"Now just what the hell has that little shit gone and gotten himself into this time?" Matthew Courser, John's father, said. We'd caught him on the way out the door; he had work, and we knew better than to keep him for long. "No, he's not here- been out all night with his new friends, a buno-good lowlifes if you ask me. That he'd joihieves' Guild, though... When I get my hands on that boy, I'm gonna-"
"Easy, sir," I said. "We'll teach him the error of his ways, I promise. You mind if we go iake a look through his room?"
"Yeah, of course, go ahead," Matthew said, nodding. "Now if you'll excuse me, I've got work to do."
Matthew Courser was a factory worker- a borer who did get paid a det enough wage, but whose skillset retty limited, thanks to being traio perform exactly oask on an assembly line, and having no practical experien doing any other part of the process of building a bicycle. It was a dead-end job, without any real path of adva; if he wanted a better job, he'd have to go to a night school to spend his time after work learning a whole new skillset, and be left with no time to rest, rex, and actually recover from a long shift in the factory.
He was, also, an absolute asshole. Boys tend to grow up like their fathers, and that's fine when their dad is Napoleon Iro, Pilr Of The unity, but when their dad is an impulsive, violent moron like Matthew Courser... well. Maybe it wasn't pletely John's fault he sucked so bad.
I mean, it was still a little bit his fault, he was still a person with agency who was old enough and exposed enough to other people that he should know better by now, but still. I uood why John was an awful person.
"Alright," Faith muttered, othew was gone, and we could walk ialia, you gonna go wolf again?"
"Not unless I o," Talia said, shaking her head. "John's an idiot, so he probably left something incriminating behind."
I opehe door to John's bedroom, to find it looking already-ransacked and quite barren, as though he'd packed all his shit a.
"...I've been wrong before, though," Talia said, as she turned into a wolf.
"Okay, so, whoever came and got John, they had a car," Talia said, turning bato an elf. "Now, I'm not sure if you're aware, but boxes of metal on wheels are not especially fragrant things, and I 't really track those."
"Fuck," Faith said, scowling. "Is that it? Do we have nothing else we do?"
"Of course not," I said. "We've got magic, hon. And we've also got a few of John's belongings he left behind."
Not many of them, admittedly- a few old socks that had bee behind, plus a ic book that'd fallen behind the dresser. It was the first piece of evidence I'd ever withat suggested John could read, but it was hardly clusive- ic books did have a lot of pictures in them, after all.
"And as it just so happens," I tinued, reag into my pocket, "I came prepared."
I pulled out a pass- the north-finding sort, not the circle-drawing sort- and the ic book I'd taken. Some Boy's Adventure drivel, starring a plucky thief who went against the w and the Thieves' Guild te his own path of nobly taking whatever he wants from whoever isn't strong and attentive enough to effectively resist him. That robably how John saw himself, all things being equal, but holy, I didn't really care. My sympathy for this asshole retty strictly limited.
"...Is that pass magical or something?" Faith asked.
"It is, yeah," I said, nodding. Admittedly, it looked pretty magical- it was a ft pointer sitting on a pivot in the ter of a three-ring gimbal, whose outer ring was suspended from two points by a fine copper . It was very muot a typical pass, and had clearly been made by a maist with time to kill. So, y'know. Me. "I've had this thing ready and charged for a while, so all I gotta do is key it to the book."
"What did you make a half-ented pass for, inally?" Faith asked.
"Because Mom thought it'd be a good exercise for me," I said, shrugging. "I holy had no idea what I'd end up using this thing for, when I first made it."
"And your mother is a wizard?"
"She's that Ariel Silver."
It was actually a little funny; since Ariel was the archetypally on name for elf women (among elf men, the archetypally on name was Artorias), and Silver was a surhat was taken by anyone who disowheir family for whatever reason, there were a lot of Ariel Silvers running around the former Rosewood Kingdom, some of whom were mad that they kept getting fused for that Ariel Silver, the very-old-even-for-an-elf archmage who the other Ariels Silver were not.
"...Ah," Faith said. "Well. That makes your skill as a wizard a bit less impressive, if you had a woman like that as your mentor."
"Hey now, I would not be this good at wizardry if I didn't have the right personality for it," I protested. "My dad's every bit the archmage that Mom is, except with primal magic rather than are, and I have never once been able to call upon the powers of the Livih."
"I !" Talia said.
"Yes, Talia, I'm aware you're a druid," I said dryly. "You don't have to rub it in. My point is that the student matters just as much, if not more, thaeacher. Both are important, obviously, otherwise education would be pointless, but still. I'm not a talented wizard just because of who my mom is."
"I mean, personalities tend to be kinda hereditary," Faith pointed out. "You are your mother's daughter, after all. I mean, son. Son."
I rolled my eyes, and focused on the pass. It only took a few moments to link its tent charms to the ic book, and soon, the needle started pointing a different dire, hopefully towards one John Courser.
"So," I said, gently swinging the pass from my fist. "Let's see where this leads us, yeah?"
"Hang on, do you still have a real, north-pointing pass in there?" Faith asked. "Oh, and a map of the city?"
"Yeah? Why?"
"I've got an idea."
Faith's idea had provey clever. Despite only knowing which heading John was from us, by taking multiple readings from different parts of the city and plotting some lines on a map, we'd been able to pinpoint his location with surprising accuracy, trag him to a cluster of warehouses in what was, funnily enough, often called the Warehouse District.
Once we had that information to work with, we could make a more detailed pn to catch that rat bastard a what we needed from him. We'd need even more information for a real pn, but, well.
Who'd be suspicious of a crow flying overhead, hm?
Talia flew back to our little er where we waited with my bike, and turned bato an elf, rattling off details about windows, possible lookouts, hoeople she thought were inside, and hoeople there were in nearby warehouses. Most important, though, were the entrances.
"Knoock," I said, after blowing the door off its hinges with a force bolt. Once upon a time, the spell had been called 'magic missile,' for the old version's resembo a thrown javelin, but ever sihe spell had been refined, and new spells that incorporated magical elements beyond mere kiic force emerged, thus ating a renaming of what was, in modern times, a different sort of spell. "John Courser?"
"You son of a bitch!" I heard someone yell from within the warehouse.
"Shut up!" someone else said, trying to be quiet, before thumping John with something hard.
A thief stepped out of the shadows, a knife in her hand as she ed under her fingernails with it.
"We might know a guy who ao that," the thief said calmly. "What's it to you, coppers?"
"John Courser is wanted for questioning regarding the burgry of Magister Brown's office," Faith said firmly. "We don't care about anyone else here, uhey had anything to do with that."
"A pelling offer," the thief said, nodding solemnly. "However... Rock Salt?"
"Orders from the top, sorry," a thief who resumably named Rock Salt said, up iwalks above the warehouse floor. "John's ours, and we 't let him go for questioning."
"Well, you heard the man," the first thief said. "No do, coppers. Unless you think you take all of us?"
"Or if that elf with you happens to be Joseph Iro," Rock Salt added.
"What's that matter?" I asked mildly.
"The boss wants to talk to you, Mr. Iro," Rock Salt said. "Noaper, if you wouldn't mind breaking Mr. Iro's legs so we arrahat chat?"
Before Sandpaper- the thief who'd greeted us at the door- could do anything, I powered my ring back up, and put a force bolt through her kneecaps, sending her crumpling to the floor like wet paper that had been cursed with the ability to scream bloody murder.
"...Nobody told me you were a wizard," Rock Salt said mildly. "Well, shit."