It's still pretty Goddamn cold. Maybe not as cold as dragon breath, though.

Also, he is no longer in a position to talk to himself, because there are people here. Five adults - two unusually tall women, two unusually tall men, one stupidly tall man with a sturdy quarterstaff. Five children, most of whom seem very alarmed by the state of his arm. The adults are more alarmed by him abruptly existing. A large stick is leveled in his direction.

"Who in the Hell are you?" asks the stupidly tall man with the stick.

The marginally shorter man, now standing protectively in front of a six-year-old, sighs heavily. "Harry. Language."

"Michael. Timing."

"Ah, He—" he identifies that there are children, and decides to use a different word "—ai. Hi. Veron Chandler, professional lost person. Sorry, there was a. Thing. I apologize for interrupting your thing."

His bloodied arm's a bit gnawed on, and bits of frost still cover his armor, but he looks harmless enough. Except for the weapons. Like the two magic swords on his belt, the throwing knives in various places, and the small bandoleer of potions on his hip. Except for that.

"Swords are a professional tool for lost people, then?"

Michael clears his throat. Harry rolls his eyes. "Alright, yes, that's fair, swords are sometimes needful."

The younger of the two tall women squeaks loudly. Everyone present turns sharply. She points at one of the swords. "I- I do not like that sword. Bad sword. Really bad sword."

Harry turns back to the stranger. "Molly seems to think you have a bad sword. Are bad swords also needful?"

Veron winces. Thanks, Ex-Enserric, you do such wonderful things for him. He politely holds his hands away from the sword.

"When fighting bad people? Yeah, sometimes. Not casually, but sometimes. I can put it away?"

"That'd be appreciated. Molly, can-"

Suddenly, it gets very dark. There's a smell of brimstone, which Veron may find somewhat nostalgic, or possibly not.

"Charity, get the kids inside," Harry growls.

The older woman begins to shepherd her children towards a nearby storm cellar with military efficiency. She doesn't get very far before a trio of goat-men show up. They leap over the fence in an obvious display of superhuman strength. Harry turns to react, drawing another stick from his coat and hurling a lance of flame at the rightmost target.

That one screams in pain. The others charge towards the kids.

This might be a problem.

Or maybe not. Shadowstep. The world fades to grey, and all the world pauses around him.

His first instinct is to get the kids to safety, but considering the number of children, and how their parents are mid-grab to get them out of danger, what's really needed is something to slow the goat-men down. Veron can be that something.

Guy-with-stick seems to be a magic user of some kind, which means that Veron should not get in his way. Veron can do that. To outside viewers, there's a flicker of shadow where Veron used to be, then suddenly two goat-men have new piercings from throwing daggers that come out of apparently thin-air, and a third now has a gaping flesh wound that's half frozen over. Veron himself is nowhere to be seen.

The goat-men stagger. The already crispy goat-man topples into a snowdrift, bleating miserably.

Harry blinks, then blasts the two that have not already been blasted. One, the one with the frozen wound, takes the brunt of the attack; the other dances out of the way of most of it, then continues charging towards Molly, who has one child under each arm.

As the monster approaches, she vanishes and leaps in an unknown direction. The beast's momentum carries it into a snowdrift; it turns and tries to work out where the girl went, but she's significantly too invisible for that. It bleats in frustration.

And then it is stabbed. It is stabbed is what it is. Quickly, neatly, and fatally, by an invisible force. The resulting corpse is half frozen over.

Anything else close enough to menace fleeing civilians? Because Veron can introduce them to what is known as a 'bad time.'

The first appears to be too crispy for that sort of thing. The second is also crispy, but still standing, and still potentially a threat.

Charity, having stowed a child in the toolshed, charges out wielding a large steel hammer. The hammer strikes the second goat-man in the head, eliciting a very unpleasant sound and a burst of green flame.

The second goat-man is no longer standing, nor potentially a threat.

Well, that's that, then.

Veron ends his invisibility and looks judgmentally at the corpses. He has a third sword in his hand, droplets of blood frozen to its surface. He feels moderately like a crazy sword collector, but, well. It felt impolite to use either the soul eating sword or the one that makes acid here, so. Here he is, with Yet Another Sword. ... Damn, now he has to get the blood off of it. That's always a bitch.

"So I'm getting the impression you're as great at making friends as I am."

Harry gives him an appraising look, then puts the fire stick back in his coat. Molly returns to visibility; Michael shepherds children into the house; Charity sticks her warhammer haft-first into the ground, leaving the blood and miscellanea to burn off while she drags the corpses behind a snowdrift to melt into ectoplasm.

"I'm not actually sure why those gentlemen were trying to murder me," Harry says ruefully. "So, yes. Thanks for the assist."

