Your sleep Sunday night was busy. While you wake up feeling rested you simultaneously feel like you've spent ten years studying for your medi-wizard boards and doing rounds. You find yourself flicking your wand and doing a self-diagnostic almost without thinking and rolling your eyes when everything comes back clean. Well, mostly clean, you're mildly dehydrated, which looking back on how much you do versus your occasional breaks for food and drink really isn't that surprising.
One of the first things that occurs to you when considering all the medical information that just got dumped into your head is that you could fix Soon-Yi up, no sweat. A bit of thought while you shower and you figure that while you could certainly heal Soon-Yi's gunshot now it'd be super, super suspicious on a number of levels. You'll just have to be content with her getting it patched up and making sure it doesn't scar afterwards. You could come up with some 'magic hands' massaging it with vitamin-E lotion bullshit that could disguise it.
Anyway, you throw Soon a text offering to escort her to her meetup and head out to grab breakfast (and lots of water) before your math class. The rest of the morning is pretty chill, and you find yourself flicking through the news on your phone in programming when Crystal sits down next to you. You offer her a smile and she leans over. "So, did you get to see any of the Merchant raid on Friday?"
"I was at the party across the street from where they crashed, actually," you comment mildly.
That gets her attention and her long blonde hair swishes behind her as she swings around and leans forward. "What? After we found out them coming on to campus we—I mean New Wave—helped round up a some of the guys that got away. I didn't see you in the crowd when we dropped them off." Her eyes flick over you like she expects you to still be bleeding or something.
"A girl from my history class was there and introduced me to all of her hall mates. One of them got winged by a bullet and me and another guy I met there got them out and back here." You make a dismissive little wave, "I read the postings about it, we were gone long before the time the grenades started getting tossed."
"Is she okay?"
You nod, "Yeah, the bullet was removed and she got patched up. She's supposed to be going to see another doctor or nurse or whatever to have it checked today or tomorrow."
Crystal picks up her phone and bobbles it before firmly placing it back on the desk. "I'm glad. You know you could have texted or called when the fight happened, right?"
[X][Crystal] "I'm pretty sure that you, not Laserdream, gave me your phone number.
You scrunch your face up. "Why would I do that? I'm pretty sure that you and not Laserdream gave me your phone number."
"Ah, well…" Crystal seems pleased but flicks her eyes away from you for a moment. "I appreciate it, and yeah, but seriously I am a cape too, so a heads up is fine."
You cross your arms and tilt your nose up at her. "I see how it is, you think I'm a trouble magnet. You're just using me to find new people to play laser tag with."
This time Crystal can't contain her snort and goes a brilliant scarlet, putting her head down on the desk and covering it with her arms. After a moment you hear a soft, "You're a jerk, James."
"I am a total jerk. But seriously, you'd only given me your number earlier in the day and I have no experiences with firefights." You lean on the desk and prop your chin in your palm. "So I was as cool and collected as you'd expect. Got the girls out and Thor helped me get them back to campus."
Embarrassment forgotten, Crystal sits up and cocks her head. "Thor?"
Until class starts you explain your run-in with Thor, god of archeology majors, getting some laughs along the way.
Monday night you start picking through the first compartment of your trunk to try and put together a coherent cape look. The suit's going to be a thing no matter what just for armor purposes, but you're kind of torn on what to wear over it if you wear anything at all. Honestly, it makes your ass look good, and everyone should get a chance to ogle you. Still, the last thing you want is to cause accidents because you're too sexy not to be a distraction, so you try on a couple of styles of capes, coats, and robes before narrowing it down to mostly duster-style longcoats. While you dismiss the tan colored ones out of hand, a plethora of other, darker colors are available. You also decide to skip leather for now, the look of leather against the scaled pattern of your suit just doesn't work. For the moment you pick a dark mid-calf duster and put the mask on your face.
After looking in a mirror and Jojo posing for a bit you decide a hat would probably look better—the large shoulders trailing up to just a mask makes you look like a silver pinhead. Unfortunately all you seem to find when looking are pointy wizard hats which don't mesh well with the rest of the look, so you pack up what you have so far and instead spend some time looking up spells to enchant low-light vision into the mask instead.
Your Mondays are a bit too busy to run off to stalk highschoolers, and it turned out that Soon's friend found Tuesday to be better for her anyhow, so you meet up with her after lunch and offer your arm as you head towards the bus stop. For some reason she actually stops and stares at you before blushing and slipping her arm through yours. You make it to the bus stop before you decide to ask her what her reaction was.
