Your search is lengthy and exhaustive as you navigate the house, a part of your mind cataloging the incredible damage even as you send fourth continuous pulses of sonic energy to map the entire building.
First you check the kitchen, dancing through the knives and berries strewn across the floor after a careless step stains the bottom of your foot with blueberry juice. Sighing you hop and skip from safe spot to safe spot until you arrive in front of the sink and turn the handle, releasing nothing from the faucet and instead unleashing a deluge from the cabinet beneath the sink, the pipes were broken, cleanly severed as if Slip had utilized the most destructive aspects of his power to destroy it.
You groan in disappointment as you shed the offending skin and resume your search, you range from the depths of the basement and torn walls to the open safe room and its shattered surveillance system. You scrounge through the shredded dog bed which lays scattered across the living room and the savaged branches of the tree in the back yard and the messily unearthed roots beneath it.
Speaking frankly the fact it's all already been searched makes the whole process absolutely miserable, the sheer mess complicates absolutely everything and even that pales before the soul crushing disappointment you feel when a clearly important box or cavity is discovered and found utterly empty as the traps protecting the thief's stolen spoils spring into action.
Ok, the last bit of that only happened twice when you failed to catch a cunningly disguised shotgun when you weren't looking out for it and then again much later when some sort of spider web looking thread caught fire in an instant, but all together it's really not too bad.
The search drags on for hours as you dutifully catalogued every sight and every sound and every smell in that house until finally, finally. You find something they missed.
Sitting behind a bare wall is yet another hollow cavity which holds something incredibly useful. A backup security system for the house, one which still has recordings of recent events. It only takes you a moment to punch them in, and moment more to realize that this is a record of the previous two weeks, meaning it'll take a while to get through.
After a moment of thought you conclude that once the search is over you should probably watch this somewhere more secure than a house which was most likely enemy territory a few days ago, heck it might even still be being watched.
After one final search to ensure you've not missed anything you leave the house in short order, feathered wingbeats bringing you back to your mansion, well, not just your mansion exactly, Ada- oh. It really is your mansion now isn't it? Well, it is for now anyways, logically speaking you're probably going to die at someone's hand in the next few months, maybe a year if you're-
Refusing to dwell on those thoughts you march into your room, grab the disposable laptop in case this recording has some annoying surprise on it, and sit down to watch them… right before you get a call about a house fire that's gotten out of control, then catching some guy robbing a store, then getting a couple to the hospital after a nasty car crash, and on and on it goes.
All in all, a pretty typical day. But you can tell it won't last, the entire city is holding its breath. Waiting to see who would be the first to break the peace, who would take the first swing and reveal their hand, who would strike and expose themselves to counterblow.
The day passes in a blur as the weight of two people settles squarely on your shoulders. It takes you days of watching at many times its normal speed between your harried efforts to hold back the tidal wave of action which has almost wholly subsumed your life before you finally manage to ensure you've missed absolutely nothing and compile your thousands and thousands (ok not actually that many but still a lot) of notes into your diary so you don't have to keep track of not-technically-thousands-of-notes since you absolutely can't rely on your own absolutely terrible memory.
The tape stretches back two whole weeks, starting with what you can only assume to be Slip's status quo. Literally jumping at shadows and loud noises while he keeps up with a busy career of pretending to make money legally alongside his very cute dog for whom you brutally crush your affection… well, you try. It's a very cute dog.
His life went chugging on until a bit more than a week ago when he seems to make some grand decision. He pulled a little slip of paper out from under his bed, steeled his nerves, and makes a short phone call to an unknown person. "Hello… yeah this is Slip… yeah I'm reconsidering… yes I am certainly interested. Is your new place ready tonight?… Fantastic I'll be there." With that he gave his dog enough food and water for several days, killed the surveillance system for several minutes and once the cameras reactivated he geared up to go an adventure for the ages.
First he put Noodle (his dog) in his bedroom despite his vocal protest and set up a little toddler wall at the top and bottom of the stairs to the basement, then he pulled an old beaten up box with a danger warning out from a false floor in the basement and carefully sorted through a few makeshift explosives before finally setting three proper grenades on the floor in front of him and carefully attaching them to the belt around his waist.
Next he pulls a small violin case out from inside a cavity in the wall and opens it to reveal a makeshift, sparking, inspired gun. The weapon looks strange but simple and judging by its relatively good condition relatively easy to repair. It looks like a sort of ray gun with two gently glowing rods of gold-ish metal serving as the barrels and a vast array of flashing buttons around the… handle? Is that the word?
You shrug, dismissing the question as you continue writing in your memory diary, letting yourself relax for the first time in several weeks to the sound of pen on paper as you continue charting out Slip's last two weeks in that house.
He taps a few buttons and nods at the accompanying hum it produces before he flicks it off and stows it away in a concealed holster before he stores both the box and the violin case back where they should be, hides them again, lets Noodle out of his prison and plays with the snuggly fluff ball as he talks to him. "It's going to be great Noodle." He tells him as the pair play tug of war. "I'm going to get a new job! Just think of it, a better laundry service that doesn't charge an arm and a leg, backup if I get in over my head. And best of all…"
He whispers his next words into the dog's ear but after a lot of rewatches and amateur lip reading you're pretty sure he says, "…And best of all I'll be so much better as a thief if I'm not so scared all the time."
