Present Day

Stillwater Brewery's home office was an opulent and grandiose building in Old Temple, adorned with more gold than should have been acceptable outside of a palace and Lila scoffed at the overdone d?cor. Maybe the missing girl ran away. Lila knew she probably would too if she had to deal with such materialistic gross. The ragtag teenager had dressed in the closest thing to businesswear that she owned, putting enough polish on her appearance to hopefully pass for a respectable investigator despite the numerous piercings that graced her otherwise delicate features as well as the wild mane of pinkish blueish purple. You can do this, Lila. No problem, right? The internal peptalk ceased once she stepped up to the receptionist's desk, a pleasant but utterly fake smile plastered on her face for the woman as Lila folded her hands atop the counter's edge.

?Hello, I'm um,? Lila cleared her throat, took a deep breath and tried the whole talking thing again. ?I'm Lila Farron-D'Artainian. I was sent here by the Guild Master at Arcanum regarding Miss Stillwater. I believe I've got an appointment with Lord Stillwater.? With that out, she released the breath she didn't realize she was holding and relaxed just slightly while the receptionist checked the brewery owner's agenda to confirm what Lila had said. Eventually another assistant, this one just as pretty and prim and proper as the receptionist, came out to retrieve her, leading her through a side corridor that took her not into the brewery office proper but toward the grand mansion on the property that dwarfed the brewery office by leagues. Lila tucked her hands into her pockets, chewing on one of the rings in her lip as she was lead into a service entryway and up a narrow
staircase. It seemed Lord Stillwater was working from home this afternoon.

"Good afternoon, I understand you were sent here to begin looking
into the disappearance of my daughter?" There was the concern of a father for his daughter in his voice, but he seemed minorly annoyed as well. Perhaps that this had happened once before.

"Yes sir. It's my understanding that there were some rather curious details about your daughter's disappearance. I'd like to do what I can to bring her back home to you." The reassuring smile was both for the father as well as Lila herself.

He nodded, sitting down. "Please understand that I have not been around much lately, and some of this is second hand to me." He said with a sigh as he turns to face his floor to ceiling window. "I was returning from a business trip when one of the staff notified me that she had gone missing, but this was after a fight she had with my wife." He looked down, a touch of sadness. "But my wife is not her mother, which I think adds to it. My wife is a bit overzealous with her."

Absentee father. Check. Overbearing "wicked" step-mother. Check. This just had to be a case of an upset young woman running away from all that she hated. Right? All the same, Lila smiled and nodded, jotting down notes here and there. "Do you think she ran away? Have these sort of disagreements got to this level before?"

"Do I think she ran away? Yes." He nodded slowly. "But, I think something else may have happened to cause it, not just the argument. My wife believes in the world of spirits. As such, she believed that for more than a month, she had been possessed. They were fighting as my wife
poured salt in a circle around her bed. At the height of the fight, my wife tore one of her favorite ribbons from her hair and burned it, stomping out on the floor. At that point, it sent my daughter into a violent outburst. So
badly, it broke my wife's arm and knocked her out. When she came to, my daughter was gone. That was more than a week ago - I have not heard from her since. I have reached out to everyone she knows." He turns back around, for as strong as he is in business, his daughter was something he
truly loved.

Ahh, but of course. The plot thickens. While Lord Stillwater lamented on his sure to be cuckoo wife and his poor daughter, Lila was writing out the corresponding soap opera in her mind. She tipped her head to one side, her pen coming to a stop against the paper. She really couldn't believe what she was hearing at the moment, but he seemed genuine enough in his desire to find his daughter. "So we're either dealing with demonic possession or an upset young runaway." She wasn't sure which was worse.

He nodded slowly. "I have made arrangements for you to speak with the servant that witnessed this happen. She will meet you upstairs should you decide to look over the room. Also, my wife is in the solarium if you would like to get her side. She may also be able to provide insight as to what has happened over the course of the last few months. Listen...before you do anything. I need you to find her. Bring her back if she wants to come back, tell her I love her, that I'm not upset with her."

