Found Arcana – chapter 3 IC
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Found Arcana – chapter 3 IC
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“Bobby, what floor was Caesar’s room on? If you get back in, can you just drop things out the window? Or maybe AM can levitate them down. If it’s only the second floor, you can open the window and I could probably jump inside. Not sure I could do the third floor, even with hydraulic jacks. Maybe AM can levitate you down while you’re holding things. I can cover the street.”
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“I can levitate a person, usually even two.”
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“Windows are bared for the most part. I had to go in as a large roach through the ventilation.
But being levitated invisible up, I could just cut the window latch with the mircro welder, search the place and get out again the same way”
Bobby replied with a shrug. -
“Sadly, I do not know the invisibility spell, so we’ll need to defeat the window in some other way. If it is online, or can be turned online I can defeat it. If Ceaser’s link has marks then it should be easy to open without hacking.
Another idea, Bobby enters the usual way, finds the items and places them by the window. Mato jumps and brute forces the window, I’ll help with levitation if he is short. Then Bobby fly home, I drive home and Mato runs home. We’ll only get ‘home’ once we are sure that nobody follows.
“With that in mind, she scans the matrix to look for icons of interest in Ceaser’s suite, then she scans the link to see if it has marks on these icons.
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“Barred?” Mato asks. “I didn’t see any bars.
“It might not be standard glass, but it probably isn’t armored glass. Maybe ballistic glass, just enough to keep someone from crashing through it and suing the building owners if they survived the fall to the street. We can get through ballistic glass; it just depends on how visible and noisy we’re going to be.”
Mato puzzles it out, privately wishing that Jawsey was there with his spirits and astral recon.
“From the outside, I can throw something through the window, or pop my spur and open it like a can. AM can levitate me up there or I can climb up with gecko tape gloves. But this isn’t the most subtle approach, and I’m likely to be seen and/or heard. I can jump out the window and land, no problem, and I’m fast as a car on two feet, but I don’t fancy trying to run while carrying an oil painting under my arm. I could put it in the car, but if someone saw me then they’d see the car, and we’d be made.”
Mato considers the roof.
“Bobby, did you see roof access? Could you do your thing, get in, carry things to the roof, and then get levitated down from there? If we think time is of the essence, I could meet you up there, take the goods and step off the edge while you fly away. That’s a bit faster than levitating down. Then I’m in the car and we’re off. Bobby can trail the car to see if we have a tail. AM’s watcher can communicate with Bobby so that he can give the ‘all clear’.”
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Note to self “Invisibility”, she has not studied illusion magic so far, but how hard can it be. “We may be able to cut the painting lose from the frame. We’ll need to assense it carefully to see if it would damage the artifact. I think Bobby should be proficient enough to decide. There is a faster and more autonomous alternative to levitation. I can make Mato about 50% larger with my magic – which would mean that he’ll be harder to recognize, and I think he’ll jump higher, so less dependency me levitating, and the entire thing becomes much faster. Any eye witness would say definitely troll as orcs don’t normally get to be so tall.”
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Mato humms, and puzzles through the implications.
“Would it apply to my clothes?” he asks. “Or would I be bursting out of my pants all of a sudden?” Bobby does this all the time but Mato is less of an exhibitionist.
“And what about my cyber?” he asks. “Would it grow too? Or would I have the cyber of an ork while being the size of a troll?” He sucks air in through his teeth, thinking that would be bad.
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AM says “Cyber yes, clothes I don’t think so. We might want to buy these high-tech clothes for the future. How big are the ventilation shafts…. if Bobby turns me into a cockroach – can I levitate at least the knife through the shaft? reduce the chance to get caught? I should be able to do magic even in animal form. “
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Bobby shrugged: “Sure, but it can be a bit desorienting to do so. Why do you all want to avoid the backdoor so much? It’s just a little fire alert. If necessary I can disable it myself. We go up and search the room and leave again.
But yeah, we can also go in through the roof – but that will have the same result with extra steps: An alert at the door to the stairs.” -
AM says “Lowest risk is king. If we could get the things out without anyone noticing anything out of the ordinary it would have been best. Opening the fire alarm on our way out is not such a bad idea. It is just a fire alarm after all. Let’s use the backdoor then. “
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“Yeah, but what if a fire alert triggers everyone to leave the building? Right out onto the street where we are, which is going to be suspicious to those we were interacting with inside.
