Chapter 4-97: Looting and Scooting (1/2)

Sama tossed the house with a feather touch from upstairs to down, specifically making off with any and all relevant paperwork, cell phones, wallets, and anything worth goldweight... a lot of which was in machinery that wasn’t exactly movable, and sort of specialized for a purpose she wanted nothing to do with.

Minor jewelry, a magic knife designed to be eversharp, and some alchemical supplies. Then it was taking a custom squirt gun filled with alchemical fire out of her backpack, and spraying stuff down.

Some of the chemicals down here were pretty volatile, and when the cinders and ash started to fall on them from a burning ceiling, they’d go off rather excitedly. It would probably look like an accident... until they saw the guy whose head had been sliced cleanly off. She thus vivisized the corpses, letting them burn away tracelessly... they’d find no bodies, which would create some intense interest in where exactly the trio were, along with the tens of thousands of dollars of cash she’d found hidden behind a wall.

There were plenty of ways to wash normal money. Buying stuff for the werewolves, who used small Elementals to dredge up gold and silver to trade for themselves, was an easy way of disposing of it. It was remarkable how many people didn’t mind dealing in cash for certain things...

Sama cut flaming swathes through the bottom floors, discreetly popping holes in multiple windows and the ceilings to help the flames spread faster. The fires still weren’t visible as she exited the back door, although the chimney was pumping out some darker stuff, and this late at night, only nocturnals would be likely to notice anything before the house was basically a total loss.

Said loss should rapidly generate a call to a specific cell phone, which would be confirmed to still exist and be in operation. Klitza was already setting up the tracking program in a drop room to VERY quickly find the location of where the incoming call was from... and then it would be up to Sama to get there as fast as possible, hoping it wasn’t in a moving vehicle, and identify the caller.

Since she had seen the symbol, however, that made the choice of area she needed to be in pretty clear...

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The brown-haired werewolf took the phones from Sama, pulling up in her old van as Sama slid down a telephone pole to drop them off, and was off again, heading to the posh uptown area of St. Paul, where The Shining Throne and its thinly veiled elitism preached to the wealthy and established powers of the city. Their human-centered racism, and outright pandering to the Powered as the only ones who should have influence and power on Earth, totally ignored the fact that a major chunk of the non-humans alive had been humans at some point.

Nope, Imprusar just considered them ‘hidden deceivers’, and, eager for someone to blame their own failings on, the followers of the Church were quick to persecute non-humans, refuse to work with them, and discriminate against them.

They weren’t openly violent about it, but they considered all non-humans basically inferior races, as, after all, hadn’t they been disguised as humans to hide themselves? They particularly hated elves, since elves could get higher Level, were ALL magical, and seemingly didn’t age, inspiring all sorts of jealousy. Half-bloods varied somewhere between abominations for polluting the blood of humans and half-better versions of their non-human parents, depending on the Imprusar doing the preaching, and likely the shifting of the political winds.

A Hagchild? There were more than a few Imprusar who would like to see her shot on general principle, although they’d never dirty their own hands doing such a thing, of course.

But an Imprusar Priest had laid that Geas down... and those alchemical additives were the kind of things designed to get around, say, a dwarf’s resistance to poison, or an urukhar’s general toughness, or explode the senses of an elf.

So, it hadn’t been a hired Imprusar doing this. Either the cook was one of the faithful, which was highly unlikely given his appearance and condition, or he was the minion of someone using a disposable tool to advance his agenda.

Sama was poised on top of the roof of the Shining Throne, ignoring the Wards here as they ignored her. Specifically, she was sitting atop the attached manorial house that housed the serving Priests attached to the structure. She had no idea if any of them were actually involved with this effort, as Powered weren’t required to divulge the source of their power. An Imprusar using his Clerical magic to build a following, a virtual kingdom of his own, was totally in line with the Church’s ideals of everyone being subservient to their theocracy.

That said, it was a thing that when industries and companies were acquired by people with Imprusar beliefs, that knowledge started to get circulated rather quickly, and skilled and unskilled people tended to desert them in droves. The phenomenon was so established that it was called ‘Abandoning the Thrones’, and it really pissed off a lot of Imprusar as they watched the kingdoms they were trying to build evaporate underneath them once their people knew who they served.

The Church of Tiirith, who was a Halvyr god, and the cheerful Chaotic Good Patron of all the half-bloods, particularly despised Imprus, and his followers outed the rich racists snobs whenever they could. It meant that many Imprusar liked to conceal their faith, and even attended services masked... which only made the Tiirithi mock them even more.

These kinds of frustrations from their inferiors might well make an Imprusar angry. If the Cleric who cast the spells was not here, he’d probably be close, as this was the wealthy part of town. Making money while corrupting the weak and poor was an easy thing to do, and Imprus was popular among criminals as well as ‘honest’ wealthy, because kingdoms were kingdoms, and if you put humanity first, a lot was excusable.

If you were in charge, you made the rules, after all.

Klitz let me know when the fire alarm went out. That meant law enforcement would learn about it, and it was in a decent neighborhood. Someone might know about the importance of the location, send up word, and a phone call would be made as the dawn rolled around, the city started to come to life...

“It’s ringing,” Klitz informed me. There was a recorded click, which was not the phone going to an answering machine, but actually being picked up. She’d already broken into the cell to get the recorded message, and was playing it back for whoever was calling to keep them on the phone while she hungrily tracked the signal back.

“Morleft, we’ve heard about the house. The boss wants to know what happened. Call immediately.” There was a click as it hung up, but Klitz laughed in Sama’s ear.

“2143 Compton! And it wasn’t moving!”

Sama had already memorized the map of the city... Compton was about a half-mile west, towards the river, the 2000’s edged down close... might be a riverfront property there. “Got a name?” she asked, as she shot into motion across the rooftops, opting to drink a Potion for a few minutes of blurring camouflage in the increasing sunlight.