The Kensington Klub sits on the northeast side, close enough to the docks to hear them and far enough from the smell to matter – a converted brick mercantile exchange, a flight of steps up from the pavement, oak doors, a bronze plaque with nothing on it but the name. What used to be the traders’ pit is now a single vast hall under a forty-foot ceiling, wood-panelled, chandeliered, its bars stocked with drinks nobody in Jewellers Row could afford. The clientele runs to old money and older secrets, and the Klub’s reputation for staging theatrical “special guest” scenarios – the kind that draw a fine for owner Kensington Smythe every time, and an invitation every time after – is precisely why nobody thought twice when this month’s theme turned out to be Jouvaine archaeology.
The exhibit built for it was still visibly in progress the night everything went wrong: mock sarcophagi, crates of fossils, a dais of jewellery and bone, and a centrepiece the display plaque badly undersold – the Bay of Chuza Bead, a marbled, silver-mirrored sphere “always cold to the touch,” netted from the bay by a crew who had no idea what they’d actually pulled up.
FILE NOTES
It was Raven, walking off an unrelated bad afternoon next door at Lyall the jeweller’s, who noticed the thin red line seeping out from under the Klub’s front doors. The bouncer swore up and down it was paint, the place was “redecorating,” and offered a little too readily to fetch his boss. Forcing the door cost her a knife across the shoulder and revealed two dead Nesterook Reaver guards in the foyer, and past them, a hall full of Chuza’s wealthiest patrons and staff held hostage by armed figures who were very clearly not hotel security.
The chief concierge, Phillips, was the first sacrifice – killed for arguing, his Les Clefs d’Or badge (the mark of the Golden Key Hotel Concierges, a network with a reach and self-regard rivalling any gang in the city) doubling as the key to the Klub’s own hidden lockdown winches. What followed was a straight ultimatum from a githyanki calling herself Niizeg T’ai: hand over the elf woman who’d fallen from the sky, and the sword she’d taken with her, by noon, or the hostages started dying. She let one go to make the point, checked the hall’s own clock, and vanished back into the dark with her soldiers.
Outnumbered and with a room full of hostages between them and a fight they weren’t ready for, the Agents pulled back rather than force it – carrying the deadline straight back to the Section House instead. What actually happened when noon came is not yet part of this file.
“I am a representative of the T’ai clan. I have a proposition – if you will wait.”
Niizeg T’ai, from somewhere in the dark
STATUS: Filed under Locations. Under hostile occupation as of the last confirmed report – see Varan for who the T’ai clan actually wants, and Grimlocks for the closest thing Section 18 has to an explanation of quintessence, the substance the Bay of Chuza Bead is apparently made of.