Quoted By:
<span class="mu-i">All great Dances start with a few stumbling steps that rapidly escalate. So it is with all graceful things - you see the perfect pirouette but not the thousand stumbles that got the dancer there.
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The <span class="mu-s">Grey Manor</span> is a fortified compound, one of the few spared the blaze of the theurges in their final wrathful hours.
Record checking and some cross-referencing with the ever careful depths of a tax archive reveal that despite the voracity of fire the district still pays their taxes. And every year, slightly more there-of. Life returns from the nutrious ash, and so it is with the people. It is in a sense free real estate for the daring and those who do not mind the few peculiarities of the neighbourhood.
But while we can expect to find the intrepid and the entreprenurial, this is still a place mostly empty. We don't have to worry so much about collateral or gathering attention. The Census reveals it. The abandoned urban landscape would offer good hiding places in a scrap across it, and the many alleys, cut-throughs and crumbling buildings make ambushes easy. The Slicerats know this. They have check-points, which we stake out with quiet eye. Level finds one, on a soft-foot walk the area. Rotating crew, keeping an eye on the road. We stake our their stake-out, watching the watchers.
A spot of light out here: the Empyreal Emissaries run a mission out of an old chapel house, providing water and ministrations to the locals. It would be tantamount to sacriledge to fight near such a place and Amicus donations find us a way in with the local acolytes. They're only to happy to accept the donation and provide information on the local landscape. Have we any wounds later, we can seek aid here. Only ratsouls bring violence on those who do charity. It would be a place to go to ground if chased off by patrolling Slicerats as well, because it would take a craven kind of rat to start a fight in a medical ward.
The <span class="mu-s">local</span> Slicerats are being trained by the instructors of the Grey Manor. It's a kind of dojo. They won't yet have practiced the finer subtleties of hand to hand, but they'll be more bold when guided by instructors. Low Guard, this lot, but they pack a punch. The knives they have in sheaths on their person is a badge of honour. Rinik and his Rat Kings consider them fit for cadre status, in a few years of training.
As for the <span class="mu-s">Manor</span> directly, we can lend a few siegebreakers from the Veteran Association who provide colourful architectural commentary from the stakeout. The walls are meant for privacy. Scaling them is a simple task, hardly worth a siege-engineer. What other approaches can we find? Well, there are tunnels out here, few, but there's the old sewer network and the deeper systems - the Associates are familiar with the Smugglers highways, and are mapping the less used path as we speak. We should be able to move swiftly from one area to the other using those...</span>
