Interrogator Sand's gaze fell on each Acolyte, as they in turn asked their questions. After a few seconds he gave a slight nod before speaking once more.
[color=Darkgray][b]"All excellent questions, I will answer them as best to my knowledge. To be honest, I'm rather surprised by your inquisitiveness... All personal information we know on Mr Arbest, I have revealed to you. Before this investigation, we had no reason to be tracking a habprole such as himself. The Inquisition's resources are best spent elsewhere, I'm sure you'd agree. To find leads and ties with anyone responsible for such, heresy. That is your job to find, although it is his highly likely that it had occurred within the 30 something days he was missing... Now priest, the lung replaced storage container contained nothing upon post mortem examination, and there are no signs of anything that would leave a trace. As for the tech-heresy required for such work, we have connected this to the Logicians, a tech heretic organisation intent of overthrowing the most Holy Emperor... Blasphemy, we can assume that they are somehow connected, however they have remained difficult to track and we have no official leads on them of worth." [/b][/color] 

Absently straightening his long white gown, Sand's gaze falls on the Arbitrator before continuing.
[b][color=darkgray]"We believe Lili Arbest to still be living within Hab block 7-17 shared until recently with her brother. To reach her you would have to take the transit rail to the Coscarla Division. As to the transit car in which the body was found, the car was examined by the Biologis forensic, and turned up nothing of worth, nor should you expect any considering the cause of death. Lastly, his invalidation was resulted to poor workmanship, intoxication at the workplace and volatile behavior which led to his removal, the main reason of any invalidation it seems. I believe your best bet would be to question a few of the local populace of the Corscala Division, perhaps they would be able to shed some light on his behavior or indeed his disappearance.[/color][/b] 

Setting the jar containing the white, stringy length of tentacle to one side, he now looks at Arkaeus.
[b][color=Darkgray]"If there were even traces of warp to be found on this abomination, it would not be here I assure you. This is purely the creation of heretical skin grafting and technology as far as I can tell, not of the warp, I doubt you would find anything here. Ah yes, the alchemic traces found on the body are present in most surgeries, clearly the individual responsible knew what they were doing and has some experience in surgery. Even if any form of pain prevention wasn't present."[/color][/b] Taking a step back from the glass window, he regards the group as a whole.

[b][color=Darkgray]"Now before you leave, If you would Guardsmen, open up that crate you are so interested in... Within, is some equipment that might prove useful to your Investigation."[/color][/b] Within the crate there is: 

[b]Coscarla Pass Tokens:[/b] (One per Acolyte) These coded devices, each about the size of a small thick coin, will allow them legal clearance for the Coscarla Division and free passage on the transit rail around the midhive area. 

[b]Hand Vox:[/b] (One per Acolyte) These are cheap and battered looking personal communication devices that use a private encrypted channel, and are good for a range of a few kilometers in the hive. Sand will happily explain that thanks to signal interference in the areas of the hive where they are going, vox traffic is almost impossible over any real distance or between levels, except by wire station, but these hand vox will let them keep in touch with each other at least.

[b]Low Hiver’s Overcoats:[/b] (One per Acolyte) These voluminous and somewhat tattered patchwork leather and canvas highcollared overcoats are common lowhiver garb in Sibellus and will easily fit over anything the Acolytes are wearing. They are also quite tough and will provide 1 extra Armour Point.

[b]Chem Lamps:[/b] (One per Acolyte) These small portable lamps use a chemical reaction to provide light and operate continuously while their shutters are open. Such lamps will illuminate an area of about a three metre radius around it or provide a six metre directed beam of whitish light.

[b]Coded DataSlate:[/b] This worn-looking brass cased dataslate carries basic copies of the information found in their briefing, a series of maps and data about the Coscarla and (largely empty) files on the Arbasts, including pictures of them and addresses taken from the Administratum register. The slate also has basic short range audio and visual recording and playback functions. The slate features a five key input code which Sand tells the group, if it is accessed without this, its core memory will be wiped.

[b]BioSample Kit:[/b] Added as something of a hopeful afterthought, this satchel carries three small biostorage tubes and a small bioauspex with a range of about a meter or so. Set for human tissue, the indicator on the auspex will flash red and whine with increasing volume in the proximity of anomalous tissue. The kit also comes with a long bladed, razor edge mono scalpel (this will inflict 1d5–1 plus the wielder’s Strength Bonus (SB) Damage and ignores the first 2 Armour Points (AP) of the target). As the Acolytes remove this from the crate, Sand gives  a shrug and smile saying, [b][color=Darkgray] “Use the kit for acquiring any samples, while I’m not expecting deft surgery, try not to hack at it like an underdone Grox steak and get it in the jar, eh?”[/color][/b]

[b]Money Pouch:[/b] This pouch contains 120 Thrones in loose coin and used notes, [b][color=Darkgray]“For sundries and bribes. I’m sure if you need more you can be resourceful,”[/color][/b] Sand puts it. 