Soon-Yi colors again and turns away like she's hoping one of her friends would suddenly appear to take the heat off of her by distracting you. Finally she shuffles her feet and plays with the hem of her jacket before muttering, "Even my ex-boyfriend never offered me his arm, it was all arm-around-my-shoulder or grabbing my hand and pulling me somewhere. It's nice, very gentlemanly." She straightens up and looks you in the eye. "We can't do that when we get off the bus, though. There's enough ABB guys around that we'd attract attention." She mutters something in Korean and frowns, then takes your arm again, brightening when she does.
The bus arrives shortly after and Soon spends the ride cuddled into your side. You manage to get a wandless diagnostic going without her notice and realize she's still low on blood—and the medical knowledge that's knocking around your brain now tells you that it can take like six weeks to completely replenish a missing pint of blood. Soon hadn't lost quite that much but it'll still be a couple of weeks until she's completely recovered unless you find a way to slip her a blood replenishment potion. It's something to think on, at least. Once you arrive and get off the bus she maintains a bit of distance between you as you walk her to an apartment building that's maybe a mile from Winslow. She assures you that she'll get a ride from her friend back to campus, so you continue on to find the birthplace of the Queen of Escalation.
Winslow's just as ugly a shithole as you would expect. There's graffiti—both gang-related and not—all the way up to the roof, any plants that may have there for looks are dead, and some of the windows are broken and patched with plywood. Rotted plywood. There are kids just hanging around when you're sure classes are in session so you don't stay close by, and instead commandeer a bench near a bus stop and hit it with a light notice-me-not and yourself with a minor glamour to change your facial shape and hair and eye colors. The high schools seem to let out around 3, so you don't have too long to wait until you hear a bell ring and kids stream out as quickly as they can.
Normally it would be impossible to find a single dark-haired girl in the middle of a pack of highschoolers, but in the middle of the mass of the kids there's a gaggle lead by a redhead and a black girl who are giggling and pointing at Taylor as she tries to slip through the crowd. You get a fair bit captured on your phone, you'll have to try and get more film at a later time.
Ensconced in your hiding spell, you could probably hit Emma and Sophia with a low-powered jinx or two so long as they weren't super obvious—no belching slugs or dancing, but perhaps a gradual hair loss jinx or a hex that caused a song to get stuck in your head for days would be acceptable?
[X][Curse] Don't cast anything on the girls
Despite how easy it would be to pop the girls with a jinx you hold back; anything that bothers them would likely be treated as more fuel for their treatment of Taylor.
You do manage to get a feel of their minds so you could pick them out of a crowd later. A brief brush of legilimency on Sophia leaves you with a sense of her feelings—you don't know if it's the shard influence or not but she seems thrilled by the feeling of being better than everyone around her. And that's another issue, she's considering people as things, livestock, mewling weak masses that she can lord over. It's disgusting but fascinating, you'd love to do a deep dive into her head to see where her brand of crazy ends and the shard begins.
Dropping the spells you manage to cut line-of-sight between the duo and Taylor by walking in front of them and slowing down while checking your phone. Sophia breaks first, muttering something about 'work' and pulling Emma off in her wake.
You're relieved when Taylor's bus finally arrives and none of the Trio or their hangers-on follow her. Actually the bus is pretty empty, and you find a free seat a bit in front of her and sit with your back propped against the side of the bus so you can keep Skitter-in-waiting in your peripheral vision.
Taylor has sagged in on herself and while she's not crying she doesn't look far from it either. Her hair is lank along her back and when you catch a look at her face, the bags under her eyes are so large they almost look like black eyes. You take the time to feel her out in your mind sense, she's a blazing beacon in comparison to most people, you can only assume it's something to do with her connection to every bug in sight? After getting a feel for her mind you cast a much more detailed diagnostic spell than you've been using and it comes back with the information that there are lingering infections, lack of sleep, dehydration, high stress, healing wounds probably from the bugs in the locker, and she's a high squib.
A squib?!
Trying again with a slightly different spell you get the same returns, including the squibness. Before you suspect some kind of weird all-capes-are-squibs thing you target an older woman sitting at the front of the bus and get a similar squib return, if barely. Of the ten people on the bus with you, seven end up being some shade of squib. Maybe it's a weird function of this world or perhaps it's just subbing 'squib' for 'has a corona polentia'? You're worried that more invasive scanning spells would end up with visible effects, so this is yet again something you'd need to look in to some other time.
What you can do, however, is hit Taylor with a couple of spells to boost her immune system and speed healing slightly for the next day or so. Once again more powerful help would be really obvious, but basics like that would work fine. You do so and wait until Taylor exits the bus before getting off a couple of blocks farther down and trailing her. You make sure to stay at least a block and a half away and make a note of the house she goes in to. Poking around the block gives a couple of places you could use to apparate to, but you don't know any bug wards, so it's possible that Skitter would be aware of any teleportation. An abandoned building three blocks away is a safer choice.
