In the Previous Installment, the PCs:
- Contemplated a Massive Erection.
- Milked a Jelly.
- Predicted a Riot.
The PCs are:
Tom Shambledrake
Electric Wizard
and heir to the bankrupt Shambledrake estate. Inventor of the Lightning
Accumulator and the Lightning Inverter, which, when combined, should
revolutionize magical charge production in Endon.
Jonty Earl
Dandy. Assistant Professor at Loxdon College, and accidental inventor of the Jonty Suit.
Dr. Augustus Hartwell
Biomancer.
A foreign doctor and self-described "quack", currently employed at
Blumsworth Hospital. Ally of speaking rats, workers, and other vermin.
Lizzy Ramchander
Potion Wizard, former cook, former brewer, and current secretary to Doyle Wormsby.
Doyle Wormsby
Civic Wizard, Private Investigator. Motivated by truth, justice, and tobacco.
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| Edouard Menta |
As Tom prepared to raise his iron tower over Endon, Lizzy, in a tastefully exuberant dress, scanned the crowd and tried not to go "cor" too loudly. She'd spotted ministers, bankers, financiers... and a mysterious yet familliar figure.
"Snedge," she hissed. The group's nebulous nemesis, henchperson-at-large to Lord Tarrigan-on-Burl, was moving through the crowd in an unconvincing disguise. Lizzy discreetly pursued him as he ducked under a grandstand, and watched, concealed, as he pasted a sheet of brown paper onto the wooden scaffolding.
"Aha!" Lizzy cried, pointing at Snedge with more bravado than sense. Snedge took a half step backwards and reached for a concealed pistol.
For the past few weeks, Lizzy had slowly perfected her duplicate self spell. Normally, she cast it on a gel stabilization matrix, extending the spell's duration from minutes to hours. She also cast it in a locked and specially warded room, both for the sake of propriety and to avoid frightening her newly hired assistants.
But desperate times call for inadvisable applied magic. Lizzy tossed her enchanted kitchen knife into the air and vomited up a second, naked, mucus-covered copy. Lizzy II crawled out of Lizzy's I's throat, caught the falling kitchen knife, and charged Snedge while screaming like a banshee. Lizzy I turned and ran to get help.
Snedge was a seasoned purveyor of evil deeds by night, day, or magical light, but the horrific spell-birth of Lizzy's duplicate shook him to his rotten core. He went white, fired one wild shot, and then tried to hit Lizzy with the butt of his pistol. Lizzy realized that Snedge probably still had his damage-triggered teleport amulet, and so, instead delivering a well-deserved stabbing, cast cone of dense foam, hoping to drown the footpad in a wave of beer-flavoured bubbles.
As predicted, Snedge's amulet did not react to the foam. Unfortunately, after a few seconds of agitated spluttering, Snedge managed to bludgeon himself and teleport away, leaving a Snedge-shaped gap in the foam.
The gunshot had attracted a small crowd, who were very surprised to see a naked young woman under the grandstands. Lizzy I, with the rest of the group in tow, arrived at a dead sprint. "My sister!" she exclaimed, as if that explained anything, as her duplicate attempted to fashion a dress from foam. The two Lizzies recombined with a brief squelch.
"Nothing to see here," Jonty said to the crowd. "Just some, err, wizard business. Please return to your seats."
"I've been shot!" a young man yelled from the stands. Dr. Hartwell was already examining his superficial wound, while Jonty fretted about liability and damage claims.
Tom and Doyle examined the papers Snedge had been pasting to the grandstand supports. The backside was painted to resemble wood, but the other side concealed a magic sigil. The group collected a case full of papers discarded by Snedge, then raced around peeling off as many as they could find.
"They're not spells," Lizzy said, peering at one. "They're more like blank spellbook pages. I think this bit is a focal rune."
"And that's Nesbert's elemental condenser," Tom said. "Perhaps this is a sort of lightning... attractor?"
"But that doesn't make sense," Lizzy said. "You're not summoning lighting today. You're just making a tower. It's not even raining!"
