14 Epilogue: Breaking News!

*The following articles were pulled from various newspapers around the city of Beacon over the course of the next year*

ROYAL INQUIRY INTO CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES TO OFFICIALLY BEGIN

An announcement made by the head of the official sub-committee of organized criminal activity announced that there will be an official Royal inquiry into the rampant criminality that the city has faced in the last year. There have been rumors for decades of an underground cabal of people inside the city who have been in control of most illegal activity that happens here, but no solid proof has ever come forward.

The committee says that they are looking to prove a connection between seemingly random crimes throughout the city and tie them into a citywide conspiracy of corruption and control. Just last year alone there were over 350 murders inside the nine Southern districts alone. Most of these were either drug or robbery related and, until now, thought to be the work of either lone criminals or possibly a small-time operation of people working together.

The murder rate has doubled over the last two years in the city, and has seen a steady rise in Endlane and many of the outlying cities in the wastes. Public outcry for The Empress and the Royal Guard to make a statement regarding these heinous crimes has steadily risen since a shooting at a nightclub last year, dubbed at the time as The Ascension Day Massacre, took the lives of over 30 innocents.

The announcement also specifically points the finger at some lower ranking nobles, including District 18 Assessor, Arnold "Arnie" Whitelake, who has been in office for almost twenty years and has won five consecutive elections by a landslide. We reached out to his office for a statement, but none was received.

Time will tell what the future will hold for the sub-committee and if their belief that the murder and mayhem that has been happening is all connected. We will keep our readers informed of any breaking information as it occurs….

LOCAL GOVERNMENT AGENT FOUND DEAD

The body of long-time ESIU agent and former Lieutenant in The Empress' Royal Guard, a 37-year-old man named Benson Stillwater, was found in his car yesterday evening. While the official cause of death has been noted as a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the Guard said that they would be investigating for any signs of foul play. A statement by the Royal Guard and signed by The Empress herself was released after the body was found on Friday morning.

In it, they expressed their condolences to his wife and two children. The statement said that William was "the pride of his platoon" and "a shining example of loyalty and integrity in the Royal Guard and the ESIU." They went on to say that, pending further investigation into his death, if there were any signs of a homicide that all, those involved would be found and swiftly brought to justice.

Some people have speculated that his death may have been related to criminal activities. An undisclosed source within the ESIU has told us that he was under an internal investigation for evidence tampering in a case that they had been building against an unknown criminal affiliate. We approached the ESIU for an official comment, but our attempts were unsuccessful.

This hasn't been the first time that a member of the Royal Guard has taken their own lives. Just four months ago we ran a piece on the rising suicide rates among members of her majesty's royal protectors…

FIRST INDICTMENTS HANDED OUT IN QUICKLY EXPANDING CORRUPTION CASE

Lower members of the royal houses were called into court the day after Beacon's yearly Fall Harvest Festival on Tuesday afternoon to face corruption charges in one of the first major cases of corruption in over two decades. Various nobles were called to account for discrepancies in bank accounting and reports.

It's alleged that members of the Holden, Van Harrington and Whitelake families have been misappropriating funds given to them in the form of taxes on their land holdings as well as both offering and accepting bribes and even, in the case of Arnold "Arnie" Whitelake, election rigging.

While no one from the Holden or Van Harrington families were willing to offer a statement, we were able to get a statement from Arnold Whitelake himself. Our resident field reporter, Sharon Stoltz, caught up with him outside of the district courthouse earlier yesterday morning where he made an official statement to various reporters.

"All of the allegations against me are bold-faced lies perpetrated by other houses that are trying to bring mine down. Unlike them, I'm not going to throw out any names, but I will say that they know what they are doing, and they won't get away with it. They also know that I can play this game just as well as they can, and I'll win. There are plenty of old-money families who have been around for centuries. They are nothing but puff-shirts who sit in their ivory towers and look down on others from above.

They hate me because I made my fortune and my success on my own. My father was a toaster-salesman who didn't have two credits to rub together for warmth. I made my own way in the world, and every piece of land, business or title that I have, I earned for myself legitimately. I didn't ride off of the backs of my ancestors and I wasn't born into a world of lace and gold. I fought for every single bit that I have earned, and I will continue to fight for it. These charges hold no water, and once they are dismissed, I plan on using every resource I have at my disposal to take this right back to those who conspired against me."

Someone then asked what he had thought about the allegations that the special subcommittee that was set up earlier in the year had made about him being a part of a city-wide conspiracy that included both murder and racketeering.

He responded only with a scoff, calling it, "Just more mudslinging by those who would like to see me lose my power, no matter how much they have to drag down my family's name to achieve it."

While this isn't the first time that officials in positions of relative power have been indicted, it is the first time in recent memory of an incident of this scale. If evidence does point to an actual conspiracy of murderers and thieves being in-cahoots with those in power, it will be an unprecedented event in Beacon's political history. We will keep our devoted readers updated on the trial as it progresses.