"No problem. In retrospect I maybe should have tried to capture one alive to ask questions of. But they didn't seem... super talkative, and they were threatening kids, so. Seemed pretty obvious which side I was on." He eyes the burning warhammer. "That's not, I dunno, cursed evil fire or anything, right?"

"Nah, the fire just sort of happens. Steel plus faerie blood. It'll burn off."

"And I didn't leave any alive either," Charity notes curtly. "You're in fine company."

"Cool, just checking," says Veron. This is not how faerie blood works where he comes from, but he's not home, so this makes about as much sense as anything else.

Instead of going through the trouble of painstakingly chipping frozen blood off of his sword, he casually holds the blade over the fire. The blood ice will probably melt, and his sword will be so much easier to clean. This would be a terrible idea with an ordinary weapon, but he got this sword in Cania. It would take a lot more than some magic fire to fuck up the metal of this sword. Well. The not-metal of the sword. Whatever.

"Nobody's hurt?" he confirms. He's pretty sure nobody's hurt, but it's always safe to check.

The ice: does not melt. The fire, which should probably be giving off palpable heat from here, instead just makes his hand feel kind of tingly.

Charity raises her eyebrows. "The one time someone actually wants something set on fire. Wizard, your talent for arson is being tragically ignored."

Harry looks up from the dead goatman he had been inspecting. "Oh. Uh, faerie fire doesn't really- it's not hot, it's just fire. I can get that for you. I do fire good."

"Fire that isn't hot. Okay. I've seen weirder things," he snorts. Then obligingly offers the sword to Harry, hilt first. It seems rude to point the sharp end at him. "Thanks, I'd appreciate it. It's a pain to clean."

Harry takes the sword. Holding it away from himself, he mutters "lento fuego" and sends a lazy stream of fire over the blade. Newly liquid blood drips down into the snow; soon enough, the only ice on the blade is, well, the ice that makes up the blade.

"Cool sword," Harry notes, offering it back (also hilt-first). Then he winces. "Pun not intended."

Now that the blade isn't crusted with frozen gore, it's possible to see the lovely ice it's made of. The sword would look ordinary and almost unimpressive, except for that. Pale blue and faintly translucent, it's possible to pick out smaller swirls of twisted light within the blade, like veins on a leaf. Or, more accurately, like ripples in ice.

"Poor thing's already named for a pun, another won't hurt anything," says Veron, smiling back. "Thanks."

"What's the pun?" Harry asks. "I need to know if it's worthy."

"Its name in Infernal is Aceleka, which translates to Frostbite. I don't know what makes a pun worthy. Is it worthy?"

Harry makes a face. "Barely even a pun. I feel cheated."

Charity reclaims her warhammer, now clean of unpleasantness and smelling faintly of ozone. "Not to drag anyone back onto the topic at hand, but do we have any idea why those things were attacking my children?"

"Um." Harry looks deeply uncomfortable. "It might be... related to our actions at Arctis Tor."

Yep, definitely as great at making friends as he is. Is this what his life looks like on the outside? People nodding seriously and bringing up fantastic past events without any kind of context for the casual layman? This might be what his life looks like from the outside.

"Would you like some kind of help?"

Harry is abruptly reminded that there are people who do not know every detail of the violence he is contractually obligated to commit on a daily basis!

"Oh, we - kind of led an assault on the stronghold of the Queen of the Winter Faeries, a few months ago," he explains. "Armed with steel weapons, which is, um, kind of a personal insult to her and every other faerie in the world."

"It was to save my daughter," Charity says gravely. "I would do much, much worse."

"And... I don't really know how you can help, at least not yet, but I'm not turning down somebody that good with a sword. Things in my life need stabbing with distressing regularity."

Veron nods at Charity. Yep. That sounds like a reasonable and proportional response to someone kidnapping and menacing a daughter. It's kind of a pity he wasn't here to help with that, because he would have.

"Then I will be happy to make myself available as a stabbing consultant."

Harry nods decisively. "Then, with no objections, I will be going back to my place to figure out what in the Hell those things were. Charity, Michael should probably carry his sword for the foreseeable future."

"Teach your grandmother to suck eggs," she agrees.

"Probably deserved that. So, uh, Veron, right? Do you want to come with me or stay with the Carpenters?"

He looks between the Carpenters and Harry.

"Which one of you is more likely to get into some kind of trouble?"

Charity's thumb points instantly in Harry's direction. She maintains a flawless deadpan.

"She's not wrong. Also, Michael's a holy warrior, so they've already got a sword guy. When he has his sword, at least."

"Yes, please forgive my husband for not bringing Amoracchius, Third and Final Blade of the Cross, to a family snowball fight."

Harry mutters something unflattering.

Veron has been at this long enough to also maintain a flawless deadpan. Yes. Definitely.

... Okay, fine, his lip twitches. Just a little.

"Sure, we can space out the sword guys present."

"Alright, let's get out of Charity's hair."

