Overview
The main story is delivered as Major Cases, the critical path through Commissions. Major Cases are numbered by Act and Scene, and the second closed beta build ran from the Prologue through Act IV, Scene III.
The protagonists are a pair of siblings, Huginn and Muninn. The player picks one of them at the start; the other dies at the story's opening, and the story does not fork into separate routes from that choice. Their official epithets are "The Raven's Claws" for the elder sister and "The Raven's Beak" for the younger brother. See The Detective.
Act and Scene Ladder
Every scene has its own achievement, worth 10 Reactor Crystals, and each achievement carries a one-line description that names the time of day and the place. Those lines are the most reliable index of the story's shape, because they come from the build's own text.
Act | Scene | Title | How the achievement describes it |
|---|---|---|---|
Prologue | - | The Peak | Daytime in the cemetery. The Detective reminisces over their sibling and swears to chase down the one behind it all. |
I | I | The Return | Dusk at the coronation celebrations. After a talk at the bar, the Detective agrees to work with Lorin. |
I | II | Case File | Dusk at the cafe. A curious case dredges up a painful chapter from the Detective's past. |
I | III | Assistant | Daytime at the Detective's Office. Taking on a peculiar case, the Detective and their new assistant set off. |
II | I | The Dead | Rainy evening in a dark alley. Rex takes the remains away and the investigation comes to a standstill. |
II | II | Constabulary | Daytime at the constabulary. With the remains damaged, the Detective must seek the help of an old friend. |
II | III | All Becomes Clear | Daytime at the Detective's Office. The notebook is found and the Grimm case is cracked. |
III | I | Going Deeper | Nighttime by the bank. With a little help, the Detective apprehends the rich man, catching him in the act. |
III | II | Trust | Daytime by the clinic. The Detective's mind is sent reeling. Just what was that dream all about? |
III | III | Shattered Bonds | Daytime at the Detective's Office. Ashley falls under suspicion and bids farewell. |
IV | I | Informant | Morning at the Ballroom. The Detective follows a trail of clues, gaining information and a dance partner too. |
IV | II | Lion's Den | Nighttime in a dark alley. Heading deeper into the hideout, danger closes in on the Detective. |
IV | III | All Aboard | Daytime at the docks. Mind hazy, they board the last train. |
Two acts have titles of their own in the build: Act I is "Old Friends and New Acquaintances" and Act II is "Night Chase in the Rain". No titles have surfaced for Acts III and IV.
Prologue: The Peak
The Prologue is a Major Case that begins aboard the Evermore, a flying whale airship. The two sibling Detectives are invited there for an awards ceremony held in recognition of their work for Silvernia.
Objective | Step |
|---|---|
1 | Form a plan with your partner |
2 | Attend the awards ceremony and inspect the ballroom |
3 | Investigate the points of interest based on the signal |
4 | Make your way to the signal's endpoint |
5 | Fight Vita et Mors |
6 | Visit the grave |
Knights aboard the ship are already uneasy about traces of hazardous material found in its sewage pipes. The siblings split up, one attending the ceremony proper and one working the area around the venue. One receives a Gravitas reactor from the queen; the other finds a reactor rigged to explode and defuses it. The person delivering the award then lunges at the queen and is blocked with that same reactor, and the guards drag the attacker out.
A silver substance flows from the attacker's body, seeps into the ship's core and summons Vita et Mors. The queen is caught by the entities, attendees flee, and some of them are turned against the Detectives. After the fight the queen is recovered by the surviving Knights. Before the siblings can take back control of the ship, one is disarmed in the confusion and their own weapon is used by a candle-like humanoid figure to shoot the other. An explosion throws them clear of the ship and separates them. The survivor leaves the city for three years. Prologue rewards in the build were 300 Reactor Crystals, 30,000 Ounces and two copies of The Science of All Things: Volume III.
Act I: Old Friends and New Acquaintances
The Detective returns to Silvernia in answer to a letter from Chief Inspector Lorin of the River Constabulary. Their identity is exposed almost immediately when they save a newspaper peddler in the street. At the Memoir Bar, Lorin presses them to take the cold case he is working; the conversation breaks off when a werewolf crashes into the bar. The Detective's ability to sense creatures in disguise flushes it out of the crowd outside, the townsfolk are impressed, and Lorin gets his answer.
The case is discussed properly the next day over coffee. Working through the Mindpalace, the Detective ties the file to the bullet that killed their sibling and accepts it, on condition that the assistant Lorin insists on is at least literate. Three candidates turn up at the agency: Alf, a maid from MISS; a clerk whose place has been taken by Red Rose; and Ashley, who wins the job on the strength of her reasoning. The Detective hires Alf as a maid at the same time. Full detail of the cold case is on The Nameless Ashes Case.
Act II: Night Chase in the Rain
The journalist Grimm is found burned to a charred corpse in a dark alley. The burn pattern matches the earlier arson file, and the Detective reads the damage as an attempt to destroy identifying traces. A fleeing gang member gives up a lead: a scuffle with a woman who left a shoe behind, and the shoe carries the same substance as the scene. By the time the Detective returns, Superintendent Rex has had the scene cleaned and the remains removed.
The Detective infiltrates the constabulary to get the evidence back, fights the Superintendent on the way out, and escapes when a werewolf breaks loose. The remains are damaged in the retreat, so the doctor Firtho performs the autopsy instead. Her findings put the body at a thirty-year-old man with a fractured left hand, which rules out the journalist. Laboratory work at the agency identifies the substance as a fire retardant. The reading that follows is that the journalist faked his own death using someone else's body, and his hidden notebook, recovered from a flower box in the reception room, ends the act on a name: Cinderella.
Acts III and IV
Only the scene ladder and the achievement lines are documented for the last two acts of the beta build. They place the story at the bank, the clinic, the agency, the ballroom, a hideout and finally the docks, and they record that the assistant leaves the story in Act III, Scene III.
Cases on the Board
The main-story cases filed under Chapter I on the Evidence Board in the second closed beta build were:
The Stolen Silver Mystery
Case of the Journalist's Death
Theft at the Royal Bank
Case of the Rising Detective's Death
Cinderella's Case
Side content runs beside the critical path rather than inside it: Private Requests, City Errands and the branching Curious Deductions cases each have their own achievement track.
Notes
The protagonist names, the sibling structure and the epithets are official. The scene ladder is transcribed from in-build achievement text.
The act summaries come from the second closed beta build. Chapter and scene naming is not consistent everywhere in the build, so the achievement objective strings are used here as the authority.
The queen at the awards ceremony is not named on this page. The monarch attested in official copy is Queen Feliana; the prologue's own naming has not been published.