4. Arson at the Avatar/Old Omashu Opera House - coming on the heels of the premiere of a new play by a Northern playwright that flatters the Ba Sing Se government. Is it a coincidence or is someone making a political statement? The official police are making no headway in their investigation and the mayor is demanding the assistance of the tangs in figuring it out, lest the provincial governor become involved.
Background
The date is Fall of 93 AG, 93-10-28. / 永無17年10月28日 - About two weeks after the last Beigang one-off.
The Old Omashu Opera House (奥瑪舒老劇院)
This grand play house is located in the heart of downtown of Beigang, and it's the preeminent cultural attraction of the city. It's a large, roughly pyramid-shaped building which is clad in sandstone to resemble the buildings of Omashu. The building, which is 425 years old and dates to the era of the water Avatar Kuruk, is decorated with ornate carvings of traditional Omashu opera scenes. However, many years of freeze-thaw cycles (not so much of a problem in Omashu) have taken their toll and the sandstone has been weathered enough that many of the figures are unrecognizable. Those near the entrance are kept up better.
The opera house was a gift of the King of Omashu to the people of Beigang, in gratitude for the rescue of his son by an earthbender in Omashu whose ancestral home was there. It was badly damaged when the armies of Chin the Conqueror and a warlord supporting the Hao-Ting dynasty in Ba Sing Se clashed, but by that time it had become a beloved cultural institution of the city and was renovated and expanded when Beigang was rebuilt.
The character of Omashu Opera (the art form itself) is something similar to Sichuan Opera.
Two Omashu opera companies, the Agate Boat Opera Company and the Mysterious Mountain Opera Company, share the opera house for their productions. The Agate Boat is the original one sent by the King of Omashu centuries ago, the Mysterious Mountain split off from it over a hundred years ago. They are nowadays on good terms and sometimes even give joint productions. Both include descendants of the original actors sent by the king from Omashu.
Besides the two Omashu opera companies that jointly own the opera house (along with the government of Beigang), other actors and troupes use the venue, sharing a cut of the profits with the owners.
Surroundings
The opera house's adjacent area includes the Omashu village, which is where the King of Omashu who donated the opera house had an Omashu-style residential area built for the actors and craftspeople he sent to Beigang. Because it ended up being in a very valuable downtown area, the Opera House eventually sold most of this property and it was redeveloped. (By that point, most of the opera company members were native-born Beigangers and didn't particularly care to live in Omashu-style houses.) However, a few of the buildings were kept for ancillary purposes, storage, and cultural interest, including a bathhouse and an inn, which sells Omashu-style cuisine to this day.
Elsewhere on the street are largely uninteresting trading houses. The players should probably be steered away from straying too far from the theater other than for some specific purpose (getting supplies, research, etc) that can be streamlined.
The Play "The Tragedy of the Xijing Prince"
The controversial play by Wei Si. The plot concerns the Hao Ting prince of Xijing (a city in the West, and the political capital of the Hao Ting administration there), whose personal name was HAOTING Fu. In reality, Prince Hao Ting Fu was a short-tempered and arrogant noble who allowed bandits to flourish in his fief, failed spectacularly to suppress the rebellion of Chin the Conqueror, executed a loyal general of the Hao Ting for remonstrating with him over the conduct of the war with Chin, forced the peasants into illegal labor corvees, and ultimately was killed by his own mutinous troops after allowing the royal army's baggage train to be captured by the rebels and getting trapped in a swamp. Supposedly, Chin made a cup out of his skull.
In Wei Si's revisionist play, Prince Hao Ting Fu is a tragic hero and brilliant military commander; his fatal flaw is his love of his concubine Mei, he makes a deal with Chin the Conqueror to get her back - she was captured with the baggage train - but Chin betrays them and kills them both. They die together at the climax of the play and become astral spirits.
The play has not been popular. Although people in Beigang have, for the most part, no love of Chin the Conqueror (whose army sacked the city), they are also very aware of the mismanagement by the distant dynasty in Ba Sing Se that led to his rebellion, and see that mismanagement as having returned in their day. They feel neglected by the dynasty, and are not especially keen on a play that appears to be a propaganda piece glorifying the heroic virtue of a historical figure who is locally remembered as a fool whose incompetence led indirectly to Chin's sack of their city. Whereas the Omashu opera typically plays to a full house, only about half the seats are full for performances of The Tragedy of the Xijing Prince, and that's after the mayor made them lower the ticket prices...