With that he boops the dog on the nose and continues playing with the dog until the sun goes down and he gets in his aging car, leaving for thirteen long hours as Noodle waits at the door.
When Slip returns to the house he does not arrive in the car he left in, instead pulling into the driveway in an entirely separate and significantly nicer vehicle than his previous ride. His personal appearance absolutely does not reflect this change.
His eyes are baggy, his hair disheveled, his grenades are missing, his clothes ragged and burned in places, revealing the fact that his dual barreled pistol is missing from its holster.
He stumbled to the door and proceeded to flip through what seemed like every single key on his keychain before finally opening the door to be enthusiastically pounced upon by Noodle and response he kicked the poor dog in the face. "Back you stupid mutt." He snarled in a tone filled with absolutely none of the love he'd displayed before, following the words up with a barrage of skillful kicks to the head that sent the poor dog sprawling before he dragged the adorable fluff ball out the door by its leg as it laid there stunned.
"Ah, a bit of quiet." Slip declared. "Fantastic." With that he set abound ransacking his own house… in the least efficient way possible. It seemed like he'd never actually been inside his own house before, what had previously been an open book to his eyes seemed to vex him endlessly. Hidden compartments he'd effortlessly, casually found before now seemed to be almost impossible to locate. Leaving him to stubbornly drag a hand through the wall searching for secret compartments.
"Stupid paranoid welp." He muttered to himself, ignoring Noodle's whining and pawing at the door. "Why couldn't the fool have just left… ah of course." With that he strolled into a kitchen and yanked open a drawer, grabbed a knife and began walking towards the door, only to freeze for a long, long minute with his hand on the nob, his body struggling against some invisible force.
The knife dropped from his hand and after a moment Slip… or perhaps the thing wearing his skin, turned around and restarted the process of ransacking the house, starting with a walk up to Slip's safe room and actives the surveillance system to check the thief's actions in the previous few days, noting the minute long blackout with a loud curse before, it's purpose fulfilled, he smashed the system with a chair.
With that done he used the knowledge from the system to pick out compartments and hidden places systematic fashion until he ran out. Then he continued simply ransacking the house in brutal fashion. Until finally he pulled a diary out of a pipe in the basement and ripped it to shreds, then an hour later he pulled a slip of paper from behind a clock and stared at it for a moment.
"So that's what your trick was, that could've been dangerous… if it had been hidden properly." He said to himself, mockery soaking into every single inch of his tone before he placed whatever it was in his mouth and devoured it.
Then he simply walked out the front door, Noodle having proven wise enough to flee long ago, leaving Not-Slip to return from to his car and drive away.
You gradually exit the trance you entered while you wrote to find yourself staring down at the page in deep thought, your exhausted mind whirling as it returns to the same well worn tracks it's been running along for the last several days,
Slip, or rather, Not-Slip, broke into Slip's house to dispose of evidence of Slip's… something. But what the heck was Not-Slip? Had he been Possessed? Cloned? Was it possible that that was the real Slip and that the one you'd known was the-
Your thoughts are suddenly cut off as once more your phone rings, summoning another truly dispirited groan past your lips as the phone cavity in your chest begins to jiggle in response to the machine's vibrations.
"Ugh… what-" you begin before cutting yourself off as the call connects and the calm and practiced voice of a 911 operator jerks you back into full alertness.
"There's a shootout between a moderately well armed group of Five Elements thugs equipped with small arms and The Massacre Men on Pencil Avenue, Water is engaging with Road Trip and Cosplay as we speak." It's happening. You're already on your feet and coaxing feathers from your back before the words even finish penetrating your mind and you're in front of nearby window before her sentence finally finishes.
"The three of them seem to be fighting over a van of some sort, owned by a small startup company called Memoir Incorporated. The company's owner and sole member is apparently inside this van."
You soar towards the battlefield and less than a minute later you're almost there, preparing to dive as your sharpened eyesight picks out almost every detail of the battlefield below you.
Water's goons, (distinguished by the blue arm bands they wear) are focused on the van but Roadtrip seems to be taking incredible delight in stalling their progress, taking lazy shots with a rife whenever they get out from behind the cars they're hiding behind and laughing with gleeful delight as every bullet sent towards her halts with a pulse of red light from the five mile speed limit sign circling above her head.
Meanwhile just down the street a Water fought a samurai, accepting a brutal flurry of cuts too fast for the eye to see before a mean right hook sent Cosplay sailing backwards, even as Roadtrip starts to prepare another sign.
The three of them look much like they always have, well, two of them, Cosplay is something of wild card beyond the near total lack of effort given to each performance.
Water wore long black gloves, a nice fedora, and an unbelievably expensive black suit to contrast with her sister's white one. Her pale and undeniably pretty face contorted into a disdainful scowl, inspecting the damage Cosplay's blade had done to her long black hair. "You'll pay for this transgression." She told the swordsman, who sprung back to his feet and silently returned to his stance,
Every aspect of his appearance told everyone who bothered to look exactly how little effort he put into each costume, eclipsed even by Roadtrip's simple metallic armor painted red and white.
O-O-O-O-O
Congratulations, you have earned 3 power points (used for improving your powers and skills and such) for your adventures thus far and two hero points (which you can spend while playing to do better) one for compelling you into battle with Mary (my bad that you didn't receive it sooner) and the other for the exhaustion you're currently dealing with.
[ ] Write in a Battle Plan:
Would you like a complication in this fight in exchange for another hero point?
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