On cue, a light drizzle began to fall on Endon. Clouds rolled towards the city from every direction, called by a weather-changing spell. Doyle sighed in satisfaction. He did his best work in the rain.
"If these are lightning traps," Tom said, "we should put them in a warded are and check the rest of the construction site for other surprises."
A few minutes later, Chastity Flintwich, their cantankerous hired expert in metals and thaumic field theory, spotted some suspicious engravings on the heaps of iron bars around the construction site. "This looks like a golemancy anchor," she said. "Fine work. If this iron gets hit by the right sort of lightning it'd be bad news."
"What do you mean, the right sort of lightning?" Tom said, alarmed.
"I'd need to be modulated by some sort of imprinting machine or spell. This is just an anchor, a signpost. You'd need a very fancy bit of thaumic engineering to turn lightning into an empowering spirit."
Tom looked up at the swirling stormclouds. The sky was a bruised and turbulent purple. Rain was spiraling down in the eldritch winds. With a clap of thunder and a flicker of octarine light, a fiendishly complicated magic device appeared in the center of the construction site. It looked like a mechanical washing machine made of glass and copper, and it was clearly fizzing with potency.
"Like that," Chastity said. She then swore hard enough to ionize raindrops and ran for cover.
"Fuck this for a lark," Doyle muttered, and cast a teleport spell of his own. He swapped the device with a patch of air directly above the site, at the limit of his spell's range.
Lightning flashed from horizon to horizon, pouring into the device but finding nowhere to earth itself. Trapped in midair, the machine detonated, showering Needle Circus with a fine mist of metal droplets and mercury vapour.
"Between this and the stock fraud," Jonty moaned, "I think we should cancel the tower raising. Unexpected delays due to weather." He forced out the words "full refunds" but was overcome with emotion before he could finish the sentence.
"What stock fraud?" Tom said.
"Oh, ah, well, someone - that is to say, several someones - have been selling false certificates of Iron Spike Thaumaturgy stock. Well-made forgeries, damnably well made," Jonty burbled. "Doyle's on the case."
Doyle had examined the false certificates. He had to admit that they were almost as good as the originals. All the anti-counterfeiting measures had been replicated. The only incongruity were the certificate numbers (which didn't appear in the real registry) and a faint blue tint to the purple ink.
Though he was loathe to involve the Coppers, this case suggested prior history. He'd called up Victus Crane via Nero Krahlhammer's scrying orb. The last time they'd used the orb, Victus had warned them that the Thaumaturgic Detectives - the Deekers - were cracking down on scrying attempts in Endon. If a glowing red eye appeared in the scrying orb, it was a sign the watchers were being watched.
The Deekers hadn't intended for the system to be used to summon them, but when Doyle scryed their headquarters at the Grim Baliol and held up a handwritten note, Victus turned up promptly.
"The work of our escaped forger?" the Copper asked.
"Probably. I suspect we're both being set up by someone. We lose credibility for these fake stocks. You follow up, rush in, and have a nasty accident," Doyle said.
"Seems implausible," Victus said, but he seemed hesitant.
"It's all too plausible. This is a political move. Who's backing this forger? Who broke him out of prison?" Doyle said, gesturing with his cigarette.
"This is police business," Victus said, "so stay out of it. In particular, stay out of it if I use some high-grade scrying equipment to track this forged stock to its source and then send a messenger to you and your disreputable friends. As a member of the Metropolitan Police I'll, of course, have to take the obvious approach, but you should not take an oblique approach at the same time. Do you understand?"
Doyle continued to smoke.
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| Alexey Egorov |
Lizzy stuck up her hand. Dr. Hartwell shrugged. Tom thought about it, then agreed. "I should stay here and ensure the crowd disperses," Jonty said.
"Front door or back door?" Tom asked.
"Roof," Doyle replied, pointing. "They won't expect that."
With shouts of "urgent wizard business, make way," the group bluffed their way into the adjacent tenement, cracked a staircase window, and peered at the roof of the warehouse. Through a greasy window, they could see Victus Crane and two other figured locked in combat.
