Imaginary TV summaries continue apace
Season 1: The Daylight City
“Please, Mr. Elwood. I just want to know that my daughter is safe. If she doesn’t want to come home, that’s fine, but I need to know she’s alive.”
-Veronica Caravaggio, Season 1, Episode 1: “A Midnight Train to Nowhere’
In the first season, things are strange, but not supernaturally so. It all starts with Jake Elwood getting a visit at his run down office by one Veronica Caravaggio, wife of Salvatore Caravaggio. Sal’s the alleged head of the alleged Caravaggio crime family, and his daughter’s gone missing. Neither Sal nor Veronica want to involve the police for obvious reasons, and Jake, as Veronica points out, is the only private investigator in the city who isn’t an ex-cop. Veronica is skeptical of using Sal’s men as it might rile up the other factions, and so it’s down to Jake. At first, he wants to turn her down- there’s no good reason to get involved with the Caravaggio family, but something about her pleading gets through to him, and he’s on the case. He follows the trail, which initially goes cold thanks to a dead body- not the missing daughter Natalia, but that of the man she was last seen with, who’s been murdered with a spear.
We soon meet another recurring character- Mark Cornish, a homicide detective who knows Jake and has been assigned to the case of the murdered man, who turns out to be a Romanian mobster named Andre Dragos. Jake is forced to work with Mark to stop Andre’s brother was raising hell, and learns that Natalia is now wanted as a person of interest in the case since she’s the last one who was seen with Andre while he was alive.
Natalia seems to be moving from gang to gang looking for sanctuary from a mysterious figure pursuing her and as Jake follows her trail as well, he encounters the outlaw bikers of Moon Devil MC, uncovers a conspiracy of knightly bank robbers in the Organization of Archaic Amusements while trying to track down a lead on the spear used to kill Andre, and finally gets a his first look, and a picture of the man who followed Natalia and Andre on that fateful night, a man known only as Mr. Long. Reporting his progress to Veronica leads to disaster.
Sal Caravaggio finds out about Long and leads some men to bring him in for a chat about his daughter’s whereabouts. None of the men survive, and Sal is hospitalized after getting a spear through the gut. The local news start calling Long ‘The Impaler.”
Through all this Jake’s relationship with Veronica seems to be getting closer than “Detective and Client”, with only guilt about Sal’s condition preventing it from progressing beyond the occasional flirtation and lingering look. Jake continues to investigate the people Natalia’s contacted, but the girl remains one step ahead.
Jake continues to run into new organized crime outfits: another encounter with some Dragos muscle leads to him befriending the Park siblings, Nathan and Wendy, who both operate as a single white hat hacker known as Parsifal. As Parsifal they help him get access to some records that may give allow him to finally get ahead of Natalia’s flight.
No gang story would be complete without corrupt cops, and unfortunately for Mark Cornish’s appearances on the show, he ends up crossing them, then dies in Jake’s office with a fatal gunshot wound. The cops initially try to frame Jake, but as it happens, they’re on the Caravaggio’s payroll and a word from Veronica has them searching someone else to frame. Not being of fan of someone else getting railroaded, Jake finds the truth: another detective, one Tristan Knight, was the real killer, having developed a jealous obsession with Mark’s wife. He wasn’t even part of the group that threatened Jake, so they’re happy to turn on him. Mark happening to have crossed the dirty cops was a coincidence, and they apparently, get off scot free, which is just how it goes sometimes.
Mark’s widow, Isobel, provides Jake with his personal casebook, which contains the final info he needs to track down Natalia and Mr. Long. He catches up to her just as Long does, and the confrontation goes badly. Jake apparently meets his death at the hands of Long, and Natalia runs again- but this time, it seems, Long isn’t chasing her. Instead, he leaves a different way, and walks entirely out of the story and the show (Since he doesn’t reappear in any later season.) We roll credits and then cut to Mark sitting up, gasping for breath, with only a scar where the spear mark would be.
Showrunning: Running a game set explicitly in season one probably involves an agreement that no one takes any supernatural abilities. There’s definitely odd things happening, but those odd things aren’t magically odd. The sort of stories that happen would be mysteries and crime dramas, not supernatural adventures.
