Beneath the Bloodrise Mountain Range, at the westernmost edge of human habitation, there lies a lake. The same sun that lights the grey stone and green trees red and glad by dawn’s first light casts its colours in a beauteous cacophony upon the rippled surface of that body of water each evening, giving the surrounding city—and the barony which lords over it—the well-known name of <span class="mu-s">Sunset Lake</span>. In recent years, though, a shadow has fallen upon those mountains, and it is a shadow which has finally stretched out to swallow the wealthy fishing village and trading hub below it.

There are monsters in the mountains and, it seems, they also live in Sunset Lake.

A few days ago, a small group of strangers arrived in Sunset lake, drawn by tales of the mysterious monster said to lurk therein. This was not in and of itself unusual, for many parties of adventurers had arrived chasing those stories, the possibility of reward. This particular party, however, was strange because many would view them as numbering among the mountain’s monsters themselves: two goblins, a goat-girl sitting astride the shoulders of a living effigy of bundled branches, and two other creatures who defied such easy categorization.

There was <span class="mu-r">ZIth-Zi</span>, the apparent leader and utterly unplaceable in the taxonomic categories of modern racial philosophy: goblinoid in stature and (when she didn’t hide it) in mannerism, yet pretty and pink, shapely and symmetrical, pleasing to eye and ear and nose, and capable of casting spells… or, well, -A- spell, anyway.

And then there was her ‘sister’, like her shadow: <span class="mu-g">Cara-Zi</span>, or Carazzi, or simply CZ. She was green as a goblin, when one noticed her at all. She had an uncanny ability to elude proper perception, and to slip from close scrutiny. When one set eyes upon her properly, though, her oversized black robes hid much that was twisted and wrong even by the standards of goblinkind: scaly scutes across her skin like mosaic scales or scarification; horns upon her head, stubby affairs jutting up from her temples; hair all over, reddish-brown and rough; feet that almost, but didn’t quite, resemble the goat-girl’s hooves.

The monstrous company joined the hunt for the Monster of Sunset Lake almost as soon as they’d arrived. Zith-Zi seduced and insinuated herself into the festivities of a certain rival company to deduce the true nature of their quarry: an overgrown exemplar of those amphibious, dragon-adjacent creatures called ‘drakes’. Cara-Zi’s occult instinct uncovered unsettling magical contamination in the lake, where the monsters passed.