Sporemageddon

A few days ago.

He was sitting on a rickety chair in the dusty end of the City Nineteen Record’s Department. It was a long, low building a block over from the police headquarters and two doors down from the courthouse. This was where paperwork inevitably found itself and where it usually remained. The site had two Librarians and a Bureaucrat. People whose entire skillset revolved around sorting and finding paperwork.

None of them were happy that he was here, but that was normal. They were the sorts of people that were rarely happen to see others slipping into their domain, and he supposed that he understood.

Still, he’d been here for two days now, and so they’d grown used to his presence in the corner. They’d even relaxed the rules about having tea within the reading room, though bringing food in was right out. That’s how ants happened, apparently.

In any case, he found himself staring at a stack of reports, some of them two or three years old.

They were more or less sorted by date, with the oldest to his left and the newest to the right. He had detached pages from each other and constructed overlapping piles that he imagined would make no sense to anyone but himself.

Fortunately, the people working here also insisted on putting any reports he pulled back into their place. He was definitely not allowed to sort through the stacks himself, less his lacking skills disrupt their organizational systems.

Most of the time, this place was only visited by lower-ranked officers bringing in reports or court clerks coming to grab copies of something or another for an active case. He was an intruder here.

He wasn’t the only intruder in the city.

And another poison had been used on the nobles at that faithful birthday party.

There were links. The birthday was of a boy attending the Academy. The poisons were fungal. The local gang had issues with several local nobles, including almost all of those--with the exception of the spouse of a nobleman--who had perished.

He had run through hundreds of reports, aware the entire time that they would be biased. Two stood out.

The first was the incident report surrounding an embarrassing moment in the local department’s past. A young person of ill-defined age and gender (thought presumed male) had used some sort of explosive to spread a powder around.

The effects of these were to cause the officers to lose control over their bowels and suffer some cramping. The effects subsided within a day.

The event was public and from the tone that the reporting officers used in their reporting, it was hugely embarrassing to some of the gentlemen on the force. The kind of thing best forgotten.

The second was about the Ditz Dungeon.

No, not the dungeon, but the consequences of the dungeon failing.

It had happened before that a dungeon failed. There was a historical precedent, though it was from before his time. Still, when Ditz fell apart, it left a massive and sudden vacuum. Riots started soon after, but these were organized riots.

And this is where he noticed something strange.

A city the size of City Nineteen had room for plenty of gangs, guilds, and ne’erdowells. A street’s youth might band together to keep their quarter safe, or to cause trouble, a guild might hire some muscle to take care of problems, gangs might form around the sale of illegal narcotics, or to smuggle things through the city.

There were thieves that worked together, forming their own guilds, assassins in the less savory cities, and toughs of all flavours.

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In City Nineteen there was one gang.

Only the one.

It was so unusual that he hadn’t noticed it until he started digging. There had been others, of course, but overtime, it seemed like they had all been subsumed. The local thieves? All working for the Union. The toughs? Union members. The little street gangs? Their streets were Union as well.

The reports he had couldn’t pinpoint the exact time and date when it had happened, but he suspected that that didn’t matter. It was gradual, most likely.

How had Ratesco’s Union grown so quickly and spread so far?

It wasn’t just the one thing. The city had been in a slow downturn before Ditz had crashed, and the riots that came after, the lack of food in the lower parts of the city... it all pointed to a failing section of the local government.

Usually, in this kind of situation, a purge would occur.

It was deeply distasteful, but a failing city would wall off or close an area, then excise it, like cutting off a gangrenous limb. Many would die, but those that listened would be resorted and relocated, and the city would retake lost ground afterwards.

It would be the kind of thing that would spare the middle-class and would hardly impact the nobility. It had to be done, sometimes, and it generally proved to be a good, rapid way of resetting a city to rights, returning it to full productivity. As long as the city has a surplus of workers, that kind of thing would allow the government to pour money into improving infrastructure and reclaiming space that could be used to better effect.

Obviously that hadn’t happened here.

The slums clung on, and grew, the Union’s influence pushed in deeper into the city.

Nobles died.

Those that had died at that party weren’t the only ones, though he was convinced that the other few deaths were accidental, or simply more violent.

Mallory shook his head.

One gang, ruling over an entire city. It was unusual. How had they grown so powerful? Did it even matter? If they had this level of strength, then obtaining the services of an alchemist to make novel, fungal-based poisons wouldn’t be that complicated.

This was almost enough to call his investigation complete. The Chief of Police had been right. The Union did it.

Obviously, he wasn’t satisfied with that, so he had continued to dig. Knowing that one person killed another was all well and good, but knowing why was the entire reason Detectives like himself existed in the first place.

He had looked through reports about the nobility, though those were not as common. What a noble did may, under a certain light, be a crime, but crime committed by the gentry was usually done in such a way that it didn’t raise too many alarms. Rather, it was done with the clear intent of paying out, and so it went unpunished and unreported.

He started to notice a pattern, however. Two of the noblemen who had died had businesses that interfered with those run by the Union. They had, in recent memory, fired large numbers of employees, or closed down factories where the members were considering unionization.

Mallory could read between the lines. These nobles had made themselves enemies of the Union. They hadn’t broken laws by firing anyone, or by squeezing their employees like someone trying to draw water from a pebble, but an act not being illegal didn’t mean that it wasn’t unjust.

He picked out some of the pages before them, creating a neat stack, then went to find one of the Librarians. They were annoyed at the mess he had made, but he apologized for it, and it was their job to resort these things.

The man made a copy of all of the reports, pen flying across the page in a precise blur so that forty-odd pages were copied over in a mere twenty minutes down to the very last detail. Then Mallory headed out.

It wasn’t far to the police headquarters. He found the place rather calm. The city had been going through a less tumultuous period as of late. It wasn’t difficult to book an appointment with the chief of police, though the man was too busy to see him just yet.

So he tucked his pages within his coat and headed out for lunch.

The headquarters were in the middle of the city, in a rather busy spot. It wasn’t hard to find a place to eat here, and the walk gave him time to ruminate.

That was, until he noticed two officers carrying a man between them.

“What happened here?” he asked as he approached. They seemed ready to dismiss him, but recognition sparked in their eyes.

“Another sleeper,” one of them said. He patted the chest of the man they were holding onto. It looked like someone who could have been just any old clerk, though their outfit was rumpled and a little dusty, and it seemed as though they had been laying on the ground.

No stench of alcohol, no redness to the face. Not a drunkard, then.

“A sleeper?” he asked.

“It’s a whole thing,” the officer said. He pulled out a small glass vial from a pocket and handed it over.

Detective Mallory held it up, squinting at the powder within. His intuition was screaming at him.

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