Eldritch Guidance

Jazzy: “There are three pieces of intelligence that have surfaced in the last week which defy easy categorization. I will present them in order, starting with the most recent and concluding with what I consider to be the most… headache-inducing. The first is this: a Witch Hunter has apparently arrived in Graheel, possibly within the last day or two.”

Kyle leaned back, unimpressed.

Kyle: “Hmm. I’m sure there’s a detail that makes this stand out? Witch Hunters pass through Graheel all the time. They’re like stray cats; you shoo one away and another shows up looking for a saucer of milk.”

Thalia: “I believe that was more true before the Schism with the Witch Hunters,” she corrected gently. “Back in the Agado swamplands, they were a common sight, rooting out fringe cults. But since the schism fractured their authority and resources, their presence has become far more rare and focused. I imagine it’s the same here.”

Jazzy: “Precisely. And while I personally don’t keep a ledger of every holy zealot who darkens our doorstep, you are correct that there is something different about this one. What makes this rumor particularly interesting is the descriptor attached to it: this hunter is allegedly super famous.”

Kyle: “Famous? Who is it?” he asked, his interest now piqued.

Jazzy offered a slight, apologetic shrug.

Jazzy: “I have no idea.”

Kyle shook his head in disappointment.

Kyle: “You bring me a rumor about a famous Witch Hunter and you don’t even know his name? That’s not intelligence, Jazzy.”

Jazzy: “I did say this was the most recent,” she reminded him, a touch of steel in her tone. “I literally received this report just hours before you arrived and have had no time to corroborate it. The source was one of our more… inebriated patrons, bragging that the legendary Archmage and Witch Hunter, Betty Vo, was currently a guest at his estate.”

Kyle snorted.

Kyle: “That’s not just drunk, that’s delusional. Betty Vo is dead.”

Jazzy: “Hence my skepticism regarding the specific name. The man was swimming in his own liquor. But the core of the boast—that he is hosting a renowned Witch Hunter—is a fact I believe is worth verifying. He was specific enough in his drunken state to be boasting about someone of note.”

Thalia: “Hmm, I sincerely doubt a Witch Hunter has anything to do with the people I’m looking for,” she interjected, her tone dismissive. “Their purview is heresy, not… clowns.”

Jazzy: “Perhaps, or perhaps not. Consider their profession. They are hunters. They track cults and heretical organizations. If the group you are pursuing has even a tangential association with a cult or esoteric practice, a Witch Hunter would be on their trail as well. They might possess information that has eluded even our network.”

Thalia: “But I have no confirmation that these people are linked to any cult.”

Jazzy: “Oh, darling,” she said with a knowing, almost pitying smile. “If there is a shadowy organization operating within Graheel that deals in contraband, espionage, or assassination, we know of them. The only groups that we can’t entirely track in this city are the cults of the Nameless Gods. ”

Kyle: “Jazzy’s right,” he grunted, folding his arms. “There’s a non-zero chance this circus of yours is a front for something far less amusing. So, I’ll have some of our people discreetly look into this drunken lordling and his supposed famous guest once I’m back at the Night Tower.” He turned back to Jazzy. “What about the other two rumors? ”

Jazzy: “The second piece of intelligence,” she continued, her voice lowering a fraction, “came from one of my girls who lives in the southern districts. Apparently, there have been some disappearances in South Graheel.”

Kyle let out a dismissive grunt.

Kyle: “So? People go missing in this city all the time.”

Jazzy: “Not like this. Not this many people, in such a condensed area, and in this short a timeframe—which aligns perfectly with the time frame you gave me. The disappearance started two weeks ago to now. And I will correct you, Kyle: people go missing in the east end all the time. Our territory. People who renege on debts, or mutts who forget their place. This, however, is happening just beyond our border, in the southern hills. It’s as if whoever is responsible is deliberately avoiding our turf, knowing full well we would take a very dim view of someone scooping people up on our doorstep.” She let that implication hang in the air for a moment before turning her gaze to Thalia. “And I also seem to recall you mentioning that one of the reasons you’re pursuing this group is because they have been kidnapping people of importance?”

