Once you've angered the wrong people, sometimes just talking a walk out of the hosue can attract the wrong sorts of attention. Naturally, the one weakness of that is the right sort of attention!

Elvis returns home to visit his family, and while they aren't exactly the shining definition of helpful, they do have a certain amount of knowledge about the upper echelongs of society and plenty of opinions about them.

There are a few ways out of jail. Sometimes, just doing nothing at all is the fastest way out, provided you can afford a good lawyer to figure it out for you. However, in a society with rules that aren't as well put together, sometimes a few greasy palms in the right places can make a very sudden difference.

The trick to any successful plan is to ensure that it has the fewest possible number of steps. Or, failing at that initial step of good planning, to simply have the time to repeat the plan as many times as necessary to get it right. Where it comes to a rumor mill, eventually something will figure itself out. Where it comes to breaking and entering, well, there aren't a lot of chances for a do-over.

Rutherford promises everything can be cleared up within a mere twenty-four hours. There may be a lesson here about things that sound to good to be true, but in this case, the lesson might be unfairly harsh to Rutherford.

What you want is rarely what you get, especially when it comes to experiments. Unfortunately, this was bound the be the only result Rutherford was liable to get, although there were worse possibilities! There weren't many worse possibilities, but there were some.

Not everyone knows about the most important cultural staples of Dungeon City. In particular, Gerald the Dog, a comic character who as it turns out has quite a lot in common with magic and the idea of the city itself.

Rutherford has a proposal for the team, but unfortunately he's a bit more familiar with dealmaking than our heroes. To start with, they're already willing to work for free! Or just on promises, which is a flaw a lot of adventurers need to learn to drop early on if they'd like to live for long.

If money attracts anything, it's bureaucracy, and the Adventuring Guild has that in spades. There's rules, regulations, fees, and a wait list to get in to the dungeon. And as these systems always exist, there are always temptations to work outside them to save time and money.

There's nothing quite like a religious organization to get you questioning everything you know about life. Or is that not how it's supposed to work? In Paul's case, it's a source of stability and existential furstration.