15: Another Crate

You had been rescued from the island by one of the many boats that had come by to see what had caused the troubled sea and the pieces of wreckage. You had retrieved your horses and managed to sell them. And Morrslieb grew faint in the sky again.

You bought Egg a dog and enrolled her at the Red Maids of Verena school and paid fifty guilders for her first term’s schooling. She had lost Mr. Whiffle and Molly and you were pretty sure that her powers were no longer in effect, so you hoped she might have a relatively normal upbringing.

You now had a decent amount of cash. Kris had spent some of his on a first class mariner’s warrant, and was able to get a decent job on a ship bound for Tilea. The rest of you moved back into Frau Koester’s.

Max wrote a letter to Altdorf Engineering College asking for a reference so that he might join the engineers guild in Marienburg. He hasn’t got a reply, yet. Max said that if the reference didn’t come through then maybe he could do some pro bono work for the head of the guild, instead.

Wellentag 7^th Sigmarzeit

Then, after a few weeks where not much happened, except you did a few small jobs for Johan Rotter, Max and Heinrich were drinking at the Hangman and a purple robed wizard type came in and asked for Rotter. He handed Rotter a letter and after a brief char Rotter introduced him to you. He was Dietrich Flemen from Altdorf, and he looked like a mopey teen death wizard.

Dietrich had been sent to accompany the crate by a magister at the Amethyst College, Sepulchrius, and had been given a letter addressed to Johan Rotter at the Hangman Inn.

You immediately got into an argument about whether Altdorf or Marienburg was the best. And Max warned Dietrich that he shouldn’t be so loud about it because Marienburgers were proud of their independence.

Rotter requested that you help Dietrich move the crate he had just delivered to a warehouse and then guard it until he could find its owner. And he said he would pay you eight shillings a shift. This seemed pretty simple until you saw that the crate was massive, about nine foot by five foot, and extremely heavy.

In the end, Rotter paid a nearby gang of stevedores to move the crate to the warehouse and you moved in to guard it. You spent much of the night, telling Dietrich all about your adventures in the Wasteland, but he didn’t believe many of your stories, anyway. And then you heard a crash coming from the other crates and went to investigate.

You could see that one of the crates had fallen from its place and it had been eaten through and some of its contents, Fromage de Paravonais Royale, gnawed on. And there were rat droppings about. You managed to trace the rat route to a nearby broken paving. And you could see that the slab was easy enough to move, and so you did. And below the paving you could see some water. You decided to just replace the paving, block off the hole, and pile some crates on top of it. Then you found an undamaged cheese and ate it. And you decided that two of you staying awake while the third got some rest was a decent enough way to guard the warehouse.

Aubentag 8^th Sigmarzeit

In the morning there was a knock on the door, and it was someone called Johannes Jaeger, who said he was there on behalf of Arno Cloos who owned the crate. And Dietrich quickly got into an argument with him about politics. You weren’t convinced that Jaeger was legit and although he threatened you, Heinrich stood up to him and he went away again.

A coupe of hours later a larger retinue turned up with Jaeger, Cloos, and two bodyguards. They all looked a bit hardened and weather worn, and you thought maybe Cloos looked a bit ill. They said they had been away for a few years. And with them was Cloos’ partner, Ofra, who looked a lot younger than him and looked very exotic, and you decided she was Arabyan or something like that.

And Rotter turned up to explain that Cloos was indeed the intended recipient of the crate. And so Jaeger got to work on it with his crowbar, and he gradually demolished the crate, revealing a large stone sarcophagus with lots of carvings and marking on, which Dietrich recognised as Arabyan, or Nehekharan, or similar.

As more of the crate was revealed Cloos got increasingly excited and said that he believed that this was the genuine second half of the pair that they’d been after for so long. And he explained that the cartouche said Ofra, which you realised was the same name as his partner.

You told Rotter about the rats and the moveable paving slab and recommended he get the rat-catchers in. He explained that this was a legitimate smuggling route into the warehouse. He said that there was a network of canals under the island that linked many of the warehouses and it made a good secret exit. But he warned that if you see anyone down there that you should just ignore them and they would ignore you.

A few hours later another bloke turned up. He had two bodyguards with him and he had the same sort of look about him as Cloos and his men. He told you that the crate belonged to him and not Cloos, and he would get it, and you wouldn’t be able to stop him. Then he flounced off.

You told Rotter about this and he said he had been ordered to get the crate to Cloos and Drexol who were partners, and he didn’t think it mattered which of them he contacted. He didn’t know they had fallen out.

Dietrich zoned into the magical energies of the casket and could perceive his familiar purple magic but it was mixed with a darker magic also. He said he would cast a spell on the sarcophagus that would warn him if it had been booby-trapped or something, but he didn’t seem to be able to.

So that night, you guarded the warehouse, and in the small hours while Dietrich was on watch there was a great crashing at the front door. Dieter hid behind a crate as the door shattered and in lumbered a bulky human form wrapped in bandages.

You were all quickly up to confront the thing, but it mostly ignored you and pushed the lid of the sarcophagus off, which crashed to the floor and broke. Heinrich managed to get a good hit on it but his sword thrust just seemed to get bogged down by the bandages. Dietrich tried to cast a spell to dazzle the creature but he couldn’t manage that, either. And Max fired his pistol but missed.

The creature shoved Dietrich away and flung him across the floor with such force that you thought he was dead. But, as fate would have it, he had just been knocked unconscious. Then as Heinrich tried another attack, and Max reloaded his pistol, the creature scooped a similar looking creature up from inside the sarcophagus and made its way out of the warehouse. You attacked it as it went but your attacks had little effect as the creature strode away carrying its bundle and disappeared into the night.