Alex just shrugged. “None of the hotels or tour companies said much about missing people when I asked. Didn’t really surprise me, either; even if they knew, they wouldn’t want to spread rumors for fear of affecting business. I can pretty easily ask about tours in different areas and see if there are any areas around the city they recommend we avoid, but that could indicate a lot of things, including completely mundane threats.”
“Do we know where the missing people were going or where the patrols were supposed to go?” Latoya asked, looking back and forth between Sam and Miriel.
“Not really,” Sam answered. “At least not that I’ve learned yet.”
“The patrols didn’t know which direction would be best, so they were working in a spiral pattern,” Miriel answered. “Unfortunately they were counting a bit too much on the patrols getting word out even if they got ambushed, so they were a bit lax about routine check-ins. We know an approximate minimum distance from the city for our threat and that’s about it.”
“I’ll make sure not to ask about anything too close to the city then,” Alex said.
“I hate to be too suspicious,” Sam jumped in, “but that note about mundane threats does make me want to ask if we’ve ruled out some kind of non-magical threat. I vaguely recall something about terrorism in this country, for example.”
Miriel shook her head. “Most of them have disarmed now. And while I suppose it’s possible, it’s hard to imagine the mundane ambush that could have taken out a dozen soldiers without a single one of them getting any word out, particularly after the first patrol went missing.”
“True,” Sam admitted.
“We’ll keep it in mind, of course,” Miriel continued. “But I think we probably are looking at something supernatural. No idea what effect it could have been yet, though…”
“I don’t suppose they actually could have been spirited away to hell?” Latoya asked half-humorously.
“I think we’d be able to see the magic required to open or close a planar portal from here even if they were halfway into Brazil,” Miriel replied dryly. “We might not detect an active portal, but active portals to hell tend to be hard to miss what with all the demons that typically start coming out of them and wreaking havoc.”
“Don’t think they’d have needed our help figuring out what was wrong if we had one of those, no,” Latoya grinned. “They might have needed to ask for help blasting the entire area to ruins until whatever was making the portal went away, but that’s not what we do.”
All four of them chuckled a little.
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