit B corresponds to weeks 1-4 of unit A’s ‘Downtime’ adventure.
Having returned from the Cloudwood, Niniel, Will and Ffewig needed time to recover from their ordeal at the hands of the dragon. The unit’s report was delivered, but caused less of a stir than they expected, as the HQ was focused on the return of Alpha Unit from their top secret mission. A couple of them were spotted on the corridors: Sergeant Veilleux’s face was covered in bloodstained bandages and Inspector Malthusius had lost an arm!
Captain Theren, Brajham and Sevitar were called into the office of Asst Chief Inspector Dima, and promised a meeting with Chief Inspector Korrigan within the week. They were then given new marching orders. For the next few weeks they were to begin investigating the ‘Kell Guild’. Dima explained that they had been chosen for outsider status. As one of Lorcan Kell’s modus operandi was to target the friends and family members of his enemies, this was very important. They were also very unlikely to have been corrupted.
They were given several parameters for their mission:
- Limit themselves to the fringes of the guild.
- Do not attempt to apprehend certain key guild members themselves. (They were given a list including Lorcan Kell, Nick Reder, Kate Glenn and Rufus Hammerton.)
- Attempt to ‘roll up’ lower-ranking guild members and find some evidence linking them to Kell.
With only three members for the first week, they did the best they could, and succeeded in discovering a brothel in Bosum Strand that operated as a front for the guild.
Will and Niniel returned to duty half-way through the second week, but Ffenwig did not: Her status as an RHC officer was a matter of some contention and, despite her success in the Cloudwood mission, it had been decided that having a bugbear on the RHC staff would cause alarm and consternation among the populace. As it happened, there was an officer who had been intended as a member of the team from the outset, but who had been unavailable when they first formed. Dima checked his pocket watch and complained that he should be here by now. Perhaps they would find him up on the roof and tell him he was late?
The unit went up onto the roof of the building where they found a well-dressed man drinking tea from a china cup and gazing meditatively over the rooftops of Flint. As he rose to meet them the china cup disintegrated. He introduced himself as Professor Ludo Marcione, master of Esoteric Energies. At once, he explained that he had already made investigative inroads and had discovered that a Kell Guild lieutenant named Vander Lepage ran a nightclub in North Shore, which he proposed they target. Captain Theren struggled (with the help of a hostile Brajham) to wrestle the reins of his mission from this imperious man, and insisted instead that they focus on the brothel for now.
This operation took almost a week: the unit needed to establish that illegal activity was taking place on the premises. Sure, individuals associated with the guild came and went by a back door, but that was no crime. Entering from the front drew a blank in the form of a madam who would not allow non-customers to advance beyond the lobby. Niniel established that the brothel employed musicians and posed as a singer. She was duly employed and the following evening found herself in a large lounge area where she and a pianist entertained clients along with girls who took the role of hostesses, with whom a private room could be purchased.
There was an entrance, a door that led to a suite of private rooms and another door which no one was allowed to use. Occasionally a guild member would enter through that door and avail himself of one of the girls. Niniel worked towards getting access to that back door and arranged a signal with the others who waited outside in the rain.
One night, Sevitar spotted Falkrow the Fixer arrive. Falkrow had escaped him on the night he first met Theren and Niniel a fortnight ago. He tailed the Fixer when he left, but the wily criminal gave him the slip.
Over time, Niniel made friends. She gained the confidence of a dead-eyed halfling girl named Imelda and gradually learned that some of the girls were given a narcotic when they went into the back rooms with the guild members. Imelda was addicted to it. ‘Falkrow gives it to us,’ she said. ‘He shows off about it.’ Niniel could tell that it wasn’t fey pepper.
It became apparent that a burly, thuggish looking guild member had become somewhat enamoured of her. She flirted with him and worked towards gaining an invitation to the back rooms, promising to give him and his friends a ‘private show’. After a few days, he eventually came and shyly invited her to see a ‘present’ he had bought her. They went through the private door and descended a set of stairs into what would once have been a joint kitchen area for the apartment. The room was full of smoke and the sound of voices.
As Niniel arrived a pink-faced porcine man with thin yellow hair rose and admonished the others for allowing her back here in his presence. He left immediately and an older thug, who clearly had seniority admonished Niniel’s beau for doing so. The mood altered when Niniel was presented with a tambourine which the thug’s grandmother owned. It was worth a lot more than he realised, and she sensed a magical aura around it. Also giving off a faint magical aura were the tiny piles of silvery powder on the table, which some of the guild members were consuming. Niniel was horrified when she realised what it was: Pixie dust! Highly illegal.
She promised them a song if they would open the window a crack to let some of the cigar smoke out. They acquiesced, and she began to perform a song which just so happened to be one of the ways she could signal the rest of the unit to spring into action.
Theren, Brajham and Ludo took the front door; Sevitar and Will burst directly into the back kitchen. The kell guilders put up a fight, but the unit quickly dropped them, including a bookish type with an accountant’s green eyeshade who burst forth from a side-office and began casting spells back at them, accompanied by a vicious mechanical dog.
The criminals were all arrested for possession, use and distribution of illegal narcotics. The paperwork and documents in the office were confiscated too.
Although the gangsters remained tight-lipped and refused to bend to even the most careful of interrogations, the unit managed to glean enough information from the paperwork and rumour mill to establish the following: that another of the guild’s recent interests was the manufacture and sale of unlicensed (and therefore illegal) military constructs, such as the mechanical dog they had seen. They learned of a major shipment of these that was due to pass through the strand, and also of a major sale of pixie dust that Falkrow the Fixer had been bragging about to the girls at the brothel. (He had even gone so far as to say that ‘I won’t be under Lepage’s thumb after I pull this off!’)
While some of the group looked into these matters, the rest of the unit investigated Vander Lepage’s nightclub in North Shore – L’Inferno. Sure enough, it was owned by Lepage, but after several days of surveillance, they could find nothing untoward going on, much to Ludo Marcione’s disappointment and frustration. Lepage very rarely even turned up there.
In the meantime, Chief Constable Delft had returned from a week-long trip to Slate, and article had begun to appear in the
Flint Courier written by Chief Inspector Korrigan. Unit B began to hear rumours from the secretarial staff about how ambitious Alpha unit were – and of how the previous unit B had been disbanded when they got too big for their boots! They still hadn’t had a meeting with Korrigan. Dima said he was busy with other matters, and told unit B that they had just over a month to wrap up their investigation. They couldn’t help but notice the pressure and tension that accompanied Delft’s return from Slate…
Back to work:
Following up on some leads from the brothel, they established that many businesses with nefarious connections were buying cheap and potentially dangerous ‘security constructs’ from the Kell Guild. A warehouse owner with a nasty reputation was supposed to be taking receipt of a couple of guard golems at the end of the week.
Now that Ffenwig was gone, Sevitar was the only member of the team capable of getting his sneak on. He set about keeping tabs on the warehouse in question while the rest of the team holed up a block or two away.
Their intel was good: within half an hour two carriages arrived and – to Sevitar’s pleasure – none other than Falkrow the Fixer jumped off the first and went inside to do business. They waited for the warehouse doors to slide open and made their move when the carriages were halfway in, preventing the doors from sliding shut.
Sevitar was in the lead, out in the open, when a shout went up from the the gangsters. They didn’t sound surprised. The warehouse owner protested feebly and was shoved into his office by Falkrow, who rubbed his hands together and shouted, “Okay guys, let him have it!”
