Down the Rabbit Manhole
When people talked about the Chinatown underworld, it wasn't usually meant in a literal sense. This time, though, it was plain that something shady was going on downstairs. I knew I wouldn't be able to get in through the front door, but that courier had unwittingly shown me another possibility.
I pulled open the manhole, secure in the knowledge that any bystanders would either be too distracted by the parade to notice, or too well-versed in the standard Chinatown "see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing" protocol to raise a fuss. Muttering a curse, I lowered myself down the ancient metal ladder, slick with oil and rust, and pulled the lid shut after me. A short drop landed me in a concrete tunnel, thankfully separate from the main sewer drains, though near enough that the smell was still a punch in the gut. The tunnel was dimly-lit -- bright enough to keep you from banging into the walls, but not enough so you could avoid stepping in puddles. Someone was going to owe me a new pair of shoes after this. Probably a new suit as well.
Only one tunnel was lit, which made sense -- it wouldn't do for the yakuza's couriers to be getting lost down here, after all. After a short time spent creeping through the dim light, I became aware of a certain smell that grew more distinct as my distance from the town sewers increased. It smelled like rotten eggs -- sulfur -- and burning tin.
Triads.
Whereas the yakuza mostly worked out in the open, with their distinctive tattoos and yak heads and shows of wealth, the triads preferred to stick to the shadows. And where the main tools of the yakuza were intimidation and brute force, the triads preferred magic and hacking -- which, according to a low-level triad guy I met in a bar once, were essentially the same thing from two different perspectives. After that, his speech got too technical (and I got too drunk) to understand any more of what he was talking about, but the upshot was that, like regular hackers, triads refused to do any work that they could summon a daemon to do for them. I'd since learned that magic smells like burning tin, and daemons smell like rotten eggs, and the combination of the two meant you were near a triad operation.
The dim tunnel opened up into a series of large brightly-lit concrete rooms -- old abandoned maintenance sub-basements, I figured. The place was laid out like some kind of factory, but it wasn't knockoff designer handbags they were making. It looked like electronics, judging by the computer workstations and spools of cable, but there were glass tanks of some kind of bubbling yellow-green liquid too. What the hell was going on here? It looked like a pretty big operation, but the best way to knock down a house of cards is to start at the bottom.
"Right," I said, striding up to a guy wearing a labcoat and glasses, and taking his clipboard. "You've got quotas to fill, and the boss wants a production report. What's in those boxes there?" I flipped through the papers on the clipboard, but they were all numbers and Chinese squiggles. I looked back up at the guy, who was staring at me like I'd asked for a bowl of fish soup without any heads in it.
"Who the hell are you?" he yelled. Dammit, that bluff usually worked.
Occurs on your first adventure in the Triad Factory.
