[tshiggins]

Rather unnerved, Doc Bascher asked the two nunnupi to follow her home, and they agreed. Along the way, she called Henrietta and asked her to hurry home from Grand Junction. However, while Bascher advised the rest of the group about the situation, she asked them to stay away, since the two visitors seemed pretty jumpy.

Eventually, Doc Bascher got the two Magpie Girls settled into a shed with some ham sandwiches and a television tuned to the Cartoon Network (they liked Bugs Bunny, a lot). The veterinarian tried to find out more about the nunnupi, but what she discovered during the somewhat disjointed conversation disconcerted her further.

The nunnupi absolutely refused to promise not to harm anyone, saying that while they didn’t go out of their way to hurt anybody, they absolutely would do so if they thought they had “good reason.” To them, “good reason” included somebody trying to hurt them, or trap them, or trick them, or (worst of all) try to “break a deal” with them.

Henrietta arrived a few minutes later, and she took over the conversation. She discovered the Magpie Girls really liked stories, and agreed to swap stories with them. During the course of the long evening, she learned a bit more about the two little people.

The anthropologist reported that they seemed to genuinely match the Comanche “little people” folktales and myths, even though the Comanche stories said female nunnupi were incredibly rare. Henrietta also said the nunnupi had let slip that they were “hundreds and hundreds” of years old, and had traveled through “a number” of portals and across “a bunch” of different worlds. She also said they told her a lake in the mountains to the west had a "spirit-gate", and Superstition Mountain in Arizona had another one.

Henrietta explained that their actions (and the fact that they sprouted dragon-fly wings, at one point) made them New World counterparts to Old World faeries and, as such, would likely be mischievous, somewhat random, easily bored, offended by lies or other forms of deception, and amazingly dangerous.

When she arrived the next morning, a shocked and disoriented McShane (after she recovered herself) agreed with the anthropologist’s assessment.

With that, the party decided they needed to get the Magpie Girls back through the portal, as quickly as possible. However, McShane said she had no idea how to do that, and knew even less about the nature of these creatures. She had learned what little she knew of magic from apprentice notebooks left by her father, Douglas McShane, after he and her grandmother fled Denver in 1927.

They had done so following the mysterious death of her grandfather, Oliver, a mage from an ancient line of Scottish mystics. He had died as part of some sort of secret magical conflict, during the 1920s, and his entire occult library had disappeared, the same night. JoBeth McShane said she had gone to Denver 20 years ago – in her early 40s – to try to learn what she could, but had instead lost her nerve.

For most of her life, McShane explained that she had used what little magical skills she possessed to give her an edge in business, and as such had a fairly successful life. However, that left her wholly unprepared when faerie came fluttering through a gate between universes, and seemed disinclined to go back from whence they came.

With that, the party decided they urgently needed to find out what happened to the elder McShane, and try to recover his books.

JoBeth McShane said her grandfather, Oliver P. McShane, had worked as an architect for the firm, Bennett & Associates, of Chicago. Oliver McShane traveled to Denver in 1909, as a liaison between his Chicago employer and the administration of then-Denver Mayor Robert W. Speer. Speer sought to create Denver’s Civic Center Park as the locus of the city, a plan that eventually came to fruition during his third term, which ran from 1916-1920.

The party’s instructor said the park project had been controversy, as it had required the condemnation and demolition of several blocks of homes and businesses, located to the west of the Colorado statehouse. Speer, a successful property developer before he entered city politics, had actually been voted out of office after his first term, despite the establishment of a strong political machine.

However, after a four-year absence, he won a second election, and pushed the park project through, in the face of strong opposition by (among other groups) the Colorado branch of the Ku Klux Klan.

The park opened in 1919 and was hailed as a success. By then McShane had married and settled down in Denver, and become embedded in the city business and political community. Although he married rather late, he had a young son, by then. His son, Douglas McShane, was JoBeth’s father.

The success of the park didn’t end the political conflict, in Denver. Oliver McShane stayed on, JoBeth reported, and her grandfather worked with the city’s business and politicalelite to oppose the KKK efforts to take over city government.

She suspected that was why he was murdered in his 17th Street office, in 1927. Following his death, her father and grandmother fled to Grand Junction. At the time, Grand Junction was difficult to reach from Eastern Colorado, and they feared they would be hunted if they returned to Chicago.

Also, Oliver’s had discovered the portal during a hunting trip, and by the time of his death he had initiated his son by traveling through it. Douglas McShane thought it might offer an opportunity, of some sort, to gain enough power to avenge his father’s death.

By the time he arrived in Denver, Oliver McShane had already been a mage for some years, as well as an established architect. He hailed from a line of magical learning that ran through his Scottish family line, and may have dated back as far as Roman Brittania.

He came to Denver with an extensive magical library, but that had disappeared the night of his murder, along with a negro janitor who worked in the building. The only magical knowledge available to Douglas were the notes he’d taken as an apprentice to his father.

Those books, in turn, formed the basis of JoBeth’s knowledge, and were her only resources. As such, she had little in the way of general magical knowledge.

The party decided upon a road-trip to Denver, and the Magpie Girls (sensing adventure) invited themselves along.

The group located an inexpensive hotel outside of downtown, and traveled to Civic Center park to look around. The Denver Public Library had been created during Speer’s time, and group thought McShane’s books might have wound up locked in a sub-basement, somewhere. It seemed as good a place to start, as any.

However, upon arrival, the nunnupi went into a flurry. They reported that the park had a much stronger magical field than usual, and almost reached the strength of the area within a mile of a naturally-occurring portal.

Shocked, the party continued to the library and located a helpful research librarian. She helped them uncover newspaper coverage of the Oliver’s murder, including his obituary. From that, they determined the Denver Police Department likely had an old case file, somewhere. They also learned that McShane had been a founding member of the city’s venerable Academy Club.

Upon investigation, they learned the Academy Club served as a private, invite-only organization for the city’s educated business and political elite. College degrees were required, people could only join after invitation from a current member, and were vetted by two others before the membership board even began to consider a membership application.

(continued...)