Slumrat Rising

Vol. 3 Chap. 22 Better Homes and Gardens

Truth rolled his shoulders. In theory, The Meditations of Valentinian should be keeping his body supple far beyond what mere stretching could do. On the other hand, working hunched over a bench for a whole morning left him with a stiff back and aching shoulders. It was probably all in his head, but it felt real.

Not a wasted morning. He had a nice little selection of tools here, most of it fairly stock stuff from the big box talisman supply store. Just a few little modifications to some pathways, underpowering some arrays, overpowering others. Little tweaks. He packed everything into a soft tool bag and took a last minute to make himself a name tag, just in case.

He looked at the sticker and laughed. His “just in case” had really changed since his visit to the Silent Forest.

Truth caught a carpet back to last night’s diner and walked from there to Gullvar’s apartment building. It was profoundly unlikely that anyone would be checking carpet ride logs, but in Jeon, the carpet drivers did keep logs, and there was absolutely no need to make things easy on some plain clothed prick.

He was down to his last hundred wen. He chuckled grimly as he walked up to the private entrance. No need to fish for scrap these days. His objection to a life of crime was always that it wasn’t much of a life, and it rarely paid. Now, long-term thinking just seemed silly.

The access panel was unchanged from yesterday, and so was the spell needed to bypass it. The lock clicked open without him breaking stride. He almost felt bad for the technicians who made it- all that effort going into making an encrypted authentication system, and it was completely worthless against an attacker who knew what they were doing. You could trip the emergency unlock release without engaging the fire alarm if you just used a firefighter’s entry tool. They sold them in specialty hardware stores. The bypass was a building code requirement. It was faster than using the amulet and code phrase by design.

Truth had never worked firefighting, so he had limited appreciation for the necessities of the job. He just knew it made bodyguarding harder and raiding easier. The elevator access system was a bit trickier to bypass. You could go down without using any particular tools, but going up required either a pass (the use of which was logged by a bound spirit) or the firefighter’s access, which did set off an alarm… and was logged.

Someone had a brain when they designed the elevator security system- every usage was logged. Truth didn’t know how often, if at all, those logs were checked against the door entry system and the mansion wards, and didn’t care to find out. So he did the same thing he did yesterday when he was in a rush. Nothing. And just like yesterday, “nothing” worked perfectly.

Nice smooth ride on this elevator, Truth thought. Sometimes, those lift talismans don’t get properly maintained and the force transfer is rough. This is smooth as ice. The elevator lifted up to the top floor. The doors didn’t open. Truth smiled anyway. He loved “rich logic.”

It made perfect sense from a certain point of view. From a security perspective, you wanted the elevator on the top floor where it would be hard to attack. From a fire safety perspective, you wanted it up top for easy evacuation. It could only ever be at the top or the bottom of the building; there were no other floors to consider. So have it automatically return to the top when it’s idling. After all, anyone in there without a command medallion would be trapped, just waiting for security to collect them.

And if people had to wait a little longer for their elevator at the bottom? Anyone using the elevator was not arriving by air. Therefore, elevator users were poor and weak. Their time and comfort were not worth considering. Truth grinned and stuck in a short pry bar wrapped in a little soft cloth tape between the doors. A quick flex, and he was back on the roof, looking over at the mansion and the ward. He double-checked his “fix” on the ward. It was still good. He walked right in.

Amazing how much of burglary was just knowing how systems work. No sneaky creeping, dodging tripwires or super secret spy tools. Just… “How does this thing work? And how can I abuse it?” Some of the regular security guys did physical penetration testing work. All jokes aside, I should get into that. Got to be better money than general talisman maintenance.

The mansion remained its profoundly boring self. Truth wondered if he had become jaded after seeing Siphios and growing up in the architectural madness of Harban. A mansion on top of an apartment tower should be really impressive. This felt… pathetic. A series of glass boxes stacked on top of an apartment building, which was a series of concrete boxes. There was a yard, a few dwarf trees, some bushes trimmed into odd shapes, and the landing pad. Two tonnes of cast bronze blobs on stone slabs, each “art piece” likely costing as much as a nice house.

Not that he knew about art. It just seemed like rich person logic. Expensive plus Incomprehensible plus Bronze/Marble/Other equals Art.

He could see staff walking around, maintaining the grounds. They all had gray jumpsuits with the Three Rivers logo on the back. They didn’t have the face of citizens about to get the System. Figures. A whole damn mansion and she hires denizens to work the grounds. Grounds staff are not allowed in the house proper, he’d bet. And the domestics would enter through the rear.

It took a real effort of will not to walk right up the front steps and kick in the door. He was a long way from the slums, but that Provisional Denizen stain never quite scrubbed off. Firmly reminding himself that he was on the job, he walked around the back and into the staff area. He blended. Everyone was Level One. They didn’t even know he was there.

