Chapter 4 – the plot thickens

Winter had arrived in Talagaad with a bitter, unrelenting grip. The month of Kaldezeit brought heavy snowfall and a biting wind that cut through any exposed skin, turning the streets into a miserable landscape of gray, gel-like slush that cracked underfoot and clung to boots. The city felt heavier than usual, as though the cold itself carried a warning — and for the party, that warning had been growing louder with every passing day. Pushka had spent time quietly investigating rumors of missing people, only to find that her usual contacts were strangely tight-lipped, their denials coming too quickly and too cleanly. One of the street urchins, however, had pointed her toward someone who might know more: a girl called Halfbite.

And so it was that Pushka, Baeliya, Mel, and Eddie made their way toward Mineshaft Manor, the warm and lively tavern that had become something of a second home to them. Mora was away, as she often was as a Road Warden. Faye was following clues as to where the barrels from the Charbonniers were being shipped. So it was that just four of our party headed to the tavern.
As they passed Dame Ysabeu’s stately manor house, they noticed something unsettling — the old noblewoman stood outside by her wrought iron fence with only her majordomo at her side, her slender, wrinkled hands wringing together as she looked anxiously up and down the street. The usual gaggle of children she fed and taught each evening was nowhere to be seen. It was a small detail, but it sat uneasily in the back of the mind as the party pushed on through the cold and into the warmth of the tavern.

Inside Mineshaft Manor, the hearth blazed and the music played strong. Hulking Hugs, the enormous and perpetually cheerful fixture of the place, wrapped each of them in his great arms with his signature disarming grin before Gottri, the dwarven tavern keeper, shooed him back to work. The party settled into their usual corner table, away from the bard and the noise, and Pushka ordered a generous pot of venison stew with extra bowls — enough to share with the urchins she hoped to find. It was not long before the evening’s peace was shattered. Caspar, a young nobleman seated across the room with the Bretonnian dancer Elaine, suddenly erupted into a violent coughing fit, his face going red before he hurled his mug against the wall. Instead of ale, a gray, goopy dishwater-like substance ran down the planks — the work of the urchins, clearly — and Caspar’s fury boiled over as he turned on the laughing children and then on Gottri herself.

What happened next silenced the entire tavern. Hulking Hugs stepped in front of Gottri, rising to his full, imposing height in a way no one had ever seen him do before. His face darkened, his presence became something vast and menacing, and the sheer weight of it stopped Caspar cold. Baeliya, watching closely, saw something the others did not — a faint red glow deep within Hugs’ eyes, eerily reminiscent of the chaos-tainted dwarves the party had encountered before. More disturbing still, she perceived rippling patterns just beneath the surface of his skin, like raised scarification that left no mark, forming shapes that were not random but deliberate, possibly runic, and unmistakably reminiscent of Chaos. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone.

Hugs deflated back into his usual warm, wide-grinned self, ambling off to clear a table as though nothing had happened, leaving the tavern to slowly, shakily return to its murmur.

Halfbite arrived at the table not long after, her cheeks still flushed from laughing at Caspar’s misfortune, her one-eyed dog Winky trotting at her heels. She was perhaps thirteen or fifteen, hard to tell, but she carried herself with the weathered maturity of someone who had seen rough times and learned from them. She helped herself to the stew without ceremony and spoke freely between mouthfuls, telling the party what she knew. Normally, she explained, urchins disappeared for predictable reasons — Shallya’s orphanage, the dangers of the sewers, or the lure of work with the Redgrins gang down in the Narrows. But lately, something far worse was happening. Entire groups of children were being taken from their above-ground hideouts — abandoned attics, old stables, crumbling ruins — five and six at a time, their hiding places found and raided as though someone knew exactly where to look. She had ordered all of her remaining urchins into the sewers, where she hoped they would be harder to find. Nobody, she said plainly, cared about missing street children.

Back at the shop later that evening, the party turned their attention to both security and understanding. Pushka and Eddie spread flour liberally across the floor near the front door and windows — a simple, non-lethal way to track any intruder who might slip inside unnoticed. Meanwhile, Baeliya buried herself in her research, drawing on her growing knowledge of the arcane to examine what she had seen in Hugs. The markings she had perceived were Chaos in nature, she concluded, and their shapes bore the hallmarks of Khorne. Crucially, what she observed in Hugs was taint rather than full corruption — Chaos had touched him, perhaps was influencing him, but had not yet consumed him. Taint, she knew, was how it always began; Chaos was patient, offering just enough to open the door before it demanded everything. When the conversation turned to the bones the party had previously discovered, Baeliya’s anatomical knowledge and Pushka’s sharp memory worked together to reach a chilling conclusion — the remains were consistent with human or elven children, not dwarves or halflings as they had initially wondered. The realization settled over the group like the cold outside.

