This continues a long-form campaign, Zen and the Art of Caravan Maintenance.
Emmett and Joshua are now cattle ranchers, seeking a quiet change in career for various reasons. They’re driving buggalo from Emerald City to the Porcelain Citadel.
They’ve arrived at the Last Serai to collect their promised autogolem, but nothing’s showing up…
Story
It’s a new day, although not particularly alluring here at the Last Serai. The landscape hums and smells while the people scurry shiftily.
This doesn’t deter Emmett or Joshua; who find a bath-house with neon-purple bubbles frothing from the water. They have a happy soak and ignore other patrons who look askance at Joshua’s scars down his back. Instead they listen to the mutterings, the word among the bathers is that a new spot-tax is going to be collected in a few months for “security”. Presumably this means it funds the polybody police? Nobody knows.
Next: dinner at a cosy bistro, the server has heard from other diners that there’s a new vome nest nearby; and the tax is to pay for hiring mercenaries to eradicate it. No idea where the nest actually is, though.
And so to bed.
The next day they look for the autogolem – and do not find it. Nobody’s heard anything in the markets and haulers. So Emmett goes into the seedier areas, and finds the shadow economy. His attempts to skulk his way into the warehouses bounces straight off the guards though. They politely inform him of the great danger to his person of trying it again.
At a nearby bar, the barman reveals he’s heard of a gang claiming to have jacked an autogolem. He won’t do anything more, though. Joshua optimistically offers his occult services, and gets a very strange reaction. The ability to speak with the recently dead would turn out to be exceptionally useful for the local crime magnate. This would be going very quickly and very deeply into the underworld here.
Joshua and Emmett dive right in.
Leonti Mecanzio is grieving the death of his daughter Lateria. She died in a guarded room the day before and he doesn’t know how it’s happened. If Joshua can gain information that lead to catching her killer he will do anything in his considerable power. If Joshua is lying; he and Emmett will definitely live long enough to regret it. But not much more than that.
Her body is fetched, and the party are fed and guarded. Joshua summons Dreamspeaker and speaks to Lateria…
Tools
Unchanged.
Lessons learned
I made up the don’s daughter, inspired by a Hellblazer1 comic that suddenly came to me. Lesson learned: do this more.
In At The Deep End #230—231 ↩︎