Thalia’s eyes dropped to the floor, her expression turning grim.

Thalia: “Yes,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “They’ve taken people who are deeply important to a great many families.”

The atmosphere in the room grew heavy, the opulent surroundings feeling suddenly hollow. Jazzy raised a curious eyebrow, while Kyle, who understood the full, painful context Thalia carried, simply crossed his arms, his jaw tightening in shared, silent empathy.

Plowing through the grim atmosphere, Kyle steered them back to practicality.

Kyle: “Thank you, Jazzy. This is good information, but it’s also a logistical nightmare. The south end is a sprawling, chaotic mess outside our direct control. Sending too many hounds down there to ask questions would be like kicking a political hornet's nest. We’d be limited to a handful of operatives, and searching that entire area would be like finding a specific needle in a stack of other, very similar needles.”

Jazzy:“I know it’s troublesome. But given the circumstances, it sounds like your best, if not your only, viable lead. And as troublesome as that rumor is,” she added, her posture shifting into something more guarded, “it pales in comparison to the final piece of information I have.”

Kyle: “And what rumor is that?” he pressed, leaning forward.

Jazzy took a slow, deliberate breath.

Jazzy: “Well, I called it a rumor, but that’s not entirely accurate. This one is a confirmed piece of intelligence. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure I should even tell you.”

Kyle: “You’re holding information back from ME?” his voice rose in a sudden, thunderous burst of indignation. He shot to his feet, his frame towering over the seated Houndmaster. “The Second in command of the Nighthounds! Yin’s own—”

He was immediately cut off as Jazzy sharply raised her hand.

Jazzy: “It involves Clark Codsworth.”

The name landed in the room like a death nail.

Kyle: “Aaaaagh!” he roared, his cry one of pure, unadulterated frustration. He dragged his massive hands down his face, pulling at his skin as if he could physically tear away the stress, his expression a tortured mask of anger and profound weariness. The mere mention of the name was enough to unravel the crime lord completely.

The raw, guttural sound of Kyle's anguish was so potent it physically pulled Thalia from her own grim thoughts. She looked from his tormented form to Jazzy, her eyes wide with bewildered alarm.

Thalia: "Who in the name of the Red Church is Clark Codsworth," she asked.

Jazzy let out a long, weary sigh, the elegant composure she wore like a second skin beginning to fray at the edges.

Jazzy: "Clark Codsworth is..." She paused, searching for a diplomatic phrase, before abandoning the effort entirely. "Ah, fuck it. He's a piece of shit that gives shit a bad name! He is the single biggest, most festering pain in all of our collective asses!"

The explosion of vitriol was so sudden and vehement that Thalia physically recoiled, leaning back in her seat as if pushed by the force of Jazzy's words. The cool, calculating Houndmaster was gone, replaced by a woman whose eyes burned with a pure, undiluted loathing.

Kyle: "Oh, how I long for the day!" he roared, slamming back down onto the sofa with enough force to make the frame groan. He brought a fist down on the low, polished table in front of him. The tempered glass top, designed to withstand the revelries of wealthy patrons, shattered into a thousand crystalline pieces under the impact. "The day I can personally wrap my hands around that smug, scrawny neck and squeeze until the light leaves his beady little eyes!"

Jazzy: "You'd better get me a front-row ticket to watch that," she snarled in agreement, her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists on her lap.

The energy in the opulent VIP room became thick and charged, vibrating with a shared, suffocating rage that felt more dangerous than any magical threat Thalia had faced. She wisely remained silent, a spectator to a storm of pure vendetta, allowing the two Nighthounds to exorcise their demons. For nearly two full minutes, the air was filled with a creative, venomous litany of curses directed at this "Clark Codsworth," detailing imaginative torments and violent ends.

Finally, the storm began to subside. Kyle, his chest heaving, muttered to himself,

Kyle: "Deep breaths, Kyle. Deep breaths," inhaling and exhaling slowly through his nose in a visible effort to master his fury. Jazzy, too, seemed to pull the mantle of her professionalism back around her shoulders, smoothing her pantsuit and composing her features, though a dangerous glint remained in her eyes.

