There is only so much she can learn about her heritage, and her abilities, from her mother and through experimentation.
The Elder Continent is, if not precisely off limits, not somewhere she even wants to try to go until she knows more. So: London, which is much closer anyway. She'd have to pass through to make it to the Continent anyway.
The stalagmites thin, and she blinks as she steps out into the lights of Mrs. Plenty's Carnival.
She nods slowly. "I don't think much of that bastard's word, but if you know what's in that churchyard...
"Bugger this twisty thinking," she says eventually. "Just tell me you'll help her, alright?"
"I have no intention of allowing any harm to come to her that I can prevent."
"That's enough for me, then. Angie's hiding out in the Forgotten Quarter. Her sister's up to her neck in some awful business, and she's been dragged into it as well. She was s'posed to be back by now - I'm worried summat's happened to her."
"Here," Hephaesta says, removing a daguerrotype of the Singer from her mirror and pressing it into the Wastelander's hand. "So you'll know when you find her."
"Thank you."
Off to the Forgotten Quarter. What does the Forgotten Quarter contain.
Lots and lots of ruins.
Also, a woman in a finely tailored navy-blue suit, wearing a rakishly tilted hat of a kind she's never seen before, sitting on an intricately carved plinth. "Hello there," she says, inclining her head slightly.
"You don't walk like a Londoner," the woman observes. "But you don't walk like a tourist, either. A bit of an enigma, there."
"Aha. There's an answer that I didn't expect. And what brings you to the Forgotten Quarter?"
"Trying to track someone down who's trying to be forgotten."
"And that's an answer I did expect. You don't have the look of a tomb-raider or a fugitive."
She hops down from her plinth. "This person you wanted to track down... a woman? Blonde, a touch past her prime?"
"You're not the first to come this way looking for her. The last two were minions of the Masters."
"Oh, I'm not accusing you of anything. I'm laying out the facts. They were from the Masters... and they found her. She was staying in a Fourth City stable to the east, but I don't know where they may have taken her. You might look at where she was staying for a start, though."
Sigh. "Great. --Thank you very much for telling me." She heads off towards the stable.
"Au revoir," says the woman in the suit.
The stable is somewhat dilapidated, but the roof is in decent shape, and it has a good line of sight to the Royal Bethlehem Hotel. Someone has been living here, but there are signs of a recent struggle: an overturned cooking pot, scuff marks in the bare earth. Dried blood, too. A considerable quantity of it. A quantity that bodes ill for the person it used to be inside.
Most of it was spilled in the house, but enough of it dripped as whoever-it-was carried her that she can follow it.
The trail leads to the Stolen River.
Oh come on, is she going to have to search the riverbottom for the Music-Hall Singer's corpse.
It's beginning to look that way, yes.
Fuck!
She finds a hidden corner with no witnesses, strips, slips into the water, and turns into an enormous diamond-shelled crab. Heeeeeeeeere Fading Music-Hall Singer...
She's sunk straight to the bottom, but hasn't had time to sink into the mud. She's also been beaten to death, apparently with some kind of sledgehammer.
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