The Fixer (Giovanna)

The Fixer is a criminal of some renown in Aristonia's underworld — a specialist known for delicate, high-end work. The saying goes: if you want something done right, you go to the Fixer. To the underworld at large the Fixer's true name is a well-kept mystery, and accounts disagree over whether the Fixer is a man, a woman, or neither — but the party has since learned her name and faced her in person (see below).

By one account, the Fixer is a human woman with curly red hair and green eyes who keeps her hair pulled back beneath a hood. She is said to associate at times with the Black Blades, and has lately been reported to frequent the Emerald Diamond, a high-rollers' club in the entertainment district.

The Fixer is being sought in connection with the death of an Aristonian nobleman and with meddling at an old ruin site beneath the city. Some who know the Fixer's careful reputation, however, doubt that such carelessness fits — and wonder whether the trail points at someone else.

Associates at the Emerald Diamond

The Fixer keeps company that operates out of a private VIP room upstairs at the Emerald Diamond. Three of them received the party there: a broad, heavy-handed human man in his early thirties, built like a laborer; a sharp-featured half-elf woman in her mid-forties with a scar running from ear to jaw and silver, rune-etched rings on every finger; and a slight, androgynous person of uncertain age in dark, close-fitting clothes. They are protective of the Fixer's name and wary of strangers, but not unwilling to do business. The Fixer was not present, and they agreed to arrange a meeting a day hence — weapons checked, no funny business.

Met and Taken

At the arranged meeting, the party finally faced the Fixer in person. She proved to be a human woman in her mid-thirties — lean, red hair pulled back but not hidden, green eyes, dressed in dark, practical clothing, a leather satchel at her elbow — matching the description that had long trailed her name. She was composed and unhurried, and spoke of her work without apology: "I fix things. That's what I do."

Pressed about Dale Ashveil, she admitted plainly that she had killed him, saying that sometimes people simply need to die — that whose death, and why, is the concern of whoever hires her and not her own. She refused to name her employer or to sign any confession, and moved to slip away and lie low.

The party did not let her. In the fight that followed she was subdued, and her three associates overcome: the heavy-handed brute and the ring-wearing half-elf woman were killed, while the slight androgynous figure surrendered and was taken. The Fixer herself was captured alive and carried off into the night, her satchel with her.

A Name, and a Greater Fear

Held captive, the Fixer at last acquired a name. Her surrendered associate — Sable — named her as Giovanna, and it was borne out when a Saltmoor fence, Octavian Drell, knew "Giovanna" as her at once. The password long used at the Emerald Diamond's back door, it seems, was her own.

Under questioning — including a reading of her own thoughts — Giovanna gave up that it was House Betony who had commissioned the killing of Dale Ashveil. She was strangely calm about the confession itself ("I think I'm dead either way"), but plainly afraid of something else: a figure known only as V, whom she feared far more than her captors or the house that had hired her. Her satchel, it turned out, held a brass lens and a note from V ordering her to carry it to a "waypoint" and stay clear of Aristonia.

She refused to trade her employer for leniency, but under pressure gave up one operational thread: in Saltmoor, seek Octavian Drell — her contact for the rendezvous with V. She and Sable were then handed over to the Aristonian city guard.