Wednesday evening you cut a piece of pipe in half lengthwise and enchant it with a medium-powered banisher. Sticking a hopper on top you start lobbing debris at yourself and practicing your blocking. You shield charm seems to hold pretty well against the bricks and rebar that's being shot at you and while your general conjuration isn't great the specific silver shield conjuration like Voldemort used is within your grasp. It doesn't last long, around ten to fifteen seconds, but erecting it and then banishing it like you're discount Captain America is pretty nice. Transfiguration of the floor into head-height walls works too, although it's not nearly as fast as you'd like. You're still a ways away from pulling the street up to block attacks reflexively.
The most interesting defensive charm you practice is actually the good old disarming charm. If you time it right you can hit something coming towards you and bounce it away or possibly reflect it completely. Your hand-eye coordination is good enough to hit things coming at you well enough, but direct reflexion isn't quite in the cards for now. There may be variants on this that work better for parrying things, but your Defense knowledge tells you that you should be able to use this on pretty much anything, energy beams included.
The rest of the week isn't quite as busy, as you use your non-class time to try and track down Shaggy. Unfortunately that like, turns out to be real hard, Scoob. The current divinations you know don't work on people, just objects so that's a bust. You do manage to find apparition spots near the other stash houses that you pulled from Randy's mind, as well as the few meeting spots that are currently being used as hangouts and drug dens. You notice extra cameras being added to some of the buildings and get better at finding good shadows to hide in. Some practice with disillusionment or research into whether notice-me-nots hide you from cameras would probably be a good idea.
You are able to mind read some of the muscle when they step outside to smoke or walk the premises in some cases. Your range seems to have gotten better, and you can guide what the person is thinking about to some extent without being super blatant. You don't find anything that pinpoints where Shaggy is, but some other names start cropping up that might be his lieutenants. One of them, Ricardo or 'Ricky', either heads a grow-op or handles incoming weed shipments. Amongst other appearances, he apparently comes around a warehouse out in the Trainyard to manage the drop-offs once a week or so. You might have actually seen him drive off as you were scoping the place out—if he keeps to a schedule he'll be back next Thursday.
Sia is another name that's come up and as much as the Merchants seem to be primarily drug dealers, it sounds like this Sia person either runs a whorehouse or acts as some kind of facilitator for escorts or something. That sounds like a job that would involve lots of information or little black books, but you have even less to go on, just a name.
One of the other things you have discovered is a lead on what's either Squealer's workshop or a garage where they keep Tinkered up equipment. Oddly, it's down south in the Commercial District, and the best set of directions you were able to pull was 'west of the UPS warehouse, near the old concrete plant', which isn't super helpful since you've never been there.
After scoping out all of the locations that Randy had in his nasty little mind you get a fair amount of practice popping between them. You even manage to apparate while walking, and with a bit more practice figure out a trick to either keep the momentum on the other side or bleed it off to arrive stock still. You'll need to do a bit of research to see if the 'smoke teleport' trick that was in some of the movies is an actual thing here, because that may end up working better in a combat situation.
You finish off Friday by making a quick stop by a hardware store to find a diamond scribe. That helps when making glass lenses for your mask as with an enchant for improved hardness lets you mark the glass like butter. Unbreakable charms as well as low-light vision charms completes things for now. You're not quite able to cast an appropriately-sized bubblehead charm that will last when enchanted.
A second try at finding a hat has you settle on a fairly wide-brimmed stetson-ish one that meshes fairly well. You are a little afraid of looking a bit like a plague doctor, but without a beak it'll probably be okay. A look through that charms book you found last week about household charms for pureboods gives you a charm that keeps cloaks from tangling on legs, so casting it and stalking around the top floor of your warehouse while humming 'I'm too sexy' lets you know that tripping over your own coat won't be an issue. Maybe you're rocking the Harry Dresden look. Maybe you look like an idiot, you're not a fashionista. Honestly you look pretty intimidating, maybe you'll need something a little less dark if you decide to do healing. A light grey cloak, maybe?
It's only seven PM when you get a text from Crystal.
C: Uh, hey. Vicky and her bf are taking Amy on a double date
C: And it turned into a thing, my brother's going
C: with a date
C: and I don't wanna show up without anyone
C: but totally as friends!
C: will you help me out?
[X][Friday night] Go, dressed nicely, be a gentleman
C: will you help me out?