Thalia: "Um," she ventured cautiously once the silence had settled, "now that you've both... calmed down a little. I take it you hate this Clark Codsworth?"

Kyle: "Hate is too nice of a word." he growled, staring at the shattered glass as if it were Codsworth's face. "He is a sentient embodiment of everything wrong with this city. He's a noble sniveling little leech that would be better for everyone if he wasn't around, a vulture who preys on the problems he helps create." He ran a hand over his face, the anger momentarily replaced by a profound, bone-deep exhaustion. "And he is the primary reason my desk is perpetually buried in paperwork, my phone never stops ringing with new crises, and why I haven't been able to spend a single goddamn evening with my family in a month!"

Jazzy: “Let me explain,” she said, her voice regaining its measured calm, though a hard edge remained beneath the surface. “I assume Kyle has given you the basic picture—that we control a significant amount of property here in the east end, both directly and indirectly. Correct?”

Thalia: “Yeah, he mentioned that,” Thalia confirmed.

Jazzy: “Well, the only reason we ‘mostly’ own the east end, and not all of it, is because of Clark Codsworth.”

Thalia’s eyes widened as the true scale of the Nighthounds’ influence finally snapped into focus. Kyle’s earlier explanation had sounded like they had a lot of holdings, but Jazzy’s wording implied something far more absolute—a near-total dominion.

Thalia: “How… how is it even possible to own that much of an entire city district?” she asked, her mind reeling at the logistics and the sheer power it represented.

Jazzy: “Hmm, perhaps Kyle didn’t explain it thoroughly,” she said, casting a sidelong glance at the Doberman mutant, who merely shrugged with his whole body, a silent admission that the finer points of their real estate empire hadn't been a priority. “We control most properties on paper. The ones we don’t legally own, we control through other means: by holding the owner’s mortgage, by being their sole source of income, or by ensuring that if they ever try to sell, we are the only permitted buyer. And then there are those so deeply loyal that their property is ours in all but the legal documents. The entire ecosystem of the east end belongs to us. The sole, stubborn, immovable exception is Clark Codsworth.”

She gestured with her chin toward the window overlooking the performance hall, where masked figures reveled in decadent anonymity.

Jazzy: “He’s a real estate mogul who lives on the opposite side of the city in a enclave of the rich and noble. We here call that area ‘the Ritz.’ A lot of the customers below are from there, slumming it for a taste of our particular brand of excess.”

Kyle: “Except you won’t find Codsworth in this place,” he added, his voice a low growl. “He’s our enemy, and he’s not stupid enough to walk into the lion’s den.”

Thalia: “And what makes him your enemy, exactly? Beyond the simple fact that he owns property you want, or is that all there is to it?”

Kyle: “It all comes back to the property,” he said, leaning forward, his earlier explosive anger now condensed into a cold, sharp intensity. “Before the Nighthounds became what we are, Codsworth was the undisputed real estate king in this city. Where we ruled the east, he owned the west. And he was the primary architect of the homelessness crisis back then. He charged extortionate rents, bled people dry, and drove them into the streets. Then, at his behest, the cops would sweep those ‘undesirables’—the people he robbed—and corral them all into the east end. That way, the rich nobles didn’t have to look at the ‘unsightly poors.’ We were his dumping ground.”

He took a sharp breath, a specific, ugly memory flashing in his eyes.

Kyle: “What truly defines the man is his sheer, bottomless lack of decency. I got a report last year about a grandmother, a sweet old bird who’d lived in one of his west-end apartments for forty years. She got sick. Dying. Missed one month’s rent because, you know, she was busy dying.”

Kyle’s knuckles were white where he gripped his knees.

