Diversity Hires, part 9: Actors and Armpits

While hanging around Altdorf, a city increasing descending into riots as food supplies decreased, we began investigating the location of the mysterious Ansel. All of us except Mormacar who had been misplaced in a brothel somewhere, that is.

Burlok, who had recently learned to read thief sign, was able to identify a local butcher as a fence. He queued up along with Frida to buy some sausages and also question him. In addition to some information, we also got some excellent sausages made of named meat. The butcher told us they would go well with some good bread and beer. Having recently been in a pub where the bread and beer were excellent but the sausages were terrible, we were very pleased with the purchase.

More importantly, for those slightly less motivated by sausages than Frida, we had also obtained some information on Ansel - or at least, someone meeting his description. A thin man with a scar on his forehead had apparently been seen around the Temple of Sigmar, and while his name was Axel rather than Ansel, we decided it was worth a look. Frida also noticed that the description could also fit the vigilante known as The Vengeance, a mysterious masked figure known for taking out mutants and witches with a 100% accuracy rate, in contrast to the rather high false positives of the actual witch hunters, who was also known to hammer a tin badge in the shape of the twin comets of Sigmar into his victims' foreheads.

We'd encountered a tin badge seller earlier in the pub, but despite buying a cake and a symbol of Shallya from him, Frida hadn't managed to get him to talk.

We headed for the temple to look for Axel. Somehow we felt the rose garden would be the best place to look for him, but what we actually found there was an actor. He was initially inclined to dismiss us as unworthy poor people, but since interaction began with Frida turning on her charm and complimenting his shoes, he rapidly became more friendly.

Being unpleasant to poor people turned out to be his favourite hobby. We asked why he was doing it here rather than in the poor quarter where targets were easier to find, but he didn't like visiting that part of town. We suggested he could stand on the wall at the edge of the quarter and throw things at the poor, like coins. He wasn't entirely sold on that idea until Armando suggested loading the coins into a blunderbuss. There followed an extensive discussion on the practicalities and uses of the coin blunderbuss and the best position for a poor person to stand relative to it when it was fired.

Eventually discussion of tormenting the poor wound down, and we were invited to attend the theatre the following night, before heading off in search of Axel in the library.

Axel was not in the library, but his boss was, and was rather annoyed about him being missing. We decided to visit his house to check up on him.

Axel was not in a good condition when we found him, and was able to live just long enough to explain that he had previously been known as Ansel. He had some mutations - feathery armpit gills that allowed him to sniff out other mutants. What was it with mutated armpits?

More useful were his journals. We learned the strange and disturbing story of a man whose obsession with an uninterested woman had lead to stalking and dark magic, ultimately sending him in search of a magical necklace that would cause the one who wore it to love the person who put it on them. Ansel/Axel had eventually got over himself after some unspecified incident, but now somebody wanted the necklace to get control of Karl the scion/demon child.

Chapter 10, the one that would tell us how to actually find the necklace, was missing, but a clue suggested we could find it in a holy book in the temple library. Getting into the library again proved more of a challenge, as it was after closing time and everyone had gone to the pub.
Not that we needed much persuasion to go to the pub.

The head of the library had no intention of leaving his theosophical pub club to open up the library for them, and neither Gildiril's attempt to bribe him with brandy nor Frida's attempts to persuade him to loan them the key proved convincing.

We did eventually get the key off him, along with a beer mat with his signature, and headed for the library. Going through the catalogue we learned there were three copies of the book we wanted in the library. Naturally the one we wanted was in a separate room for special books, which had a separate lock that none of us knew how to open.

We decided to spend the rest of the night in the library, so that we'd be there ready when either the librarian got back with the key or a bunch of evil cultists showed up for a fight. Burlok, despite being a dwarf in plate armour, managed to hide himself completely convincingly by pretending to be a statue. Everybody else hid very badly.

As expected, the evil cult showed up next. There was an evil goth pigeon outside the window (which Frida totally failed to notice despite being literally hiding in the window), a wizard who appeared to be Yan again, and a couple of minions. Fortunately Gildiril's enhanced elven hearing meant we had warning of their arrival and he was able to magic up a couple of weapons before they arrived. Not that that helped much. Burlok couldn't get much of a swing up on his pick, Frida failed to hit anything with her tiny rocks, Armando missed with his pistols and then failed at parkour to get to the balcony where Yan stood, and Gildiril was hit by Yan's Golden Torrent spell, which was as awful as it sounded and required a jar of urine to cast. It wasn't long before Yan had also flooded the room with an unpleasant green smog (this time using the tears of a diseased child) and we were all struggling to achieve anything at all.

It was at this point that a vampire popped up behind Yan, deploying daggers from drop sheathes into each hand...

Will the team survive the cavalcade of bodily fluid based magic? Will Mormacar turn up in time to make inappropriate jokes? Will we all end up as mutant vampires? Find out next time on Diversity Hires!