1 - Bottled Up

Ryosuke politely waited for an answer.

Nicole looks at Ryosuke in silence for a moment, searching his face. "There is not a budget for expenses, beyond covering your accommodations and travel. As for advanced pay, I can give you today's pay up front after we meet with the client. If this assignment takes a week, you will have failed your mission. But you will understand better once the client explains the situation, so let's head there. It isn't far," she says looking at Tadaoushi. "As for Ms. Aiko..." she punches some info on her comm, "...there, your room has been cancelled. The amount saved will be added to your travel expense when you have finished the job. Now if you'd all follow me..."

Nicole leads you out the back door of the nightclub and into a short alley, where the bouncer that greeted you earlier is waiting next to another door. The path is seven flights of stairs down into what appears to be the parking garage of the Siam Plaza Mall. There are only four cars parked here: a moving van and three trendy Rover SUVs. A cluster of Japanese suits nervously point submachine guns at you. One of them looks less nervous than the others; he simply looks miserable. He’s flanked by two thugs, one in a standard suit, and the other wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sporting a cobalt-blue ponytail.

"These are the prospects," Nicole says to the miserable looking man. She introduces you in turn. Then, she says, "This is Shinoda Yoshinori, oyabun of the Kuroiban-gumi."

"Hello," Shinoda-sama says. "Thank you for helping us. I’m going to be direct with you, because we don’t have time for great subtlety or protocol. Someone has been attacking my gumi. So far, we’ve lost nearly thirty men in five days. I didn’t find out about the attacks until the day before yesterday, when I went to a meeting with the former oyabun. I found him and his council of advisors like this."

Shinoda-sama motions to the moving van. The Yakuza in the Hawaiian shirt opens the rear door. Inside you see two large jars about one meter wide and one-and-a-half meters tall. Each jar contains a human body floating in a yellow fluid.

"These two were found in an opium processing operation in Siam Plaza. Every incident has had identical results. This is a fight for survival, and you’ll be well rewarded for helping us."

Knockout strains his neck to look closer at the jars. "Was the tanks part of the opium processing operation?" he asks. "Or did they go to the trouble of bringing them to a slaughter? And has other operations been targeted or has the other men targeted been killed on the street?"

Kla gets as close as he's permitted to scrutinize the jars and their contents. "Art? That's some pretty sick shit for art. Maybe some kind of ritual magic instead. Have you opened any of the jars? Tested the fluid?"

Ryosuke tried to hold it together, although bile rose in the back of his throat. He had seen corpses before, the victims of violence. It never really settled with him, part of his humanity he tried to keep hold of. But he'd never seen someone... ...preserved before. He defocused, averting his gaze, avoiding eye contact with the bodies by examining the containers. Hopefully, it would be interpreted as professional.

"This isn't the sort of thing you buy off-the-shelf at a craft store." He leaned in a bit, examining the container and its fixtures, looking for any kind of brand, or maker's mark, or even a distinctive sign of manufacture. He also searched for fixtures that might be used to open and close the containers, that might have forensic evidence - or at least present a clue as to their original purpose.

"And you say the killer has left... thirty of them? Thirty two?"

Slightly upset at the "display" Tadaoshi moves closer to see if there are any wounds or traces that my indicate cause of death and/or post mortem uses. Have multiple sites been attacked? While I am sure your competitors may know of some of your facilities it would be useful to know how public the attacked facilities were or who may have known of their locations and defenses.

Taodaoshi opens up his astral senses and detects the faint signature of magic. A specialized combat spell of some kind using ritual sorcery. The bodies have no physical wounds of any kind. Magic surely killed them and most likely immediately. None of the faces register shock or pain.

He relays his findings on the magical nature of the deaths, siting the lack of wounds as his reasoning, but holds off on sharig additional details about his sould sight for now.

Aiko blinks at the reveal, but honestly she's more way of the guns being pointed at her. The thing about a flatline is they're already logged out of the meatbrain space, they couldn't do the same to you. Well, unless someone puppeted them but at that point was it the stiff or the caster? Theological arguments aside, that was the situation she found herself in.

"Do the timeframes all check out? That is to say, how long from when people disappeared to when y'all found 'em like grandma's pickles?"

"Well, what I mean to say is unless they were kegged overnight, which they might've been, surely someone would've noticed when they didn't show up?" She shrugs. "I'm thinking you answered my question anyway, immediate timeframe."

"Could it be an inside job?" Knockout asks. "They seem to know when to hit. And it would take some time to carry in the cannisters and pickle the victims. They seem heavy even without the added weight of the body."

Can you give us the timeline of these attacks and their locations? I agree going to the most recent site may be useful as would a list of potential suspects.

Kla says to the group, "Let's go to the most recent crime scene and see what we can find."

Ryosuke gently knocked on the glass, looking over towards Tadoshi. "Conjuring something like this that would remain permanent... or teleporting an object of this size, that is beyond state of the art in spellcraft, am I correct?"

It is more likely that it is simply crafted and used in a magic ritual. he musses aloud, pondering possible uses.

"But that means that whoever brought it carried it to the scene somehow, desu ne?"