“If AM can stomp on the fire alert, null persp. But I agree that the lowest visibility option is probably the lowest risk option.
“Bobby, why don’t you go inside and see what you can see. We’ll set up with a view of Caesar’s room. You can open the window blinds and use sign language to tell us what you’ve found and what your next steps are. Maybe you find nothing and go out the way you came in. Maybe you find a giant oil painting that’s going to be awkward to handle. We can update our plan from there and go.”
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Bobby nodded: “Alright. Although I really wouldn’t mind having that watcher to communicate with you. We should keep that for the future.”
With that, Bobby turned back into a pidgeon, and followed his previously found way back into the building as a roach until he reached Cesar’s room again. There he turned back, and secured another pair of trousers. Only then did he start to search the place in earnest.Spoiler: -
I will send my watcher to talk to you. It would tell me what you tell it. Easier than sign language.”
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While Mato and AM sat in the parking lot behind the Building, Bobby started looking through Ceasar’s accumulation of stuff. For someone who hadn’t been here long, they’d accumulated rather a lot of boxes, bags, and the like …
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Spoiler:
Bobby went about the search quite methodically, starting at the top and working his way down to the floor.
Once he found something interesting, he opened his astral eyes to take a closer look at the object and to comment on it to the watcher hovering nearby. -
While Bobby was searching, the watcher kept watching so he is not disturbed. AM scanned the matrix looking for a way to temporarily disable, the fire alarm.
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Mato sits in the car. Unusually, AM let him have the driver’s seat so that she could go VR if necessary. He keeps his glasses (and their vision enhancement) on Caesar’s bedroom. The driver’s side window is rolled down so that he can keep his earbuds (and their audio enhancement) tied into what’s going on in the street. He’s good at watching. He’s patient. A long youth of being feeble to the point of incapacity have trained him to be an excellent observer, a sharp eye on the sidelines. He observes, ready to drive, shoot, or jump out of the car as fast as his reaction enhancers will let him.
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The bayonet wasn’t too hard to find. It — or at least something that looked like a sword with a couple bolts on the handle, that was presumably a bayonet — was in a sheath in a wooden box on the table in the lodge room. AM’s Watcher confirmed that it was magical.
The other was a little more frustrating. Bobby eventually found an oil painting of a woman holding a baby under Ceasar’s socks. However the Watcher didn’t seem to think it was anything of note, and when Bobby checked the astral himself it seemed mundane to him as well. But this was just a canvas, without a frame. Bobby might not have been an expert on art but that seemed odd, so he kept looking.
He eventually found a poorly disguised compartment in the table, containing the frame and some hand-written notes that looked like they’d been cut out of a notebook (in what he thought was Spanish). The frame didn’t seem magical to him or the Watcher, however there was something to how it was constructed of of three layers of wood that made him think of ritual more than artistry.
Neither he nor the Watcher could find anything else magical in the room.
The half dozen sheets of paper, if he wanted to take them, were easy enough to shove into a pocket. However the bayonet was about half a meter long in total. The oil painting was a little smaller than the sheets of paper and he wasn’t sure if rolling it up would damage it, and the frame looked like it had indeed originaly fit around the outside of the painting, being a bit larger than the sheets of paper and about 3cm thick.
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She speaks through the watcher to Bobby
“Not like Ceaser to ruin what she knew was a valuable artifact. More so, she said in her notes that the card was the only magical artifact whose function was unclear – so she knew what the painting was good for. Let’s take the canvas and frame if you can carry them.I’ll send the watcher to watch before you exit, so you’ll have the right time. “
AM orders the watcher to find the proper time to open the back door. That is, with nobody directly watching it or in the hall.
Spoiler: -
Bobby shrugged and put the picture back in its frame. Then he liberated the matress cover to stow both it and the bayonette.
With an ill fitting bathrobe and his improvised loot sack he left the apartment when the watcher gave its ok, moving towards the fire escape, pausing to learn if it was already disabled.
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