They kill her. It doesn’t stick.
An ancient chthonic power called Monkey resurrects her and suffuses her body with magic. On the run from her former colleagues, she has to solve her own murder before the plague gets out and tears her home to pieces.
The Dawnhounds provides examples of:
- And I Must Scream: Particularly dangerous criminals have their consciousness wiped, and are experimented on and forced into dangerous jobs, they’re still aware of everything around them, and can feel pain. Also, the ‘particularly dangerous’ part is mostly a government fiction: there aren’t enough criminals to fill demand, so they’ll blank people for incredibly minor offenses.
- Animal Motifs: all the weavers have an associated animal patron who grants them magic. Different patrons grant different powers: crane weavers can teleport, ox weavers are incredibly strong, and tiger weavers hide in plain sight.
- Big Damn Heroes: the Kopek teleports into a city canal, wrecking itself in the process, to save the day.
- Bio Punk: with a Steampunk twist.
- Body Horror: the plague repurposes human flesh and other organic material to create aggressive fungal/flesh hybrids.[...] a dog with a man’s face, crying out in pain. Its mouth remade into a snout like a dog’s, but puckered pink human flesh. It tried to bite him until he walloped it with the cane and send it running off down into the rats-nest of alleyways, shrieking in the voice of a child. Sen moved on.
- Cast from Hit Points: weaving requires life energy going in to put magic out. That energy can come from an external source, but in a pinch can come from the weaver themselves. It has a tendency to go poorly.
- Dirty Cop: of two flavours: Wajet is tremendously corrupt but is good-natured and has secretly been letting LGBT+ people out of the cells and directing them towards better company, while Varazzo is squeaky clean but is working to unleash the plague.
- Eldritch Abomination: Monkey is not a monkey. None of the Gods are what they say on the tin.
- Resurrective Immortality: when weavers die (if they’ve got magic left in their body) the Gods stitch them back together and throw them back. Jumping back and forth between the void and the land of the living makes them significantly more powerful, but chips away at their sanity and makes them less and less human as time goes on.
- Slasher Smile: Zao would be bad enough, but he has anglerfish teeth implants, apparently for the intimidation factor.
- Subverted Trope: Bury Your Gays. Most of the weavers are queer, and they’re very hard to put down.
- Synthetic Plague: the MacGuffin, though it takes a more active role in the story later on.
- Touched by Vorlons: weavers get their power by making contact with a specific God, and the Gods are … nontraditional.
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: implied to be the eventual fate of all weavers: every time they come back, a little bit of their sense of self gets chipped away, until they’re barely human.
