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In a city that was, relatively recently, stolen by giant bats, a young man wakes up in a holding cell. There's a guard standing watch, though a rather scrawny one.
serg in fallen london
"Too old for the orphan-gangs, too young for anything else. Bloody shame."
They come closer to the bars and squint at the prisoner, their keyring dangling from their belt. "It's odd, but I'd swear I knew you from somewhere."
The guard squints harder.
Then they shake their head. "No bloody idea. Maybe I saw you running with an orphan-gang ten years ago."
The guard worries their lip.
Then they seem to make a decision. "Fuck the sergeant's nephew," they decide. "He probably deserved whatever you did to him, and I'm not sending a kid like you to the Spike until you're my age."
They remove a key from their keyring and toss it into the cell. "Anybody asks, you stole that from me. Got it?"
"I'm off to get some coffee. Make better decisions about who you stab in the future."
They leave the cell, leaving the prisoner to escape.
can-never-leave
He waits until there's no one around, lets himself out, locks it back up behind him because why not, tosses the key back into the cell just to be annoying, and leaves.
No one stops him - a purposeful stride does wonders.
Outside the door of the jail, the city of Fallen London spreads open before him. Watchmaker's Hill, specifically. There's a pub, and an office building with a sign out front reading DEPARTMENT OF MENACE ERADICATION, and at the top of the hill there's an observatory. Around the hill there are marshes, thick with tall treelike mushrooms.
Inside, there's a bored-looking man playing solitaire at a wooden desk, along with a few grizzled old men with harpoons chattering with each other. Behind the desk are various posters.
RATS: 11 ROSTYGOLD PER 10. WORRYINGLY LARGE RAT: 200 ROSTYGOLD. SORROW-SPIDER LEGS: 15 ROSTYGOLD APIECE. SPIDER-COUNCIL: 1000 ROSTYGOLD. THE VAKE: 1 MILLION ECHOES.
The Apathetic Secretary looks up from his solitaire. "What you here for, eh?"
can-never-leave
"...how big does a rat have to get before it's worryingly large?" he wonders, peering at the assortment of posted rewards.
"That's a bounty on a specific rat," the Apathetic Secretary clarifies. "We call it the Worryingly Large Rat because it's pretty concerning that a rat can get that big. The Department want it dead, but the reward they posted isn't enough for the big-time ratkillers to go for it, so it's sitting there until somebody really needs two echoes' worth of rosty."
can-never-leave
"Okay, that's pretty big," he acknowledges. "What about the Vake, what the hell's that?"
The monster hunters go quiet.
The Apathetic Secretary looks, for once, engaged. "Nobody quite knows. It's like a bat, they say, but very big, and deadly as anything. It preys on Londoners in general, but its favorite prey is hunters - specifically, Vake-hunters. People come in and say they're after the Vake, and next thing anyone knows they've vanished without a trace."
can-never-leave
...he laughs. "Wow, a giant bat that eats people. Why does anyone ever admit they're going after it, then?"
"Well, you've got to track it down somehow, don't you? And if nobody knows you're after it, then they can't tell you where you'd find out."
can-never-leave
"How does anyone know where to find it if it kills you as soon as you admit to looking?"
"Well, there is one man who claims to have seen it in person and lived," says the Secretary. "He lives in Bugsby's Marshes, in the mushroom forest. I could tell you where to find him."
The Apathetic Secretary scrawls a quick map on a piece of foolscap and hands it over. "Maybe after you kill the Vake you can take on that Worryingly Large Rat too."