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You don't see a lot of cities in the Northlands, especially cities mostly full of humans and human-looking things. The Dragons don't tend to like it when mortal kingdoms try to carve claim to parts of the territory used for their Long Game, y'see. But there are a few exceptions here and there, small outposts and little towns where they're either securely in a friendly Dragon's territory where there's not much risk of losing them to a rival, or are in parts of the Northlands that nobody wants or cares about enough to lay claim to them or drive out softskinned invaders.
Torch is one of those places, the former specifically 'cause this place is waaaaaay too interesting to be ignored. The town is named for and built around Torch Hill, a place where a biiiiiig column of purple fire used to shoot up out of the ground, which was excellent for everything from alchemy to metallurgy to glassmaking. When it really got going, it could even melt skymetal!
Then it went out. Poof. No more torch in Torch. That's kinda a big deal here. Everything runs off the torch, it's what keeps this place alive.
So it didn't surprise me much when my Boss went looking for answers. I'm apprenticed to a mage engineer named Khonnir Baine, who's also a sort of town leader on the council that runs things here. So when the torch went dead, he gathered up a team to look into it.
A few days later, I get a message from another councilor, Dolga Freddert, asking for help tracking him down. I was kinda surprised it came to me instead of Val, but I guess she's also gotta keep the Foundry running, so I got the buzz instead.
I showed up early to get a drink while I waited, and didn't take me long to notice the others Freddert had gathered up to help with the search. There's Ellie, a nice human girl who's a healer priest of some god or another, she never really specified. There's Sully, a big orc guy with a weird hat who really likes to ramble about weird stuff, complaining about "Big Farmers" and "governments hiding ayleeins from us". There's Ratao, a quiet fellow with a scarf over his face. And there's Ratthew, a kinda scrawny human who kept ranting about working at a grindstone and how he's not in alpha testing anymore, which hey good for him, masonry's a respectable craft.
Freddert was a bit confused by some of us, but she eventually got the idea across that we were supposed to gear up for going into the nearby lake caves to look for the Boss; we were even advised to head to the Inventor's temple and have old Joram give us magic to breathe water so we could get through the lakes easier. It took a while to coordinate the group, especially since Sully and Ratthew really wanted to do a lot of weird talking about stuff I admittedly couldn't fully follow, but we did make it over there eventually, get a bit of chatting with old Joram, watch Sully get dizzy watching one of the gizmos spin and fall on his tail, then get our magic and head out on our way.
Granted, me and my heavy armored coat and big crossbow aren't much made for swimming. So I just walked across the bottom of the lake until I got to the cave side and climbed back out. Some of the others got across no problem, but one of 'em needed a bit of a helping hand from Ellie, though I didn't get a look at which one.
Inside the cave, almost immediately we found a body stuffed in a side chamber full of stalagmites - one of the town's local fighters, sliced up with a knife. CAVE MURDER.
I made my way through that passage, the others squeezing their way through as well, then we found a pile of junk and a bunch of weird drawings on the wall, three-legged beasties and four-armed people unlike anything I or the others've ever seen. I was able to tell they were a bit less than a month old - older than the torch going dead, but not reeeally old.
Whatever they were, they sure got Sully excited, and he got really loud about it being "proof" of something or other. This got the attention of a weird grey-skinned man slunking about the caves, and he ran up and stabbed Ratao something nasty before I could plug him with my crossbow, and Ratthew and Ellie could start flinging spells at him. We took him down pretty quickly, and nicked his knife. One of the others said it was a beasty called a Skulk, Sully I think.
This was clearly the Cave Murderer. One mystery solved! But there's a lot more cave to explore, and we still haven't found the Boss yet.