Tom was the first to leap over. He overestimated the strength of the roof and plunged into the upper offices in a cloud of dead pigeons and broken tiles. The escaped forger, his hired thug, and the Deeker all paused their struggle to look at him.
"Aha!" he cried, for lack of anything better to say.
Faced with a wizard with burning eyes, a magnificent hat, and a death wish, the thug downed a small vial of black liquid. Green scales, grey warts, and muscles like greased ferrets in a sack bloomed across his body. He'd been a large and sturdy man before the change; now he was a very large and very sturdy troll. He hit Tom with a fist the size of a pumpkin.
Tom flew backwards, bounced off the wall, landed on his feet, and charged. He cast shocking grasp and filled his fist with lightning.
But Lizzy cast first. She fired inebriate at the goon. Her mutated spell had a pleasant side-effect; it also had a chance to disenchant its target. The trollblood potion reverted; Tom's shocking grasp knocked him the thug cold before he could reconsider his position.
Unfortunately, Tom's shocking grasp also flung the wizard across the room, where he collided with both the forger and Victus Crane. Tom was the only one to stand up. Victus was unconscious, bruised, and had a broken leg. The forger had broken his neck in the tangle.
The Coppers swept in to clean everything up. With Dr. Hartwell's aid, Victus was able to corroborate the PCs' story. Doyle's discreet investigation of the forger's workshop revealed the stock plates, currency blanks... and a peacock.
The peacock worried Doyle. He'd been hired to retrieve a pet peacock, and that case lead him to the forger, who was apparently using peacock blood to counterfeit Bank of Endon notes. He'd assumed bills being marked in peacock blood was an urban myth, like the child-eating crocodile under New Bridge, but apparently it was true. He'd returned the peacock to Sir Truckle, in this very cage... and here it was again. How? And why? And was it his imagination, or was it giving him a knowing look.
"Can I take this bird?" Doyle asked Victus. "It's not really evidence. It's a bird. Besides, the forger is dead."
The wounded Copper shrugged, then winced. "Write out a receipt."
"Yes," a voice whispered in Doyle's head. "Take me from this place. Open this cage. I will reveal great and terrible secrets."
Doyle gave the peacock a very stern look.
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| Senfeng Chen |
"It's not magical," Tom said, "which is odd, because it's gold plated. Any gold in Endon will pick up some stray magic, but this is completely inert. I suspect it's actually enchanted, but very cunningly concealed. It's old too."
"Hello birdy," Lizzy said cheerfully.
Doyle sighed. "What are you? Who hired the forger to make fake stock certificates? Did you escape Sir Truckle, were you stolen, or are you the mastermind behind this operation?"
"And why can't we hear you?" Lizzy added.
"Release me and I will reveal many secrets," the peacock telepathically whispered to Doyle. "I can speak with this one because his mind is sufficiently paranoid. The rest of you would ignore the subtle powers I can currently employ."
"It wants to be let out," Doyle said. He considered the cage, then, before anyone else could react, snapped the lock and opened the door.
The peacock hopped onto his desk and peered around the room with insane orange eyes. Sounds of collective dismay were drowned by the fizz of magic. The peacock transformed into a horse-sized dragon. Doyle watched in dismay as his ancient desk collapsed and his carefully stacked piles of newspapers were pushed to the edges of the room.
The dragon, thankfully, seemed to be mostly tail and neck. Its bulbous goggle-eyed head whipped around the room, examining the PCs with its blazing eyes. Despite the colour-leaching properties of Doyle's office, which usually turned everything inside it greyscale, the dragon was a rich blue, fading to purple along its crest and wings.
Free at last!" the dragon piped.
"Dragon!" Lizzy said intelligently. Dr. Hartwell moved towards the door. Tom just stared. Doyle nodded in satisfaction. He'd expected a supernatural being of some sort.
"You will address me as Balchezazar the Azure," the dragon said imperiously. Lizzy nodded.
"Delighted to meet you. I'm Lizzy Ramchander. This is Doyle Wormsby, Dr. Hartwell, and Tom Shambledrake."
