Sporemageddon

Several weeks ago.

The place was seedy as all hell.

He’d been in his share of suspicious bars, of course. It was part of the job. In fact, it was so much part of the job that those who knew very little about actual detective work tended to romanticize this part at their own leisure.

The pub was called the Wellspring under previous ownership. It was just a few blocks over from the exclusion zone around the Ditz dungeon and had been a popular destination for delvers and their ilk to come and spend some of their hard-earned money after a long day’s work.

Now that the Ditz dungeon was... mysteriously unproductive, the Wellpring had changed hands. It was now owned by a man who used to be a customer and who still partook a little too much.

They’d stopped selling hearty stews and warm bread and had shifted over to lukewarm sandwiched filled with meat from a can. The alcohol’s quality had likewise dipped. There weren’t any more nice bottles, and the beer on tap was more akin to moonshine than anything else.

Still, the place had a certain clientele that visited it. It kept running, even as the slums expanded into the neighbourhood and slowly pushed out all the other businesses that had been here and turned local warehouses into makeshift tenements.

The large W on the sign out front had been replaced by an H made from a few creatively placed pieces of lumber. He found that oddly poetic.

“Hey, you the, uh, guy?”