So we quickly interrogated the brigands we captured before the city guard arrived, determining that they were merely mercenaries paid to grab [[farne:actors:hilda_madrigal|Hilda]]. They didn't know or care why, but at least provided the name of the guy who hired them, some guy named Mr. Larkis. The city guard eventually showed up to take the would-be kidnappers away, and after they finished asking us questions and left, I stayed behind to watch over Hilda while the others went to check out the place that Swiftwind tracked the last merc to. 

[[farne:protagonists:trent:index|Trent's]] bird pointed the building out to him, an upscale inn/club known as [[farne:locations:dragoth_s_hunt_club|Dragoth's Hunt Club]]. After the others (with the help of some city guardsmen) spoke with the proprietor, Dragoth, he allowed us to interrogate one of his employees, Jean-Pierre, who worked in the kitchen and could possibly have been in contact with the last kidnapper. So the next morning, when Jean-Pierre came in for his shift, we questioned him. I had used my time magicks to view the kitchen the night before, where I saw Jean-Pierre speak with the mercenary and hand him a key to who knows where, wherein he rode a horse out of the city. Armed with this info, and with [[farne:protagonists:cassie:index|Cass]] monitoring Jean Pierre's mental state and surface thoughts, we confronted Jean Pierre, who caved pretty quickly. He actually didn't tell us any more than the mercs we captured, just that they were working for Mr. Larkis. Dragoth, upon hearing this, was quite angry. He informed us Mr. Larkis was a regular customer of his, but like the guys we questioned, he expected us to know who he was. 

Apparently Larkis was some minor crime lord who fancied himself quite the playboy. But only because Dragoth's high priced call girls made him think so. Oh yeah, Dragoth's club was a high class brothel. Apologetic for his employee's behavior, he would allow us to work on Larkis, and paid us quite nicely to keep things discreet and make sure none of this blew back on him. So that night, Dragoth lent us some finery so we could blend in with the club's usual patronage, and I sat in on a card game with Larkis. He was a weaselly looking guy with a freaky laugh, but Dragoth's ladies made him think he was hot shit in a champagne glass so he would be quite loose with his money when it came to ordering food and drink and other amenities. Heh, I used my magic to give me an advantage, though I prolly didn't need it, as Trent used his own magic to get Larkis quite inebriated. In the end, I scammed five thousand gold off him, but since Dragoth fronted me a thousand gold to play, I had to pay that back, and I also kicked back another five hundred to him out of respect. 

So it was already a good deal, even if we hadn't gotten all that information out of him. He apparently was a slave trader, and upon hearing that, any reservations we had about taking this guy down were gone. We had been unsure on how we were going to handle this, we didn't want to rock the boat too much and bring heat down on ourselves and Dragoth. But given our own experiences, we decided shutting Larkis down was worth the risk. But yeah, he had actually kidnapped dozens of girls alredy, and it wasn't random, he was given specific names of girls to grab. He quickly discovered a unifying trait amongst all of them, that they were all well-off redheads. He didn't ask why, he just took the money and did what he was paid to do. He had just sent off a shipment of girls, but had a couple more in a safehouse somewhere. We were determined to rescue the girls.

Using the information we gathered, we did some research to try and find his holdings to figure out where the girls might be. We found them at one of his warehouses by the docks. Trent and I had snuck into it and checked it out, discovering a hidden room within. We sensed three people inside, two of whom were quite distressed. We guessed they were the kidnapped girls, but to get into the room, we had to crawl through a tight passage which would negate any chance at surprise. I went back outside to meet up with Cass and [[farne:protagonists:grey:index|Grey]], and we gathered around the outer wall of the hidden room. Grey made the wall as malleable as putty and tore a hole in it. I quickly ran in and cut the guard in half, but despite my speed I wasn't fast enough to stop him from raising a cry of alarm. Trent warned us more guards were coming and tried to hold them off, but there were too many of them for him to handle alone. Grey and I rushed through the opening while Cass freed the girls, and together we made short work of the guards.

We escaped with the girls and got them cleaned up. The older one was Jan Rallisa, 24, the daughter of a wealthy merchant prince, and the younger was a sixteen year old named Sina Falric. She was the daughter of a judge, and we took the girls back to him to inform him of what was going on and ask how we wanted to proceed. He deputized us and tasked us with bringing down Larkis. If we could find proof linking him to the kidnappings, we were authorized to arrest him. Using my winnings, I bought some new finery and was hoping to meet up with him at Dragoth's club. But I guess all our efforts against him freaked him out and he was trying to figure out how to handle these setbacks. We decided to check out his mansion (which Swiftwind had followed him to the previous night), with Cass passing herself off as a gift girl from Dragoth, sent because Dragoth was saddened he hadn't shown up that night. The rest of us snuck in, and after, Cass and Grey found all the secret cubbies within the house. Cass searched the one in the library, which were just some family jewels, and Grey discovered the one in the kitchen contained the deeds to Larkis' secret holdings. The one we needed, the one containing the transactions proving he sold the girls was of course in his bedroom. We managed to get upstairs without alerting the scribe in one of the upstairs rooms, but there ended up being an actual Dragoth hooker in there. She was quite drunk already, but Trent kept her out of it so we could get into the safe.

He awakened the safe's spirit and ordered it to open. Contained within was the ledger, but we saw it was trapped with some sort of forces-aspected runes. We got Grey up there, and he dispelled the trap, and then I weaved some threads into it so I would be able to find it later in case he moved it. After replacing it, we successfully snuck out, intending to show up later to "discover" the ledger and arrest him.