The dragon eyed Tom. "You're named 'Shambledrake'? Why?"
"It's my... family's name? I don't know. We've always had it."
"Disgusting. Might as well be named 'Mucus and Lung Diseases'. Wait..." the dragon said, and sniffed Tom. It recoiled like a cut spring. "Oh no, you're related."
"I'm what?!" Tom said.
"Maybe related is the wrong word. Contagious? Your family is, or was, the dracocult of my disreputable brother. We hatched at the same time, but his scales never came in. He turned out all wrinkly and awful. Just awful. I always wondered what happened to him. Yes, that's his smell on you. How horrible."
"One of my ancestors is a dragon?" Tom said.
"No, no. Disgusting. No, several of your ancestors spent a lot of time around a Shambledrake. Not a proper dragon at all, but it seems it's still contagious. That's how dragons work," Balchezazar explained patiently. "Mortals pick up elements of our magnificent nature by proximity."
"Magnificent nature, got it," Doyle said. "What were you doing in a cage?"
The dragon looked chagrined. "It was a long time ago. I was young and foolish, and there was this human in a garden. I decided to... well, in any case, I was captured. That was two hundred years ago. Two hundred years in a cage, in the Truckle family, listening to them prattle on and live and die and talk and talk and talk. Awful."
"You were captured by Sir Truckle's ancestors?"
"Yes. Horrible people. And then they used my blood," Balchezazar said, "to mark your idiotic paper money. As if paper could be valuable."
Doyle nodded as the dragon rambled about hoards and sound currency. Any rich lunatic could buy a peacock, but dragons were mythical.
"So Sir Truckle sold your blood to the Royal Mint?" Tom said. "Where did the forger come in?"
"Sir Truckle became avaricious. The forger he hired, in turn, desired more than a share of the forged bills, and so parted ways with Sir Truckle. This lead to our first meeting," Balchezazar said to Doyle. "Though I do not know who broke the forger out of prison, or who hired him to make your so-called stock papers."
"And what is your plan now?" Doyle asked.
"First, vengeance. Sir Truckle, his family, and his servants will burn. Then... well, I am not entirely certain."
"Ah," Tom said. "Perhaps we could convince you not to burn Sir Truckle." Tom knew that the Truckle family owned several potion-refining works. A blast of dragonfire could level more than just one building.
"You cannot," the dragon replied frostily.
"What if we could inflict vengeance on your behalf?" Tom added cautiously. "After all, Sir Truckle is only a human, and it would be demeaning to personally take vengeance on a human."
"Continue, wizard," the dragon said, narrowing its eyes. "You would burn Sir Truckle for me?"
"Ah, well, not as such. We would inflict a much more terrible revenge. We would see him prosecuted for his crimes and executed in a lawful manner," Tom said.
"And his name would be printed in the newspapers," Lizzy said. "Oh the shame! The disgrace!"
"Whereas if you merely burned him, the reputation of his ancestors would be unharmed," Tom added.
"I will consider this. But hark," Balchezazar hissed, "if you do not take sufficient vengeance I will be forced to destroy Sir Truckle and all his wretched relatives. And in any case, I must rest for at least a day. This hovel will suffice."
"Hovel," Doyle grumbled. "Whose name is painted on the door?"
"Yibsmirrow Elyod," Dr. Hartwell said quietly.
The next morning, without fanfare or tickets, Tom raised his tower.
Onlookers thought the tower appeared by magic. This was technically true; Tom had hired an illusionist to project the tower's form accurately and perfectly, a skill illusionists mastered in their training. All Tom had to do was shape hundreds of tons of iron to match the illusion. It was a legendary feat of metal control, and it nearly turned Tom's brain into a potato pancake, but it worked. As the thin morning sun poured over Endon, it struck the largest iron structure ever raised.
Newspaper editors howled to stop the presses, find some architects, and get some iconographic images. Architects, wizards, and opinionated citizens lurched to their windows to stare at the apparition. The Daily Denunciation called it a marvel of the age and a sign of inevitable progress. The Sign of the Times called it a hideous pincushion, a diabolical instrument of wizardry gone mad, and the ugliest building yet devised by mortal minds. But for everyone else, it was simply the Iron Spike.
