The rumors had reached my ears near the end of my visit back home - faint whispers at most, careful and quiet, the speakers trying to avoid attention. But I had long been trained in following the soft trails of rumors, tracking back along hints of activity. At first I had discarded the rumors as nothing more than that, mere gossip, but the more I looked into the situation, the more I confirmed them. The more an aching anger formed in the back of my mind, a burning need to know more surging through my veins. Through the cities I moved, following the trail of hearsay and back door conversations.
There had long been a criminal organization operating in Alerar. I had dealt with them in the past, in fact - often ending up in Hunts against members of their group that had drawn attention enough to warrant more than just city guards taking an interest in them. Every so often they would rear their heads up, thinking that the lash against them would have died down. It had been a long while though, since I had heard of them engaging in this particular kind of activity though - for good reason, and as my angry suspicion was confirmed I was already planning on introducing the insides of everyone involved in this sick scheme to the air.
Child kidnapping. In the dark of the night, in blind alleys or in busy streets - children were vanishing from under the watchful eye of their families. If you were not consistently attentive to where your child was, there was a worrying chance that they would be taken. It was a slow process - never more than a few a month, but in my opinion that was already far too frequent. I dug deeper, tracking down city statistics and I found a nasty picture painted.
It didn't start recently. In the transcripts of a census in one of the larger cities, I found a terrible piece of information. Orphans, the children on the streets - they had been disappearing for far longer. My knuckles turned a dark blue-black as my fist clenched while I read through these documents, furious at the callous disregard the papers showed. For months, over a year even, youths had been going missing, there one day and gone the next. It only seemed to cause a concern, raise hackles in the public eye - to the limited extent that it had - when children of families had been taken from their homes.
I had no way of knowing, for sure, how many children had been taken by this group. So I set to tracking them down, hunting through the records of their activity. Slowly, patiently, I narrowed down their region of activity, following the trails of rumors to places where children had gone missing. Until I had trimmed away the possibilities, leaving only one of the larger cities as where their base of operations could be. Saw-Spear strapped beneath my coat, and protective attire firmly in place against the thick smog of the city, I made my way to one of the local bars.
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“I tell you, we need to figure out how to increase the pressure! The manifold can handle a lot more than we’re putting into the system! Barkeep, another, please!†I stared, eyebrow raised, as a drow who was apparently an engineer called out loudly, demanding alcohol. I was becoming unwillingly impressed by his tolerance - the man had in just the time I had been in here, put down more than ten full mugs of beer - and he had been here far longer than I had. He had drawn the attention of those around him - and lost it, as he seemed to be just a scholar drinking himself to unconsciousness.
But I kept my eyes on him, fingers of one gloved hand drumming against the table. I had a simple reason - as I was coming in, he had looked at me and frozen for a moment, his eyes on the small badge sewn into my collar. Most people these days overlooked the Huntsman emblem - the group had fallen out of the public eye some time ago. These days, only Huntsmen were aware of it. Huntsmen, and those who dealt with us in the past. There was no matching emblem on this man, which narrowed down the options considerably. So, he was a criminal then, one who had had a run in with a Huntsman in the past.
He was obviously putting on this show for me - though he was doing a good job in not looking at me too much. Still, it was too late for that, and he had my focus. I spent my time watching the rest of the bar - just because I had one possible lead on this child kidnapping ring didn't mean he was the only option. Hopefully, not being the full recipient of my attention would also put my first target at ease.