From the Notebooks of Eolin Anysa, alias Tanya Nix, businesswoman, archaic weapons collector, anthrophile and now apparently volunteer detective at large in Salvation City…..

August 18 – 2011

My day at work started out normally, I did some business around the club: signed for a couple delivery orders, made sure the bar was stocked, got everyone’s paychecks together, cleaned my warhammer, you know, the usual. If only the day had stayed like that. I knew it was going to be a long night when three rather unusual humans arrived at the front of the club.  They were packing some serious heat, which of course my body guards would not allow them carry with them. I later found out that the one carries around a katana in his lacrosse bag. Humans are so fascinating. Anyway, after all their weapons were locked away, two of them sat down at a table and the other headed straight to the bar. I noticed that they seemed really uninterested in the girls, which I thought was weird…because I own a strip club. What human comes in there that isn’t interested in my girls? The one at the bar just started pounding down drinks. The other two at the table just kind of sat there…the one ordered a drink but didn’t take a sip. It was a waste of fantastic vodka, in my opinion. Anyway, after a couple minutes I saw a party of Unseelie (several guys and an important looking chick) come in and sit at a table. I looked at the table of Seelie faerie a couple feet away. It’s a shitty convention of the human world that I have to allow Unseelie into my club. (of course, Unseelie faerie who have a dark complexion just look like black people to normals, and I would not want to have a reputation for being a racist…that’s just not good business). I went downstairs to do a walkthrough and assess the general situation of the club and chat with everyone. I broke the line of sight of a vampire trying to entrance one of my girls. He didn’t try anything funny after that, he knows the rules. My club has kind of become a haven for supernaturals living in Salvation. Especially with the accounts of suicides of young faerie girls that have been a little too frequently occurring of late, we all need a place to congregate.

After a little while I decided to have a look upstairs at all the private rooms where some of my more high paying customers spend their evenings in these old movie boxes (my club is a converted old movie theatre, think the theatre in the human blockbuster Inglourious Basterds). I entered a box with a young-middle aged looking businessman who began to flirt with me a little, which is of course is agains the rules. However there was something extremely compelling about this man and I felt the need to stay and listening to what he had to say. He was telling me that his profession was to “make people’s dreams come true”. Then everything went to shit. In an instant I saw him for what he really was: a putrid disgusting lump of excess flesh…a dreamghast. He jumped from the balcony down to the first floor effortlessly. I screamed and was paralyzed by fear. I could hear hell breaking lose downstairs. Alwin, Lucas and Red, those heavily armed and slightly out of place looking clients, who would soon become my companions later told me that as soon as the dreamghast came downstairs, the vampire disappeared into thin air and the Unseelie stood up and began to light up the table of Seelie. Lucas, Alwin and Red quickly ran to retrieve their weapons, as did I. By the time I entered the main room of my club, all the Seelie were killed and the dreamghast was a splatter on the floor, thanks to Lucas. All the club employees had been taken to the back and the clients had run out of the club as soon as the violence started. In my sole moment of combat effectiveness, I decapitated the female Unseelie, who was the leader. (I have lived in Salvation for 40 years and have yet to learn how to use a gun). We tied up the remaining henchmen and were getting ready to question them, when perfectly on cue the Shadowmen arrived to clean up the situation. Their presence is terrifying, even though I know I didn’t do anything wrong. Everyone seemed on edge as they walked about the place clearing memories and cleaning up evidence of the supernatural. No one was happier than I when they left the premises.

When I was checking to see if my girls were ok, one remarked that her friend Jessica had gone missing. At this point, Alwin, Lucas and I were properly introduced, and I found out that they worked for the BSID. Red seemed a little in shock, and the other two seemed unwilling to share a lot of information with him. He was apparently a cop of some kind. I found out that Lucas and Alwin were investigating the faerie suicides that had been going on for the past few months, and had come to the club, afraid that I was a target. After relaying the information about the missing girl, who we all remembered was a faerie, we decided to check out her apartment and make sure she was ok.

The door was unlocked when we arrived and we came right in to a seemingly normal urban apartment. There were no signs of forced entry or struggle, there was a candle still let on a small table in the first room. We went to her bathroom and found her very clearly dead in her tub, in what had the appearance of a suicide. However, something was just not right about that. She was the eleventh supernatural to have died this way, and as far as the BSID was concerned, it was not a suicide. We looked around the apartment and found a plant sitting on the edge of the table and looking like it didn’t normally belong there. In the fridge we found a vial of blood. There was a glass of water sitting on another table, and a window was open and a fan was blowing in the room, and to top it all off a single candle was lit in the living room. After a long time of searching and thinking, Lucas came up with the idea of finding the center of all of these objects, which he theorized represented the elements. At the center of the circle, under a rug we found an inscription that I was able to read:

Darkness comes to the Tuatha de Danaan. I am the sheep the hunts the wolf. 17.

We all decided to sleep on this and meet up the next day to try and meet with some contacts in the supernatural world to see what they know about the situation. The next day, we went to the house of Duchess Rosalinda Wetzler, one of the past victims mothers who I knew as a member of the Seelie Court at large in Salvation. I lied to the doorman about why we were calling, and he let us up to see the Duchess. She was surprisingly callous about the deaths of her daughter and was dismissive of Lucas and Alwin and the BSID. I’m not sure why the faerie community doesn’t appreciate their efforts in trying to solve the crimes that so far the Seelie court has been unable to stop. The Duchess did give us an important lead though; it seems as if all of the victims were children of Aethos, the first king of the Faerie. He had 18 illegitimate daughters, and currently only 6 are alive the others have been victims of these “suicide”/murders. Well, at least that takes me off the list of potential victims…I think. We left the Duchess’ place in a huff, as her coldness towards the BSID and seeming disinterest in helping us find her daughter’s killer was angering. At this point, I was no longer afraid that I was a potential victim, however I was angry at the Duchess for the way she treated my human companions, who I just see as looking out for the protection of American citizens like myself. I will never understand the bias that faerie have against humans…that kind of racism is unacceptable to me. I now see that a large part of the reason I stayed volunteering my services to these members of the BSID  is because I want to help show the magical community that humans also have something to offer the world, they aren’t dull or useless as so many magic users think.

Lucas et al had the idea that I call Aethos on my Eldrich cell phone. This was a terrible idea, in my opinion. As much as I respect the BSID, sometimes I think they lack knowledge of basic faerie etiquette. Me calling Aethos is like poor Red calling the President of the United States. But, in one of my admittedly irresponsible moments, I went along with their plan called the infamous King of the Faerie and greeted him “Hello, are you aware that your daughters are dropping like fucking flies?” He promptly hung up on me, as he would have done after about 2 minutes of me trying to weasel information out of him anyway. I’m good at manipulating people, but not that good.

After that, we decided to pursue a more logical and accessible path: looking up genealogy charts. We visited one of my friends Chris Alexander who lives on this island thing with his wife, who understandably despises me, which is fine. As a strip club owner, I can’t really expect my patrons wives to love me. We gleaned a little information from these books, especially concerning one of the daughters, a girl named Kira who mysteriously disappeared from the list of Aethos’ legitimate children in a later edition of the book. That’s about all we really had time to find out, because Chris told us to be gone by the time his wife would return. We were back in the real world and returned to our respective homes to rest and tackle this mystery in the morning…………………………….