Jonty had commissioned crates of pewter models for immediate sale, and handed slightly more impressive bronze casts with any purchase of stock. Nobody else in the group entirely understood Jonty's stock market schemes, but he assured them that they were all enormously wealthy... in theory.
The tower seemed to change Tom's personality slightly. "Tower madness," some elderly wizards said knowingly, behind closed and warded doors. A wizard with a tower tended to view the world as a campaign map and fellow citizens as ants. Tom had his workers build a rubber-lined insulated room near the top of the tower, so he could look over Endon during even the wildest storms.
He also reinforced the walls of the Gel Knight works, Lightning Inverter warehouse, and surrounding yards. If civil unrest was coming to Endon, Tom felt that he could wait out the rioters inside a fortress made of iron and magic. He had stacks of unused iron discreetly stacked around the compound. If all else failed, he'd simply raise an impenetrable iron wall, call down hourly lightning strikes, and... starve to death. Lizzy spotted the flaw in Tom's plan and discreetly began stockpiling supplies.
Anna Hartwell (Dr. Hartwell's sister), and John Huffman (the golem-maker) evaluated the golem-raising glyphs cut off the raw iron bars. They manged to raise a tiny iron figure, which staggered about, filled with lightning and confusion before running into the barrier wards and fizzling out. "Imagine that, but eighty feet high," Anna said. "Rampaging around the city."
When the group returned to Doyle's office, Balchezazar the Azure had carefully rearranged the room. The dragon seemed to be using Doyle's collection of plates, pots, and pans as a shabby hoard. "This is temporary!" the dragon exclaimed. "I am out of practice. Tell me, hairy bipeds, what is your plan to ruin the name and works of Sir Truckle?"
Tom explained, and Balchezazar listened. Then the dragon laughed and laughed and laughed.
Nevertheless, that evening, the group implemented their scheme. One half of Lizzy had spent the day discreetly scouting the mansion of Sir Truckle. As darkness feel, Lizzy (recombined) and Dr. Hartwell (disguised) ambushed one of Sir Truckle's maids as she returned home from her evening off. Dr. Hartwell used alter self so he resembled the maid, changed (awkwardly) into a matching set clothes Lizzy provided, and set off to infiltrate the mansion. Lizzy remained with the maid as backup.
Meanwhile, Doyle crept from rooftop to rooftop, a bomb tucked under one arm. It wasn't a particularly deadly bomb. He'd requested "fireworks, smoke, sparks, and flame" from the back-alley alchemist he'd hired for the job. Enough to burn down a house, but with enough noise and smoke to give everyone a chance to run out, and for the police to run in. Dr. Hartwell's job was to set off a similar bomb in the cellar, where Balchezazar the Azure said the family kept their forged printed bills. All the Coppers needed to do was follow the trail of breadcrumbs, assisted by anonymous tips from Doyle.
The back-alley alchemist, Aloysius Trent, had also hinted that the double-walled vial of liquid that Doyle had seen Benjamin Fits and other members of the Mechanics' Society handle might be oil of azide, a new explosive developed by Endon's leading alchemists. Super high explosive liquid expert Aloysius[1] could level a building, "even one such as the Iron Spike." What the labour agitator Fits, and the shadowy collection of wizards known as The Project, planned to bomb.
[1] I'm amazed my players turn up to these games.
Dr. Hartwell's disguised worked for under five minutes. He managed to get into the basement of the manor, but as he searched, he noticed a green mist creeping down the stairs and swirling around his head. It seemed to be some sort of magical burglar alarm. He found a wall safe by examining the masonry, but as he planted the bomb, Sir Truckle's butler appeared at the top of the stairs.
"Oh dear," Dr. Hartwell thought. "I should signal Lizzy for help." He paused, staring at the very confused butler and knot of other servants. "And we should have agreed on a signal before embarking on this ludicrous scheme."
