Menace Eradication Contract: Sorrow-Spider Infestation

Menace Eradication Contract: Sorrow-Spider Infestation Actions for the Menace Eradication Contract: Sorrow-Spider Infestation Venture are all found in Watchmaker's Hill. You will need to raise your Running Battle… quality to advance the Venture. When your Running Battle… reaches 5, actions appear to complete the Venture. Once this Venture is available, you can complete it multiple times.

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Accept the Contract

Destroy an infestation of sorrow-spiders

The Department of Menace Eradication will pay for the eradication of a sorrow-spider infestation. Applicants should not be troubled by fear of spiders, and should not be overly nice about foul odours. Bring back the legs.

[You'll need to build up a Running Battle… quality to at least 5 to complete this.]
Unlocked with Dangerous 24 (No longer available at Dangerous 35)

Accept

'Bring back the legs'. It could be worse, they could have said 'Bring back the eyes.'

Reward spoiler

You've accepted the contract

These little charmers sneak into rooms at night and bite the eyes off sleepers. Apparently they don't attack when you're awake. Unless there's dozens of them. An infestation, for example.
Begun a new venture! Menace Eradication Contract: Sorrow-Spider Infestation
Running Battle… shows your progress in the venture.

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Work the Contract

Menace Eradication Contract: Sorrow-spider infestation

The house at the address you've been given is alive with furtive, scuttling motion. A blind man begs on the street outside.

[You'll need to build up a Running Battle… quality to at least 5 to complete this. ]
Unlocked with Menace Eradication Contract: Sorrow-Spider Infestation 1

A straightforward approach… Squash the filthy things!

Sorrow-spiders are the size of a small cat, and both armoured and poisonous. The best way to deal with them, although not the tidiest approach, is to hit them as hard as you can with a hammer.
(Dangerous challenge, chancy at 27)

Reward spoiler

Got one!

Squashing a sorrow-spider sends yellow-green ichor everywhere. It smells like badly rotting fruit. And they keep wriggling for hours. Still, one down.
Dangerous increase
Running Battle… increase

Rare success spoiler

Perhaps a tad overenthusiastic, there…

A happy swing of your hammer knocks a sorrow-spider clean through a wall. Investigating the ensuing hole you find a compartment behind the skirting, from which a dusty china doll looks up at you. Its eyes are glass; its skirt is velvet. Looking closer, you see that someone has stitched the names of nine dead men into the hem. How picturesque. It's old information, but everything's of value to someone.
Dangerous increase
Gain: 9 x Whispered Secret

Failure spoiler

It moves too quickly

You land a few blows but it skitters away into the night before you can kill it.
Dangerous increase

This might be faster… Track them to their nests

They're wary of lamplight and fiendishly cunning. But you might be able to work out where a nest is from their movements.
(Watchful challenge, modest at 26)

Reward spoiler

Aha!

Here, beneath the mouldering floorboards. You pour hot wax through the holes. There may be more nests…
Watchful increase
Running Battle… increase

Rare success spoiler

There's more to this…

With your ear to the floorboards, listening to the sound of the nests, an improbable truth presents itself. The rhythm of the sorrow-spiders' whisperings is the same as the muttering of that blind beggar outside! You race to the half-boarded window as the spiders' susurrus takes on a warning tone. There he is - vanishing down an alley that leads to a busy thoroughfare. He left his meagre begging bowl, though. It holds a chipped relic: a donation from a kind passer-by? Part of his cover? Or something else?

Back in the building the swarm has lost much of its coherence. Individual spiders are scuttling away, though a couple of more determined knots may remain. You wonder how many other infestations like this one are no accident, and how many other ragged beggars are whispering significantly near them…
Watchful increase
Running Battle… increase
Gain: 1 x Relic of the Fourth City

Failure spoiler (unknown)

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The Conclusion!

Destroy an infestation of sorrow-spiders: the resolution!

It's hard to be sure, but you think the infestation is dealt with.
Unlocked with Menace Eradication Contract: Sorrow-spider infestation 1, Running Battle… 5

Turn in a sack of sorrow-spider legs

The unattractive but vital proof of your success.
(Running Battle… challenge, modest at 5, low-risk at 6)

Rewards spoiler

That'll do

The Department is satisfied. You're paid in full.
Dangerous increase
Gain: 72 x Rostygold.
You've lost a quality: Menace Eradication Contract: Sorrow-Spider Infestation although it doesn't say so
You've lost a quality: Running Battle… although it doesn't say so

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