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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 6219931" data-attributes="member: 79141">Session 93 - On task and off piste9th Spring continued Leon devoted his final hours to tracking down Asrabey.  It turned out he had  headed into the midden at the foot of Cauldron Hill near the Nettles.  Uru followed him in there and witnessed his meeting with a strange fey entity whose elvish name translated into primordial as Heap of Filth or Trash Heap.  Their conversation was not a long one.  The Trash Heap had heard Ekossigan's call, but was powerful enough to ignore it; it did not think Ekossigan was hidden in the city itself.  The Trash Heap gave Asrabey the gift of a magical dagger before he departed.  Uru's friend, the pixie trader Searkil Shortankard, had told him about the strange creature who lived in the rubbish dump and handed out magical items of prophetic usefulness, but Uru had dismissed his tales until now.  Asrabey left Flint and headed into the Cloudwood, where Uru chose not to follow him.  Instead, he headed back to the dump and called upon the Trash Heap. The Trash Heap was grouchy at being disturbed twice in one day, but Uru placated it with the gift of a vial of strange fluids he had distilled from the ichor of Malice Land insects.  Mollified, the Trash Heap told him that it had once possessed the golem eye he sought.  His friends had found it and brought it to him, and he had given it to the servants of the Clockwork King (just as the unit had suspected).  This all happened a few weeks ago.  Uru asked who the Clockwork King's servants were.  The Trash Heap said they ranged far and wide throughout Flint and gave a description of a rat-like being with some mechanical adjustments.  Uru then asked about the friends who had given him the  golem eye.  The Heap said they would be along soon, after dark, so Uru waited... After sundown he heard a clicking and a skittering and soon found himself surrounded by several huge, fey arachnids.  They were very friendly and pleased to meet him.  They called themselves 'the Nice Spiders' (another clumsy translation of their elvish tongue) and were keen to change human perceptions of their kind, so asked if Uru could spread their message.  The Nice Spiders knew about Uru: they bowed to him as Lord Clatterspin, and did not care that he had renounced his title to avoid being dominated by Ekossigan. They spent their days tidying up the city, bringing things of value to the Trash Heap, and had found the eye where it fell in the steelworks and had been left, undiscovered by the original unit B months before. Sadly, they did not know where to find the Clockwork King either. Malthusius and Rumdoom finished their day visiting the places in the dwarven community where folks might know about the eschatological cult. They were greeted by a wall of silence borne not out of sympathy for the terrorists, but  out of fear: already, dwarven homes and businesses had been attacked in reprisal for the explosions.  Malthusius convinced many of them that it would be in their best interests to cooperate.  It could only help their cause if the dwarven community could be said to have rooted out the cultists. The unit returned to RHC HQ for a debriefing with Sergeant Macon.  Almost the entire strike-force had been devoted to casing districts and scouting.  Results were mixed: a lot of fronts, illicit transactions and dens were discovered, but when Matunaaga led a bust on one of them, it turned out to be a legitimate business. A couple of officers were also lost scouting the strongholds, which turned out to be a lot stronger than expected.  Still, the unit had plenty of intel to use the following day, and the decision was made to prioritise and focus every effort on the Get Kell initiative, with Malthusius, Matunaaga, Uru and Rumdoom leading squadrons of officers against key targets. 10th Spring The  strike team took out several fronts, dens and an illicit transaction that day, though due to one of the fronts being bolstered by guild thugs after it was scouted, a few more officers were injured and lost to active service. While four of the unit kicked down doors across Flint, sending a very clear message to the Kell Guild, Korrigan took the case of the dwarven cultists in hand, fearing further activity could result in the deaths of more civilians.  It was intended  hat Leon would help him, but the tiefling arrived that morning following another meeting with Asrabey, who had searched high and low for Ekossigan to no avail: none of the local fey knew where he was, nor did the Vekeshi.  The only fey he had been unable to make contact with was Hana Soliogn.  Leon used the messenger wind to reach Gale, and to his surprise she agreed to a meeting on a switchback trail deep in the Cloudwood later that very day.  Leon told her he would be bringing Asrabey, but Gale refused to meet the eladrin, so Leon went on his own.  Alarm bells were ringing, but Leon chose to take a gamble. The  exchange of messages had taken several hours (with the messenger wind functioning at walking pace) so Leon had time to visit with The Trash Heap and ask it more questions before learning the location of his meet with Gale, where he did not arrive until early afternoon. As a fey warlock, Leon usually felt at ease in the Cloudwood, but this was not the case today.  The whole forest seemed eerily quiet, and Leon's spirit companion sensed hostility.  At the allotted time and place Gale spoke to him through the messenger wind and did not appear before him.   Judging by the speed of her replies he knew she was close by and the fact that she kept her distance in this way was unnerving. Gale told him that she knew why he had come and that he should cease to pursue Ekossigan.  With some emotion in her voice she said that the fey lord was very powerful, that he commanded the four seasons with equal strength and was as irresistible as the coming of winter.  Gale's words, and the circumstances of their meeting, prompted Leon to fear that Ekossigan might very well be close at hand.  