Severe Scissors

The Musty Tailor Pawnbroker

The Musty Tailor is a rundown pawnbroker's shop in the North docks district of The City of Keelford. It's an unassuming building, standing sandwiched between two equally rundown townhouses in a narrow cobbled street named Brownbrick Alley. The exterior of the building is grim and rotten, a sight of pure neglect - the dark green pain that once graced it's woodwork is now a crackled and peeled mess with as much paint flaked off onto the dusty cobbles as on the building's framework. The shop's windows are caked in grime, which builds up at the base of each smokey panel like a polluted snowdrift, whilst flecks of rust glides to the ground, from an iron lantern fixed by the door, like rotten snowflakes. The faded golden lettering above the door proclaims "Th Musty T ilor", and above that, two stories of blackened brickwork rise, set with rotted and broken wooden shutters, creaking on their hinges.

An Exchange of Scissors

The Musty Tailor Pawnbroker's is indeed a place that no-one would want to set foot in or to purposefully seek out normally, but the proprietor of the shop, a certain Mr Geddum Fisher, seems to get a lot of business on a daily basis. People from his neighbourhood and around the city come to trade old items, from battered chairs to bent silver cutlery, filling his shop with all sorts of odds and ends, including a large collection of scissors.
Fairly often (say twice or thrice a month) a customer will enter the shop with a pair of scissors, always made in the same "severe" design with angles as sharp as the scissors' edges. They will wipe their feet on the mat (the floor is so dirty that it hardy matters), perhaps examine the bottles, rings, thimbles and spools of thread which line the dusty shelves, and make small talk with Mr Fisher, remarking about relations between two merchants or noble houses. They then pass the scissors across the table, collect a small sum of money, and leave without another word. A week or two later, the two parties mentioned by the customer (even if they seemed on perfectly good terms before) fall out, perhaps over some triviality or even over a city-wide scandal. To the untrained eye, this might be viewed as simply a strange coincidence, or a lucky guess. To the eye trained in the workings of Keelford's underworld, however, this is a discreet transaction, involving the unassuming scissors as a secret symbol, and a criminal organisation which specialises in causing relationships and ties to be severed. 

Dealings with the Cleavers

The aforementioned criminal organisation is crudely named "The Cleavers", although many of its members wish to change it to somthing a little more sophisticated to suit the service that they provide, namely stealthily causing social and political ties to be cut. Their preferred weapons, rather than the clumsy and obvious daggers and poison used by assassins, are the more humane (but no less lethal) weapons of deceit, rumours, and intrigue. Their customers are most often upper class nobles or merchants seeking to destroy the alliance between two rival companies, or between enemy houses, but can range from royalty to simple craftsmen.
      To employ the services of the Cleavers, one must do the following simple steps. Step one: Find out about the Cleavers. This can be done in two ways.  One can either discover them via dubious contacts, or one can be discovered by them. In the first scenario, a meeting might be arranged with a spokesperson from the organisation (this spokesperson cannot know too much about who is involved in the Cleavers, in case the meeting is a trap set by Keelford Law enforcement). In the second, a shady figure might approach you in a bar, offering to help with your problems. One one of these scenarios are met, move on to step two.
  Step two: Earn your contact's trust. Your contact will not be able to directly cause the ties you wish to sever to be broken - they are too low down in the organisation's hierarchy, and they do not know if you can be trusted. The Cleavers will first examine your background and contacts in case you are a member of the guard. If they find that you are not, your contact will give you sometimes clear, sometimes cryptic instructions on what to do next, usually amounting to getting hold of a pair of severe scissors, which might be provided be the cleavers, and giving them to Mr fisher at the Musty Tailor, along with a brief and discreet description of what ties you want broken, most often disguised amongst small talk.  
Step three:Follow the instructions.
Step four: Lie back, and watch the relationships between your enemies disintegrate before your eyes. Some people, who have used the service before can skip steps one and two, instead trading the scissors in straight away.
Step five: Pay up. The service isn't cheap.

Item type

Tool

Rarity

Severe Scissors are a little known design of ordinary scissors. They are not rare or expensive, but uncommon enough to serve as an adequate symbol, as there is little chance of an honest person bringing the scissors into the pawnbrokers coincidentally.

Base Price

4 - 8gp

Significance 

Severe scissors have been used for years by the organisation known as The Cleavers, as a secret symbol used by their customers to indicate that they want one of the social or political ties between their enemies severed.

Design and History

Severe Scissors were designed by an artificer, who's name has been forgotten by history. They wanted to create a pair of pliers with a magically enforced grip to assist in their tinkering. They worked, creating a unique angular design. Sadly, their dream of better pliers was never realised. It was only until after their death that their work was rediscovered in a house clearance sale amongst a box of parchments by a silversmith named Gryla Angleton, who adapted the unique design into scissors, which she made and sold from her shop in keelford. They sold reasonably well, but the style of them was not in fashion at the time (nor is it now). Nevertheless, she made a fairly large number of them.