Night 1 - Nan's Kitchen

"Ah, yes, Mr. Wilde, that's right. What is it about that box that has you so interested, Mr. Wilde?"

"And danger, Ms. Brown? Do you have reason to believe the assistant may be a sign of things to come? or connected to the disappearance of Memphis the Great in some way?"

Idella stammers a moment and then replies. "No, nothing like that. It just seems like something about that act went badly wrong tonight. With Mr. Wilde wanting to investigate the boxes further, I just thought that whatever went wrong might still be wrong there."

"Do you think the equipment was to blame for the accident?" she asks, a worried look in her face as she asks for Charles's thoughts on that matter.

"It's either the equipment or the performance. Something mechanical failed or someone missed a cue. That's the thing about shows, they're rehearsed many times to make sure it goes right once on stage. Idella practices her 'stunt' flying over and over before going up to do a show." John seems confident he's making the right association between the flying shows and a 'magic' show.

"Mhm," Yuna says nodding, "of course. Well, I won't pretend to know the first thing about shows like this, but that makes sense. Have other accidents like this happened with Harold's act before? Any other accidents you've heard about?"

"Danger? Oh, I expect so, yes!" Charles says, with a disarming wink. You need to let people hear what they want to hear sometimes, especially if they were to be moved to action. It just so happened that this time, it was also the truth.

"The artifact itself is immensely dangerous, purely for the purpose it fulfills. But quite beside all that is the fact that these things come at a price, you see.

Magic, real magic, if you’ll entertain the fiction for a moment, has a price. You’ve heard tales of great sacrifice, willing or unwilling, I’m sure. Most often the price for great feats of magic is… blood."

Yuna sits back in her chair and eyes Charles carefully, considering his words. Even if 'real magic' was a fiction, which she was surely convinced it was, she knew all too well the lengths someone might go through to entertain a fiction, if they believed in it well enough. "I suppose the question, then, would be how did Harold come by such a thing," she says finally.

Barrington sparkles his smile at Rosa and orders himself Nan's Kitchen's famous waffles and chicken, together with a mug of coffee - some fat, some sugar, some caffeine to help him through this rainy, eventful evening.

"What is this talk of "real" magic, Mr Wilde? I was watching Harold's show carefully - as one magician to another - and it felt... off... I couldn't understand how Harold was able to do these things, and that shouldn't happen".

"You see, Ms Yuna, I too wouldn't say Harold and I are RIVAL magicians. You might be surprised, but we magicians are a pretty sociable friendly lot. We may keep our secrets within our circle, but between ourselves we enjoy telling each other, explaining, how we make our magic work. It almost never happens that I see a trick and don't understand the illusions involved in making it happen. But I did not understand what happened this evening!"

"So I'm here because I'm worried about what's going on with my colleagues Harold and Memphis the Great. And if they're in trouble, I want to help them out."

"So, Mr Wilde, what are these dangers you're talking about? What do you think might have happened to Harold, to Memphis?"

"I can respect that, Mr. Van Ness," Yuna says, "and find myself now even more curious to find some answers to those same questions."

She looks to Charles, awaiting an answer.

"If we can answer to question of how Harold sourced the artifact, we shall have some very dangerous information indeed!

Dangerous information concerning dangerous people. You won’t find these artifacts just anywhere.

You’ve heard of ‘cults’, I assume. Satanic cults, of course. But there are cults worse than that, believe me. It might be that Harold has fallen in with such rogues.

Or, he could be their unwitting tool. Did he seem the cult sort? They often don’t, you understand. By design…"

After taking several sips of unusually-good tea - a taste Barrington picked up in his time over in Europe during The Great War - he speaks up:

"As I think you know, sir, all five of us here were at Harold's performance last night - that we saw Ingrid while we were there - and that the evening was beset by strange unexplained occurrences."

"While there, I couldn't help but notice a lot of tension between Harold and Ingrid, more than I would have expected from just the evening's incidents."

"With Harold, Ingrid, Memphis the Great, and us somehow all tied together with things now - and as we were invited here at the request of Ingrid, would she be available to meet us, to fill us in on recent events? Whether she could give us some information on any recent strange behaviour or happenings around her, Harold, or Memphis the Great?"