Truth moved through the rooms steadily. The staff areas were surveilled by recording talismans and bound spirits, the family areas had motion detector spells, sound detection alarms, panic buttons, trap demons, and all the usual paraphernalia of the rich and paranoid. Truth noticed how new some of the physical defenses were- the armored glass, the steel core doors. Can’t rely on magic much longer. He wondered how they were stocked for spears.

The interior of the house curiously matched the exterior. Everything was a sort of beige or gray, though even the gray was softened and muted- the gray of a heavy cloud, not a thunderhead. Rooms decorated with light tan sofas and contrasting throw pillows in washed out green. Every room had a single item that was the designated contrast point- a canary yellow chair sitting across from the cucumber sofa and the slate green rug hemmed in by the Winter Olive painted walls.

Truth didn’t know the word “liminal” which was a pity. It was the right word. He was stuck with “boring, and borderline creepy.” The art on the wall wasn’t any better. Some of them were just blobs of color. Meaningless, sterile, inoffensive. “Vacuous” was another word he didn’t know, but he certainly knew the emotion it inspired.

He explored room after room- sitting rooms, a game room, a small library, guest bedrooms, bathrooms, on and on and on. Every surface polished to a mirror sheen. Not a single fingerprint. No worn down high traffic carpets. No chipped paint on the doors or smudges on the walls. Out of morbid curiosity, Truth ran his finger along the top of a door frame connecting a guest bedroom to the attached bathroom. Not a speck of dust. In Siphios, he would have assumed a busy demon was hard at work. In Jeon? His bet was a golem, or, more likely an obsessive team of maids.

What he didn’t see was a single book that looked like it had actually been read, or a tray with change or charms by the door. No wall of “I’m So Great” pictures, or framed portraits of honored ancestors. The house felt staged. That was the best way he could think of it- like it was set up to be looked at, not actually lived in. Someone had spent an awful lot of money to make something completely devoid of personality.

He came upon a room that was clearly intended to be a sort of family room, set up to watch scry from a sofa. Truth carefully looked it over. No rings on the tables, no evidence of spills, or crumbs in the upholstery. He gently ran his hand over the cushions. Had they ever been sat on? He really couldn’t tell. It didn’t look like it.

Where did Gullvar sleep? She had a family, did any of them live here? This didn’t even feel like a decoy- actual decoys would be made to look real. It wasn’t a glamour or illusion- he was checking for that, and he wasn’t easy to glamour in the first place. He kept working his way up. He found bedrooms, including what was intended to be a master bedroom. The closet had been cleaned out, the drawers emptied, even the soap in the bathroom was replaced with a new, unopened bar. There was a safe built into the back wall of the closet. It was hanging open, empty.

Truth ran his hands over the shelves and along the back wall of the safe. No false bottoms or hidden panels. Or dust.

He had run out of house. He had carefully searched from bottom to top. No hidden anything, except, perhaps, the family that was supposedly living here. But the grounds were exquisitely maintained, the house was kept in impeccable order, and they received a Level Five something-or-other here. Which they absolutely wouldn’t have done if there was the slightest chance that person would be offended by the conditions of the home.

Truth was frankly afraid to collapse on the furniture. He had an irrational fear that if he so much as creased a sheet, horrible monsters would come bursting out of the walls and eat him alive. He sat on the (lid closed, sanitized, water turned bright purple by the cleaning agent) toilet and tried to figure it out.

Could the residence be in an apartment below? It would be a nifty piece of misdirection, but unless there was a very hidden entrance, there would be no way to get from the mansion directly into the true living space. Also, if the mansion was intended to throw people off, it was a complete failure.

Could Gullvar be up on the roof? Somehow? For some damn reason?! That actually tickled a memory. He retraced his steps through the top floor and found a closet with a long string hanging from a hatch He had thought it was to access a crawlspace or something. He gingerly pulled the string. With startlingly little effort, the hatch swung down and a metal staircase unfolded.

Gullvar was on the roof. Fantastic. Whole damn mansion, and she’s up on the roof. Truth hadn’t known he had arsonist tendencies, so he had learned something new about himself today. He couldn’t wait to burn this thing to the ground.

Truth moved up the steps, quietly, carefully. No alarms, no hidden sentries. He pushed open the door at the top of the stairs and stepped out onto the roof. The air felt thick, prickly. It reminded him a little of the execution grounds on top of Nag Hamadi, where arrays were used to overpressure the victim’s apertures and explode their soul. This was weaker of course.

His first thought was a cosmic ray gathering array. His next thought was a demand to know why there was a metal coffin standing in the middle of a ring of iron chests. And on the subject of iron chests, why did they all seem to have blue mist boiling around them? Lastly, just who the hell was Gullvar?