Charity frowns. "Aren't you going to take Molly? Don't you have some kind of lesson plan for the rest of the day?"

Harry shakes his head. "She can practice what she already knows. You can continue the snowball fight, if you want. Right now I'd rather make sure you guys have a magic user around."

Charity nods. "Go, then. God be with you, wizard. And- thank you, Veron. God be with you as well."

Which one? he wonders, but doesn't ask. Later he can ask about the local religion, right now:

"You too. Good luck," he says, which feels appropriately polite, while also acknowledging his own goddess of luck. Not blasphemy, probably.

It seems to go over decently with the locals. No word on Tymora.

Harry leads Veron to what is implicitly a vehicle of some sort. It does not look like a good vehicle; it's clearly been patched with parts cannibalized from others of its kind, lending it a somewhat gruesome aspect. Harry seems confident in it, though.

Veron... has no idea what that is.

"What is this?" he wonders, curiously.

"Oh, I... don't know why I assumed you'd know what a car is. You sit in it and it goes fast, basically. Like a very large metal horse. This is a seatbelt, it keeps you safe if the car crashes. Well, safer."

"To keep the passenger from experiencing the wonders of momentum followed by a very sudden stop. Makes sense. How fast does it go?"

"Open road, I can get about sixty miles per hour on a good day. In the city we're not likely to go above twenty."

He has the reflexes of a minor deity, the ability to briefly stop time to his own perception, and the ability to become ethereal. At faster speeds he'd accept the don't-become-paste belt, but here he'd rather not get tied up.

"Then I should probably go without the seatbelt so I'm not pinned down if something happens. This is safe instead of stupid because I can do this." His form fades to transparency and wisps at the edges like smoke. He waves a hand through the car's frame; it passes through like the car isn't even there. This demonstrated, he fades back to corporeality. "Among other things. At slower speeds the belt would just be getting in my way."

"Okay."

Harry still buckles himself in. "If we're stopped by someone official-looking, can you put it on anyway? It's slightly illegal not to."

"Yeah, sure. I don't want to get you in trouble." He can even put it on faster than an ordinary human can blink, because he cheats.

He eyes the amount of space in the car, decides that his swords will just get in his way if clipped to his belt. It might be viable to awkwardly shove them into a place he can easily grab them, but that risks them flying around if something happens. Instead, he casually shoves all three of them into a bag that should really not fit that many swords, Mary Poppins style. This task completed, he slides into the passenger seat.

"How'd you manage that?" Harry asks, gesturing toward the bag. (Harry turns a key repeatedly until the sound of grinding metal changes to a low, mostly constant growl, which may be presumed normal. They begin to move.)

"Bag of Holding! I didn't make it, I just hoard useful magic things like a highly motivated magpie. Including a useful magic item for hoarding useful magic items."

"Hell of a magic thing. Can I take a look at it when we get where we're going? I don't want to open my Sight while I'm driving, but it sounds cool."

"Yeah, sure. I also have a portable hole, it's in the same genre of convenient carry-thing. It, uh, makes a hole in the ground filled with whatever junk people have already put in it. Even when that doesn't make sense; I can use it on the second floor of things without breaking into the first floor."

"This is sounding less and less like magic that can happen in this universe. Where are you from?"

"I'm getting the impression I'm from another plane of existence. The plane I'm from is called Toril, it's a material plane kind of like this one, where things have regularly arranged physical substance. Some of the rules for how things work here and how things work there sound like they're different, though."

Harry keeps his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road as his expression undergoes a series of changes.

"Historically, the consensus of the White Council of Wizards has been that everything that isn't either Earth or the Nevernever is full of horrible sanity-rending monsters," he says eventually. Then he shrugs. "Scratch that one, I guess. Still, I'm gonna advise against telling that to anybody else. Or using your portable hole thing in public."

... Giggle.

"I can pretend to be local. Maybe not very well, but I'll try. No portable hole in public, got it."

"Mostly just around wizards. Most people aren't really going to care, but the sanity-rending monsters are a thing, and most of the Council is of the opinion that you can't be too safe. I'm just, uh, unusually conscious of the fact that the Council can be wrong. Especially on this point."

They pull up at a tall but run-down brownstone apartment building. Harry exits his car, still somewhat pensive.

Veron nods, seriously. He exits the car and looks thoughtfully at the apartment building. Yep, this place sure is weird. But he's been to a lot of weird places, so he doesn't do too much staring.

"I understand their caution, but uh. Yeah I don't think I particularly rend sanity in any way I've noticed. Thanks for not freaking out and, uh. I dunno, attempting to burn me at the stake, or something."

"You are extremely welcome."

Harry's apartment is in the basement. He doesn't verbally invite Veron in, just opens the door and gestures. It's at best a few degrees warmer in there than it is outside; Harry does not take off his long coat. He moves a rug to uncover a trapdoor in the floorboards and starts down the ladder thus revealed.