"What's all this then?" the butler said. Wreathed in green smoke, Dr. Hartwell coughed politely, then tried to sprint past the butler. "None of that," the silver-haired servant said, and caught the disguised biomancer with a surprisingly sturdy arm.
Dr. Hartwell cast inflict pain on the butler but, to his shock, the butler simply shrugged off the effects and tightened his grip on the doctor's arm. He then cast mutate. One of the butler's eyes bulged and turned a vile shade of red, and something rustled in his unmentionable regions. He looked deeply concerned, but if anything, even more determined to bludgeon Dr. Hartwell into unconciousness.
At this point Lizzy appeared at the head of the basement stairs. She'd (sensibly) decided to watch the back of the manor from a dustbin across the street, and (questionably) decided all the commotion was a signal to intervene. The butler took one look at her and, to everyone's astonishment, fired a squirming magical ray from his newly mutated eye. The ray struck Lizzy in the chest and knocked her flat on her back.
Dr. Hartwell used the distraction to down a potion of ratform. With fearsome ease, the butler caught the falling rat with one hand. "Got you!" he gloated, as Dr. Hartwell tried to figure out how his claws worked. Instead, the twice-transformed doctor cast polymorph, transforming the butler into a rat as well. Both rats dropped to the floor as the bomb Dr. Hartwell planted detonated, filling the room with smoke and sparks.
In the confusion, Dr. Hartwell skittered across the room, leapt onto Lizzy's chest, and scrambled into her pocket. Both PCs fled the building. On the roof, Doyle decided the detonation of Dr. Hartwell's bomb was the signal to drop his bomb down a chimney. A few seconds later, the windows in the front of the house blew out with a gust of oily flame and bouncing sparks.
When the Coppers finally arrived, they were baffled by tales of "rat-witches" and "agitators among the lower orders." Sightings of "rat-witches" increased overnight, aided by articles in the illustrated press. The Coppers did not find any obvious signs of forged currency.
Dr. Hartwell nearly lost his equilibrium when Sir Truckle's butler turned up at Blumsworth Hospital the next day seeking urgent magical treatment. The butler hadn't seen the doctor's true form, and was therefore more than willing to listen to the foreigner's advice. The mutated evil eye was troubling, but the butler was far more worried about certain rearrangements in the trouser area.
"I regret to inform you that you are oviparous," Dr. Hartwell said gravely.
"What does that mean?" the butler asked, pale as a bottle of ooze milk.
"I means you will, err, lay eggs. That is, you are going to lay an egg shortly, and will continue to do so until cured."
"This can be cured?"
"Oh yes," Dr. Hartwell said, confident that he could polymorph away the mutations easily. "But you should lay the current egg first."
"What is it?" Lizzy asked.
"It's an egg," Dr. Hartwell replied, as he pondered it.
"I can see that, but why is it in a warded glass jar on a hot water bottle?"
"It is going to hatch soon," the doctor explained. "Sir Truckle's butler laid it."
The rest of the group gathered around the dinning table of the townhouse to watch. After a few minutes of tapping, a tiny pink fist burst through the shell, and a fully uniformed miniature butler crawled out. He glared at the group with a malevolent mutated eye, then stared at the glass jar hard enough to chip it.
"No," Dr. Hartwell said. He refused to imagine a world filled with tiny egg-laying evil-eyed butlers. Creating a breed of mutated speaking rats in the basement was one thing, but this was too much.
"What are you going to do with it?" Lizzy asked.
"Smash it with a hammer and burn the remains," he said. "It's the only way to be sure."
The shadow of the Iron Spike is not the only shadow falling across Endon. Doyle's investigations suggested the 26th of Malbrogia was the day of action for the Mechanics' Socitey and the out-of-work miners marching on Endon. Labour agitation, speaking rats, currency manipulation, a vengeful dragon, a new explosive; all signs pointed towards doom. Will the PCs evade the grasping hand of fate, or, like a rat in a basement, will they be caught by the relentless butler of tortured metaphor?
Find out next time.
A pun so good, it demanded a footnote.
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