The following morning, the party made their way to the Lockup, the Town Watch’s headquarters near the docks. It was a busy, chaotic place — watchmen hauling people in and out, desks buried under disorganized paperwork, and haphazardly placed posters covering the walls. The captain, an older guardsman stationed at the main desk, was dismissive from the moment Pushka raised the subject of missing children. His denial came before he had even paused to think, smooth and rehearsed, and Baeliya noticed something else — deliberate gaps on the poster wall where missing persons notices had clearly been removed. The captain also wore a signet ring bearing a tower wrapped in a thorny rose, an unusual adornment for a guard captain, suggesting ties to nobility or some other faction. When pressed further, he referred them to Sergeant Stein at the boat launch, the man supposedly in charge of missing persons cases.

The boat launch was an outdoor working area adjacent to the Lockup, busy with the sounds of hammers and saws as workers constructed and repaired boats. Sergeant Stein stood at a table overseeing the operation, and the party approached him directly, Pushka reporting the discovery of bones and offering their help. But as Eddie quietly observed the scene, he noticed Stein subtly eyeing the workers around them, and a man on a platform above holding a large net. A soft whistle from the sergeant was all it took. The net came down over the group, fully ensnaring Pushka and partially catching Mel and Baeliya, while Eddie managed to roll clear just in time. Workers armed with ropes began closing in from every direction, and it became horrifyingly clear that the Town Watch — or at least some of it — was not there to help them.

What followed was a desperate, chaotic struggle. Eddie moved quickly to free Pushka from the net, cutting and untangling it with practiced precision while Mel drew her dagger and moved to flank Sergeant Stein, placing the blade near him in a bold attempt to give him pause. He was surprised, his hand going to his sword, but he did not draw it — not yet. A worker tackled Baeliya to the ground mid-effort, and another grappled Mel’s knife hand, trying to wrench her weapon away. Pushka, once free, ran past a dock worker and clocked him hard with the hidden club she kept on her person, sending him sprawling. Mel, freed when Eddie’s threatening approach caused her grappler to release her, stabbed at the man who had been holding her down, driving him back.

Then Baeliya did something none of them had ever seen before. Even pinned to the ground, she had been quietly, desperately gathering something — a force that made the air around her blur like a heat haze, that lifted snowflakes from the ground and raised the fine hairs on her head. The winds of magic, which she had studied and theorized about for so long, answered her call for the first time. She released them in a cone of explosive force that erupted outward from her position, and three dock workers were flung violently in different directions — one slammed unconscious into the wall, one was blasted into the freezing river, and one was hurled over a stack of trunks. The entire boat launch fell into stunned silence. In that moment of collective shock, the party ran.

They pushed past the distracted workers, past Sergeant Stein himself, who lunged for Pushka but found her already gone, and burst out into the open street. Stein gave brief chase, but the moment he saw the ordinary citizens of Talagaad going about their day, he stopped. He looked around, something like nervousness crossing his face, and withdrew back inside. As he retreated, Mel shouted after him, demanding his name and badge number. It was a small, defiant gesture, but it was all they had.

Back at the shop, shaken and trying to make sense of what had just happened, the party pieced together what they knew. Asking innocent questions about missing children had been enough to make the Town Watch try to capture them — which meant that whatever was happening to those children, some within the Watch were either complicit or actively involved. Mel recalled that there was one body with authority over the Town Watch: the Talabheim 11th Regiment, known as the Longsights for their use of rifles. They were a military outfit, more disciplined and less prone to the corruption that had clearly taken root in the Watch. When Mora, the party’s warden companion, stopped by briefly to collect supplies, she confirmed as much — her trusted friend Lieutenant Danya Klossner served with the Longsights, and Mora believed her to be reliable. But Mel, still raw from the day’s events, was in no mood for reassurances about trusting authority figures, and the tension in the room was palpable.

The party resolved to spend the coming days preparing carefully before making their next move. Mel reached out to her contact Cyria Mellois, a fixer with the Redgrins gang, who knew of illegal ferrymen willing to move people across the river quietly and without official scrutiny. Pushka, meanwhile, spoke with her dwarven merchant friend Mifra Farrbrand, who knew of legitimate shipments that could be used to conceal people crossing the bridge during the day. Both options carried risks, but both offered a path to the cold side of the city — and to the Longsights. In the meantime, the shop stayed quiet, the flour on the floor undisturbed, and the party slept lightly, knowing that the Town Watch now knew their faces and their questions, and that somewhere in the city, children were still disappearing.