Lila was just about to rise, intent on seeking out the servant and maybe as an after thought the wife. If the wife thought the girl was possessed, well, Lila wouldn't be able to put too much stock in that. The father's words had her pausing, an earnest and tight lipped smile working its way across her lips. "I'll do everything I can, Lord Stillwater. I've worked with my fair share of runaways, don't worry."

As she leaves, she would hear quiet sobbing.

This wasn't nearly the quick investigation that Lila thought it would be. Her notebook filled up with ideas, interviews with interested parties, and random doodles here and there. The more she looked into it, the less it seemed like a cut and dry case of a spoiled heiress running away from home. Pouring over her notes, she sat in the dim light of the run down tavern by the bay, ignoring the lascivious looks given to her slight frame by drunken sailors and greasy bar hands alike. Truth be told, the looks no longer bothered her and she felt far more at ease in the seedier parts of town even if she stuck out like a sore thumb more of the time.

Signalling the tender for another beer, she ticked a cursory smile toward the grizzled old man, at the very least for serving someone who had no business drinking at her age. Let alone at this time of day. Lila's pen tap-tap-tapped against the paper as she waited and once more she examined her notes. Her conversation with the father had been brief and full of third party stories so she had to seek out those actually involved, spending a lengthy part of the day scrawling down details from a thoroughly freaked out maid and a half frazzled stepmother.

There had been some rather divisive arguments between the missing heiress and her stepmother, the former coming to loathe the latter over the years despite the stepmother's good intentions. But it had been bearable, it seemed, for the most part up until recently. Within the past few months, the younger woman had become increasingly obsessed with someone she had met on one of her numerous holidays. The stepmother had thought it would pass, that it was but a fleeting romance. How wrong she had been.

The household staff and the stepmother all reported that the young heiress had taken to talking to herself, pacing the halls of her father's palatial manor like a caged animal, looking for the first chance to escape. Always on her person was a sleek and elegant ribbon, a detail Lila was rather keen on for some reason or another, though why she couldn't remember. Flipping through the pages of her notebook, Lila scanned for something, anything really, that might nudge her in the right direction. To her right, a meek young woman stepped up to the counter, requesting a drink in a low murmur to the tender. Lila glanced aside to the girl, quirking a brow at the woman's demeanor. Within a few moments, a tankard of ale was grasped within the girls slender hands and Lila watched as she took it back to a man within a booth. Rather than slip into the booth as well, the young woman took up a kneel beside the half open curtain, head bowed as she went utterly still.

She rolled her eyes, shaking her head and returning her attention to her notebook and her own beer. What she needed to do was retrace the heiress's steps over the past few weeks, seeking out any sort of a hint for where the girl might have gone in her distressed state. Certainly it had to do with this new found romance, Lila figured, but she was still left to figure out just who could have held the young woman's heart. A cloud of acrid odor hit her from the left and she wrinkled her nose, looking up at the incredibly intoxicated man that had finally found his inner Lothario and thought it a good idea to approach the unaccompanied teenager at the bar. That was her cue. Before he could hit on her too much, she quickly shut her notebook and stuffed it under her arm. Leaving her half drank beer behind, she cut a quick path out of the tavern, glancing only once more at the girl kneeling by her master.

Lila felt no closer to solving this than she had been at the start.

The more Lila talked to people, the more she felt herself falling into a rabbit hole that she wasn't sure she would be able to pull herself out of. It was slow going at first, finding friends of Angela Stillwater that were willing to talk to her. First and foremost there seemed to be some sort of an issue with talking to a girl like her, ink and metal adorning her visible flesh like it did. She was hardly the picture of posh perfection like these giggling gossip girls that she was trying to extract information from, which made the whole thing rather frustrating.

"I swear I'm going in circles." She muttered under her breath, en route tracking down another lead, another of the young maids in the Stillwater household. It seemed like few had direct knowledge of Miss Stillwater's personal life despite her being the social butterfly that so many knew and loved. One dead end after another had plagued Lila's search, finding herself canvassing a far larger social group than she had ever intended. It wasn't like she wanted to broadcast the fact she was looking for the heiress, but it would be common knowledge before long. The hand rolled cigarette dangled from her lips, exhaled smoke rising in thin tendrils around violet locks to mix with the heavy atmosphere of winter fighting to maintain its hold as spring edged in.

