The Investigation (Parts I & II of Priantos' POV in Book I)

I promise I intend to start clearing up all these temporary threads at some point...


Okay, I was writing over the weekend and hit a brick wall when I realized there were still quite a few aspects of the investigation we still need to figure out. So this is where we'll attempt to solve it.


Current (slightly watered down in description) timeline (problem areas still marked with [?]s):

Part 1:

-Priska from king; Order meeting.
-Palace servant comes forward with info regarding a suspicious palace servant.
-Goes to White Tower; senator falls to death.
-Palace servant spy pursued; man uses suicide device.
-Post-mortum results of both spy revealed (Brotherhood first mentioned).
-Private investigator (for the murdered senator) sends Priska resqesting to meet in private at an Inner City café.
-Investigator's dead body (stabbed in the back with a retractable Brotherhood skewer) found in café back room; investigation jounrnal found in a secret compartment in her cloak.
-Priantos investigates aforementioned journal [we need to figure out the private investigator's coarse of investigation...]. Leads investigation to Priska station.
-Priska station spy is captured alive. [what was his purpose?]

-King arrives back in Valdin; palace bay meeting thing.
-Priska station agent interrogation; revealed planed assassination attempt at Quabble finals.
-Priska station agent set free under hidden watch - agreed to act as double-agent in exchange for a lightened sentence.
-King/advisers meeting to discuss findings; king decides to attend.
-Lash'irr in priantos' house; she somehow helps (or pretends to help) Priantos with the investigation. Also, she's no longer supposed to be dead. The reason their relationship is kept secret now is considerably worse.
-Priantos, in the meantime continues with investigation dead investigator started using info from journal [?]. Learns of the Key of Acanthos [better name?] that the investigator somehow figured out the Brotherhood was after [how?]. Priantos visits a history lecturer at the university about the subject and learns that it supposedly unlocks Acanthos' burrial chamber - which was moved from Tel'nir to a locked off, museum-like section of the catacombs [should probably have some special name] which intersected with the palace basements after the capitol moved. The Key went missing decades prior OR got stolen [from where?] recently [which makes more sense?]. The Order checks out Acanthos' burial chamber just to be sure and finds the entrance sealed shut and quite untouched (which will confuse the reader, considering there'll be scenes of Lash'ir in the burial chamber) and so considers is a dead end.
-Quabble finals thing and all that. The Key of Acanthos is found in the possession of one of the killed agents.
-Priska station agent killed (though this will be in Lash'irr's POV); found dead by the Enforcers tasked with watching him.

Part 2:

-A poor girl is caught trying to sneak the Key out of the headquarters of the Order. The girl says she was hired to bring the object to a man in an Under City tavern.
-The Order lets the girl return to the man (carrying a wrapped object the shape and size of the Key in order to stall the man. Alternatively, Hylla or Tiard could've switched the fake key with the real key which the man would then take (see next chapter's events)), following her to him out of sight. The man realizes the deception (which may be a bluff, depending on the aforementioned) and grabs the girl before fleeing into the depths of the Under City. The pursuit scene happens - Priantos is momentarily separated from the rest by Tiard's encounter with crates and corners the man at the edge of one of the huge Under City water ways. The man threatens to dump the girl in the raging waters (as it was raining heavily at the time and the storm drains would thus be flooding). The man then reveals the whole Shadow/Jaylen/Jin thing before the other Order members catch up to them and the man leaps with the girl into the water. Priantos instinctively dives in afterwards and manages to save the girl without drowning and is saved by another Order member who uses his/her cloak as a rope that Priantos grabs hold of. The man disappears and is presumed dead. His body is never found.

-Up to now, culminating in the above chapter, it should have become clear that there has to be a mole in the Order. I need help figuring this out, though, which will probably add quite a bit to the above and may even solve some of the [?]'s. Oh and [?] for the mole thing.
-Jer'ij and Priantos systematically plants stories with different agents regarding where the Key is being kept (as they know the Brotherhood wants it)
-Hylla is discovered as the mole when another Brotherhood agent is caught trying to get to the Key through the location Hylla was given. Alternatively, all the agents could be given the same false location of the Key (which Priantos or Jer'ij would then keep with them on their person) and then they'll just wait to see who tries to get it.
-Hylla is interrogated and reveals a secret entrance into the burial chamber from the sewers and that they never needed the Key at all, merely using it to distract the Order. Alternately, the Key the Order currently has is actually a fake and the the real Key was somehow already in the Brotherhood's possession (which they would need to open the sarcophagus). Either way, Hylla had been playing them all along so that the Brotherhood can get away. [Which scenario should I use? Order having a fake key or the Key never being needed by the Brotherhood to begin with?]
-The order rushes to Acanthos' burial chamber, as well as immediately stationing Enforcers and guards at all the known Under City entrances, but it's too late - the Brotherhood has already left, leaving only a dying fire, remnants of a weird Shjerr'dûll ritual and an open sarcophagus with something torn out of Acanthos' corpse's grasp behind.
-The Order wastes no time getting to the burial chamber, but they're too late. The agents are gone, leaving only an opened sarcophagus and something missing from Acanthos' corpse's grasp. (Also, I semi-figured it out now. The piece of evidence the sneak girl was supposed to get the Brotherhood was a key to the sarcophagus that one of the killed or captured agents had in their possession. Dunno why they'd need a sneak to acquire it for them, though...)



