My walks home really needed to be less interesting. First it was a kidnapping and a rift, and today it was some sort of Mote geyser.

I wasn't sure what else to call it, as I was standing in front of a machine on the top of a flat-sided boxy building and it had motes just spewing out of it. Well, less the machine itself and more the exhaust to it. The building itself was also kind of suspicious but that's not what got me here in the first place.

I'd been walking home when I heard shouting and then saw a group of people in some kind of altercation. Over what, I hadn't a clue. These sorts of things weren't common, but weren't exactly uncommon, either. They were definitely more likely to happen the farther into the city center you went. Unlike the sort pseudo-shanty town we lived in, they couldn't get away with just building a lean-to out of random materials here so they made these kind of communal encampments.

Our house wasn't built that way, but a lot were. There was this kind of skeleton of older homes that had some viscera of smaller, more DIY shelters around them, like a blanket for warmth. Most of our neighbors were decent people, but it definitely wasn't the kind of place you wanted to leave unattended anyone or anything - if you didn't want it getting tactically acquired by someone else.

Where was I? Oh right, finding the Mote fountain.

After I saw them, I took a detour around the street fighters, and then noticed that one of the buildings I passed on my new route showed up in my new magic vision. I mean, it showed up in my regular vision too, it wasn't a ghost building.

Is it still a haunted house if the whole thing is a ghost?

Anyway, I could see some of the shimmer I'd previously only noticed around artifacts on the top of the structure as well. As I got closer, I realized it had a lot of what I was still thinking of as "deep vibes" around it. Only these felt very wrong somehow. Like the soul equivalent of scraping a plate with a fork.

I walked around the back of it, where the aura squiggly-whatevers were the strongest. All these pipes popped out near the ground and then snaked up the side of the building. They were applied to the wall in such a fashion that there was no way they were originally intended there. It was as though someone with the plumbing knowledge of a pit of snakes just started gluing them to the walls haphazardly, adding one on top of the existing set whenever they needed another pipe.

This did have the side effect of making them really easy to climb, since there were footholds everywhere. I may have taken advantage of this.

So once on the roof I could see all these Motes just flying out of the tops of the pipes. They weren't what I'd call "healthy" though. The colors were extremely muted, almost a grey, a 'left out in the sun too long' fade of the original vividness I knew them to have. They'd drift around in the atmosphere for a bit, mostly rising up into the air like a spray of water, hence the Mote geyser.

Did I mention the smell? Because it reeked of burnt something up here. I got the feeling that whatever that slow-roasted garbage scent I associated with the city at large was, it probably related to either this whoseyamawhatsit I'd found or something similar to it.

I could get nasty smells, but the bit with the Motes was what had me really confused. How did they get in there? Why did they come out of the top looking a beige-obsessed vampire had sucked the color out of them? Who was doing something that seemed pretty obviously sketchy to them? If I kicked the thick tangle of pipes, would it stop? Probably not, and it'd be a little silly to try.

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Normally, I wouldn't be one to snoop (this far, anyway), but I kind of felt offended on behalf of the Motes, like what was being done with them harmed me intrinsically somehow.

So I started looking around for a way to get inside the building, being somehow both gratified and disappointed that it wound up being a very cliché roof vent cover, conveniently not bolted down by a builder that valued the price of fasteners more than passing an inspection that probably wouldn't even happen.

I probably wouldn't even have noticed, except that it had rattled when I kicked the pipes.

Lifting the cover off was easy, and I fit down it pretty well. I honestly shouldn't have been surprised when the ducting was not up to the task of supporting a sixty-plus kilogram idiot, and it promptly broke away from the ceiling of the floor below.

But I wasn't nearly as surprised as the guy I landed on, who was not expecting the critter making a racket in the ventilation to be human-sized. And after I landed on him, he wasn't expecting much at all, as he was quite unconscious. Turns out the old canard about an idiot bringing you down to their level and beating you with experience was referring to me going around and inflicting brain damage. Fitting, since labeling people as bad guys via them failing a roll for 'vibe check' didn't seem like a big-brain move.

That said, this whole affair was like petting the cat backwards, if my instincts were the cat. Something was very off here and whatever it was, it was off on a wavelength that gave me the intuition that in a fair world the venue for sentencing their crimes would be more 'war crimes tribunal' than 'local courthouse'.

I left the oblivious goon in his crumpled state and moved out along the floor. For all their playacting the generic villain with the way they dressed - all black, with shiny boots - they were making my life difficult by being properly shady and not labeling their dozens of suspicious crates with manifests of what was in them. It'd be so much easier if they'd just written "nefarious doohickey #3219" or something on them.

I went over to one of them that was already cracked open. As cool as it would have been to rip the top of a nailed box off with my bare hands, that required you to be one of those dudes who was so big they could be legally classified as construction equipment. And I wasn't Viktor.

Looking in the box that was open, I was startled to find it full of artifact cases, the same kind we used at work. These were labeled, or rather, had been at one point. Someone had come along and done some CYA work by taking off all of them. I did, however find an intact corner of a label, and immediately recognized the handwriting as István's. Oof.

Opening it, I saw an artifact that'd been through my own hands not that long ago. I guess that's not too surprising considering the proximity of this building to where I work. I started opening other cases and found more artifacts I recognized. Which was depressing. I recalled István saying that we were selling these to people, but I had hoped it wasn't this kind of person.

Digging down a layer, I the first artifact I grabbed was that I didn't recognize. It also had some of the label on it, and I didn't even recognize the label this time, much less the remaining writing, which made me feel better, as that meant that this place was likely aggregating artifacts from many rift collection companies.

Hearing the guy behind me stir a bit, I swiped two of the artifacts out of their cases, one of ours and one of this other companies, leaving the cases behind, but swapping them for the ones deepest in the container I could easily reach. Hopefully it'd buy me some time and the henchmen who ran this place wouldn't look too close at everything they were using. Judging by the amount of crates in the room they went through a fair bit, so it should hold for a while.

I scampered off deeper into the building like a squirrel, channeling my inner annoying rodent and hoping the guy I fell on would assume they now had a minor inconvenience loose inside their facility, instead of a major dumbass ransacking the place for clues.

Seriously, what was I thinking doing all this? Why was I here? The whole idea was nuts!

Which at least made it suitable for me. Guess I've gone from being a bird to a playacting a squirrel, I thought, slipping through another door.

Squeak squeak.

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