My characters are investigating a couple murders, and are thinking it could be a member of the Templars, which in my story were mass killers of supernatural beings. My characters are mages in a city full of mages (still trying to figure out how to pull this off. The setting world is like ours and supernatural creatures live in secret.) They are in the city to be trained, but its more like a college, as most characters attending are 18-20. Despite their magical talents, they are still normal psychologically. Most anyway. The murders just began and they saw the corpses of the first two and failed to save a third who was in a kind of Jigsaw trap situation. Several other similar murder reports show up on the news. The protag has no instinctual shock and the violence seems strangely familiar to him (this was covered in another thread) and one demon possessed girl has absolutely no reaction to it at all, but the other characters are freaked out. One even pukes. So what I want to know is, what could make them follow the protag on the investigation? I was thinking that it could be since they saw three of the murders themselves they feel obligated, or since most the killings are near the school. I am not sure either of those would make sense though to an average reader.
What are the authorities doing about it? Most of us would just leave it to the police and get on with our lives. So your characters need to know something that the police dismiss as irrelevant, or somesuch. Possibly they get the feeling that political pressure is stopping the police from following an "obvious" lead. Perhaps they know they won't be able to convince the police about their evidence without blowing their supernatural cover.
I think it would need to be a little more than obligation because they saw the murders, perhaps a stronger bond with the protag so they want to follow and trust them. It could be out of plain fear that they might be next. Is there any way they could know or be connected to the victims? In which case, obligation feels more plausible.
Oh, the whole city is supernatural. Its on an island off the west coast of the U.S. And the police have a lot on their hands And for the other poster, like I said, pretty much all the victims are students and the protags are students.
Fear that they might be implicated (since they were there). Fear that the killer saw them and would want to eliminate witness (or even on overt threat from murderer). The possibility of learning some rare form of magic used by the killer (or the victim). A reward. The chance to produce a really killer school report/project.
