Sporemageddon

It took two days to arrange for the arrest of Ol’ Jim.

The local police was willing to arrest the man, but when the chief of police asked Mallory about the overall situation and discovered how connected Ol’ Jim was, he decided to err on the side of caution.

Mallory wished he could be upset, but crossing one's Ts and dotting one’s Is wasn’t something he’d look down on. The arrest was a delicate thing, especially as Ol’ Jim had a few guards and contacts within Ratesco’s Union.

It still went smoothly.

For all that the dealer had some local thugs hired to keep him safe, they weren’t the kinds of men equipped--either materially or mentally--to stand up to a full squad of bullies charging into the bar with billy clubs and voices raised. They scampered off in a jiffy, and it was only luck that let the cops catch Ol’ Jim halfway out of a window.

The man was spitting mad, and managed to shank an officer with a knife, which earned him a few hard wallops before he was loaded into a wagon and carted off to the nearest station.

Mallory attended the interrogations, but didn’t interfere, not on that first day.

They had pretty concrete proof that Ol’ Jim, or Jim Oldsworth as his record said, was selling illegal substances. That didn’t include the mushrooms-based drugs, which hadn’t yet been made illegal.

They were working on that, but the cogs of bureaucracy could be slow at times. In a few months, the sale, possession and distribution of sleeping powders would be made officially against the law, at least within City Nineteen. That would help, a little.

The Union was entrenched a lot deeper in the city than some officers realized.

Mallory... wasn’t as surprised as he maybe ought to have been. The fact that the Union had their own agricultural initiative going, their own import and export business, that they had internal police and security and even their own accountants.

There were some pretty significant ties between the union and several businesses.

Some of those were expected. The few shops and services within the slums were all write-offs as far as the police were concerned. Obviously those were in the hands of the union. But the group’s grasp extended far outside of the slums. They had members in plenty of otherwise respectable industries. Small artisan shops, a few minor guilds, and especially the factories of the city, all had ties back to the union.

Ol’ Jim wasn’t the only confirmation. Once he spilled a few things, the chief of police sent out some of his men to make a few more arrests, which led to a few more in turn.

It was creating a web. Mallory was there, and with his skills, he could piece it all together with relative ease.

Unfortunately, there was an obvious downside to their poking. The Union wasn’t blind or dumb enough not to notice that they were the centre of the police force’s interest, and the gang was on the move.

A few union-affiliated businesses shut down, and over the next two or three days, there were several small fights that broke out in and around some of the larger factories. Three guards were injured, one died.

It wasn’t an unusual amount of violence. The factories worked by keeping people in line, and that often required a heavy hand. What made things different was the heightened frequency of the violence. It was all rather sudden.

Mallory helped where he could, but he still tried to keep his main investigation going. He was certain that the union was involved, at least tangentially, but that would be difficult to prove if the union was in a full-on revolt.

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He was in the police headquarters, after a long day of witnessing interviews with captured criminals and working with some of the local detectives to form a proper organizational chart of Ratesco’s Union when there was a sudden shift in the air.

Mallory paused mid-discussion, then lowered the page he held.

The detective across from him paused as well and looked up to meet his eye. “Is everything okay, sir?” he asked.

“Yes? I mean, yes. I just felt something off,” Mallory said.

He searched his own senses, trying to pinpoint the vague feeling of dread that had just run through him, but he couldn’t quite figure it out.

It was another half hour before he noticed movement across the headquarters, then an alarm rang.

He, like the others, raced to discover what was happening. It took a while, but a senior officer gestured him over to where the chief of police was cursing under his breath. “It’s happened again,” he said.

“What has?” Mallory asked.

It wasn’t the chief, but one of the others that answered. “The Wendell-Smith dungeon just had a reaction,” they said. “Everyone near the dungeon felt it.”

“Is this anything like Ditz?” he asked.

There were some nods and shrugs all around. “We had some reports when Ditz broke, but at the time it was swept under the rug until a few days later, when the dungeon properly stopped working. Or at least, when we noticed. That’s about when the riots started too.”

“I see,” Mallory said.

He’d known about Ditz’ failure, but hadn’t truly investigated it. The city’s second dungeon failing, however, was going to be an issue.

A city on the precipice could hardly afford something so catastrophic happening to it. He could already imagine some of the consequences if the only remaining dungeon in City Nineteen failed.

Other cities had grown beyond the need to exploit their dungeons, but that usually only meant that they were pulling in raw materials from the dungeons of small settlements nearby instead. Or, on occasion, they pulled from the area, culling natural predators and turning forests into pastures.

City Nineteen wasn’t there yet, and it wasn’t situated to switch all of its industry rapidly.

Three full squads were sent out to the Wendell-Smith dungeon. Two more were added to the local patrols, then they started to prepare a rapid reaction squad.

That dungeon was deeper in the city, which meant that a lot of the factories serving it, which would inevitably have to close, were nearby. That was an affluent part of the city which was likely going to be hit by riots, not the slums.

Mallory excused himself and departed with one of the teams making for the dungeon. They had a carriage filled with ten fully-equipped officers, but they made room for him at the back.

When he arrived, he found the space around the dungeon filled with rubber-neckers, several small delving guilds, local security, and perhaps most notably of all, a team of delvers with several mages and higher-leveled fighters in it.

He moved over to question them, but only received a cold shoulder. They were going to dive into the dungeon, securing it floor by floor until they discovered exactly what was going on here, and they didn’t need a lowly detective interfering in their work.

He left them to it, backing off to stare at the dungeon’s entrance and wonder what was going on, exactly.

More people showed up, and the need for several squads of officers became clear as some of those showing up weren’t well pleased with the situation as a whole. He could almost smell the desperation and denial. Some of the people working this dungeon didn’t have the greatest jobs, but they still needed this work to feed themselves and their families.

A small team of higher-level delvers exited the dungeon with the corpse of a large rat hanging from a wooden post between them.

The rat was set on the ground, on a tarp, and several people stared at it for a while. Then the flesh started to break down. Mallory knew decomposing bodies. It was one of those things that came with the job. That rat went through an hour’s worth of decomposition in ten minutes.

They quickly covered it up with another tarp, but the evidence was enough for some.

He noticed some more people showing up. People in suits, others dressed better than the average worker. It was becoming a real who's-who off to one side. He was tempted to join in, but refrained for the moment.

This was going to have repercussions, but he wasn’t in a place to know what all of those would be. He did know that this was going to severely impact the city.

It might be the city’s death knell.

Or, maybe, it wouldn’t be. A city was a big thing, it didn’t die so easily.

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