Hello again, folks. Got another write-up for you. Can't think of anything clever to add, so let's get into the cutscene I prepared to preface the action. Just a reminder, where we left off, the group found out that information broker Doctor Zither is in fact one of the Bad Guys and they left off on going after him.
And here we go...
As Shango walks down the tunnel towards Kanut's home/morgue, he sees Doctor Zither casually strolling towards him. The camera's focus shifts to over the man's shoulder where, in the background, Xương rushes at him from behind with Hǎifēng in monkey form clinging to the Full Moon's shoulder. The information broker moves as if he has no clue as to what's about to happen... until he meets Shango's gaze and winks.
A split-second later, he explodes. Xương's fist and arm tear through him like thick cobwebs and Zither's entire body bursts into what at first looks like black smoke or dust but what Xương can feel is greasy ash. He rears back from the explosion, shocked.
"I was trying to set this up for later tonight," Zither's voice echoes in the tunnel, the exact source hard to discern. "But we can do it now."
The ash collects together again, some of it peeling and flaking off of Xương's arm, reforming into a human body. It starts from the ground up -- boots, pants -- when his torso reforms he's wearing a soulsteel hauberk, the metal plating sculpted to look like hide and muscle and the chain shirt underneath looking out it was made from the chains of a rantai. A symbol on the armor resembling a wave fading into mist as it breaks stands out, in the spot where a clasp holding a cloak might sit. As his arms reappear, daggers slide into his hands. When his head and face reappear as if growing out of his neck, the three of them see it -- just the briefest of glimpses -- before it disappears: A bleeding brand of an open circle on his forehead. But the blink of an eye later, it's gone.
And on the TV screen at home, where the viewers can see it but the characters cannot, text appears at the bottom of the screen for a few seconds before also blowing away like ash:
The Abyssal, his back to the wall with Xương and Hǎifēng on one side and Shango on the other, glances between them and says "We don't have to kill each other. The books are business, Sentulga was just a personal grudge."
Then he lunges at Xương, moving ridiculously fast, to try and quickly disable him with a warning shot to warn the trio to back off. (Essentially Worfing him, or at least intending to) Xương sees it coming and doesn't bother to dodge, merely puffing up his chest to lean into it. But even in his human form, his skin is tough enough that the Abyssal's blade (a mundane weapon, not an artifact) only gets a shallow cut across his chest.
Shango brings up his bow to fire, putting his Essence into the shot, his anima banner hitting Iconic right away.[0] The shadows of the tunnel seem to have hidden predators waiting to strike as he fires, but despite putting his full supernatural puissance into the attack, he merely grazes the Abyssal. Meanwhile, Hǎifēng dramatically leaps off of Xương's shoulder to do a flip, shift into their Deadly Beastman shape, and activate Laughing Monster Form. Xương looks down at the bleeding cut on his chest and says "Nobody said anything about killin', but you're not going to win," before he himself takes on his Deadly Beastman shape (though remaining human-sized, as the tunnel they're in won't allow for his usual kaiju-esque attacks) and dares Slit Throats' Last Gasps to try that again.
"Nice to meet you, Bonetaker," the Abyssal says with a cruel grin before lunging at him. Xương, almost visibly drooling in anticipation of actually feeling pain for once, digs in to brace himself... and gets what he asked for. Gasps drives the blade into his gut, cutting through skin and muscle, dragging the steel through him to cause as much actual damage and pain as possible into the attack. It's enough to take a human to near-death, but while Xương can stand up to the damage it's still going to leave him a wicked scar for a while that will probably heal.
Shango channels his Essence into another shot, and Gasps is slow to block it. He cut Xương a little too deep and lingered a little too long, and thus he threw himself way off-balance before he could yank the dagger free to destroy the arrow mid-air. A chunk of the arrow flies right by his head, almost hitting him in the face before he deflects it with his other dagger.[1]
"You will pay for harming my pack," Shango snarls.
Hǎifēng leaps in, getting right up in the Abyssal's face just when he realizes how fucked he is, and they deliver a series of quick fan strikes across the torso, messing him up further.
Then the world goes 'whum' and gets really quiet for a moment except for the sound of a single 'drop of water' landing in a still pool as Xương's own Iconic anima plunges the tunnel into darkness evocative of the ocean floor. His eyes roll back in his head and his teeth get longer while his lips pull back, giving up all semblance of his humanity and lunging at Gasps. He moves with the raw speed of instinctive animal predation, sinking his teeth into the Abyssal and tossing him around like a ragdoll.
Gasps manages to wriggle free, losing a chunk of his not-entirely-alive meat in the process, landing with a tiny shred of dignity before Shango dashes into close range. He does a flip for momentum as he brings his iron boots down on the man's head. In the last split-second before the boot hits his skull, Gasps gives him a wicked, satisfied, 'I'll have the last laugh' grin. But then his head unpleasantly and fatally squishes under Shango's heel as he crushes it like a pumpkin.
As the others stop and catch their breaths, anima banners still blazing (fortunately, this happened deep enough into an empty tunnel that there was nobody close enough to see what was going on), Hǎifēng rushes back into the necromancer's house. Without hesitating, they deck Kanut and just knock her out with a single punch because she's a squishy mortal. Xương spits out the chunk of Abyssal Exalt he's got stuck in his teeth and he and Shango quickly follow, where they can get out of sight while their anima banners fade.
Kanut the necromancer, pale-skinned and pale-haired with an accent evocative of a distant land (which for our purposes sounds like a Scandinavian accent) wakes up strapped to one of her own autopsy tables about an hour later. The three Lunars are standing around her, caste marks shining on their foreheads (one full moon, one crescent moon, and an ever-shifting tableau of lunar phases). She's confused, but assumes she's being robbed and tells them that they can take whatever chemicals they want. (To be fair, Xương has already helped himself to some of her ether.) Hǎifēng asks what she was working on with 'Doctor Zither.'
