Zilo and Sparky enter the tiny kenku home, and it looks rather messy. There were small pieces of trash on the ground with only a hand full of rooms. There looked to be a small bedroom straight past the entryway with a common room and a side kitchen. To the left of the common room was a smaller bedroom with the door shut.
Zilo and Sparky begin to look around the home as Rat's Scurry caws to a more lithe kenku in the larger bedroom. It emerges and the two of them make indistinct bird noises at each other before the thinner one sits down.
Zilo looks to it and says, "Good morning, my name is Zilo, and this is Sparky, who might you be?" Rat's Scurry takes a seat next to her and speaks in common, "Wife." The wife then makes the sound of the sound of dirt being thrown into the air and landing.
"Dirt Throw?" Asks sparky with a questioning eyebrow. After a few more wrong answers and hints from Rat's Scurry, the two heroes eventually learn that the lady's name is Dog Digging. Zilo smiles to the two of them and says, "Interesting, if I had the time I'd like to learn more of you kenku. Your names are so interesting."
Dog Digging mimics back Zilo's phrase, "Your names are so interesting." Zilo and Sparky both beam smiles as she says that. Zilo takes out his notes on the journal entry that Mathew had made for him. He then looks back to the bird couple and asks.
"As I explained to Rat, we are here to look into the death of a kenku girl, she went by the assumed name of. " Zilo squints at the journal and says, "Pigeon Flap?" Dog Digging lowers her head as Rat coddles her. Sparky notices this and asks, "She your little girl?" Rat nods.
"Me so sorry." Responds Sparky. Zilo as well says, "Indeed, sorry for your loss. We intend to find her killer and make them pay." The two birds look back to them and Zilo continues, "The guards are reported to have returned the body to you, may we investigate it?"
The two birds look at the bard quizzically before pointing to an urn on the wall shelf. Zilo squints at the urn and says, "That's... that's just an urn."
"It urn." Echos Sparky. Zilo points to the little goblin and says, "It is an urn, thank you for backing me up Sparky. We mean her body, now would you please show us to the basement pool of shadow energy that you send your ancestors bodies to."
The two birds look at Zilo like a madman as Sparky follows up with, "Send your ancestor's bodies to." Dog keeps her suspicious look as she speaks, "No."
Zilo rubs his temple and says," Look, I don't plan to meddle with her soul, in fact, if you wish I can send her soul on to the afterlife, but the body must be looked at so we can move on." Zilo continues to try and explain his ability with examining the dead from his time in the shadow plane. Meanwhile the kenkus continue to not be able to tell him he is wrong about the urn.
Sparky, meanwhile gets curious of urn and he climbs up onto the shelf while Zilo continues to fail to bridge the language gap. Sparky takes off the top of the urn to see ashes inside. Sparky reaches in, takes out a bit of the ash, squints at it, then licks it off his fingers. His eyes widen as he clumsily falls off the shelf and runs over to Zilo and says,
"ZILO, BIRD IN URN!"
"What?" Zilo looks to the goblin in shock, Sparky continues, "Me burn lotta beasties. Stuff in urn taste like burned feathers!" Zilo's eyes widen and he says, "Truly?" Zilo turns to the couple and says, "Did you both burn your daughter's body and fill the urn with the remains?"
The couple meanwhile is just staring at Sparky. Rat speaks back Sparky's words with a questioning look, "Taste like burned feathers!" Sparky nods and says, "Yup, me try some, solve mystery. Me do good good." with a large toothy grin on the clueless sorcerer's face.
After a few moments, Zilo and Sparky flee out of the kenku home with different sorts of kitchenware being thrown at them. Zilo shouts back, "You're the ones who burned her! What did we do wrong!?" The two birds continue to hurl their objects as Zilo and Sparky hurry out of their effective throwing range.
The two of them catch their breath around the corner as the couple lets up on their attacks. Sparky looks up to Zilo and with big sad eyes asks, "Sparky do bad bad?"
Zilo rubs the little goblin's head and says, "Course not little friend, in fact, you helped me learn the weird death rituals on this plane, but we better think of a new place to look into this." Zilo takes out his journal and says, "The scene of the crime looks to have taken place near here. Pigeon was shot near the third dock in the city, so we should look around there."
The two of them travel for a bit and arrive at a wooden pier marked as dock three. The pier stretches out far into the bay and housed a few dozen ships with crews doing repairs on their weather-worn vessels.
Zilo walks up to a nearby ship worker hauling a box onto his ship and asks, "Excuse me, sir, is there a dock authority around here we can speak with?" The man stifles a laugh and says back, "You ain't from round here are ya pale skin?" Zilo shakes his head and the man continues, "Merchants run this port, not sure which one right now, but give it a few days and a new one will swindle the dock from the first one."
Zilo asks, "Then who do we talk to?"
"Don't know, don't care. Now buzz off I gotta finish hauling this crap."
The man walks away and Zilo looks down at Sparky. The bard sighs and says, "You wanna give it a shot?" Sparky puffs up his chest and tries to look as tough as a 3-foot goblin can and walks up to one of the dock workers.
Within a few phrases, the goblin is kicked across the dock and splashed into the water. Luckily the little guy rolled with it and despite plunging into the water, he was uninjured. Zilo scanned around the surface of the water looking for his friend. With no luck using his eyes, the bard cast Detect Magic to locate the goblin by his elemental blood.
Zilo spots him right away and he dives in to retrieve his friend. Zilo hurls the goblin back to the dock, but while he was doing so, Zilo felt another source of magic in the water. The bard swam down to snatch up the source before returning to the surface.
Once there, Sparky assisted getting Zilo onto the dock, and the bard was holding with him an arrow. The arrow was menacingly barbed with a small air of necromancy magic on the tip. The bard took a few breaths of the air as Sparky patted him on the back a bit.
Sparky took the arrow and asked, "What this?"
Zilo spoke, "It was jammed into some sunken driftwood. It was magic, so it made me curious." Zilo cast Identify and looked over the arrow. The bard smiled and said, "Well, it looks like we have a clue." Sparky looks to Zilo with a questioning look and the bard says,
"This arrow looks to be a Slaying Arrow, but what is interesting is that this one looks to slay Kenku."
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