Jan 12, 1885
Arriving in Tarant was positively exhilarating. It was one of the largest cities I have ever seen. And so modern! It had a large, well-organized train depot, and even local streamrail stations for rapid transportation around the city!
We first travelled to Stanton Importers, in the industrial district. This turned out to be a seedy looking establishment run out of a warehouse.
The representative inside gave a very shady impression, but given the mine had proven worthless to him it was not hard to convince him to sell us the deed for a reasonable sum. .
We would deliver it to Sarah the next time we passed through Dernholm. That would likely please Sarah, enrage Percival, and possibly pacify Bessie’s spirit – all positive developments in my book.
Next we visited the telegraph office to check for Joachim’s promised message to Virgil. It appeared he had travelled on to the town of Stillwater investigating the assassins, and requested that we follow him there. Virgil wanted to leave immediately, but I insisted we follow a few leads in Tarant first.
We tracked down the offices of “P Schuyler and Sons” to 44 Devonshire Way, but the clerk inside was extremely unhelpful – deflecting any and all questions about the business, his employers, or their customers. He refused to even take a message for any of the Schuylers – which seemed rather suspicious to me. We thanked him for his “help”, and resolved to return that night for a more clandestine investigation.
In the evening when we returned, we found a dwarf standing outside the offices – peering in the windows while attempting – badly – to look inconspicuous.
When he saw us he began interrogating us about our interest in P Schuyler and Sons, and I asked him the same. When we managed to get past a few touchy subjects – he was suspicious of my appearance, and apparently dwarves consider asking their names to be an insult – we discovered we had similar purposes.
He was trying to track the provenance of a bracelet with worn etchings which he believed were old dwarven. They looked like scratchings to me, but I humored him.
He had much to say about the Schuylers. They were apparently one of the oldest businesses in Tarant, no-one could verify having seen any of the senior partners in decades, and rumours about disappearances and strange happenings were rampant. Many of them seemed likely to be the type of extravagant exaggerations one gets when stories run wild, but there did genuinely seem to be something odd about the place. I suggested we team up to investigate further, and he agreed. He introduced his “public name” as Magnus.
Whatever else “P Schuyler and Sons” may have been, they certainly didn’t spend a lot of effort securing their doors. I could have bypassed that lock by age 10. Whether that indicated cutting corners, incompetence… or simply not caring if anyone bypassed their exterior security I couldn’t say. But the latter had me concerned.
Searching the showroom we found a secret door beneath the carpet.
Underneath was a dark cellar, and odd noises…
We found ourselves beset by zombies from all directions!
It was no wonder they cared so little for security above. Whatever they *really* valued must be hidden below. We progressed through twisting catacombs, battling the occasional zombie and circumventing the occasional trap until we came to a slope leading down to a lower level.
Where we found something else – dwarf zombies working tirelessly searching through old dwarven ruins – entirely ignoring us! Magnus was horrified, “Their bodies have been raised to ransack their own home!“
Behind the large excavation area was a building that stood out – both for its neat appearance and for its human-sized doors. As we entered three elderly men rose to stare at us. “P Schuyler and Sons”, I presume?
Magnus was inclined to let his axe do the talking, but I managed to convince him to let me speak with them. It seems they had been practicing Necromancy for a long, long time. Since the Age of Legends, if they could be believed. Using zombie labor to excavate for artifacts and materials which could be sold. I asked them about the signet ring, but they were quite reserved about it. They were far more concerned with what to do about us. And as it turned out, they were not negotiating in good faith.
While I was speaking with the leader, his brothers were sidling around behind, until they cast a spell to magically paralyze Sogg!
And as I turned to see what was happening, the third cast a spell upon me!
Fortunately our companions were not quite so susceptible. Virgil immediately interrupted my assailant, freeing me from his Magick.
Magnus similarly interfered with one of the other Schuylers, which left Sogg a free hand….
We wasted little time finishing them off. We had no desire to see what other tricks they might have waiting for us.
We searched their papers and effects looking for any information. It was slow going, but eventually we discovered a receipt referencing a purchase order for a signet ring for… Gilbert Bates. I stared at it, stunned. The description of the ring matched perfectly. I had not even considered his name, although in retrospect it seemed obvious. Gilbert Bates was one of the wealthiest and most famous men in Tarant. The inventor of the Steam Engine. The father of modern technology. I wondered just how one might go about arranging a meeting with someone like *that*.
Magnus was disappointed as we left. Apparently he was a city dwarf – raised in Tarant. And had been searching for clues as to his native clan. But he did not believe the dwarves we had seen below were any relation. I told him we appeared to be in the business of digging up buried secrets nowadays, so we could likely help him in his search in the process. That appeared to brighten him up a bit.
Jan 13, 1885
Before approaching Mr Bates, I wanted to do a little research now that we were in a proper city. We first visited the Library at the University of Tarant, but the librarian there looked down at me and suggested that I wasn’t “the right sort of clientelle”. I stiffly informed him that I had as much right to read as any other, but he told me the library had a membership fee “to keep out the riffraff”. £5000!!! Then he suggested the local pub might have a few story books behind the counter that would be more my speed. I’d like to say I eloquently disputed his jabs, but Virgil might disagree with that characterisation.
