The players decided to gather up Mia'thos to help them with this session. Cinderbite, Mia'thos, Khart'ka, and Roderan all hid in the back of the wagon while Dirk drove it.
To keep the players on their toes, I put in several pre-ambush encounters. Most of them were just people asking what they were doing, but one was a potential ambush from humans that was pretty easy for players to bully their way out of. One of the encounters was a baby crying in an alley, which the players chose to ignore. Fortunately for them, it was the Kenku using their mimic ability to try and trap the wagon in a narrow and deadly alley.
The Kenku had to change their plans and ran across the rooftops (their known method of travel) to set up an ambush deeper in the district. One Kenku snuck up behind the cart, one came from an alley in front, and two were firing arrows from the rooftops. The beginning of the encounter did not go well for the players. The Kenku made a pincushion out of Dirk, who didn't manage to get under the cart fast enough. Cinderbite did a nifty acrobatic trick to swing out of the wagon and crawl along underneath it in order to get into a better position. Once the players managed to extricate themselves from the cart, they managed to get Dirk healed and to take down the Kenku in the street. Unfortunately, my players forgot to announce that they were going for nonlethal finishing blows, which they needed to question the Kenku. I figured that was a pretty reasonable "rookie adventurer" error, especially in the heat of combat, so I didn't allow them to take back the oversight (in a different circumstance, I may have, but it made good roleplaying sense for it to be an oversight). By the time the players realized they needed a body, the remaining Kenku were on the rooftops peppering them with arrows. In the interest of survival, they shot the Kenku down instead of managing to capture any of them.
I hadn't exactly prepared for that oversight. The players decided to wait around hoping that more Kenku would show up. Instead, a halfling detective strolled up to the players. He introduced himself and said that he had been following the Kenku for a while figuring that they had made enough enemies. He offered to take them for 25 gold, which my players stubbornly refused to pay. They tried to follow up on several other options, but short of hiring a new detective, no one had known where the Kenku were staying! Roderan, the good cleric, eventually ended up acquiescing stating that gold wasn't worth not keeping the community safe and he paid the entire fee himself (I gave him Inspiration for that definitively selfless act).
The halfling led the players to the Kenku hideout in an abandoned part of the city, a three story building that really was more like a tower on the corner of the street. The halfling explained these were a kind of building project to house the poor, a "project" if you will, but that the crafting quality of these building was so low and location was so bad that living in them wound up being more detrimental than finding other slums to reside in.
Cinder scrambled up the side of the building with the plan of going in from the top while the main group came in from the bottom. The plan was set up to prevent any of the Kenku from escaping, and it worked amazingly. I had originally planned for the Kenku to flee out the window on the third floor and to force the players into a series of skill checks that would be a rooftop chase, but their good planning trapped the Kenku in a death spiral. It was a tough fight, but the Kenku and their Blood Hawks couldn't match up to the players who were much better prepared this time around. One hilarious moment occurred when one of the Blood Hawks landed a critical hit on Dirk, which I described as having the razor sharp beak plunge through the meaty part of his arm through to the other side. He was delirious with pain until the clerics healed him.
Meanwhile, the Kenku were rushing up the stairs to escape...right into the waiting sword of Cinderbite. It was a good fight, but the players wound up making mincemeat of the Kenku. They kept one alive this time, though by their count (and the halfling detective's) they thought that they had captured or killed all of the Kenku.
They proceeded to investigate the rest of the tower, wondering if they could turn it into a base of sorts, and they noticed there were some red fleshy things hanging from the ceiling in one room. Upon distant inspection from the door, there was either a sleeping or dead Kenku in that room as well, but there had been such a racket with the combat that it didn't make sense that the Kenku was sleeping. The open fired on the nesting stirges, who flew to feast on the players but were summarily put down by the party who had prepared for that encounter as well.
After all that combat and haggling with the detective, the session came to a close, with plans to start the next one questioning the last living Kenku on how he got into the city...
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