THE ASCENSION DAY MASSACRE: ONE YEAR LATER

It's hard to believe that an entire year has passed since one of the most brutal and deadly non-military attacks in the city's history occurred at a nightclub in the heart of the southern district. The ruthless and bloody massacre that occurred last Ascension Day had an official death toll of 36 with over 200 injuries. It has been the subject of both swarms of controversy (for Beacon's seemingly lax weapons policy) and morbid fascination (a book entitled "The Night I'll Never Forget" written by a survivor was published last month and has become a smash success) by people from all over Beacon, and it's not hard to imagine why.

Such an act of brutality upon innocent civilians had been considered unthinkable until then, especially considering the holiday that it fell on. What was considered our holiest of days, when The Empress vanquished the enemies of freedom and created our glorious city, was marred by wanton acts of bloodshed.

Just after midnight at "The Hop!" an (at the time) fledgling but popular night club, a group of masked robbers burst through the doors with automatic weapons and opened fire on the crowd. The shooting itself only lasted for about four minutes, but over five-hundred rounds were fired in that time. When the dust settled, all that was left were the screams and cries of the victims as they called out for help while bleeding out on the dance floors and under tables.

We caught up with the owners of the establishment, Victoria De Santos and Lucas Thompson, who were later hailed as local heroes after defending the club and saving the lives of quite a few of the occupants before a high speed race to the hospital on ice almost ended in disaster for both of them. We wanted to get their take on what had happened and see how the place was holding together towards the one-year anniversary.

Victoria, a tall but muscular woman with electric blue hair, did most of the talking at first, and she had quite a lot to say.

The following contains some offensive language and disturbing imagery, but out of respect for what they did to save their patrons, we present it to you completely unedited.

"I was chatting up a nice couple at the bar who had come straight from the founders play when the shit all started going down." Ms. De Santos told our reporter as she lit a cigarette.

"They just came in and started shooting. I've never been in the military or anything, but I grew up on the streets, and I've always had an instinct when it came to protecting myself. I grabbed the shotgun that we kept below the bar and started firing back at them as quickly as I could to try and save as many of our customers as possible."

We then asked her if she was afraid. She didn't respond with words, she simply shook her head. Her partner, a solemn looking man dressed in a dapper suit with jet-black hair, who looked to be about the same age as her, cut in.

"I was certainly scared. I had never seen madness and chaos at that level before in my entire life. I grabbed my friend and flipped over a table for protection. She had a small handgun in her purse, which we used to fire back at the attackers. When Vicky was shot though, I started running on pure instinct.

Victoria then picked the story back up.

"I never imagined how much being shot would hurt," she said with a chuckle.

She pulled up her T-shirt to her bra, revealing a deep scar that stretched across her stomach.

"They got me right here," she said, pointing to the scar.

"Bastards almost killed me," she continued, putting her cigarette out. She then put her arm over her friend's shoulder.

"If it wasn't for Luke here, I would have bled right out on the floor with the rest of them. He saved my life that night for sure, as well as the lives of many others when he took out two of those creeps. He scooped me up off of the floor and drove me on the ice all the way to the hospital. He even crashed into the damned building just to get me there faster."

Lucas flashed a barely noticeable blush and gave a light chuckle before saying, "I couldn't just let you die like that, we had a lot of work to do still and I wasn't going to do it without you."

When asked how their business had been recovering since the shooting they both responded positively.

"People never stopped coming once we got back up and running," Lucas told us. "Whether it was out of morbid curiosity or just a genuine love of our club and the way we do things here, I can't say. I can say however, that we've done so well since then that we're going to be opening a new location starting at the beginning of the new year if everything goes according to plan. We bought a building that used to be a bakery a few blocks from here, and we're hoping to have it up and running by early spring."

At that point in our conversation, the evening had come and people were starting to file in, so the reporter bid the owners farewell. However, before he left, they took him to the bar and showed him the plaque that was made to honor the victims that would be placed above the bar. It was gold and had a picture of the three founders and The Empress, engraved on it with the text "To those who passed on the eve of our most treasured holiday here, you will never be forgotten" followed by a list of all of the names of the victims.

The club had an odd charm, despite being the location for such horrible violence, and the reporter found the owners to be quite charming themselves, if a little reserved. He fully understood why, of course. Most people never see so many awful things in their entire lifetimes, let alone all at once, and live to tell about it. He salutes them for carrying on in the name of the victims of the tragedy and wishes them well in their future ventures and the opening of their second club. Read again tomorrow when we interview five survivors of the incident and try to piece together the exact events of what happened on that fateful night through their shared experiences. That's all for now, and we'd like to remind all of our readers to have a happy, and safe, Ascension Day.