She was certainly going in circles. Not in a physical sense, no. But each acquaintance that passed her on to the other always came back to the same point; the man that Angela had gushed and swooned about in the months leading up to her disappearance. Harmless, they said, simple infatuation. None seemed to piece together that perhaps it had been a contributor to the young woman's sudden snap. Lila didn't even put it together at first. But as more and more spoke of how the unwoo-able Angela Stillwater had become completely absorbed in the lavish dates and exorbitant amount of time and attention granted by her beau, the more Lila watched the red flags fly.

Alas, none of them knew his name. But Lila finally had a path to seek out instead of wandering aimlessly. Now, now she had to find out just who this man was and how he might have drawn the adoration of one so fickle and flighty as Angela Stillwater. She had plenty of questions at this point, she just needed answers.

"Angela was dressin' like one those dockside ladies of the night, you know? Ver' scantily clad an' revealin'." The source had told her, though Lila wasn't sure how much stock to put into the matter. What she was putting stock in, though, was the sighting of the young heiress and her lover at the tea shop in the market. That was a lead she could go off of. Notebook in hand, pen tucked behind her ear, she slipped into the shop. The chiming of bells got a glance upward before she put on a thin smile for the shopkeeper behind the counter. A mug of coffee was ordered and some sugary looking pastry thing. Lila took it as an excuse to chat up the shopkeeper and see what they knew.

"You know, my friend said she's in here a lot and I was hoping to catch her but it seems like luck isn't on my side." Lila tsked, her tongue ring clicking against her teeth in mock lament as she watched the keeper's reactions on the matter.

"Oh? Lots of regulars in here. Who is she? I may know who you're speaking about." Coffee was poured, cream and sugar were mixed in. Lila checked her hip to make sure her flask was there for a solid splash of whiskey once the keeper handed it over.

"Childhood friend of mine, Angie. Well, Angela. Last name, Stillwater. Pretty lass, about yea tall, blonde, green eyes. Usually has some hot guy on her arm." Lila rambled like she might about an old friend. It was her best guess, really she had no idea what she was doing. The shopkeeper was retrieving the pastry from the bakery case, pondering over Lila's words.

"You know, I think I might know who you're talking about. Dunno if that's her name but a real pretty young woman was in here not too long ago with a handsome gent. Cold looking fellow but she was at his beck and call no matter what he wanted, was sort of sweet in an odd way." The portly keeper offered over the coffee and snack, exchanging it for payment from the teenager across the counter. Lila flashed a bright smile and took the items to a table.

"Thank you. Do you know when you last saw her? I can't seem to get ahold of her for the life of me." Still keeping with the concerned friend routine since it seemed to be working, she batted her lashes innocently and prayed that she might get a lead from this.

"Must've been a month ago, there abouts. Can't really remember what they were going on about, something about a trip of some kind. He was really seeming to dote on her. Had this weird thing about her hair, kept running his fingers through it, fixing her pretty ribbon. But she seemed to love it, PDA just isn't my thing." The keeper shrugged and went back to cleaning the counter. Lila smiled politely and nodded, nibbling and sipping here and there even if she had no intention of finishing it.

"Thank you so much! Maybe I can track her down to catch up." Another sip of the hot coffee had the teenager pausing before setting the mug down to splash another stealthy dose of liquor into the cup.

"If she comes in again, can I give her a name for who might've been looking for her?" The keeper asked and Lila faltered. That was a good question. She swallowed her bite slowly, holding up a single finger in a one moment gesture.

"Mmh, tell her Lily Kate from primary school. She'll know who you mean." Lila lied, throwing out the childhood nickname like it was nothing. Oh well, her conscience would clear up before long. Finishing her coffee, the pulled apart pastry was left behind on the plate as she scribbled down a few notes and then thanks the keeper before heading on her way. This man was the key, now who was he.