But he felt that in coming here alone, and as a Vekeshi Mystic who had had positive contact with Gale in the past (convincing her not to kill Guy Goodson; leaving Isobel Travers in her care), he stood a better chance of getting out in one piece if an ambush was planned than if he had turned up with the whole unit. Discretion being the better part of valour, rather than persist in trying to mine Gale for information lest that provoke suspicion, Leon lied and said that he had little interest in pursuing the matter if Ekossigan did not want to be found, and no intention of harming the fey lord. "In that case," said Gale (and in doing so she confirmed Leon's fears), "you may leave this place." Meanwhile, Korrigan sat down with Unit B and went over their incident report on the bomb attacks.  His patience was rewarded by a clue that had been missed: the name of the company responsible for the engineering work done on the skywalk was Soknik's Repairs.  Korrigan spent a long and tedious morning tracking down the company to an address in Central Flint., but when he got there it seemed he had reached a dead end.  The unassuming little business showed no signs of significant activity, and the bookish teenage clerk had no useful information to share. Only when Korrigan asked if he could inspect the company records did the clerk's response set alarm bells ringing. He demanded a warrant. At once, Korrigan pulled out his badge and made it clear that he would take any obstruction of his duty very seriously.  (This, after all, could be a matter of life and death.) The clerk allowed him into the back office.  Korrigan checked the ledgers and discovered hardly any entries at all.  A quick glance suggested this 'busy' workshop had been operating at a loss for months.  Before he could say anything further, he noticed that the clerk had slipped out of the room.  A window shattered, and a display case behind him exploded. Korrigan stepped to the window and looked out.  There was an empty warehouse over the road, with upper windows giving a clear shot into the office.  Using his canary pendant, Korrigan flew out of the repair shop and straight through the open window of the warehouse building, in a move that took the dwarven sniper completely by surprise.  But instead of scrambling to reload, the dwarf raised his rifle in the air, lowered it slowly to the ground and stepped away from it with his hands behind his head. It was Kvarti Gorbartiy.  Korrigan told him that he was under arrest. Kvarti acquiesced without a struggle and told him, "I want you to know I could have blown your head clean off just then. I aimed to miss." "Why would you do that?" asked Korrigan. "To stop you going any further alone. And because I wanted to meet with you."Again, Korrigan could only ask why. "Because there are many cultists in the tunnels beneath the workshop.  And because I have a message for Rumdoom Kagan." Kvarti went on to tell his story.  He said that he had been contacted months ago by Grundon Zubov, who he knew to be a radical eschatologist from Drakr.  He accepted Zubov's offer of employment. As an assassin, he assumed he would be chosen to target a key political figure, maybe Governor Roland Stanfield, so he hung around to check out if Stanfield deserved to die.  (He had already decided against killing Rock Rackus on  behalf of Tyler Starke, he said.)  He was also charged with finding a suitable hideout, and uncovered the tunnels that lie beneath the streets of Flint. While waiting for Zubov, he became interested in Rumschatology and discovered that a number of Zubov's other allies -  Azon the Stoneforger, and Thered and Thangir Kharngraft - were also  members of the group.  They were soon to become the security detail for the sect, which confirmed Kvarti's impression that Rumdoom was a follower of Zubov too. Of course, this turned out to be false when Azon and the others stole the sect's funds and killed Harn in the process.  Kvarti said that this was wrong and by the time he and the others joined up with Zubov (newly arrived in Flint) it was evident that Kvarti was not an ardent fellow traveller.  Instead of letting him in on their plans, Zubov instructed him to take up a place in the empty building opposite and keep a watch  out for anyone poking their noses around.  Kvarti toyed with the idea of leaving, but figured his best bet was to hang around and wait until the unit showed up, as he figured they would.  When Korrigan told him about the bombs, Kvarti was shocked and shook his head. Unsure of Kvarti's motivations, Korrigan placed him in cuffs.  With the rest of the unit otherwise engaged, he could only call in Leon (who was on his way back from the Cloudwood).  So he took the decision to call on Unit B, who left only Niniel and Doctor Will Stanmore to guard Brakken of Heffinata, while Theren, Brajham, Professor Marcione and Sevitar came to root out the terrorists.  Leon gave them a frosty glare, but decided against blaming them for what happened to Lilly. For their part, Unit B lowered their eyes apologetically, not wishing to provoke the tiefling. By now it was early evening.  When reinforcements arrived, they headed back into the office. Korrigan already knew the 'clerk' had  disappeared.  In the back room he now found a secret hatch, revealed by the clerk as he escaped.  The hatch led into a network of tunnels which Korrigan estimated at being several hundred years old.  Kvarti said they dated from a time when the inhabitants of Flint were hiding from the witches coven that had taken hold of Cauldron Hill.  He warned them that the restless dead inhabited the tunnels, and a colony of army ants used them to get about too.  The network was confusing, but Kvarti knew the  way through.  What he didn't know about, however, was a series of traps that the eschatologists had laid along the route.  A freezing rune proved particularly dangerous, though Leon was able to dispel it before it killed the junior team members.  Leon himself fell victim to a pit trap when the group failed to heed Kvarti's advice to keep going straight, and instead investigated a 'hidden' portal which triggered another rune.  Further tunnels were revealed beneath, with signs that they too were frequented by giant ants.  Leon teleported back up.  One final and particularly deadly trap lay just before the entrance to the hideout: a room that filled with ice, after hidden portcullises had dropped to prevent escape.  But this trap was avoided entirely thanks to the group's keen eyes and cunning. They reached the hideout just beyond the second portcullis.  Leon waited in a room littered with rib bones, while the others raced across to join him.</blockquote>

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