In this update we'll be heading off towards Tarant, Arcanum's biggest city and investigate the jewelry store, P. Schuyler and Sons.
We make our way across the town's main bridge and onto Kensington Broadway, a street with a lot of shops and a tavern.
That woman there in the pink dress will offer you a bit of merc work if you talk to her.
New sidequest but we'll be doing it later. For now we'll head toward the jewelry store and advance the main quest.
On the streets there are paper boys you can buy newspapers from. Usually, they just tell you about what's happening in the world (sometimes about something you were involved in) but sometimes you'll find one that'll give you a lead on a new quest.
This is one of the ones that hint towards something for you to look up. You can report what happened to the zeppelin at the Tarantian office for 500 gp, but there will be consequences with the assassin guild after you.
This one here doesn't give you any leads, but it does foreshadow an event that happens much later in Tarant that you can take part in.
After asking around we're given directions to P. Schuyler's address on Devonshire Way. Standing by the entrance is a dwarf who also has business to attend to here.
He gets easily butthurt if you bother to ask for his name, so we have to apologise if we want to get any useful info out of him.
Fucking christ, I hate dwarves. We ask if he has any business here, and hope the dwarf yields any useful info about the Schuylers.
They seem like a normal popular business establishment, indeed. Maybe this guy is just being paranoid.
Definitely likes his conspiracy theories. He just said this is the oldest business in the city, it's quite possible for a few coincidences like this to crop up every once a blue moon or so during all those years. The owners being introverts certainly isn't nothing spectacular, and it wouldn't be far-fetched to assume some robber began stalking the women after they heard about the expensive shit they were carrying around.
Anyway, we get back on topic and ask if he's here to investigate anything as well.
We tell him and in return he shows us a fancy dwarven bracelet with hieroglyphs he's investigating.
Guess he's on a quest for family history then. We ask him about his clan but once again he starts bitching about that honor bullshit, so fuck it.
We ask him if he wants to join us on our own investigation and he agrees. No spare weapons to give him though, so he'll just have to make do with a rusty pipe I dug out of a trash bin.
We chat up the guy at the reception desk, but he's a bit of a dick. Thanks to our persuasion skills we're eventually able to talk to him again and scare him into giving us a key by convincing him we're Tarantian authorities. We take the key and head down stairs in search of the Schuylers.
And immediately find ourself in a tomb full of undead. Hell, maybe Magnus wasn't pulling shit out of his ass afterall.
We adventure deeper into the catacombs and eventually find ourselves in an old dwarven tombs with dwarf zombie workers running around. They aren't hostile towards you, though.
In the room straight ahead we finally meet the Schuylers, who are pretty pissed (understandably so).
We show him the signet ring, and then he strikes a bargain with us in exchange for the info we need.
Good question, wtf are they doing with those zombies?
Ah. Necromancers using zombie workers to make their shit with after finding a tomb of exiled dwarves. Good thinking.
He proceeds to give us a big boring sob story about how no one appreciates the dark arts anymore, and then we're finally able to get back on track with the bargain.
Sounds like a good deal to me, so fuck it, why not.
And then Magnus decides to throw a fit, angry about the dwarven tomb's desecration.
We try to reason with him but he doesn't listen, and then tries to manipulate us into killing the Schuylers by playing the guilt card.
Well, fuck you, Magnus! We all gang up on and beat him to a pulp.
After the battle, Schuyler uses his magic to summon his father's spirit who'll tell us who he sold the ring to.
And now we finally solved one of our mysteries about the blimp assault. We'll attempt to arrange a meeting with this Bates in the near future.
On the way out, we loot the silly little dwarf and steal his fine set of dwarven gauntlets.
Lastly, we do as Joachim requested and check in at the Telegram office to get the message he left for us.
He gives us another contact in the village of Stillwater, way out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. It'll be a while before we have to go there though. Next update we'll be trying to get a meeting with Gilbert Bates, after we find out who he is.