[x][A]Investigate a place:
-[x][A]Elainus Levon's Workshop.
Rolling…
You sent off Alexa with a simple goal: investigate the workshop of your target, Elainus Levon. She returns, a week later, with nothing. Or close enough to it. She's mapped up a route to the workshop, with a low enough enforcer presence that you could walk a small army up to the workshop door, but little more than that. It wasn't useless, but any of your mooks could have done that given the same amount of time, and for a fraction of the price. So you sat her down again. Alexa coughs nervously as one of your henchmen 'carelessly' brushes dust off of a shelf into her face. You might have to reevaluate how much you value them; they seem to do rather effective work for the pitiful wages you pay them. You flick your letter opener through your fingers idly as you lean against the only rickety table you have. It sheds splinters which prod at your elbow.
"Would you like to make any excuses, now?" You ask coldly.
"He was holed up in his workshop the whole time," She insists. "He didn't go out once, all week long, honest! I couldn't open the door without tipping him off, right?"
Katarin Awareness vs Alexa Stealth: 57 > 29 + 20
1 degree success
It's hard to tell exactly how Alexa Tahlin feels at things at the best of times, given her invisibility. A lot of the tells you've trained yourself to see just simply aren't there. But her voice is honest, a lifetime of upright living coming back to haunt her, and you know she's trying to mislead you. Not quite lying, you don't think, but leaving something out. You don't reply for a bit, running the blade of your letter opener down your pointer finger's nail. She gulps audibly. You give the filed nail an inspection. It's not particularly clean work, but trying to fix it would undermine your current image.
A gentle suggestion seems apt here. "Do you have anything to add?"
"No?" She asks, as if you were really asking.
"Something about being discovered, perhaps?"
"I wasn't!" She blurts. "He's just paranoid, definitely!"
She believes her own words, certainly, but you're not so sure she's right.
–
[X][K]Investigate a place:
-[X][K]Your Base. There were still some secrets left behind by the former occupant.
[X][M]Base Development:
-[X][M]Clean up the place.
A good portion of your time went into making sure you weren't sleeping over some sort of magic weapon, and making sure you could sleep at all in your hideout. You couldn't exactly excavate extra ventilation out of the stone that surrounded your base on all sides, but you could clear existing paths out as much as you could to make sure you didn't suffocate. You ended up finding a lot more of those than you expected, actually. Maybe five of the shelves and drawers in the original workshop ended up covering up secret passages. A brief forage down them revealed that a couple had collapsed over the years, but you've found yourself a couple extra paths down to the city sewers if you need them.
Base Information updated.
Also, in the clearing dust and tossing of ancient, broken gears, you found a jewelry box. To your untrained eye, it looked like the jewels and gold were arranged in some magically significant way, but decades of tarnish and wear have long since broken any spell that might've been on it. It also had a metal lock on it, which your letter opener manages to pop open with a bit of fuss. Inside you find a pile of papers, which probably mean something to someone magically inclined, but which look like gibberish. You ask Alexa, and she has just as much understanding as you do. According to her, the diagrams within are either encoded or completely wrong, both of which are pretty possible for someone as far lost as the former professor was.
Acquired: Skeleton Professor's Magic Schematics (Value ???)
Maybe some other day you could find an appraiser, but if the information contained on it was actually valuable just getting it appraised could drop its value substantially. That was the difficulty with trying to sell information: it just had too many ways to slip out of your grasp. It wasn't as if you could go to the Board with accusations of stolen knowledge, after all; you weren't even a student, much less one with the backing to rouse the Academy's oligarchs. Well, you have the papers, you could probably find a way to use them in the future.
--
Ultimately, your work making your base liveable takes up most of your time in Spring. With Elainus Levon's scheduled presentation coming up at the start of summer, you only have this season to conduct your hit if you want to get any money out of it. You've laid pretty much all of the groundwork you need to, even if your investigation didn't end up as complete as you would have liked. Ultimately, you didn't think this job was particularly difficult. If you didn't care about being subtle, a few of your henchmen could probably just kick in his door, bash his head in, and call it a day. Well, you could probably still do that, if you don't feel like making a real plan.
[]Take the Elainus Levon Hit.
-[]Send Mooks.
--[]How Many?
-[]Send Famed.
--[]Who?
-[]Optional Write-in: Any strategy?
[]Do no missions this turn.