..and here I was hoping to go to another house party/firefight. :J
So, before I say yes :J
Vicky's not gonna try throwing down with me, is she?: J
C: ….
C: Her bf will keep her in line
I ain't sayin I don't believe you, but… :J
In any case, where're we meeting? :J
And what're we doing? :J
So that leaves you with the need to dress nicely. You end up with a pair of gray chinos and a white checkered shirt. With your peacoat on you look like you actually have an idea about fashion which honestly couldn't be farther from the truth. You pull some cash from the Merchant haul and scourgify it before tucking it in your wallet, stash your backup wand and holster on your leg and make sure the holster on your arm is freshly notice-me-notted.
Popping over to campus you walk the short distance to Crystal's dorm and walk in. You're right on time when you rap on her door and she opens it pretty quickly. As soon as the door opens though you get a head-to-toe look over and the door is shut until all you can see is her face. "Not quite ready yet, one second!"
A couple of minutes later when she re-emerges you've been counting the times that people on the hall have 'surreptitiously' looked out to see who's standing outside of Laserdream's door. After meeting the latest person's eyes and sending them skittering back in their room Crystal throws the door open wearing a very nice green patterned tunic dress and leggings that's totally different than the more casual outfit she was wearing when she answered the door. Her hair is missing the red hairband that's her normal signature, instead in a messy bun on the top of her head with a few stray strands framing her face. You give her a smile and wait until she's locked her door before gesturing for her to proceed you towards the elevators.
"Sorry I, uh, lost track of time," she says, offering a weak smile.
"Not a problem, my evening is in your hands. So, I didn't bring my tiara, but am I getting princess carried there, or is there a saddle option?"
Spinning around to look at you she lifts off the floor and floats backwards. "We're taking my car."
"Does it fly?"
"No."
You heave a dramatic sigh and slump against the elevator wall as you drape an arm over your eyes. "This would never have happened if I didn't forget my crown."
One side of Crystal's mouth is turned up at you. "You said it was a tiara, not a crown. For a crown I'd be willing to try the carrying thing."
As you make your way outside you offer her your arm. "You parked in the big lot?"
"Yep."
"Cool. So anyway, the tiara is for me, not you."
"I don't get to say this when Vicky's around, but nah, I'm the princess here," Crystal smiles up at you. She's about to say something else when her phone dings and she releases your arm to dig it out of her purse. She reads the message she got, frowns and reads it again as you move your arm around her waist and keep guiding her. She starts typing back and transitions to floating again between one step and another. "Oh my god, Aunt Carol why are you like this!" She looks up from where you've stopped at the entrance to the parking lot and sets back down to lead you to her car. "So apparently they're already at a movie somewhere with my brother and his friend. We're supposed to meet up and chaperone because knowing Vicky she's going to want to go out and strut on the Boardwalk until after midnight." Digging through her purse she holds out a set of keys. "Can you drive? I need to see if Vicky or Amy can tell me which theater they're at. Hopefully they're paying attention to their phones."
You pluck the keys from her hand and open the passenger side door for her as she shoots you a grateful smile. Hopping in yourself you slide the seat back a bit and attempt to start the car up. It doesn't catch the first time and you turn just enough to catch Crystal out of the corner of your eye. "So, about carrying me…" You crank it a bit longer and it starts up the next time. "When's the last time you changed the battery?"
"Never?"
"Didja get the car when you turned sixteen?" You watch her nod as you shift the rearview mirror and look for the light switch. "And I bet you drive little short hops, no more than twenty minutes or so?"
There's a sigh in her voice. "You're trying to tell me I need a new battery, huh?"
"Probably, unless your powers are electrical and you want to try to recharge it yourself." You pull out your phone and flip to a navigation app, "Do you know where we're going yet?"
"I think it's the Crestmark, just start out towards the art gallery," she says. "And no, my dad though… No, you're never allowed to mention it to him. Can you change batteries?"
Pulling out and down the aisle, the spot's filled before you're out of sight. "Yeah, I know how. My shop rate's pretty cheap, and I'm weak to bribery."
Your small talk continues on the way to the theater and after the ever-irritating search for a parking spot. Crystal's easy to talk to and more than willing to engage you in both banter and trash talk. You end up playing air hockey while waiting the last half-hour for the movie to finish.
"So what do you want to wrangle the kids into doing next? Food?"
Crystal nods and puts a hand over her stomach. "God yes, I'm starving." She throws up a shield over her goal reflexively when you try to sneak a shot in.
You give her a pointed finger and a smirk when she covers her eyes, embarassed. "I'm pretty sure that's illegal. Do you do that when you play beer pong too?"
