From Unofficial Handbook of the Virtue Universe

Adventure of the Neon Brown Eye

(part of Wyldfire/The Sara Winters Investigation, a Wyldfire Crossover series)

---

Sean offered me a very different sort of mission. He wasn't sure at the time -- last week -- whether this'd qualify more as "counterterrorism" or "counterespionage": that's one of the things we need to determine. Or maybe it's a villainy thing . . . or maybe Sean took the whole thing wrong. I doubt it, though. His judgement is generally good.

I had to wait for a day where either Paragon City would have regular flurries throughout the day and night and into at least morning, or we'd had enough rain that all of the snow and slush melted completely away. I'd have chosen the snow if I had the vote, but a warming trend early on the Wednesday one week after Sean's discovery led to rain guaranteed for Thursday in more than enough quantities to wash away any outdoor tracks I might make. So I spent most of Wednesday morning scrubbing and combing every inch of my fur, getting rid of the loose stuff and the almost-loose stuff, blow-drying myself and then doing it all over again for good measure. It's kind of like using a pumice stone to scrub off the top layer of skin cells so DNA traces won't be left behind. After a conversation with Omicron and Screak one day last year, I discovered that I do have fingerprints still, but even the thin fur on my hands tends to blur those some -- as long as I'm careful what and how I touch, I shouldn't have to wipe surfaces clean too often.

Most efforts people make to prevent or remove evidence of their activities, of course, just leads to the creation of new evidence that a thorough forensics team will discover, so there's no point to my getting fancy. No footprints, no odors, and no shedding should about cover it. Especially since he told me where to find the emergency key. Screak and Sky agreed to provide me with a distraction, should I need one; I put Screak's direct number on my emergency one-touch dial, collected the eighty-gig USB hard drive, and hit the trail just before sunset.

I've passed through that neighborhood a couple of times over the past week. It's on the western side of the Red River, not quite as far away from Adams Street as you can get and still be in the Founders' Falls borough. On one of my trips, I came under fire from a Council sniper on a nearby roof, but they were actually trying to ambush a local hero and I just happened to make them nervous -- sadly typical for the area. At the time I saw no indication that this had anything to do with Paige or Sara or whatever her name really is. A brief search in the city records came up with a floorplan called the "Rock Harbor" by a company now based in Indianapolis; from what Sean described, the office is in the slightly smaller bedroom on the upper floor. He also said she keeps the room's door open; good, I won't have to defeat separate security for just that room.

Keeping dry while travelling through a rainy day is an art. Especially if I can't take public transportation to the neighborhood of my destination. The Rooftop Express isn't as private as it used to be, either, but the rosetta pattern on my fur does a much better job of blending into weathered brownstone and expensive roofing tiles than it does of blending into most urban settings; I left my sweatsuit in a locker at the Green Line station in Talos and headed into obscurity as quickly as I could.

To prevent unbearable suspense, I'll say right now that I got in with a minimum of trouble, got the data downloaded, and got out without leaving any traces of my intrusion. That's not where the job wound up taking me two days, nor where I wound up so exhausted that I slept for almost all of Saturday and napped a bunch more on Sunday. The data's safely passed off to our computer whizzes. Amazingly. And I've checked the equipment back in, so it's no longer my responsibility if this multiple-hundred-dollar electronic thing breaks, or catches fire, or melts.
Gah, let's not talk about the melting yet.

So these townhouses are, as advertised, nice things. They're staggered so the doors aren't lined up parallel to each other, giving it less of a San Francisco cookie-cutter feel. I found the key magnetically attached to the underside of the rooftop air conditioner unit, just as originally described; I wonder how many fliers do that. While the drive did its thing, I split my attention between watching the clock -- Sara's due home in anywhere from fifteen to forty minutes, and her grocery delivery service stops by tonight so she might try to beat them here -- and glancing out the window in case something goes wrong. Because something ALWAYS goes wrong. I've already looked seventeen times for hidden cameras or motion sensors, which would've given Sean away last week if they'd existed but that helps my nerves precisely zero.