Kyle: “Rather than show even a microscopic shred of human compassion and let that old lady die in peace in her own bed, Codsworth had the cops drag her out of her home. He forced them to throw a dying woman into a concrete jail cell for the crime of missing rent. She died on that cell floor, alone. Who the fuck does that?” he roared, the sound raw and pained. “I have murdered people. I have broken bones and ended lives for disrespect or for crossing a line. But even I, a ‘ruthless crime lord,’ would never have done that. Codsworth… he makes me look like a fucking saint in comparison.”

Thalia: “You’ve painted the picture of a truly vile man, but I’m still not sure I understand the full scope of your conflict. It seems like a simple territorial dispute.”

Kyle: “I’m getting to the heart of it!” he snapped, his patience frayed by the mere act of recounting the saga. “After our group first formed, we waged a territorial war against the other gangs infesting the east end. It got so intense it’s seared into the city’s memory—the locals call it the ‘Bloody Days.’ I won’t dredge up the gory details, but it ended with us merging with or burying every other gang’s leadership. We then came to a… mutually beneficial understanding with the city’s government. We became the sole syndicate controlling the east end.”

He leaned forward, his voice taking on a tone of grim pride.

Kyle: “Afterwards, we found a very creative revenue stream: exploiting the vices and perverse fascination the city’s elite have for slumming it with mutants.”

Jazzy: “Makes us a lot of money. The nobles will pay a lot to fuck a mutant and to hide that fact. Even though it is such an open secret that nobles come here to sleep with mutants at this point. But eh,” she shrugged. ”It's their money to waste.”

Kyle: “Yes, and unlike other syndicates that would hoard that wealth, our Lady Yin directed us to reinvest it. We began buying up the crumbling properties we didn’t already control and fixing them. We repaired infrastructure, made neighborhoods safe, and fostered legitimate commerce. This, in turn, brought in more money, which we used to buy and repair more, creating a self-sustaining cycle that transformed the east end from a dumping ground into what you see today—a true home, for all its misfits.”

Kyle then leaned forwards.

Kyle: “Now, this is where Codsworth re-enters the story,” he continued, his expression darkening. “A key part of our strategy involved here is keeping the rent low on the properties we own.”

Jazzy: “Kyle, you’re underselling it,” she cut in. “We have the lowest rent prices in the entire Union. And they’re expected to go lower.”

Kyle: “Yes, yes, it’s practically nothing,” he acknowledged with a wave of his hand. “We do this because of another little secret I’ll let you in on. Despite the terrifying reputation we’ve cultivated for our Nightqueen, Yin is, at her core, a bleeding heart. She grew up homeless on these very streets, and that experience forged in her a personal war on homelessness. So, we keep rents low—sometimes even free through special programs. We’ve created charities—which we also sometimes use to launder money, obviously,” he added in a conspiratorial mutter, “to help the poor and build new housing. The result is that we’ve effectively eliminated homelessness in the east end of Graheel.”

Jazzy: “And that, ironically, bought us more political power than any amount of blackmail or violence ever could. Not many politicians are eager to move against a group that is single-handedly solving a massive social crisis, even if that group engages in ‘certain enterprises.’ They’re willing to look the other way as long as we make them look good by lowering crime statistics and cleaning up the streets. Even those incredibly rare political leaders that have morals back bone don’t do jack about us.”

Kyle then shook his head.

Kyle: “But we’re getting off topic. Clark Codsworth came to us some time ago to propose a city-wide rent-fixing scheme. He didn’t like that we were building high-quality housing and charging so little for it. It was undercutting his entire business model of extortionate rent. He tried to convince us it would be ‘mutually beneficial’ to gouge our people alongside him. We told him to fuck off.”

Kyle then gritted his teeth.

Kyle: “From that day forward, he made it his life’s mission to fuck with us. He uses his capital to snipe properties we’re trying to acquire at auction and then lets them sit empty, rotting into disrepair to deliberately drive down the value of our surrounding holdings—not that we care about property values, since we’re not in it for speculative profit. When that didn’t work, he leaned on his political connections to have banks harass us, raising our credit rates and denying us loans. We had to create our own damned bank to get around that. And recently,” he finished, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper, “he’s started paying off gangs from outside the city to try and carve out a piece of our territory. I’m only just now getting that under control, which involves sending our own boys back to their home turf to merc them as a message. And that’s just the short list. The man is an asshole. He creates endless, costly problems that we have to spend our time, resources, and energy to fix, all because we refuse to help him profit from human misery.”