"I'd have to get invited to parties first," Crystal complains as you wander over to the theater where The Green Hornet is about to finish up. You propose a nearby restaurant and she makes a quick call and casually mentions her name to secure a spot.
Chuckling, you nudge her and then wrap an arm around her when she leans her head on your shoulder. "Are you not invited because people think you're going to start busting them for underage drinking? Are you the cops?"
You're saved from her piercing rejoinder as the movie lets out. It's immediately obvious where the group you're looking for is, as Victoria keeps floating up to look over the crowd and the minor tap of her aura against your senses lets you find them easily. Crystal flies up enough to get their attention and you all crowd in between a couple of planters to plan where to go next.
Dean leads with a handshake and manages to keep a pleasant smile even through Vicky's comment of "Oh, it's you." Dean's own mind presence is muted and seems… slippery perhaps. Nevertheless you can get a general handle on him and he seems calm so your false seeming appears to pass inspection.
Everyone else seems content to give little waves as Eric's 'friend' Alex and Amy's date Lucas are introduced. Alex seems pretty chill, but even without mind reading Amy is a wellspring of negative vibes standing next to the varsity jacket-wearing Lucas who keeps trying to slide arms over her shoulders or around her waist.
"So, Crystal said she's hungry and I am too, we're all doing dinner." Four mouths open, probably to start jockeying for where to go when you continue, "We have reservations at a tapas place about two blocks from here." The crestfallen looks on half of the group warms the cockles of your evil little heart.
You head towards the exit and hold the doors for everyone as Crystal takes over the head of the train. Eric's whining softly about his sister running the show, Vicky is muttering to Dean while floating along, and Amy seems to be both freezing to death in a light sweater thing and trying to edge away from her date. You pull your jacket off and hit yourself with a warming charm before draping the coat over her. You get a look from Lucas, but the temporary disruption of the emotional miasma she was putting out tells you that was the right decision.
You hold Crystal and Amy's seats out at the restaurant and get a brilliant smile from your date for the evening. Dean likewise is a gentleman with Vicky but Lucas is left standing and looking like a moron. If this is the general quality of guys Vicky picks to try and set Amy up with, you feel like Dean should have stepped in long before now and stopped her.
Conversation between the little sub-groups is super stilted at first until Crystal decides to sell you out to her cousin. "So I didn't know that the girl who got shot was in my English class. I got to talking with her and apparently you pulled a bullet out of her arm, which you completely glossed over when you mentioned it on Monday."
That gets a lot of attention and you end up explaining being at the party, the Merchants crashing down the street, Soon-Yi's wound, her reluctance to get it seen to correctly, and finally your impromptu surgery in her dorm. The description of pulling the bullet out with tweezers seems to put Eric and Alex off their patatas bravas, but Amy jumps in and starts giving you the third degree about where the bullet was and how you pulled it out. You're able to moderate your answers so that you don't sound like an actual mediwizard and take the time to push in to the bio-striker's mind a bit to get a sense of her.
It's—it's ugly. Victoria's aura is about as controlled as you've ever seen it thanks to constant pokes from her boyfriend and yet every little fluctuation sparks some feeling or another in Amy's mind. Positive emotions that don't involve her older sister seem muted, the awe and fear that Vicky inflicts are like explosions of fireworks against an otherwise bland tapestry of life. And through it all is a constant line of thought that involves Vicky throbbing in time with Glory Girl's aura. You can only assume Gallant only sees the barest bits of this or he would have either run screaming or done his best to get her help.
Still, you're not sure that you'd be able to help her, to say nothing of people who wouldn't be able to look in to her mind. You'd need to do some serious study to see if you have any books about using mind magics to—reverse indoctrination maybe? Perhaps a way to mute her emotions in memories having to do with Vicky? Also, something enchanted to protect against GG's aura would be required.
"You did okay for someone who had no idea what they were doing, and making sure she saw someone with real training later was the right thing." Amy finally admits grudgingly.
"High praise from someone who wouldn't need to worry about cleanliness, I guess. I'll keep your words of praise in mind the next time I do back alley surgery." You raise your eyebrows at the girl and are rewarded with the faintest glimmer of a smile, probably the biggest positive emotion that she's shown for anything other than the food all evening.
Vicky drags her sister off to the bathrooms shortly after and you take the time to speak with Crystal.
[X][Amy] Mention something about Amy's reaction to Vicky's aura.
After dinner Vicky browbeats Dean into taking her to the Boardwalk. You're supposed to be chaperoning, but Amy looks ready to gnaw off an arm rather than continue the date with Lucas.
[X][Boardwalk] Let Crystal handle it.