So that's when I noticed, out the curtained window, the odd thing about the townhouse whose back end abutted the left half of this lot and the right half of the next. It was just as dark as the room in which I stood, and in fact that window over there was pretty dust-streaked; but there was a symbol drawn in layers on the outside of the storm window's glass, the sandwiched side of the regular windowpane, and the interior side of the window. An eye, with the pupil outermost, and angled straight toward me.

You can bet I moved around to make sure it wasn't animated. I felt a little relief when it remained static; maybe it was just somebody's way of creepifying any would-be voyeurs. Something about the entire image bothered me, though, so I decided -- just to be thorough -- I'd turn off the flash on the little camera built into my standard-issue comm gear slash radio slash phone, and take a picture of it.

It was while I was trying to figure out why the image wouldn't show up on the admittedly cheap digital camera's screen, just a plain-if-dirty window, that it occurred to me that the eye image had a faint neon glow to it.

So here's the thing. I have a lot of trouble seeing brown. Half the time it actually looks grey or purple to me. I've stared at a brown crayon and had to concentrate for a minute to see it as the color I remember being "brown" before II got hold of me. Apparently I can see it, I have slightly fewer cones than a human and a LOT more rods. So if I'm seeing neon brown glow on an object but not in the picture I just took, there're more explanations than "inadequate camera". I forwarded that first attempt to Screak and asked if she saw anything besides dirt, particularly any shapes or squiggles drawn in place; she sent back a faint but definite negative, and went back to the daily administration of the beat-down.

Time was ticking, so I hovered over the harddrive while its onboard software cleaned up traces of the backup it'd just committed, then grabbed it and hurried out. The Peapod/Stop & Shop delivery Jeep pulled up as I was returning the key to the exact spot and orientation where I'd gotten it; and Sara swooped up just as they were about to drive away, cursing over the bad luck that had them arriving early. I could hear her very clearly from my hiding spot five rooves away. Once they were inside, I took off for safer ground.

I didn't quite make it.

Two blocks away, I started feeling woozy. No drugs, no bleeding, and I wasn't actually lightheaded; I managed to slap an arrest chit on the drive's carrying case, marked it "Evidence-Urgent-SG Wyldfire", and activate the transportation chit about five breaths before I blacked out. (And, yes, that little pre-faceplant stunt got me a good long lecture from three police sergeants and Captain Stacy about abusing the system, when I showed up the next day to collect it. They said I crashed two computers handling the prisoner transport system.)

At least I didn't dream. Small favors.

I woke up in a box, curled up in the fetal position, with my tail almost completely numb. Violent panic city. Fortunately no one was in that section of the hold, so nobody heard me snarling and hissing as I shredded open the first non-me substance I touched. It turned out to be the side of the crate, and I got out the instant that hole was almost big enough. The sound of the sluice pumps even covered the sound, a few minutes later, of the crates stacked partially atop mine falling over when that one succumbed to its weakened structure.

It turns out that a bunch of Banished Pantheon members were sailors of some sort in life. Four of 'em have been operating a smuggling ship up and down the coastline, with one Storm Shaman for supervision, for who knows how long? By the time I calmed down, slipped up onto the main deck, scouted around, figured out how the controls worked, beat all my fear and anxiety and frustration out of the Pantheon, got hold of the Coast Guard on my radio -- the onboard radio proved as dead as the Husks, and without a big glowing rune to compensate -- and figured out how to make the blasted thing stop moving . . . it was definitely past midnight. The Coasties didn't manage to get me ashore until three in the morning on Thursday, and at that, we were well down the Narragansett Bay. I wasn't complaining. They gave me hot chocolate and answered my questions as best they could, and they didn't give me more than two or three freaked-out looks. I was pretty thoroughly frazzled, and probably looked half-ready to claw something if I got startled again.