We spoke to several faculty in the University proper, but beyond a treatise on ancient religions and an odd man who desperately wanted “take my measurements” to better characterize half-orcs in his study of phrenology we made little headway.
We did manage to borrow a number of technical manuals from a particularly cooperative dwarven engineering professor. I had been carefully examining Liam’s hat to understand the principles behind its operation, and I had a number of ideas for expanding the techniques.
I was able to design and construct a few prototype electric rings which could amplify our reflexes.
With Magnus’s help I was also able to design an electrified sword for Sogg! I would have liked to apply the same idea to my own weapon, but the capacitors it required were still to heavy for any but the half-ogre’s use. I needed to further consider the design.
Finally we visited the Temple of Panarii. The Panarii religion was the source of Virgil’s ravings, and he insisted that they could explain things better than he could.
A priest at the temple explained that in the Time of Legend, the elven mage Nasrudin had banished the evil Arronax to the Void. He could not say what exactly “The Void” was, other than that to his knowledge such punishment had only ever been meted out to four individuals. He also claimed that there was considerable disagreement over the precise meaning of Virgil’s “prophecy” – whether “the Living One” was inspired by Nasrudin, inhabited by him, or actually *was* him. He had no idea about about the symbol on the assassin’s necklaces. All in all it sounded like mythology to me, and it was not at all clear what connection it might have to Gilbert Bates or the assassins plaguing me.
With few other options, we directly approached one of the guards at the gate to Bates Manor. Unsurprisingly he was not willing to let us in. He said that they had been having difficulties with several attempted assassinations of Mr Bates lately. I tried to question him about these, but he refused to say more. He said the only way in to see Mr Bates would be to demonstrate my loyalties by helping him. It seems they had been having trouble with saboteurs at one of the Bates factories, and if we could put a stop to them then he could arrange an audience.
The security chief at the factory showed us around the factory floor. The chief told us that the saboteurs always struck late in the night, when all the workers had gone home. The factory floor was locked up securely, and there were no signs of forced entry. He said he would consider it to be teleportation – save that one would have to be near suicidal to attempt to magically teleport directly into the midst of this much machinery. I naturally asked about the potential for insiders, but he believed this to be impossible.
We scouted out the spot inside the factory the furthest from any steamworks – assuming that if it the saboteurs *were* entering by magick that would be the most accessible point. Sure enough, that’s where and how they appeared. Unfortunately they were unwilling to be taken alive. But now that we had confirmed their means of entry appropriate precautions would be taken.
Jan 14, 1885
Returning to the Bates Manor the next morning, we were granted an audience as promised. When I showed Mr Bates the ring, he immediately asked where I had acquired it. When I mentioned the gnome he grew suspicious, and asked for details of his appearance. It seems “Preston Radcliffe” the “gnome”… had been neither! Mr Bates told us he had actually been a dwarf named Stennar Rock Cutter – who had likely shaved his dwarven beard and starved himself to pass as a gnome.
Mr Bates had been orphaned as a teen, and due to his interest in technology had gone to live among the dwarven Black Mountain Clan. He had attempted to impress them with his inventions, but they had merely been amused. Only Stennar had truly befriended him, and he had given Stennar the ring as a token of friendship. Stennar had eventually shown him a prototype steam engine, which the dwarves were not developing because they saw no value in a device that deprived them of opportunities for manual labor. He adapted it to run mining equipment, but that only earned further derision from the dwarves. So he showed his device to a human mining company – and the rest, was history.
But when he returned to the Black Mountain Clan to show them what he had made, their mines were abandoned. They had vanished! He returned to his growing businesses, but kept sending investigators hoping to learn what had happened. Then one night he was visited by robed figures who warned him to stop searching for the dwarves, and to never reveal the dwarven origin of the steam engine.
He said he had never actually claimed to have invented it, but deeply regretted that he had allowed people to believe it. And he believed that his actions had somehow caused the disappearance of the dwarf clan.
He had eventually renewed his search, and now attempts had been made on his life. I showed him the amulet we had collected from our own assassins, and he identified it as being the mark of the Molochean Hand – an ancient order of assassins. And told us that the assassins that had made the attempts on his life wore the same amulets!
He asked for his ring to be returned, and I obliged. He also told us that if we wanted to know more we should investigate the Black Mountain Mines ourselves, and he would pay well to learn what we discovered.
It seemed all roads were leading us north. We would travel to Stilwater to make another attempt to catch up with Virgils’ mentor, and then continue on to the abandoned Black Mountain mines. Hopefully more answers lay buried there.
Author’s Notes:
It will be interesting to see how Cass gets on with Mr Bates long term. From previous runs I’ve seen that he considers himself “enlightened management”, because he treats his orcish factory workers “as if they were almost human”. Can’t say that that side of him is likely to go over well if she uncovers it….
In general its been interesting to see how much being a half-orc actually matters in Arcanum. It comes up quite a bit – in ways that go beyond the usual “mention it and move on” that you get in most RPGs. As does Victorian-era sexism. So Cass gets the short end of the stick both ways in that vein.
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