"Greetings to you!" the girl who had just entered the shop bellowed, spreading her arms theatrically with an expression of honest amicability that was quite frightening to see. The tradesman behind the counter jumped at the sound of her voice and looked at her with wild eyes. "Looking at you I can just tell you are the man to talk to about a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity!"
The look on the tradesman's face suggested that at the moment he wanted to be anyone but that man. His eyes flickered nervously to the elf strolling nonchalantly along the displays then back to the strange pink-haired girl and her escort.
"You see, I represent the…" the girl paused for dramatic effect. "Cormyrian Dragon trading association!"
"Never heard of you," the tradesman interrupted nervously, eager to see the back of them. The girl that stormed into the shop seemed to be a bit too young to be a representative of any trading association, but her bodyguards were quite impressive, especially the half-elven woman. He had his instructions – and even though he wasn't normally a man to question instructions, those seemed, respectfully, rather strange, - but you just didn't say 'no' right away when behind the person offering four warriors and a mage glared at you. He was paid nowhere near enough to deal with such situations.
"Oh we've just began expanding into this region," the girl grinned. It was a perfectly friendly grin, but there was something worrying behind it nevertheless. "Which means you could be the first to get your hands on the exclusive trading agreement for our dragonbone!"
"Dragonbone?" he blinked, now genuinely confused.
"Exactly, my friend! A solution to all your problems!"
"It is?"
"Why yes! You have troubles with iron in this region, do you not? Well forget iron, it is a thing of the past! Our especially hardened dragonbone will slice iron like butter! You, my friend, will be a national hero!" the girl kept chattering without pause for breath, the grin of manic friendliness never leaving her face.
"W-we are not interested in your offer!" the tradesman backed away, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. The girl appeared so sweet and innocent at first glance, but she couldn't possibly be, or she wouldn't be sent here. There had to be a reason this mysterious trading association sent her to secure this deal. Anyway, it took special deviousness to be able to effectively hide behind a sweet and innocent façade. Stick to what you knew, that was the safest rout. "We are not accepting any offers at this time!"
"Maybe there's someone in charge we could speak with?" the girl made a step towards him.
The colour drained from the tradesman's face at the mention of his bosses.
"I've had enough of this!" he bleated and stormed off behind the curtain that separated the shop from the rest of the building.
"Was it something I said?" Imoen called after him. Finally able to slip off the formidable bodyguard persona, Estel doubled over laughing. The others followed suit, even if for some of them a slight rising of the corners of their mouths was considered a joyous outburst.
"I do believe we should assign you to deal with the merchants the next time we need to sell anything," Xan remarked to Imoen's further delight.
"It was a strange behaviour for a merchant, however," Jaheira said thoughtfully. "Even when presented with an obvious sham."
"Hey, dragonbone is the real deal!" Imoen huffed indignantly.
"P-perhaps we should withdraw," Khalid offered. "He m-might be calling for g-guards even n-now, and w-we were asked t-to be discreet."
"Nonsense!" Imoen vaulted over the counter and set about rummaging around. "There's something obviously sinister going on here, it's our obligation to find out and stop it. For the safety of the city and such."
"Yes, they might be some kind of evil extraplanar creatures who had taken on the appearance of honest merchants. That would explain their fear of dragonbone," Estel supplied.
"Is that a thing?" Imoen straightened to look at her hopefully. If there were such creatures here, then the obvious course of actions would be to find and kill a dragon and use its bones to…
"Nah, I'm just making it up. Did you find anything?"
"No evil extraplanar creatures here," Imoen shrugged. "If we're going to find anything, it will be behind that curtain." They both looked hopefully at Jaheira.
"Very well," the druid answered after a moment of silence. "But we must be discreet. If something goes wrong, we can expect no support from the Flaming Fist."
"It's not like we normally go around barging into people's homes and massacring them all!" Imoen snorted.
"You don't?" Endar asked innocently, pocketing some small item.
The room behind the curtain was empty, though voices from the street penetrated through the door that was left ajar – probably the one the distressed tradesman had fled by. Ender walked to the door and closed it calmly, so that from the outside nothing seemed amiss. For all they knew, however, the tradesman was leading the guards back to the house even now. They didn't have much time.
They took the stairs up, not exactly discreet in their clunky armor and creaky leather, but close enough. The spacious hall upstairs was richly decorated – perhaps too richly for a business in decline. Three men – the three of the Seven Suns, by the girth of them, - were lounging away in enormous chairs, sipping wine. They stopped as soon as they had noticed the invaders.
"How did you get here?" one of the men demanded.
"Oh, there was no one in the store, so we decided to check if everything was alright," Imoen said innocently.
"With the city in the state of unrest because of this iron crisis and all," Estel chimed in.
"And consequentially it is about iron that we wanted to talk to you about!" Imoen finished triumphantly, the Cormyrian Dragon trading association back in business. "You see, we—"
"No," another man said, looking at them with curiosity rather than alarm.
"But you haven't even heard our offer!" the girl implored.
"I don't think they're here about iron at all, brother," the first man said, getting up surprisingly fluidly for someone of his proportions.
"I think they're here to snoop around for the Flaming Fist, brother," the second one stood up as well. The three of them slowly began to circle the party like sharks closing in on the prey. For all their apparent harmlessness there was something unidentifiably… creepy about the merchants.
"But they don't work for the Flaming Fist," the third voice came from behind them, and the adventurers automatically huddled into a defensive circle as more people began coming out of various doors. Men and women – seven in total, - looked at them with almost identical curiosity of a cat that knows that the mouse cannot escape and so is content to play with the food for a while.
