CC in the Sewer Aftermath

After the fight, the sewer went quiet enough for questions. Dhaz was soaked in sewer water. The snake was dead. The thugs were down. Podon was alive, still strange, still speaking in rhyme, and still more focused on his missing daughter than on the fact that the party had just saved him again. But the party had not been alone in the fight. Bolts had come from the north at exactly the right times, cutting into enemies from a place the group could not see. Maine called out into the darkness, thanking whoever had helped and asking them to show themselves. A masked woman stepped into view. She gave them a name: CC. Blastbelle did not recognize her as one of Valara's people. That mattered. The party had entered the sewers with a Thieves Guild contact, but CC did not belong neatly inside that chain. She worked on her own, masked and cautious, and she had been moving through the same sewer network for a different reason. She was looking for the Graven Scourge entrance. That changed the shape of the alliance. Blastbelle needed the old stash so she could keep her place in the Guild. The party needed answers about Boost, the Rat King, and the factions moving through Gravenhurst's underbelly. CC wanted to find the hidden Scourge route. Their goals were not identical, but they pointed in the same direction long enough to matter. For the moment, that was enough. Podon made the other thread clearer. He was still searching for his daughter. Her name was C-Ment, a gnome like him, with gnomish hair and a trail that seemed to run through the same Boost-stained sewer world the party was already investigating. Podon did not want to leave. He did not want an escort back to a safer place. His vice, as he put it, was finding his daughter. Jonah treated him gently anyway. The party promised to keep an eye out for C-Ment, and Podon's search joined the mission as something more specific than a sad old man wandering through danger. Now there was a name. There was a missing person. There was a reason he kept appearing in places where Boost and sewer trouble met. Then the group moved on. CC guided them farther through the sewer route, stepping over dead oozes and toward the suspected Rat King territory. Blastbelle still needed the stash. CC still needed the Scourge entrance. Podon still needed C-Ment. The sewers had stopped being one mission. They had become a crossing of unfinished searches.