TIME June 30th LOCATION The Orphanage, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
A drowned boy with an unexplained glass object, ligature marks, and a missing six-year-old – Caleb, placed in an orphanage for his own good and gone within a night of arriving. The jewellers had no answers. The orphanage seemed the obvious next stop.
WHAT HAPPENED
Back at the House, the Agents field-tested Rhabbatt’s new Revival Paddle before following up with Sam in the morgue. Her verdict on the Corpse Fisher boy: no Twitch in his system, but a clean positive for something called Bumblebee.
Chrisjen at the orphanage handed over a list without much prompting – three children missing inside a month. Andre, eight, stocky, scarred and dark-haired, gone the 3rd. Janice, seven, thin and blond, gone the 5th. And Caleb. The dinner bell went off mid-conversation and the hallway dissolved into a stampede of children heading for the dining hall.
Caleb’s room was spartan and locked from the outside, but the window was open – and showed the marks of a lockpick on both the door and the frame. A twenty-foot drop waited below it. Chrisjen mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that Caleb had been frightened of a large dog-headed creature in the days before he vanished – something that wanted, in his words, to take his breath. Looking down from the window, Raven spotted a familiar shape being thrown bodily out of the tavern across the street: Ferret, unconscious before he even hit the cobbles.
They ran him down, manacled him, and hauled him back to the orphanage to clean up and talk. Raven helped herself to his coin, his knife, and a ring she insisted he’d stolen from her, and offered him his freedom for anything useful. He gave them plenty: a large, foul-smelling creature had dropped from the second floor around half past ten the night before, something slung over its shoulder in a sack. It bolted for an alley, vanished into the shadows, and left behind the unmistakable screech of a sewer grate being forced. Ferret showed them the grate himself before they let him go – and he wasted no time putting distance between them.
It took all three of them to shift the grating. Krusha lit Crowe’s armour and he went down first into a stinking cesspit tunnel, the others close behind, following the current downstream. At a fork, Krusha was certain something had passed this way recently. A hundred and fifty feet on, the tunnel ahead filled with the sound – and then the sight – of hundreds of rats moving as one. They chose the wiser option, retreated, and dragged the grate shut behind them.
Brin, briefed on the drowned boy’s bauble, thought it might be worth chasing as a lead. Jimmy Gibbs, paid off at his bazaar stall, agreed to dig up a source of Bumblebee – a day, at least, he reckoned. A trip to the council buildings for sewer maps turned up thin records and a pointer toward Chuza Collections, the outfit that actually maintained the tunnels.
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Andre and Janice – two more missing children, alongside Caleb.
- The Corpse Fisher boy tested positive for Bumblebee, not Twitch.
- A dog-headed creature, seen carrying a sack, vanished into the sewers near the orphanage.