Edit: Okay, just a summary of the above, the two main things I need help with are A) the private investigator's journal and B) what leads up to the conclusion that there must be a mole in the Order. I've pretty much figured out A's outline:

-A few weeks prior to the start of the book, the senator that ends up dying hires a private investigator, At'ley Tahra Ezioll, after apparently discovering traces of some kind of conspiracy (see below) [what are these initial hints?].
-At'ley starts investigating, but finds a lack of anything substantial to her investigation from the enforcers and, after asking/snooping around, learns of a number of cases handled by the Enforcers [such as...?] that were either hastily closed after little to no investigation or even ignored completely (Priantos will investigate a number of these himself after reading the journal, I'm sure). One of these involve a history lecturer at the University [how is the man involved? He would probably have been either a victim or a witness] (Priantos later pays the man a visit and learns of the Key of Acanthos, which strange men maybe asked him about or something).
-At'ley would also have uncovered evidence of off-the-books payments received by the City Guard (enforcers and guards) [what would this evidence be?], which she would conclude came from outside Valdin [how'd she come to this conclusion?] and would thus have passed through the Priska Station (which now also doubles as a bank for remote currency. I should probably make a separate bank, but it's easiest for remote credit transfers (via signed papers almost like cheques) to be sent via Priska, I guess. I suppose I'll just rename Priska stations to something that could double as both a bank and a post office).
-She soon apparently cracked the conspiracy, but chose not to document it in her journal as it was too sensitive, instead reporting her findings to the senator directly.
-(Not documented in journal) The Senator then sent a Priska calling for an emergency meeting with Aleen (who was acting as Protector of the Realm while her father the King was away. Oh, Aleen is Brethin's older sister, but that's for later) and headed to the Hall of Kings immediately. On his way, near the top of the White Tower, a Brotherhood agent or perhaps a guard (or even both) confronted him and forced him out a window, sending him falling to his death. Learning of this, At'ley requested a secret meeting with the Order but was killed herself before the meeting could take place...

And here's the conspiracy:
-The head of an influential and wealthy Greyskin family (essentially the "head" family in Greskin Valiero) in a north-western province has made a secret (and, if revealed, highly very controversial, even to the Greyskins (as they're pretty xenophobic)) deal with the Iga'ji.
-Iga is supplying the Greyskins with weapons via a very non-widely used pass (technically in Valieren territory) in the Great Cyro Highlands (off-topic, but I'm actually gonna have Nomad observe one of the Iga'ji/Greyskin weapon caravans traversing the pass near the start of the book).
-Said Greyskin family (which needs a name...) is paying the Iga'ji handsomely in exchange for the weapons, but instead of taking the cash back to Iga, the Iga'ji requested the payments be sent to agents of theirs in Valdin.
-The Brotherhood received these payments in Valdin and uses the money to manipulate the City Guard to their will.

Using the Greyskins in this way is advantageous to the Iga'ji by, not only aiding the Brotherhood agents in Valdin, but also making it possible to manipulate the coming civil war in their favor (using their Greyskin puppets).



Oh, and I'm going to make the civil war so much more controversial by adding a new trigger and the true final ignition point. The king (now called Dalash Hellar Ahron) no longer only has/had a single child, but three: Thea'dro Ester Ahron, the eldest son who died at his prime due to some freak accident I'll think of later; Aleen Ester Ahron, the king's only daughter and heir after her older brother's death; and Brethin, the king's youngest, at around his twenties if he were human. The queen was Ester Aleen Ha'nor, but becoming grievously ill and died soon after Brethin's birth (do you sense the bad omen?). All of them were pure Goldskins. Now, the final trigger I'm talking about here will happen near the end of part two: Aleen will be murdered just after sunset in the Great Hall of the White Tower by a Greyskin guard. That night, mass rage ignited in the streets of Valdin - the city's Goldskin populace were outraged to such an extent that they drove all Greyskins out of the city and, in the Outer City, at least, it came to a point edging on genocide. The next day, things began to cool down a little and some Greyskin families returned to their homes, but it was done. The war began as soon as news of the event reached the north-western provinces.

Now, compare what I'm planning now with the book as it currently is. xD

That's a lot of different. A heck of a lot of different. I like it.

Different is now a noun.

I have no idea about anything I can do to help, though. My simple brain isn't working at the moment.

Glad you like it!

And I think I've figured out most of those points of quistionlyness. I think the only thing I need to figure out is what the evidence was At'ley found that pointed at off-the-books payments being received by the City Guard. Maybe a cheque-thingy received by one of the Enforcer involved in a one of the ignored or hastily closed cases and a document of credit transfer for funds of no apparent origin from the Priska station (which I still don't have a better name for).

Hmm... Priska station name. No idea. Priska office, Priska mail station, Priska mail facility, Priska mail office, Priska something I don't know.

Something that probably doesn't contain the work "Priska". A term that can mean both a bank and a post office.

Bank and a post office. Hmm... Could just use a Zen'ji word for it, seeing as I don't know of any name for a bank/post office hybrid.

I know a large amount of post offices also provide banking services, yet are still known as just post offices. Gah. I don't want to have the term "post office" in my book... =`(

I've never really gone to a post office. Heh.

How does "Parcel House" or "Parcel Hall" sound? (Still doesn't really sound like it includes money, though...)

Sounds good, me thinks. Doesn't sound like it includes money, but at least it sounds different from post office.

True... Parcel Vaults? Transaction House? Courier Node?

Courier Node sounds neat, as does Parcel Vault, although the first one doesn't seem to include a bank whilst the other doesn't seem to include a post office... I think transaction might work, but I don't really know.

Transaction Hall/House or House/Hall of Transaction?

Transaction Hall sounds neat. If only because I prefer Hall to House, heh.

Cool, Transaction Hall it is, then.

Woohoo!

Also, leaving on a flight for Nova Scotia tomorrow. Canadian maritime vacation time. Reckon I'll still be online almost everyday, though.

Enjoy it.

Doing so. Heh, mostly sitting around at my friends house playing Amnesia, Slender, SCP, that sort of thing.