What happened
The young playwright Wei Si (魏四), from Ba Sing Se, has come North from a rich and politically connected family from the Inner Ring, intending to shine the light of refined civilization on this backwater. An elite scion of the bureaucratic scholar-gentry of Ba Sing Se, He came with a commanding letter of introduction from an official of the second rank in the Ministry of Cultural Preservation (i.e. the organization of which the Dai Li are the agents.) When he told the mayor of Beigang that he wanted to show his new play, "The Tragedy of the Xijing Prince", in the Old Omashu Opera House, the mayor had little choice but to agree. The play hasn't been super-popular, maybe because it seems like a propaganda piece glorifying the incumbent dynasty (the Hao Ting) in Ba Sing Se by lionizing a historical figure, Hao Ting Fu, who is locally remembered as an idiot whose mismanagement of Chin the Great's rebellion lead to the sack of Beigang in the resulting civil war.
The play premiered two weeks ago. A week ago, there was a fire at the Opera House, in which the props, sets and costumes of the play were destroyed. The very limited law enforcement resources of the local yamen (government office) have not made much headway in investigating, and so turn to the tangs (self-protection organizations, literally "halls"), the Baitang ("white hall,") and Hongtang ("red hall," both named after their primary meeting places / offices) for further investigation. The players are members of the Baitang, which is a newer offshoot of the Hongtang. The Baitang broke off from the Hongtang over their desire to allow recent immigrants and a greater variety of ethnic minorities into the organization.
The supplies for the Tragedy of the Xijing Prince were kept in one of several locked storerooms of the Opera House. The sets used by the Opera House are not too elaborate and can generally be taken up or put down fairly quickly, and the plays rotate every few days. The play's supplies had just been put away for the first time to let another play in rotation be performed, when the fire occurred. The supplies are a total loss as the fire was not discovered until quite advanced; it was only due to the solid stone construction of the Opera House that the damage was confined to the one storeroom.
Five people hold keys to the storeroom, and hence are the suspects - it is supposed that if they did not start the fire themselves, they must have let the arsonist in and out or given them they key. (The storeroom was found locked, and indeed it being locked prevented the fire from being extinguished for some minutes more after being discovered, as someone with a key had to be found.)
GM: Pick which one of the suspects below actually did it. Each is provided with a motive.
Mou Jinghua
Stage manager of the Mysterious Mountain Opera Company.
Description: A descendant of one of the original opera actors who came from Omashu, she is 1/4th of ethnic Omashu descent. (The other 3/4 are Zhongzu, i.e. people from the central Earth Kingdom outside of Ba Sing Se.) She is about fifty years old, overweight but pretty, wears subdued clothing. She is very well read and has been to Omashu several times, including for multiple years when she was a young woman, to study the art there. She cares a lot about the authenticity of the Omashu Opera, and doesn't really like that they are allowing the venue to be used for the production of the Tragedy. She especially doesn't like the fact that it is not bringing in much money; they could at least fill seats with a cheap comedy or bending show even if it wouldn't be high art.
Motive: Eliminate an a low-quality production.
Where was she at the time of the incident: Working on ledgers for the current performance alone in her home.
Wu Tianxiang (鄔天祥)
Stage manager of the Agate Boat Opera Company.
Description: A rather mercenary man, Tianxiang is efficient and disciplined and expects a lot of his performers. He is short, muscular and balding, in his forties. He is ethnic Zhongzu, but his family came to Beigang a long time ago and are not recent refugees. He wants to first-and-foremost see the theater profitable. He is justly proud of the Omashu Opera House and is furious that it has been damaged.
Motive: Eliminate an unprofitable production.
Where was he at the time of the incident: At the Wood-changing-to-stone temple praying to Shilinshen for the success of the opera. It's a popular shrine and no one's been found that can confirm he was there.
Zhao Suilian
The custodian of the theater.
Description: A thirty-year-old man who is of Yonggan descent but assimilated - he took a common surname. He is responsible for the security and upkeep of the theater and is very fearful that he will be blamed for the fire. He was notably at a nearby winehouse when the fire was discovered and had to be fetched to open the door to let people put out the fire, by that time the supplies were a total loss. He wasn't actually forbidden from being away from the property, but he nontheless fears that this circumstance reflects badly on him. He is thin, dark-haired and nervous in demeanor.
