The Bad Penny

The party was led into the backroom of the Bad Penny, a small taproom in the mid-level towers of Sharn. The front room was filled with the usual assortment of middling merchants and tradesmen while the backroom held in unlikely triumvirate of people. Three figures were seated around a large table, eyeing the group like butchers appraising livestock.

The half-elf in the middle had the looks of one knowing her business. The House Lyrandar tattoo gracing the side of her cheek and neck only proved it. To her right sat a dour looking dwarf and to her left a fidgety gnome. As the party would soon learn, they were in the presence of representatives from three of the Dragonmarked Houses. Mervin d'Kundarak, the dwarf, represented the city's and his family's banking interests. Elsa d'Lyrandar was the chief factor of Lyrandar's shipping operations in the city. The last figure, the gnome Romeo Goldpurse, represented House Sivis as one of its chief scribes and investigators.

Without much in the way of introduction, Elsa slid a piece of parchment across the table, asking if the party was familiar with House script. Acknowledging that they were, she then asked if they noticed anything peculiar about the script in front of them. Waylander suspected it may have been a forgery, a conclusion the others agreed to after some discussion. If only it were so easy.

The script was actually part of a cargo that vanished along with the Siren's Song. The ship, under contract to House Lyrandar, was transporting supplies and funds to a Margrave University expedition on the northwest coast of Xendrik. It never arrived. And yet, script issued by House Kundarak, secured and authenticated by House Sivis, transported by House Lyrandar appears suddenly in the Cliffside neighborhood in the grubby mitts of a known thief Heinrich Yost.

The party was tasked with finding Yost and learning how the script came to be in his possession. Despite representing three Dragonmarked Houses, the trio agreed it would be best to seek out independent contractors to solve this riddle. Suspicions were aroused that the loss of a Lyrandar airship was no chance disaster. Somewhere within their organizations, someone was leaking sensitive information. Better to have outsiders, persons with no ties to these great Houses, search out the truth.

Thanks to Elis' offering of medical advice among the downtrodden of Cliffside, the group was able to identify one of Yost's hangouts within a couple of hours. The Golden Goose, despite its name, had very little of its golden lustre remaining. A shabby structure held up by inertia and fastened together by despair and filth, it looked the part of a pirate hangout. Some spreading around of gold, a cup of fresh-squeezed crab juice later ("Who drinks crab juice?" Elis asked. "They were out of shark," Bris replied.) and the location of Yost's hangout was uncovered. Apparently he ran with the Wharf Rats gang.

As it turned out, the name was more than appropriate. In dire rat form the Wharf rats would swim out to vessels approaching the harbor. Then, under cover of darkness, they would plunder the choicest loot before the land-based thieves could do so. The party spent time gambling with the unlikely named Elis the thief and Waylander actually came out ahead in the endeavor. Around midnight they spotted their quarry.

Yost was trundling back in with a large sea chest, aided by one of his fellows, and headed for the upper level of the Wharf Rats undercity lair. Bold as brass the adventurers followed him up, encountering his companion in the process of examining the stolen loot. While Elis had the man-rat nearly convinced of the group's legitimacy, it all fell apart soon after Waylander tried to muscle his way through a locked door. Luckily the battlemage was just as quick to unleash magical darts of death that struck down the wererat before he could alert his fellows.

They found the key to the door on the dead thief and proceed into a back room. It, in turn, lead to a ladder and hatch in the ceiling. Boldly going where no man ought to go head first, Waylander found himself on the receiving end of a sahuagin's poisoned spear. It appeared that he had barged in on negotiations between Yost and his sahuagin chieftain ally Zilzbek. Clinging to the ladder, Waylander tried to fight off the attackers but succeeded mainly in preventing the ascension of his compatriots. Fortunately Bris was able to fire a deadly bolt up the hatch and strike Zizlbek a near mortal blow. This afforded Waylander the chance to dash into the room. Unfortunately, it also enabled the wererat captain and sahuagin chief to attack him mercilessly.

This too proved fortuitous as then Elis and Bris entered the fray, free from assault as they climbed up. In short order the sahuagin was dispatched and, despite regenerating from some of his wounds, Yost was also compelled to surrender. In questioning the wererat captain, the party learned that Yost had purchased the script from Zilzbek. The sahuagin, he said, were working with a group of wreckers near Gull Rock, a small fishing community across the Dagger River and to the west.

Yost proclaimed that he knew nothing about the origin of the script, knowing only that it had great value if it could be cashed in. If the party sought more answers, they would need to head to Gull Rock to find out more. Though Waylander wanted to simply kill Yost then and there, Elis suggested they might be able to get a bounty from their sponsors if they kept him alive. Likewise, using Yost as a hostage might also enable them to get out of the Wharf Rats lair unhindered.

Honor among thieves is a sentiment that holds as much water as a net, the party discovered. Elis concocted a plan to attach two bottles of Alchemist's Ice around Yost's neck. the clinking bottles would force the man to be slow and careful, preventing a dash for freedom, he explained. In theory it was a good plan. In practice, Waylander might as well have killed Yost upstairs. Elis' hands were not as steady as they could have been, setting off the delicate ice bombs with himself and Yost's head at ground zero.

With the former captain now dead, the Wharf rats set about plundering their former chief's possessions. This enabled the party to escape, clutching Yost's frozen and severed head. They returned to the Bad Penny only to discover that the three patrons were gone, a function perhaps of it being in the middle of the night. their gnome guide Rumley, however, was still there. He encouraged the group to rest in the rooms the patrons had secured and to meet with them in the morning if they had anything to report. Elis decided it might be safer to stay at the temple of Dol, Dorn but vowed to return in the morning. Believing in the good nature of their patrons and likely lacking the options a cleric of Dol Dorn could avail himself of, Bris and Waylander headed to their rooms to rest and recover from their ordeal.