"No, if something happens to them, the Flaming Fist won't even admit it, because they're not supposed to be here," the fourth man said.
"Alright, now they're creeping me out," Imoen said, clutching her sword. It wouldn't be very discreet if they killed the strange merchants, but she was pretty sure they were in mortal danger now, so that was probably alright.
"Such a pretty little thing," a woman cooed, looking at Imoen. The woman herself was definitely not a pretty thing, or even a little one. But, even as they watched in horrified fascination, her skin began to ripple. There was an audible change in the texture of the air as it rushed into the space the woman had previously occupied. She was smaller now. Rich clothing hung loosely on her young slender body, falling off a shoulder to reveal a prettily defined collarbone. The woman appraised her new appearance in the same way one looks over a new dress.
"I do like this one better," a man, considerably slimmer than the rest, but not a prince of anyone's dreams, came over to kiss the woman passionately.
"Ewww!" Imoen protested.
"Stay away from her!" Xan unsheathed his sword, causing the man to smirk.
"Would you prefer to be the one to do that?" He too began to change and suddenly it was Xan, dressed in equally loose robes of the merchant, kissing the shapeshifter Imoen like there was no one else in the room.
"Can we kill them now?" Imoen asked, looking rather green.
"I concur," Xan said weakly, watching the scene before them as some kind of bizarre nightmare.
As if on cue, the rest of the merchants began changing, and soon the adventurers were faced with their own mirror images. They were only glad that the creatures had no power over their clothes, so the confusion wasn't as bad as it might've been otherwise.
Still, it was disturbing to say the least. Estel found herself facing down her own copy, but it wasn't the exact copy. Using the same powers that had let them gleam into the group's true purpose in the house, the creature had pulled the image out of her very nightmares. Perhaps it did that intentionally to taunt her. But in a way, it was easier to fight that other Estel with her glowing yellow eyes and her flowing auburn hair and her cruel smirk.
The seven of them were becoming quite a team, nevertheless. They were certainly better than the Seven Suns – or whatever ghastly monsters had taken their place. Seven grey and gangly shapes lay sprawled on the floor, returning to their true shapes after death.
"Doppelgangers," Estel breathed out, staring at the creature that was, however briefly, herself. It was now utterly devoid of the lush auburn mane it boasted mere seconds ago – or any other hair, for that matter. Yellow eyes with slitted pupils stared back at her, unseeing.
"That's new," Imoen prodded it with her foot. "And creepy as all hells."
"That is disturbing indeed," Jaheira seemed uncharacteristically shaken, as she had been the one to bludgeon to death her own husband – or at least something that looked exactly like him. "But it might have nothing to do with the Iron Throne."
"W-we have n-not seen th-them use th-this t-t-tactic b-before," Khalid agreed, his stuttering getting worse as it always did when the warrior was uneasy.
"We must search the rest of the house," Kivan stated.
"Discreetly," Imoen added nastily.
"Indeed."
They had found what they were looking for only down in the cellar. A cage had been put between the crates of merchandize, and inside it was a haggard-looking man. He raised his head when he heard them approach, and was immediately recognized.
"You!" Imoen pointed an accusing finger. "Old lecher!"
Whatever it was the prisoner expected to hear from his long-awaited rescuers, that wasn't it.
"What?" his jaw dropped.
"Are you the real one?" Estel demanded, feeling stupid for asking as she would have no way of knowing whether he was telling the truth. Doppelgangers were good at stealing not only looks, but personalities as well.
That question was evidently closer to the man's expectations.
"Did you kill those shapeshifting bastards?" he asked hopefully.
"We did," Jaheira confirmed. "Are you, by any change, Jhasso?"
"I am! Did Scar send you?" Relief was coming off of him in great waves. Relief, hope, vengeful triumph and terrible tiredness.
"Yes. I think it would be better if we took you directly to him."
They listened to the one surviving merchant's story in Scar's office while a cleric fussed over him. What they heard was greatly disturbing. The doppelgangers must've been working their scheme for months, gradually replacing every single one of Jhasso's associates, until finally imprisoning Jhasso himself. Finally in control of the organization, they began making decisions that seemed too deliberately moronic to be simple bad business sense.
"Why would they do that?" Estel asked thoughtfully. "Doppelgangers steal other people's lives and live them. Why go through all the trouble only to ruin the life you stole? And there were seven of them, too. A family. That's rare."
"It does seem that the Iron Throne would profit from such an arrangement," Jaheira nodded.
"Are you telling me the Iron Throne could be dealing with doppelgangers?" Scar frowned.
"Or maybe they are doppelgangers!" Imoen offered her theory, wide-eyes. "Maybe that's why they're doing all that bad stuff, poisoning mines and hiring bandits and trying to start wars and whatnot!"
"I doubt that," Jhasso smirked ruefully. "They were always underhanded bastards who would do anything to profit, nothing had changed there. However… if you're going to use doppelgangers, why use them only to ruin a small business? Why not go further, infiltrate the guard or even the Council?"
Scar managed to look alarmed and skeptical at the same time.
"You're assuming the Iron Throne had somehow managed to actually hire doppelgangers," he said.
"If I were you, I'd watch my people very closely. Don't want to end up like me," Jhasso shrugged.
"Still, we have found no proof that the Iron Throne is involved," Jaheira said.
"But it all fits, don't you see?" Jhasso seemed almost as enthusiastic about this conspiracy theory as Imoen. He had lost six friends to the doppelgangers, after all, and was eager to find someone to blame. The old business rival seemed a good candidate.
"I think," Scar said slowly, looking at his friend. "That it is time you and I went to Duke Eltan with this."