Motive: Descends from Westerners who were oppressed by the Xijing Prince depicted in the play, he resents how the Prince's enemies are portrayed as bloodthirsty savages with no legitimate grievances.
Where was he at the time of the incident: A nearby bar.
Li Jumei
The director of The Tragedy of the Xijing Prince.
Description: An old man, now about 75, who produces mostly historical dramas. He was a scholar-official in his younger days and reached rank seven. He was a minor functionary who was in charge of a canal in the North. The non-challenging job left him a lot of time to read old books and attend the theater, and about age fifty he embarked on this second career after resigning his official post. Although old, he's still vigorous. Always a little vain, he keeps his appearance up scrupulously, but is also eccentric and keeps a flying-squirrel-bat as a pet. He is skeptical of the Tangs and questions why the theater has paid protection money to them at all.
Motive: Some people are calling him a sell-out and questioning his artistic integrity to associate himself with this play, he wants an excuse to stop without offending the politically-connected playwright.
Where was he at the time of the incident: Asleep.
Wei Si
The playwright himself. He is described above. He will be offended if anyone suggests he was responsible for the arson, moreso than the others.
Motive: Have something to blame the failure of the play on other than himself.
Where was he at the time of the incident:: None of your business, but with family, and can produce "witnesses".
General Plot
Start with a character, such as a Baitang officer (feel free to reuse the one from Ghosts of Beigang) who explains that the party need to figure out which of the five suspects committed the crime. All the suspects are aware they are suspects and have been interrogated by the yamen (government office) personnel without resolution. However, because the officials distrust the tangs, even with the mayor seeking their help, they are not willing to cooperate with the party and the party will need to do their own talking and investigation.
All the suspects will be willing to talk to the party. They live in the vicinity and understand that the party's investigation has the blessing of the mayor and they must try to at least give the appearance of cooperation.
Evidence
Burned storeroom contains a hammer for building and maintaining sets. This would not typically be stored with the props. Anyone who works with the sets should be able to tell the party as much, but the police don't know that the hammer isn't a prop or that it shouldn't be stored with them. The hammer was present for the fire and doesn't look obviously planted.
Crumpled-up notes in custodial closet trashcan, one on the ground. Notes are written with a shaky hand, but the writing is fairly clear. "I'd rather spread fire than spread lies.", "Those of the west will not tolerate this propaganda." The notes are unsigned. The police are not aware of these notes because they weren't in the workshop when it was previously searched. They were added when the hammer proved insufficient to get the police to investigate Suilian.
Wei has on him an extended note that says "If you don't stop this play, an even greater tragedy will befall the opera house." He found it at the bar Suilian was at. Initially says he found it near where Suilian had been sitting. If asked how he knows where Suilian was sitting, he says he could just tell when he picked it off the street that that's where Suilian had past. There was a stench to the man. If asked why he just said the note was both in the bar and on the street, he says it must stuck to the man's foot or something, which obviously doesn't answer the question. He refuses to speculate more on where the note came from and gets increasingly aggravated if it's not accepted as true.
Nothing still points directly toward Wei as the culprit but he can be caught in his own lies and suspicions. He has a tinderbox on him, though. One with flint, steel, and a noted lack of actual tinder due to it being used recently. Yes, he still has the tinderbox on him days later. It's an elaborate and engraved box he got from his father. Do you know who is father is? Oh, that's right, peasant. You're not important-enough to know.
If sufficiently goaded he'll admit to the crime as he feels he's above punishment. He doesn't so much want the play to fail as he wants the controversy. He imagines the savages that hate his play and its obvious superiority already wish to burn it down and so he's doing it for them. A kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Much more satisfying than a slow death and the play being branded as one "they don't want you to see" is something he considers a valid marketing tactic.
Misc
Making up Chinese-sounding names for incidental characters:
(1) Pick a surname: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Family_Surnames
(2) Mine Wikipedia for a given name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_Chinese_people
Note: Most of the people who live in Beigang should have Mandarin-sounding surnames, not Cantonese. Choose accordingly.
If you want to make someone who is Beituzhu (the indigenous earthbending people who live up north), consider some of these indigenous Siberian names: https://www.behindthename.com/submit/names/usage/siberian
Refer to the articles on Beigang and the Earth Kingdom for more ideas for people and their backgrounds.