She explains that she was working on an experiment in alchemical corpse preservation, and that Zither had brought her the body of someone he'd killed on a personal matter because he wanted it kept in good shape in case he had use for it. She gladly accepted the offer, and so far it had worked. Zither had also borrowed a bunch of her books on ley lines, shadowlands, and ghost stories. Hǎifēng turns to Xương and apologizes for jumping the gun when they should have kept Zither alive to interrogate him, because Kanut clearly knows nothing (which gets a "Hey!" out of her). Shango agrees that she's useless (another "Hey!") and that they don't need to keep her alive before he destroys a chair in an obvious threat.
He then asks how long she's been working with Zither. She's been working with him on and off for years -- he's an information broker, after all, and she's been both customer and supplier in that regard. She explains that she's had Sentulga's corpse for a couple of days, and points the drawer it's in when asked. Hǎifēng asks if she knows where Zither lives, and she says she can hazard a guess. Xương offers to stick around and keep an eye on her in case her information turns out to be faulty. She gives them some directions -- like, real "go west at this lamp post, take the third left, turn down the alley that really smells like piss" sorts of directions -- to what sounds like some sort of basement apartment, and Hǎifēng and Shango clear out. She then says that Xương's time is probably more valuable than hers, but if this is how he wants to spend it then so be it.
Xương then stops to examine the body, definitely recognizing signs of an undercover Lintha. The preservation is quite good -- aside from the temperature, one would think the body was still fresh, with no decay and almost no rigor mortis. The only thing that's 'off' is the wound where her throat was slit looks a little odd. The slit throat was obviously what killed her, as the only other recent damage on her are some puncture marks from needles clearly injected post-mortem. As near as Xương can tell, Zither must have surprised her and struck too quickly for her to fight back. The body's mostly been cleaned up of the various immediate byproducts of death, but not so much as to seem suspiciously clean. While he can tell the difference, the vast majority of people who know nothing about medicine would think she'd just been killed.[2]
Kanut remarks that Zither was always concerned about her experiments, afraid that something would go wrong and a body would get up or an organ would burst free and attack or something. Also, noting the caste mark on Xương's forehead, comments in passing that on her educational journey from the North she passed through the Smiling Rat's domain[3], though she didn't meet him herself. Xương warns her to get rid of Sentulga's body as soon as she can if she lives through this, and that she should be spending her time thinking about how to keep the others from killing her when they get back.
Speaking of the others, they follow the directions and find the apartment that Kanut is pretty sure belongs to Doctor Zither. The door is locked, and it's just enough of a hassle to pick it open to suggest its legitimacy. The apartment itself seems very normal, though -- no torture chambers or bloody weapons or anything. But eventually they find a trap door underneath a rug leading to a secret basement chamber the size of the rest of the apartment. It's got tables covered in maps and strewn with boxes and shelves full of files.
After a few minutes of poking around, they find a crate filled with what appear to be the missing books (or at least those not already accounted for elsewhere), as well as what might be a bunch of kindling, as if 'Zither' was planning on burning them all at once once he finished the collection. Which is more confusing than anything else. But either way, they've got them, and Hǎifēng uses Ant-and-Starfish Trick to spawn a clone of their monkey form and sends them back to the clinic to inform Xương of what they found (along with a message from Shango that he was bluffing about killing Kanut). Meanwhile, Hǎifēng and Shango take the books back to the clinic.
So we cut back to the morgue, where the clone eventually gets back and climbs up onto Xương's shoulder. They let him know that they found the books and they're taking them back to the clinic. Then they whisper to Xương that Shango was bluffing about killing her and her final fate is up to him, before turning to face her and ominously drawing their thumb across their throat. And then afterwards the monkey clone vanishes in a puff of Essence.
Xương, with an annoyed sigh, unstraps Kanut from the table and tells her she better forget everything she saw. She shrugs and says "Well, how much ether do I have left?" and he hands it to her. He gives her one more warning not to tell anyone what's happened or they'll be back, and then leaves.
And then we left off there, but first...
Some time later, elsewhere...
We see an unidentified figure standing next to the window of a dark room. There's a knock on the door and a servant comes in.
"Sir, there's a message for you, from Lathe."
The servant hands the man a scroll, sealed with wax. The wax seal resembles a wave fading into mist as it breaks. The seal breaks and the scroll opens, and we clearly see the words written at the top: "I have found Shango."
And that's it for this week.
[0]-- The characters recently reached the threshold to hit Essence 3. Hǎifēng previously communed with Luna to hit that third dot, whereas Shango here (and later, Hǎifēng) cashed in an 'Essence Coupon' like what I offered before while they were fighting the Wyld Hunt way back when.
[1]-- As an aside, just for those of you following at home, Shango used Wasp Sting Blur to attack, adding on a bunch of buffs. This managed to put Gasps into Initiative Crash (the 'thrown off-balance' part), and gave Shango a second decisive attack that could actually deal damage (the 'chunk of arrow' headed for his face). But the Abyssal was able to successfully parry the second attack.
[2]-- Meaning, for instance, if someone had slipped the body into somebody's house and then tipped off her Lintha cousins, her death would seem recent enough to not raise suspicions. Not that there's any good way for the group to find this out ICly, but I'll mention here (and I believe I've told my players) that Zither was initially planning on dumping the body at Xương's place and then anonymously informing the other Lintha in town. When he overheard Hǎifēng moving around in Kanut's place before, he made something up to get the Lunars out of the clinic where he was planning on ambushing them.
[3]-- The Smiling Rat is an established Lunar in the setting. Aside from the Abyssals and the Deathlords, he's probably the most-powerful necromancer in the setting.
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