Today we had up over to the east coast, to the city so nice they named it twice. New York. The Lady Abigail had asked if we could help out the Prince of New York, a very very old friend of hers. He was having some issues with a traitor in his mist. We hop on mage airlines and meet some thug in an alley who is supposed to be our driver. First impression was, great another dark, underground, lost in the 1500's kind of Prince. I can't wait to get to the palace and be underwhelmed. As the limo took us into times square and pulled up to a shiny new skyscraper all encased in glass, things were looking up. I was still expecting to be dragged into the basement, probably some abandoned subway station from yesteryear, but instead we were greeted by a receptionist who showed us to the "special" elevator that would take us up to see the prince. Up sounded good.
The elevator stops way up top and we come out into a pretty nice looking floor, modern, bright. Even at this hour there are lots of people moving about, apparently working. Quick scan with mage sight reveals these are almost all supernaturals including changelings, mages and werewolves. We are greeted by a man who introduces himself as Caleb , the Prince of New York. He is dressed in an expensive but modern suit with a hard to place accent, but pleasingly not with the usual tone of superiority you get with the princes we've met so far (Lady Abigail excluded of course).
Prince Caleb begins to explain why we are here. He runs a pretty tight ship and trusts his councilors perhaps a little too much. While he doesn't have any direct evidence of betrayal, he has a gut instinct that somebody is betraying him here. He explains that he doesn't rule the city with an iron fist, he has his council. The council is made up of 13 members of all the supernatural factions. Two of each, with the last spot going to whoever is determined a good match. Each faction has their own method of determining who to send to the council. This was sounding quite interesting, but that naysayer side of me shrugged it off as political posturing, he was just letting the other factions think they had a say. I was still skeptical of all this until he brought us into the council chambers. Sitting in the middle was something I had never expected to see but there it was in front of us. An actual round table, you know like King Arthur's round table. The prince was quite serious about all this and I was quite shocked. This was a modern palace, with a modern prince who ruled through democracy. Still in shock I had to put these thoughts in the back of my head, because we had business to attend to.
Prince Caleb does mention they recently saw some self deleting encrypted messages leaving the network that seemed quite strange. I started digging through their network trying to trace these messages, I eventually tracked down their origin to a computer in the sales dept. I poked around the computer of origin and found a rather resource intensive program running, this program was trying to hide it's true origin. A little more digging and I find it's true purpose, it's a search spider. It is quite similiar to mine, looking for the same kinds of information and putting it into an encrypted file with a whole lot of trip wires on it. This guy was good, but I was better. I put in a very well hidden tap on the sales network to copy all data going in and out. I left the file untouched until we could decide how we wanted to deal with this guy. I pulled up the the employee records on who used this computer and it came back as a Changeling by the name of Victor Caylin, aka Puck.