As our group of Acolytes equip themselves with their new equipment and share out the rest, they must decide who will carry the BioSample kit. Someone skilled in Medicae would be most suited, while the Acolytes do so, Sand adds. 

[b][color=Darkgray]"If you have not worked out so already, as part of this shadow investigation, you will act that of roving agents for the Coblast Assay. Such men and women are known in hive “cant” as regulators—hired guns, couriers, tracers, manhunters, mercenaries and other specialists. Course, know that the Coblast Assay is merely a front for the Inquisition, this will be your quise whilst investigating. Keep it up, our involvement can not be known lest you scare your quarry... Now you will take the transit rail to the Corscala Division, all leads point there. Corscala is no-more than a few hours away, and I expect your report in a few days, no more. Know however, that you are expected to work together as befits an Inquisition's chosen, your display in the elevator tells me otherwise. Get over your quarrel lest you find yourselves dead because of it... Oh, and Assassin, while you have proven your creativity which I implore, do not prove such on my Servitors. Do so again, and I will see to it that you are punished. Now, you may leave, and may you walk in the Emperor's Light."[/color][/b]

[center]-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------[/center]
[b][center][h3]The Twilight City[/h3][/center][/b]
[b]Our Acolytes now find themselves travelling to the Corscala Division via the transit rail[/b]

The journey to Coscarla takes several hours by transit rail car, during which you have to change rails repeatedly (into increasingly dilapidated and vandalized cars), while your pass tokens and cognomen are repeatedly checked by suspicious Magistratum enforcers, dull-eyed carriage servitors and unctuous looking officials at each change.

As your journey progresses you find yourselves passing from the relatively open spaces and clean air of the government district, down and across whole hive levels, passing collapsed finery and the fallen architectural splendours of the “good of olden days” and through vast steel sky vaults filed with endless rows of habstacks and kilometre after kilometre of thunderous manufactorams. The further you go the more depressed, illmaintained and decayed things become; these are the lower stretches of the mid hive, beyond these no transit rails run. Beyond this outer circle is the underhive where no law holds sway. Long stretches of the journey are spent in the stale tainted air of the wormholelike tunnel passageways within the Hive’s thick supporting bones and in the nameless black voids of deserted spaces between, during which, the car’s lights flicker and fail regularly.
 
Alone in a single car, now deserted but for your group, the rattling carriage breaks into another vast and dilapidated hab-vault and begins to slow. You look out upon a vista of vacant and decayed buildings in a worse state than any that you have seen up until now, stretching beyond sight into a dark horizon beyond. The rail car shudders to a stop and the doors open onto a wide, raised platform devoid of passengers save for a single huddled figure dressed in rags. The figure quickly bundles themselves onboard, flashing a pass to the door mechanism with unseemly haste and takes up a seat as far from your group as possible. A moment later a dull, crackling servitor intones: 
[b]“Coscarla Southern Railhead. Passengers to Coscarla to disembark. This conveyance will depart in…”[/b] The rest is lost in a howl of static.
This is Coscarla and you have arrived.

The Inhabited Southern portion of the Corscala District opens up before the Acolytes as they step of from the transit car, the rest of the district trails of into darkness and a horizon of ruins. Those with Chromos know that there are only 2 hours of the day cycle left. Nearby, stands a women, stoic and grizzled, donned in a long grey coat, one could easily mistake her for a house guard, most assuredly one of the better of Houses judging by the Chainsword at her side. One can tell that she's suffered many a hardship, her unkempt dark hair and hardy figure suggesting as much. This is Adrianna Perdito, the last addition of your party.

As our group look upon Coscarla, it has the feel of a buried and abandoned city, shrouded in darkness beneath a steel sky. It is a cold and empty place, where whole tenements and hab-stacks are blacked by fire, or stare silently with a hundred vacant smashed-window eyes, while ancient and seemingly purposeless columns and arches of black granite soar high into the darkness. The power supply is poor and the streetlamps along the main thoroughfares flicker and cast a pale twilight, while refuse and debris clogs the alleyways where shapeless and half-hidden forms of dregs (and perhaps worse) haunt. The skyline near the southern portion of the district is criss-crossed by the overhead rail lines of Sibellus’s mass transit network, which clatters and sparks intermittently through the cycles. Far above, in the high shadowed skies, the periodic exhalations and clamor of the hive’s vast air processing network is muted into distant thunder, the action of which materializes later at ground level as squalls of sudden chill wind, and even the occasional curtain of dirty rain lasts too briefly to wash the grime from the streets. There are people living in Coscarla, thousands of them in fact, but they are so swallowed up by the vast and darkened spaces around them that they seem very few, nor do they linger outdoors, rushing silently to their destinations with their collars turned up and their heads firmly down. They are disheveled, threadbare and have the look of frightened men and women, determined to get on with life the best they can and only a few walk the streets at this time. 
 
