Not Today, Death!

"Yes, a reduced fee. You could try to sell them, of course, if the items had any market value. But then I'd have to hire assassins to find you which would be expensive for me and of course fatal for you, so let's not worry about such distasteful hypothetically, shall we?" He takes a drag on his hookah and puffs out a ring of smoke. With her wizard's sight, Salvia can see several objects glowing with magical auras on Goverbandy's person.

Goverbandy puffs out another wreath of smoke. "Of course. Once all of you have accepted, Mya, my head of security here," he gestures with the hookah pipe at the tall woman who entered with him, "Will fill you in on everything she's discovered so far and will show you around."

Goverbandy nods as he inhales a lungful of smoke. "I will take that as acceptance of the offer then," he says in his high voice as he exhales. He nods at the tall, rugged woman standing nearby.

The woman takes a step forward and stands at military parade rest. Clearly she has military training and currently surpressing anger and embarrassment at this lapse of security under her watch.

"As far as I can tell the burglary happend about eight hours ago in the dead of night. This is what I've uncovered so far.

"I found two unconscious guards in the gardens out
front. They’ve been revived but remain groggy; neither
remembers what happened. Something cut a hole in the garden wall behind the house big enough for a person to fit through. They entered the house through the second story by cutting a hole in the window glass and unlocking it. I found the muddy footprints of a single individual leading from the window to the top step of the stairs. At the bottom of the stairs is a bookcase concealing a hidden entrance to the vault below which I found open. Only Goverbandy, Gregory, and myself know about this bookcase. The metal door to the vault was also opened and the lock had been almost entirely rusted away."

"That is satisfactory, Mya," Goverbandy says. "As for what was stolen, well only I know the entire contents. Inside my vault were a lockbox containing five hundred gold pieces, a stack of personal papers and letrers, a knife, an idol, and a book. It is these latter three that are dangerous and must be returned."

"A small scale, I should hope," he says with a smile, hookah smoke escaping from the corners of his mouth. "The idol was given to me by an old archeologist for safe keeping a few years back. He claimed the idol spoke to him and he was fearful of it, so I locked it up in my vault. I am not sure if my safekeeping was supposed to be permanent or not, but after my friend met an unfortunate and grisly demise I didn't have any chance to ask him.

"The knife was purchased on my travels when I passed through Aegon. It has an 18-inch straight, double-edged blade with a black handle capped with an iron spike. The blade’s metal looks like iron but is not. It is strangely dull against living things but exceptionally sharp towards objects.

The book is called the Golden Grimoire and was reportedly penned by an alchemist named Phineas Macadoo, sometimes known as the Forever Man. It’s believed he was the most recent alchemist to discover the secret of the Philosopher’s Stone. The book has a gold cover, rumored to have been transmuted from lead. I tracked down the book and bought it from a seller in Vereen. I tried to read the book but it was either written in some kind of cypher or was just the scribblings of a mad man."

"None whatsoever. I haven't so much as looked at it since I locked it up. I remember it making my skin crawl though. It was a squat, fat thing with bat wings and some kind of insect head."

Salvia remembers a description of a minor deity of pestilence and failed crops called Grizzibulg.

When Hermann asks, Goverbandy ponders for a moment and then snaps his fingers. " Now that you mention it, someone camr to ask about purchasing the Golden Grimoire a week or so ago. An agent for an interested party he said. What was his name...? Ah, Seth Tyka or something like that. Of course I refused to even consider the offer and turned him away at the door."