0 Days, 18 Hours, 10 Minutes
Inky's Emporium, The Midnight Market, Early Morning on April 24th, 770
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Lia wrote:"I have twice now had to deal with a cat that displays unnatural intelligence, supernatural powers, the ability to speak as a human - or indeed, a Fey - and displays the most annoying tendency to get in our way and try to do us terrible harm."
"A cat?" Inkeri put a finger to her lips and swished her tail. "There are many creatures, fey or mortal, that could take such a form. There is Cecil the cat, the one who passes out flyers at the market. I know him to speak, but I have seen no powers I would call unusual, save that his flyers seem to know things no one else does. I have never known if the flyers are his, or if he works for another."She gave a small shrug.
0 Days, 3 Hours, 49 Minutes
Rue Vervain Rookery, Quartier-Ouvrier, Just after dusk on April 24th, 770
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It was glimmering dawn when you finally left the Midnight Market, and certain pragmatic concerns overrode the desire to proceed immediately to the Rue Vervain. Foremost among them was the desire to
sleep, followed closely by a wish to eat some kind of meal, and in general to recuperate after a night that had involved hot coals, burning steam, and jumping off of moving trains. Chaining anthropomorphic personifications of reality is something that one wants to do fully rested, and so the group was briefly adjourned. You regrouped at the edge of the Rue Vervain shortly after supper (or possibly breakfast, depending on one chose to interpret your present sleeping and eating habits).
Despite it's reputation, the Rookery of Rue Vervain is not really very large. A collection of several city blocks, not far from the east gates of Port-a-Lucine. But despite its small size, it is densely populated by thieves, cutthroats, footpads and assassins. They knew precisely how much a human life was worth in the Rookery of Rue Vervain, down to the last copper bit. As such, there weren't very many places in the rookery where a group of people could assemble an arcane ritual without being stabbed in the back by passing killers. But you managed to find one, even if it was the kind of place that made a thinking man wonder if being murdered might not be preferable.
It was a set of closely-linked tenements, or former tenements to be precise. They had burned down at some point not too many months ago, and the skeletal, fire-blackened remains still stood in the Quartier Ouvrier. A casualty of the March 11th chaos? Likely, though impossible to say for certain. But the locals avoided these charred ruins, and the smell of soot and rotted flesh greeted you as you entered. Not all the bodies had been dug out from beneath the rubble, it seemed. It was a queer and unpleasant place, that sent shivers down your spine. Bits of
things poked out of the charred ash, beams of wood, the remnants of metal stoves, a porcelain doll that gleamed bone-white in the darkness.
You were watched. It was a feeling you couldn't shake, the presence of burning eyes staring out of the darkness. Sometimes something flew overhead, soft but unmistakeable, always just out of sight. An owl screeched nearby, a deathly sound.
