As the new year began, you met with Brother Fabitor at his parish.  He introduced you to two residents of Ptolus that wished to express their gratitude to you.  The man and woman each told how you had rescued one of their children from the grips of the Chaos Cults.  The woman, a bakers assistant, brought a basket of treats.  The man, a cobbler, promised to make you each a pair of boots.  

Once that brief meeting was done, Fabitor also relayed the story of another Runebearer gone missing.  He knew this because the family were Lothians.  A brother and sister had been assaulted after a youth group meeting.  The brother killed, the sister (the runebearer) now missing.   Fabitor informed you that the City Watch was now involved.

Later, back at your home, Watch Captain Everard Wibert came calling.  First, he wanted to relay that he now considered you allies, based on Zavere’s recommendation.  Second, he presented an elusive case as a possible opportunity for you: corpses were being dug up and beheaded in the Necropolis district.  The bodies are all recently buried, and in unmarked graves, though clothing and other items showed that a good many of them worked for the Balacazars.  Captain Wibert offered a small reward if you would look into this at some point, and said that he would let you know when another body turns up like this.

In the following days you split up and investigated several different paths, looking for clues to the Mrathrach Machine, the name “Luth”, and some of the new mysteries put to you:  

1. The gaming hall known as the Cock Pit.  It is the only place where Mrathrach is played in the city.  Formerly run by the Balacazars, it had a new person put in charge over the past year or so.  

2. The name, Luth, you traced back to a physician.  Phen staked out his office, finding it in a small one-story building.  Only a lone dwarf came and went on a lunch errand.  No patients went in or out.  The dwarf apparently lived there, as candlelight was seen at night through the window.

3. In the Necropolis, Ebrahim met with the Keepers of the Veil.  Their story of the grave robbings matched what you had learned from the City Watch.  One witness added that he had seen a group of three men go directly to one of these graves, and the leader held a “round, flattened stone” for some purpose.  No other clues emerged from this visit.  

4. Carric visited the family of the missing Runebearer girl.  Their story matched what you had heard from Fabitor, with the additional detail that they girl was likely taken while walking home with her brother in the Temple District, but there were no witnesses to the assault, and her brother’s body was found in the King’s River.

In order to find out the history behind the Balacazar’s “hands-off” approach to the Cock Pit, you arranged a meeting with Mr. Kobayashi, the family’s representative.  Having helped save Dullin Balacazar from the cultists last fall, you at least had a working relationship with him.  The conversation was brief.  As soon as you turned the topic to the Cock Pit, its current proprietor, and their relationship to the Balacazars, Mr. Kobayashi shut down, and very firmly but politely showed you the door.  

You then decided to investigate the Cock Pit in person one night.  Under disguise where possible, you entered and engaged in gambling and conversation.  During your night there you learned that an older man with long, white hair named Argus Shaw now ran the place.  The employees knew little of him, but had no complaints with him as an employer.  You encountered a handful of strange events and behaviors while you were there:  First, working as a waiter was an old acquaintance of Phen’s, but the halfling seemed to have no idea who Phen was.  As the night wore on, Ebrahim gained entry to a back-room illegal fighting pit, but there were still more areas of the establishment you could not get to: a series of back rooms used for prostitution and private meetings.  And a final oddity was that the game Mrathrach seemed to be entirely luck-based, but from your experience most of the players were winning.  Not willing to engage in further subterfuge, deception, or stealth, you left with the back rooms unexplored.

After the visit Ebrahim relayed some information to the rest of the party.  He had, in a past visit to the Shuul’s Smoke Shop, learned of a meeting between a person that seemed to be Mr. Shaw and Mr. Kobayashi, and that a flat, round stone (sounding much like the one used in the Necropolis grave robberies) was exchanged between them.  Mr. Shaw seemed to be dictating the terms of that deal, a reversal of what you’ve seen previously from Kobayashi.  Were the events at the Necropolis and this Mr. Shaw somehow connected?  It wasn’t clear.

Luth’s office was next.  You entered under the ruse of wanting a chaositech arm attachment surgically grafted on (Ebrahim had taken one off a dead cultist weeks ago), but the persuasion fell apart, and you had to best the dwarf attendant in combat.  There were more cultists-with-chaositech as guardians in the office, but you overcame them as well.  There was no sign of Luth, but, based on what you found (blood, surgical tools, chaositech implements and charging devices) there seemed little doubt that he was the cult “surgeon”.  In his office, you found a list of pass-phrases, which you decided to try out at the Cock Pit.

Returning to the Cock Pit that same day, you donned Chaos Cult rings and headed toward the back rooms.  When stopped by a guard, you spoke the pass-phrase and were let through.  In the rear hallway you passed another guard, and eventually found a stair into the cellar.  From the cellar you took a passage several hundred yards down and away from the building, until you came upon massive chamber and a huge cylindrical pit yawning before you:  over 150 feet deep, and 60 or more feet across, and in the center of it, belching steam, was a large, whirring machine . . .