After striking out at the school (in more ways than one), the Mages touch base with Glamdring to see if any other bodies have turned up with potentially questionable causes of death. The problem, of course, is that the magic used to mask the corpses is by its nature difficult to detect. After all, if it was easy to detect what would be the point of the spell? As a result, even though the Consilium does have someone who goes by the name Kashanda working inside the coroner’s office they don’t have any information for the Mages at first. New York is a big place, and people die for all sorts of reasons. They simply don’t have the manpower or the time to run in depth checks on every dead body on Manhattan Island.

Interestingly enough, between sessions Aenaiyah’s player and I were chatting about the campaign and she told me how close Aenaiyah was to yelling at Kashanda about her incompetence in not seeing this sooner and general lack of progress since it was discovered. I had anticipated this reaction. Had she done this she would have found out that Kashanda and Glamdring had conspired to get Kashanda stationed in the city after the animator’s body was found. Normally Kashanda worked in Queens. This would have served two purposes. The first would be to make Aenaiyah feel guilty about her impatience in light of Kashanda not having been in Manhattan to have noticed anything amiss, and the fact that she was covering this area in addition to her own in light of the potential crisis. I do enjoy a good guilt trip! Secondly, it would have answered a question the Mages will have later when they discover that one of the bodies had been moved from where the murder had initially taken place – in Queens. It would have been a clear indication that whoever was doing this had some knowledge about the Consilium’s membership and their whereabouts at any given time. Sadly, by the time the next session rolled around Aenaiyah’s temper had cooled down, and so when they finally found out that one of the victims had been moved she didn’t know why. Now she knows!