My phone had no reception at that range. Once I got to shore, I borrowed a Dunkin' Donuts' phone to call the Talos Island branch of "Tabitha Fabish", which I think is where my co-worker's current sweetie works. Wish I could remember her name, because the conversation went pretty much like this:
Perky Goth BlessedBeBunny: "Blessings from Tabitha Fabish, where I'm totally sensing good vibes for you from our thirty-percent-off incense selection, and the spirits are already filling out your order, will that be cash or--"
me: "Is Bucky there?"
PGBBB: "Umm...?"
me: "Bucky. Stark Buck. I've got to get in touch with him, and I can't get through by radio."
PGBBB: "This is, like, not coming clear to my mystic senses yet. Are you sure you don't have the wrong number?"
me: "Aaarghlook. One of the employees there, probably not yourself but I'm sure you know about it, is cohabbing with a flaming satyr who does the superhero gig, and specializes in protecting people from magical nincompoopery. I've got something that I think is right up his alley, but I need his input nownownow. You've got to remember him. He's a satyr. He's got really impresive ram horns on his head. Cloven, fuzzy hooves. Wears a cape and a speedo in really nice weather."
PGBBB: "I'm sorry, uh, miss, but we have several regular customers who have horns and hooves. And I've only been working at this branch for a few months, so I've not really seen our clientele's summer wardrobe...."
me: "He's flaming."
PGBBB: "Many of our clientele are masters of the mystical arts associated with fire, especially among the licensed guardian set. I wish I could help you, but if you can't be more specific -- you're a Libra, aren't you?"
me, beating my head against the wall quietly, while the Coastie laughs at my end of the conversation: "He talks like a surfer dude. Not a raver. A surfer."
PGBBB: "Oh! You mean Buck! Why didn't you say so?"
me: "..."
PGBBB: "He's not in the shop today."
me: "That's great. You know where he is, though, yes?"
PGBBB: "Totally!"
me: "Great. Can you give me the number where I can reach him right now? This is an emergency. I need him look over a crime scene, one possibly still in progress."
PGBBB: "Oh, no, we don't give out our employees' private contact information. They'd be swamped by requests for consultations. Besides, it's, like, illegal. And stuff."
me: "Fsssssssssssssss."

Eventually I got her to call him with the number of the doughnut shop. Turns out he was up in Connecticut anyhow. He took over as point-of-contact on the Banished Pantheon smuggling ship end of the investigation, probably calling in the right contacts to give the ship a forensic sweep, but offhand he didn't recognize the eye symbol I was describing. He did point out, though, that I can see a bit lower into the visual spectrum than most humans can, so if the drawing was made in very high-frequency, ultraviolet-range light, my brain's patchworked sensor-processing center could easily have interpreted a color I can't name as a color I can no longer entirely see.

And I got jumped by about twenty Husks, with no shamans, when I left the airport just outside the Paragon City war walls. I should've had my guard up, really, but by this time I'd had no normal sleep and entirely too much excitement, and I slipped until the breeze changed direction. That fight brought Airport Security and three waiting-for-connecting-flight National Guardsmen running. Thank you, National Guard guys, because Airport Security did not have a clue. But they did have incident reports. And so did the state cops who were called in. And then the airport people wouldn't let me leave until I'd been interviewed by their insurance rep, who had to be awakened and driven in from the city.

And THAT led to an irate phone call from me to wake up the Boss. He had to come over there. Fortunately when a multimillionaire shrink glares disapprovingly, it cuts through some of the crap. He didn't even have to make any subtle telepathic nudges. (I think.) He just glared, and showed them some pages from the Rhode Island State Code of Law, and cleared his throat in that meaningful I-see-right-through-you way, and shepherded me off to his car.

Where, thank you VERY much, I had to go over the whole thing from "felt woozy" through "Bucky took charge". So now I have to tell Sean and Alan and Silver and Bucky to expect that Dr. Gironde might come looking for explanations.

I think the BP were watching Sara's apartment. I'd kind of like to know why. Since they captured me, I'd guess they were either after that drive, or else they thought I was part of whatever's going on with her and could explain it to them. (Which, "ha!".)

When I finally dragged myself into the apartment, Silver was home playing Battlefront. I curled up on the other end of the couch, dumping the drive next to him, and told him Sean needs him and Alan to crack the copy open without any damage to the data inside, and that Sean will explain the whole thing. I may've even gotten all the way through the warning about the Pantheon's interest before I fell asleep. I hope I did, anyway. When I woke up Sunday morning, he'd put me in my own bed and left me a peanut butter sandwich, which, awww. I have the bestest roommate ever.