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With the presentation of both characters concluded, Melvin begins to give a summary of the campaign that preceded this one to provide context for what was going on. "Previously, the two of you, Agnes and Tristan, found yourselves on what seemed to be a fairly common guild mission together with a few other individuals who unfortunately perished along the way; you were the only ones who survived.
It started as a simple missing person investigation; a father turned to the adventurers' guild in a last effort to find his eight-year-old daughter, who had gone missing a week ago.
The reality is that he had already done everything to find her, so hope was minimal; the world is cruel, and he knew she was probably already dead, but he wanted at least to know what happened, thinking it would help him sleep a little better.
You guys and your group followed the scarce clues, questioned people, and the case eventually escalated when you discovered that the child had been kidnapped, and she wasn't the only one; disappearance cases had been happening all over the city for quite some time.
There was no pattern: children, adults, elderly, men, women; it was a wave of rampant kidnappings that, for some reason, were being covered up.
Following the trail, you guys came across a mention of an organization, a ritualistic cult that worshiped Lucifer, the primordial demon and lord of hell.
With this information in hand, you all dug even deeper and ended up poking at the rot of the city where all of this was taking place.
You learned that every month, on the same day, under the cover of night, a large group of people dressed in red cloaks with conical hoods appeared at the city's empty port, went to a warehouse, were received by one person, and then left with a large load.
You guys then went to investigate, and despite your efforts, stealth was not the group's strong suit. It was complete chaos; many cultists and slaves, who were the cargo they had come to retrieve, died that day. And despite being badly injured, you all managed to get out alive with shocking new information.
The nobles and the city's elite, many of them, along with their families and staff, were members of this cult and were kidnapping people and buying slaves to serve as sacrifices in their ritualistic experiments.
How do you deal with a group of enemies as large and powerful as this with only five people?
Well, you guys thought the same thing before coming to the conclusion that the right thing to do was to request reinforcements from the guild, but to achieve that, you would need evidence.
So a plan was formed, you all would infiltrate the mansions of some of the families who were members of this cult in search of documents and information, all stealthily.
Unfortunately, as one might imagine, it wasn't stealthy at all. And it so happens that, at this point, the chaos at the port had already put you on the cult's radar.
And these new actions, well, they only showed that there were small pests in the cult's garden that needed to be exterminated.
Actions have consequences; they attacked the inn where you guys were staying, and after a long night fighting for your lives, once the dust settled, you realized that Duval, the friendly old man who owned the inn where you had been staying for a while, had been kidnapped.
The fight at the inn left you all injured, but even so, you licked your wounds and pressed on toward the cult's headquarters.
Death after death, you guys fought your way through the place, arriving at a massive hall in the final moments of an ongoing ritual.
Unfortunately, you ended up arriving too late; Duval's fresh body lay dead beneath a stone altar located at the center of a bright red ritual circle.
Inside this circle was a big five-pointed star with runes drawn all along its length.
There were five priests, as they called themselves, positioned at each point of the star. You guys couldn't stop them in time; they completed their sinister chant in a long-forgotten language, and the ritual was complete.
Before you all, the ritual circle shone intensely as a deafening roar of a thousand voices screamed like a World War II air-raid siren, filling every corner of the room and passing through it, alerting the entire city; the tension was agonizing. There was nothing more that could be done to stop whatever that was.
When the noise finally ceased, you guys witnessed a spine-chilling sight: the ritual circle, along with the altar, had vanished. In its place was a large hole with what looked like a thin membrane of flesh, semi-transparent and filled with purple veins; it was possible to see through to the other side, albeit blurred.
It wasn't a simple ritual; it was a fucking portal to hell. If something crossed to this side, you'd be fucked.
And as you two well remember, something crossed that membrane; it was a huge, thin, raw-fleshed creature that looked like a quadruped human with abnormally long limbs. It had no lips or eyelids; its mouth was enormous and full of sharp, irregular teeth. It had huge claws, its screams were high-pitched, and the priests called it Mundungo while happily worshiping it.
Fortunately, the portal collapsed as soon as Mundungo passed through it. Unfortunately, you guys still had to deal with the creature, which was now delighting itself in the flesh of the priests it had just killed.
The fight was grueling. Three of you died before the creature finally fell. You two then passed out and woke up a week later in the guild's hospital.
You were interrogated about what had happened, and after explaining everything, another week passed.
One day before both of you were discharged, an elderly, tall, and muscular man came to visit you. He introduced himself as 'Mr. Nobody' and said he was a recruiter for an organization you had only heard of in legends, the Ordo Vitae.
The Ordo Vitae is an organization that has been protecting the life of Arcadia for millennia; no one knows whether it exists or not. It is a legend, and a recruiter from this organization suddenly appeared before the two of you and invited you to join the cause.
He gave you one day to think about whether you would accept the invitation or not, and as one might expect, you two accepted.
After being discharged from the hospital, in a private room of the guild, he explained to both of you that the cult you had destroyed was nothing more than a branch of a much larger organization that they had been investigating for several months.
All of this happened in another kingdom, and here you are now, one year later, on a wide cobblestone street, heading toward the meeting place the supervisor you were assigned to after completing your training told you to go to.
Today marks the beginning of your first mission; the details will be provided by your supervisor, and the agreed meeting place for the gathering is at a café in front of the giant fountain in the city center."
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(AN: 1,213 Words)
Quick explanation that will appear in all chapters from now on: If you can get this fic up to the top 50 in the Power Stones ranking and keep it at least there, I promise to publish two full chapters per week, divided into four smaller chapters throughout the week because the site prefers to reward frequency over anything else.
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