1 - Looking for Katerina

## Players

Bear, the Dwarf (Nick)

Drog the Dreg (Fletcher)

Percy Claudius Plod (Patrick) (First Appearance)

Tinkflink Wobbledink (Gianni)

V1.0 (Katrina) (First Appearance)

## The Curious Case of Arthur Drake

In an office on the corner of Edicah Road and High Street, one with a sign on the door that has been painted over many times, there is a skeleton named Gregory. Sometimes called Candlelight Investigative Consultants, sometimes Tink Finkly's Holinkstic Detinktive Inkency. He answers the mail and types up the invoices, regardless of what names are on them.

It was to this sight that Mr Arthur Drake, a bit player in the Altand Consortium, arrived one drizzly morning. He was greeted by an agency in shambles. Three principles in various states of dress ill-befitting the lateness of the morning, and three staff of extremely unusual disposition. Nevertheless, Mr Drake pushed on, asking the agency to take a contract looking for his sister, Katerina Klein. The woman he described looked nothing like him, but he claimed she was his adopted sister and, most recently, kidnapped. He had apparently followed up with both ransom and hired thugs, but neither returned the missing woman, and so he turned to magical research. After a few months and many thousands of gold pieces, he had found a device that could answer any question 'yes' or 'no', but only once per person. He had asked if Katerina lived, and the artefact told him she did. Now, with barely a copper penny to pay the detectives, he hoped to entice them into pursuing the case with the offer of use of the device.

After nearly losing Mr Drake entirely, Tinkflink spent his use of the cube on ensuring their would-be patron that they would pursue the matter to the very best of their ability, and the detectives set off immediately to investigate the warehouse where Katerina was supposedly being held. There they spent many hours meticulously picking over the abandoned factory and found many disturbing details the Altand Heavies had missed. The cult was far better organised and supplied than originally thought, and many of its members had escaped detection by hiding underground in their lair during the raid. Though gone now, their traps remained, and after hours of investigation the party returned to the office, beaten and bruised.

They awoke with a start in the pre-dawn twilight to a mob of burly cultists breaking their windows. Bear, both ambusher and ambushed, was beaten to within an inch of his life before being saved by his bear companion, while the rest of the agency destroyed their reception area in an all-out brawl. The cultists were finally driven off after a savage drumming, and as V1.0 tracked the survivors on her copper wings the agency surveyed the damage. Their office was in shambles, they had taken quite a beating, and worst of all- the head of their employer, Arthur Drake, had been hurled through their window. Faced with the prospect of being hunted by a cannibal cult *and* not being able to make rent this month, the investigators began to slowly clean up their office. V1.0 soon arrived back with news: The survivors had fled on horseback towards the Mortiere Estate, the same minor Lord whose name had been on a collection of documents found in the warehouse. As dawn broke and Gregory returned to work, the party handed off the cleanup work to him and ventured towards the closest tavern in the Mortiere name.

The tavern at which they arrived was a run-down shack with even worse looking clientele. While P.C. Plod distracted the bartender with a game of goddamn magical insect face, Tinkflink slipped into the basement and discovered the blood slaves being harvested below. As the chaos in the bar above grew, a strange visitor arrived dressed all in black. Assuming bear was the party spokesman, he congratulated the agency on their ability to cause disruption and mayhem, but offered to buy them out on their current case. The vampire flashed them a toothy grin as he produced hundreds of gold, then whipped half of it away with a cryptic promise of better payment later. For the moment, he settled on their word that they would pursue this investigation no further, and invited them to the Mortiere Estate the next week.

After all, it is so nice to have guests for dinner...