Thalia: “That is a… fascinating dynamic,” she said, her tone a mixture of genuine curiosity and clinical analysis. “If you don’t mind me asking, none of you seem particularly opposed to violence as a solution. So why hasn’t a more… permanent resolution been applied to Mr. Codsworth? Not that I’m advocating for it, you understand. It just seems like the most direct path, given your usual methods.”

Jazzy let out a short, humorless laugh and shook her head.

Jazzy: “Believe me, we would have turned that man into dog food a long time ago if it were an option. Unfortunately, Clark is a member of the noble class and has the full backing of his peers in the Ritz. We can’t lay a finger on him.”

Kyle: “We exist in a state of fragile equilibrium here in Graheel,” he elaborated, gesturing with both hands as if balancing scales. “There are three pillars we cannot afford to shatter, at least not directly: the University, for the knowledge and arcane power it controls; the political leadership, for the legal framework we manipulate; and the nobles of the Ritz, for their collective wealth and influence. Attacking one is like kicking a hornet’s nest—the ensuing swarm would create problems far worse than anything we’ve dealt with.”

Jazzy: “We can’t even send an assassin,” she added, a note of grudging respect in her voice for the sheer cleverness of the defense. “He’s engineered his entire life as a dead man’s switch. His estate is wired, both literally and politically. If he is murdered, his allies have standing orders and pre-packaged fake evidence to immediately pin the blame on us, triggering a unified, all-out war from the entire noble district. It wouldn’t matter who actually pulled the trigger; the retaliation would be swift and devastating. In fact, we’ve had to actively intervene to stop others from killing him.” She gave a wry, exhausted smile. “There was a noblewoman whose reputation he ruined; she was conspiring to have him poisoned. We found out and had to thwart her plot, then offer her a lifetime of complimentary services here at the Velvet Lips just to persuade her to stand down. We literally had to save the bastard’s life to protect our own.”

Kyle: “He’s a cunning snake, unlike the usual inbred, preening nobles we deal with,” he grumbled, massizing his temples. “He’s even managed to get the media to run pieces about us, decrying our ‘monopolization’ of city property. The hypocrisy is staggering—as if he doesn’t own half the west! The only difference is we don’t throw grandmothers into the street,” he said, forcing a deep breath to center himself. “Jazzy. What have you heard about him recently? What’s this confirmed intel?”

Jazzy: “Clark Codsworth is hosting a party. A very exclusive, private gathering for his closest allies. He announced it just this week. And that is the potential connection to your friend here.” She gestured toward Thalia. “The timing fits the window you gave me. Furthermore, Codsworth is morally bankrupt enough to be involved in kidnapping without a second thought, though why he would be connected to your clowns, I have no idea. It is, at this stage, merely an educated guess born of timing and his capacity for corruption.”

Kyle: “Well, regardless of whether it’s connected to Thalia’s group, a gathering of our chief enemy and his allies is something we need eyes on,” he said, his mind already shifting to logistics. “We’ll have to send our very best infiltrators. It will be a nightmare—Clark is notoriously paranoid and excellent at information security.”

Jazzy: “That’s a solid plan. I was a little worried you were going to suggest infiltrating the party yourself,” Jazzy said, a note of genuine relief in her voice.

Kyle snorted.

Kyle: “Are you nuts? There’s no hiding who I am. He’d see me coming a mile away. I’d stick out like a sore thumb in that den of peacocks.” He turned to Thalia, his expression shifting from internal strategy to a shared mission. “We’ll leave the party to our specialists. Meanwhile, you and I will look into what’s happening in the south end. It’s a lead we can pursue directly. Okay, Thalia?”

Thalia met his gaze and gave a firm, decisive nod.

Thalia: “Okay. The south end it is.”