Ambush At the Warhouse

MAL 13

 * Jon went to his meeting with Jen at the brothel. After some chit-chat about the escaped vampire and the dockworker's strike, Jen told him that 1) the discontented complaints the party heard during the demon scare in the market square are all real concerns held by some of the townfolk (losing faith in the Mayor, distrusting the Duke, feeling Petros has been set up, feeling that the authorities are blindly protecting a killer priest.) But also 2) that a shipwright from the Docks district told one of the girls that the guy who started in yelling those things in the market square was one of the acolytes of Sesharet.
 * Then Kit arrived in the Docks, having been sent by Karna to inquire whether the party would be sleeping at the house tonight. She asked where Jon was and became very upset when told he went to see Jen. "Didn't you get my note? THERE'S AN AMBUSH IN THE WHOREHOUSE!"
 * Jon was incapacitated by a succubus, who wrapped her tail around his neck and began pulling information out of his mind ("Geez, this guy's brain is made of Swiss cheese!") After some poking and prodding, she got the information about the events in Mendham Wood, Jendarion, and Shyra out of him. Jen said to "dispose of him" as she had matters to attend to at the Docks, and started to leave.
 * Red, in the form of a homing pigeon, got to the brothel first and tried to attack the succubus, but was slammed back ten feet by an unexpectedly powerful punch from the madam. The succubus pulled a knife on Jon's throat and told Red to "back off or the bard gets it," then told Jen to open a planar gate.
 * Bay, hasted, arrived on the scene while Jen was spellcasting and used her chaos powers to weaken the succubus' knife, causing it to come apart when she applied pressure on it, and yelled to Red to grab Jon before the succubus could take him through the portal with her. Red succeeded at wresting the paralyzed bard away from the demoness and her broken knife. Aler, arriving next, dived through the window and attempted to grapple Jen, but she threw him off easily and the two women departed through the planar gate, leaving Jon behind.
 * With Jon revived, the party investigated the brothel and found Jen tied up in her office alongside the body of her bouncer Bruno, whose skull had been crushed. Jen had no explanation for why Bruno was killed and she was left alive. She described her assailant as a "tall, red-haired man, elven or part-elven, dressed in black leather with buckles all over it," and that he tied her up and cut off a piece of her hair but didn't otherwise harm her. Isolating scent trails didn't prove effective in the busy brothel, but Aler noticed a peculiar discrepancy in the footprints of the Jen who had fought the party upstairs and the Jen who had been walking around in the office-- the two pairs of footprints seem to be aligned backwards from each other. Jon also noticed that although Jen claimed the attacker never spoke to her, the upstairs Jen knew details about previous conversations Jen had had with Jon.
 * While Adriel went for the police, Kit arrived at the brothel, awkwardly expressing concern for Jon and explaining that she had overheard some of the orcs talking by pretending she didn't speak Orcish, and one of them asked where some guy named "Hasker or something" went, and the other one said he went to a whorehouse to ambush a bard, so she thought she'd better warn Jon just in case. Zadkiel asked if the guy could have been named "Harasket," and Kit said "Yeah, I think that was it."
 * The guards arrived and took over the investigation, while the party went back to the warehouse, having asked Captain Black to meet them there. They warned her about their concerns about shapeshifters and/or Jen's trustworthiness, and Zadkiel remembered that Black had been asking the guards to search Fletcher's wagon for human hair after Hector's murder. Black explained that a clump of hair seemed to have been ripped out of Hector's head, perhaps as in a fight, and she had been looking for evidence. The party wondered this could be related to the fact that the man cut off a piece of Jen's hair. Captain Black informed the party that Tad Hector has been resurrected and is recuperating at a sanatorium uptown.

MAL 14

 * Jon went to speak with Jen, who seemed shaken up by the ordeal. She confirmed that the story the impostor told Jon about an acolyte of Sesharet was one she really had heard from a client and intended to tell Jon about, but that the attacker never spoke with her, so she does not know how he learned it.
 * The party went to the Citadel in the morning and answered questions about the brothel ambush for Detective Noyar, who confirmed that both Jen and the murdered taxman had had a piece of hair removed from their heads. His questions also narrowed down the unlikeliness that Jen could have staged the entire thing himself-- since Aler has true seeing activated at the time the "Jen" with the succubus appeared to go through the portal, she could not have slipped downstairs to pose as a victim instead. Also, the true seeing rules out the possibility that it could have been an illusion--if it was not truly Jen, then it must have been either a nonmagical disguise or an innate shapeshifter. Finally, he said that Beyond Kendra had cast Speak With Dead on the dead bouncer, whose description of the attacker matched Jen's.