AGENTS OF CHUZA — SECTION 18

USE OF FORCE REPORT

A. Incident Information

Date N/A

Time Night, continuing

Location Below decks, the Sunset Ray

Incident Number 100019

TYPE OF INCIDENT

☒ Crime in progress☐ Domestic☐ Mental health☐ Vehicle stop☐ Suspicious person☐ Animal stop☐ Other dispute

B. Reporting Officer

Name CROWE	Badge No 219	On Duty ☒	Uniform ☐
Rank OFFICER	Assigned Duty RESCUE OPERATION	☒ Injured ☐ Killed

TIME Night, continuing
LOCATION Below decks, the Sunset Ray

BACKGROUND:

With the main deck cleared and Diplomat Anatoli found bound in the aft cabin, the Agents pushed into the ship’s hull – Crowe cutting down a fiendish spider conjured at Raven’s back, a Vessentaag in bulky hide armour wailing a single word over and over from the doorway ahead: Vessentaag!

WHAT HAPPENED

Hawke pushed further down the corridor and met a second zombie in a doorway to the right. A wolf, summoned from nowhere, lunged at Raven; she cut it down in two strokes without much trouble. The Vessentaag priest – Henri, as it turned out – threw a ball of flame at Hawke, and then loosed a searing bolt of light of his own before falling back to hold the doorway.

“Ahh, the Druzhina have arrived. It seems Captain Brin does not hold the hostage lives in high regard. Do you?”

Henri, thumping his scythe against the ceiling

Deafened by a thunderstone and shouting all the louder for it, Anatoli made his own position plain to anyone in earshot:

“I will not take part in this act of terrorism. These riots and hate campaigns are born out of mistrust and misunderstanding. No good will come of this.”

It didn’t win him any sympathy from his captors – one of the Vessentaag holding him had rather less patience for a countryman who’d spent so long “mixing with the Empire” that he seemed to have forgotten which side he was born on. Crowe tried to slip past the fighting to flank the guard still holding Anatoli, and paid for it – battered by the zombie and then caught by a scythe on his way through – before finally getting into position behind the Vessentaag. Hawke pushed into the room after him, the zombie close behind, and struck at the guard holding the diplomat, narrowly missing Anatoli himself in the process. Raven closed on the zombie as a magical scythe followed Crowe down the corridor of its own accord. Crowe took the flanking shot on the guard – a clean sneak attack – and dropped him where he stood.

Hawke and Henri traded blows in earnest now, Hawke landing a hard run of hits while Raven finished off the zombie behind her. Henri, furious at the beating he was taking, called out to something called Krell to ‘smite this Dhruzina worm’ – and the scythe came down true this time.

Hawke went down.

Crowe held his position rather than break to help while Hawke bled out on the deck – there wasn’t a clean way to reach him. Henri stepped into the corridor and called Krell’s power down on Raven next, lacerating wounds opening across her without a blade ever touching her. Crowe moved to flank him in the corridor. Badly hurt now himself, Henri retreated into the berth doorway where Kharsden was being held and called on Krell one more time – enough healing to keep him standing for exactly one more round. It wasn’t enough. Raven landed the blow that broke him, and Crowe finished it.

There was no bringing Hawke back. Not there, not then.

Crowe worked his way up the corridor, unlocking berth doors with his toolkit as he went – passengers still manacled inside each one, shaken but alive. Raven searched the aft room and found a trapdoor, a crate with two spare manacles, and a small casket. She lifted it just far enough to hear something inside clunk against the sides, thought better of finding out what, and set it straight back down.

The rescue boat arrived alongside soon after, rocking the whole ship as it pulled up. Volok and Dawson were first aboard – Volok already shouting obscenities about what he intended to do to the Vessentaag – and Crowe met them in the corridor with the one piece of good news going: the passengers were safe.

Raven took the keys off Henri’s body and was about to head for the aft room when Dawson stopped her, sniffing at the air, certain there was powerful magic close by.

It was the casket. Crowe checked it over for traps and found nothing, and Dawson’s reading of it once it was up on the table was unsettling – some kind of electrical or lightning ward on the outside, and something considerably more dangerous underneath, possibly fire. It clunked again while he was still talking. The Agents made the only call that seemed sane at that point and heaved it straight over the side.

Below, through the trapdoor Raven had found earlier, a sunrod dropped into the bilge turned up nothing more sinister than ballast rock and a great many rats. The passengers were ferried across to the rescue boat, and the Sunset Ray was cut loose for the harbour just as an explosion went off underwater, more or less exactly where the casket had gone in.

 

Back at the impromptu meeting room in a warehouse by the docks, Brin took the news of Hawke’s death hard. A cleric of KemerLexi arrived and worked what recovery he could out of Hawke’s own wand. Brin, characteristically, was already looking ahead – the one-foot cubes recovered from the Sunset Ray’s deck had his attention, and he had Volok quarantine the ship and bring one in for a look. Crowe checked it for traps, found none, and opened the three locking hasps. Inside: a thin layer of ice, slush pooled at the bottom of an otherwise empty box.

F. Report Log (continued)

Total Incidents 14

Date N/A

Incident No	Time	Location	Call Type	DispA
2001904	00:20	Sunset Ray, Below Decks	Hostile Contact	Crowe/Hawke/Raven
2001905	00:35	Sunset Ray, Below Decks	Officer Fatality — Hawke	Crowe/Raven
2001906	01:10	Sunset Ray, Below Decks	Hostages Recovered	Crowe/Raven

REPORTER INFORMATION

Individual Submitting Report [Print Name] CROWE

Signature

Date Report Completed

FOR OFFICE USE ONLY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EXTRAS.

OPEN THREADS

• Hawke – killed by Henri’s scythe below decks on the Sunset Ray. Section House ceremony pending.
• The one-foot cube boxes – ice/slush inside, purpose unknown. Four more remain quarantined with Volok.
• What was in the casket thrown overboard, and what set it off once it hit the water?
• Who is Kharsden, held prisoner in the same berth Henri made his last stand defending?