Café de Nuit

Raen shakes his head in disgust. "How terrible must a person's corruption be, to cause that kind of effect?! In anyway Sara, I agree with Benn. We don't chase the cloud. We're after the thing that creates the cloud with its corruption"

THE PARTY UNDER THE CLOUD
moves to an area its members hope will be safer, down near the rivebank.

They don't see Joanathon Maytr lurking there, knife in hand, or anything like that.

Just some fishing boats, a few fishermen at work, and a raft of debris moving midstrream.

Wait, no....
Not debris, a moving mass of living things. Rats.

It must be thousands of rodents, fleeing this side of the city and swimming out across the Musarde, away from the shadow of the ash cloud.

Raen raises an eyebrow in surprise and turns to Benn "Do you want one of the rats for examination? I certainly do." He turns to Sara and Kat "Ladies, do you think it's possible to get a couple of the rats alive? I don't have any spell for that."

"My name may be 'Kat' but catching rats is not my speciality. Especially when they are in the middle of a river! Anyway I doubt there is anything special about them, apart from the fact that anything the city's rats are fleeing from with that much determination is not something we ant to meet..."

Bennedict watches the rats swimming away for a long, uncomfortable moment, before issuing a long sigh. "That is probably not a good sign," he finally says.

He turns back to the group. "Well, whatever is causing this doesn't seem to be in a rush to show itself, so its time to decide where we go from here. We can keep spreading through the people here and doing person-to-person interviews, seeing if anyone has seen anything out of the ordinary. Or," he reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out the envelope of ash, "I had thought to seek a chemist and see if they can identify this compound. Or, if you have any other ideas, I'm open to them."