Before our group of brave Acolytes lies the The Southern Square, which operates as the hub of this portion of the Coscarla Division, it is bounded at one side by the railhead and several broad roadways radiate out from it and into the city, populated by hab-stacks running along either length of the roadways. The square’s most singular feature is a fifty metre tall granite statue of a winged felid. The statue is millennia old and headless, a testament to when this entire region was once a single great noble’s estate. Nearby, a ragged sprawl of stalls, peddlers, open-air cook shops and scavenger piles are grouped at one side of the Square, at the opposite, stands the Enforcer station. A squat, rockcrete pillbox three stories high. 2 what appears to be Enforcers stand at either side of the entrance of the building. In the far distance, along the side of one the large hab blocks sticks out a sign. You faintly make out the words 'hotel' across it's surface. Near said sign, is a yawning roadway tunnel entrance, wide enough to fit two huge macrohaulers through at once. Though 2 steel and mesh gates bar the large opening, past which, you know lies the once grand Tantalus Combine manufactorums. You assume this to be another entrance into the hive. Over a another large roadway leading from the square, bears a large archway over the entire street, beyond stands a Templum to our most holy emperor. Simple looking on the outside, but recognizable to the most faithful none the less.

The Acolytes are alone now, armed with whatever leads they may have made out from their briefing. However, the night draws close. They're on their own now.

[hider=Dataslate On The Corscala Division] 
[b]Reference/Subject:[/b] Coscarla Division, Designation: Workers Habitation Zone
[b]Locale:[/b] Lower MidTiers, Hive Sibellus
[b]Attribution:[/b] Interrogator Omardha Sand
[b]Ordinanator:[/b] Conclave Ascarvis/Covenant Sibellus/Chamber Obscuro
[b]TFTD:[/b] “History is but a catalogue of counted sins”

[b]Geohistorical and Demographic Overview:[/b]
The Coscarla Division is a subdistrict of Hive Sibellus on the Sector Capitol world of Ascarvis. Built in the remains of what was once the splendor of the House Coscarla Estates, the district is a seventy kilometre square conglomeration of warrenlike tenement habs and their attendant infrastructure that has grown up between the vast ruined arches and fallen statuary of its noble past.

The Coscarla was until recent years a relatively prosperous midhive district, predominantly populated by indentured labour classes, but has since suffered deprivation, disaster and a loss in status thanks to a series of misfortunes and incidents. Primary among these have been the damage caused buy unrestrained wildfires during the recent Rienholt Blackouts (the Coscarla being one of seventeen effected hive zones), although the long term withering of the fortunes of the Tantalus Combine, (see Addendum) had begun to have significant adverse effects long before that calamity.

The Coscarla Division currently awaits Administratum revaluation of its status (projected due process time until preliminary ruling: 37 years standard), but unsubdata indicates over 60% of the Coscarla is now effectively a waste/scav zone and the viable population is now confined to smaller subzones clustered around transit and utility access points. The division’s population is also in catastrophic decline, its infrastructure remains effectively crippled and lawlessness, poor social cohesion and poverty all exponentially increasing year on year.

[b]Addendum: [The State of the Tantalus Combine][/b]
The Combine, a longstanding cartel of several Houses Minoris of the Sibellan nobility has seen a drastic decline in its fortunes over the last decade. Its fall from power has been brought on by hostile competition from the SkaelenHar Hegemony and severe damage to its assets and prestige endured during the period of intrigues and vendettas known popularly as the “Vthorran Promenades” [cert.ref: Activities of the Lucid Court]. The resulting effects on several districts of the Sibellus and Tarsus Hives, formerly under the Combine’s sway, have been profound. In the Coscarla Division where Tantalus was the majority power, the Combine has sold on the indenture contracts of thousands of skilled workers and the labour force that remains now works only to meet their master’s debts. As a result, whole swathes of families have been uprooted or have deserted from the district, thus the effective economic and monetary input to the region is now negligible.

The Tantalus Combine is suffering a long, drawnout death and is kept going only by its own fading inertia and the legal wrangling over the disposition of its carcass. It has ceased to exist effectively as a cohesive organisation or political entity.[/hider]