It'd be a big deal if Lawry can simply turn off any magical effect by yelling at it, with far reaching consequences for all of society if Lawry had a mind to truly use the ability. Society would therefore be in a great deal of danger if Lawry's number one priority wasn't to completely disengage with everything it touches forever.
The party has become so well noticed by the city's higher-ups, that those higher-ups are beginning to wonder, with some agitation, why they keep hearing about a small group of guys who, prior to just this year, were completely beneath the notice of even the local guard. The unfortunate part about rising very fast and very independently is that you have no way to know what anyone else is thinking about it.
With his friends in bad shape, the only one left to get around is Paul, who's got quite a few feelings and concerns about recent developments. A lot of major players throughout the city have also developed some concerning opinions and feelings on Paul as well, and the heat is turning up.
The part has dragged one of the city's largest players into the fray! However, a big player doesn't like being called on to make small plays, so the party is forced to bet all their chips all at once on an unsure thing, and the results of that bet will mean their lives.
When you're surrounded by mystery and intrigue, the quickest way to cut to the heart of the matter is to walk up to the whatever organization it is that's making the trouble and then deman to speak to the manager. This is basic intelligence knowledge, all the world's best espionage operatives do it.
Extracting information from captive colleagues can be a complicated process, but the whole thing gets a lot easier when they aren't paid nearly enough to put up with this kind of trauma.
A lawyer is a great way to stay out of trouble with the law, unless that lawyer is hiring you specifically to do crimes. In that case, you should really consider getting a second, less illegal lawyer.
Cheri Deckard is a professional, but she's also fundamentally self-employed and lacking in any specific industry standards. It's good thing for the party, however, because a lack of standards is the only plausible way they'll be hired to do anything!
There's nothing like a pizza to get someone to admit that they're following in an unsettling and yet legal fashion. And while using a pizza as a weapon is likely a form of battery and is illegal, it's the type of thing the police tend not to want to deal with.
Once you've angered the wrong people, sometimes just talking a walk out of the hosue can attract the wrong sorts of attention. Naturally, the one weakness of that is the right sort of attention!
Elvis returns home to visit his family, and while they aren't exactly the shining definition of helpful, they do have a certain amount of knowledge about the upper echelongs of society and plenty of opinions about them.
There are a few ways out of jail. Sometimes, just doing nothing at all is the fastest way out, provided you can afford a good lawyer to figure it out for you. However, in a society with rules that aren't as well put together, sometimes a few greasy palms in the right places can make a very sudden difference.
The trick to any successful plan is to ensure that it has the fewest possible number of steps. Or, failing at that initial step of good planning, to simply have the time to repeat the plan as many times as necessary to get it right. Where it comes to a rumor mill, eventually something will figure itself out. Where it comes to breaking and entering, well, there aren't a lot of chances for a do-over.
Rutherford promises everything can be cleared up within a mere twenty-four hours. There may be a lesson here about things that sound to good to be true, but in this case, the lesson might be unfairly harsh to Rutherford.
What you want is rarely what you get, especially when it comes to experiments. Unfortunately, this was bound the be the only result Rutherford was liable to get, although there were worse possibilities! There weren't many worse possibilities, but there were some.
Not everyone knows about the most important cultural staples of Dungeon City. In particular, Gerald the Dog, a comic character who as it turns out has quite a lot in common with magic and the idea of the city itself.
Rutherford has a proposal for the team, but unfortunately he's a bit more familiar with dealmaking than our heroes. To start with, they're already willing to work for free! Or just on promises, which is a flaw a lot of adventurers need to learn to drop early on if they'd like to live for long.
If money attracts anything, it's bureaucracy, and the Adventuring Guild has that in spades. There's rules, regulations, fees, and a wait list to get in to the dungeon. And as these systems always exist, there are always temptations to work outside them to save time and money.
There's nothing quite like a religious organization to get you questioning everything you know about life. Or is that not how it's supposed to work? In Paul's case, it's a source of stability and existential furstration.
Dungeons are thought by some to be a very controlled experience where small, discreet units of bad guys assemble to be slaughtered wholesale. But in the event you ever found yourself in a dungeon where every creature in it decided to kill you, without waiting for you to arrive in their isolated room, you'd be better off staying at home.
Lawry resovles to take Elvis into a dungeon, but the whole process is ridden with bureaucracy and red tape. That means the only way is to go in unofficially, and to get a black market sample of the experience.
Dungeon City is a place where you barely scrape by if you're willing to go underground and bonk skeletons with a hammer. More of them will appear later, and they carry iron weapons, which can be sold as scrap. What this life attracts most are people who believe they're going to rise above the odds and be more than a skeleton scraper, and this is the story of some of those people!
It's the final showdown! But what needs to happen? Who lives, who dies? Some questions are a bit too big for simple men, and when it comes to issues of infinity and the great void, there are no clear answers.
The most threatening stories involve a little bit of ambiguity. When something can be anything, there's the possibility it's the worst possible thing. On the other hand, it might be the best possible thing. You wouldn't know until it's too late!
With the bait set and trap laid, all our team has to do is return home! It's as as simple as that, and everything would work itself out once Bingle chases behind. Or it would be, but the Dark Nation has been through some changes while our heroes were away.
They say a leopard can't change its spots, but the upside to this being the truth with certain people is that you predict how they'll react to some things. They'll behave like leopards, for example.
Zubo and Ibo, as it turns out, are theater fools in a somewhat desperate situation. However, just they're desperate, doesn't mean they're stupid, and the theater fool is often more clever than the men they interact with - or else they'd never survive their foolery!
The team should have seen Elvis's rampage coming. A guy who stays so happy lucky on a mission of kidnapping and deception can't be all there in the head, but what's done is done. Even better, Paul comes up with a better idea - one that doesn't need Bingle to be anyone's friend!
Elvis is not ready to let his current disguise go, but to make something of it, he is willing to go rather extreme lengths while dragging his compatriots helplessly behind.
The very universe seems set against the party in their goals of kidnapping Bingle, but on the upside at least they have funding and, normally, a lot of success with disguises!