In goes Veron! He follows Harry down the ladder. He doesn't mind the cold, he's dealt with worse.

They descend into a room of numerous wonders. These wonders include: a plastic tub full of iron filings, a shelf of carefully labeled samples of human hair, a small bag with an uncanny resemblance to the scrotum of a lion, and an intricately carved human skull, the last of which Harry taps ungently with his staff.

The skull's eye sockets flare with orange light. "I'm awake, dickhead! I just didn't want to reveal myself in case today's random weirdo isn't in the know. Speaking of which, hi!"

Veron looks around the room, at all of the wondrous weirdness present in it, then at the talking skull. He wonders how his life got here instead of something more sensible, like, 'Holy Tymora there is a talking skull.' Instead he gives the talking skull a friendly smile and a little incline of his head.

"Hey. Veron Chandler, professional lost person, pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"No freakout? Nice. Classy. I kind of get it, though. Anybody with that many shadows in them has to have seen weirder. Speaking of which, what are you? I don't get stumped a lot."

Harry looks askance at Veron. "Um."

"Um," agrees Veron. He shifts his stance a little, uncomfortable. Yeah, fair enough, they should probably know. "That's honestly kind of a complicated answer. I was human, then I fell into the Plane of Shadow for over a year and it, uh. Made some renovations. And then some weirder stuff happened. I'm still me, though, no jibbering about murder or bloodlust or anything."

"And then you were very, very cold," the skull comments, its eye-flames narrowing. "And... you know something. Something that's making you more than you were." His eyes flicker blue for a second. "Lightbringer," he diagnoses.

The flames go back to normal. "And I'm Bob, nice to meet you."

Were Veron's eyes always that shade of ice blue? They certainly look it now. Glimmering in the low light, almost glowing. He swallows at the phrase lightbringer. He does not deny it.

"... yeah. Nice to meet you too," he says, shifting his weight again. He grasps desperately for a change of subject. "So you're Harry's, uh... roommate?"

"For a given value of 'roommate', yeah," Harry interjects. "Bob, that is at least the third-creepiest I have ever seen you."

"I live for the uncomfortable silences, Boss."

"We're trying to figure out what just tried to murder us. Looked like some kind of... man-goat? Goat-man?"

"Hmmm." Bob ponders for a long second. "Could be satyrs. How big were their dicks?"

"Why. Why is that the first one you go for."

"One, personal taste. Two, because I know you were looking."

Harry pinches the bridge of his nose. "Large, but flaccid; satyrs, as you very well know, are constantly erect."

He pauses. "Also, they didn't have human faces. So. That too."

Veron is not sure why this is a real conversation that is happening! He expresses this emotion to his toes, in the sacred language of emotive eyebrow motions.

Bob snickers. "Anyway. No human face... weregoats?"

"I don't even want to acknowledge that you said that. But no, they were fae of some kind."

The flames flicker with surprise. "Fae?"

"Yeah. Burned by iron, all that."

 "...could be gruffs."

"Gruffs," Harry says blankly. "Like-"

"Like the three billy goats ditto, yes," Bob says impatiently. "They're high-powered fae mercenaries. This isn't out-of-character for them. Except... they're Summer. Not Winter."

"I'm still a little stuck on the fact that a nursery rhyme just tried to murder my best friend's kids," Harry admits.

"Can we please, for one second, focus."

"Yes, sorry. So, they're Summer? Why would the Summer Court be after me? I just screwed with Winter, they should be baking me a cake!"

"You did brutally murder Titania's daughter, you know."

"By proxy. And she was trying to end the world," Harry attempts. "It was only reasonable."

"Somehow I doubt she sees it that way."

... Yep. Definitely as good at making friends as he is.

"So you're likely to have both sides after your head," clarifies Veron. "When before they were fighting each other?"

"Oh, they're still fighting each other," Bob snorts. "They'll always be fighting each other. But yeah, I'd say Titania and Mab would both like Harry's head on a silver platter. Either head, really."

Harry winces. "I just don't get why Titania would go after me now. It's been years."

"That's faeries for you," Bob opines. "Logic isn't really their game."

"This has to have something to do with Arctis Tor," Harry says thoughtfully. "I must have done something that hurt Summer, somehow. Or helped Winter... Bob-"

There is an abrupt ringing sound.

"Hold that thought."

He picks up a device and holds it to the side of his face. It makes faint, crackling sounds like speech. "Sergeant? - Thank you, but I don't think. - Oh. Okay. Where?" He jots down a note, then clicks the device back down onto its pedestal.

He turns to Veron. "Um. Local constabulary. It sounds like they found a body. They want me to help investigate in my capacity as a wizard. Do you want to come?"

"Sure, seems smart to stick together in case of weirdness. But I might stick out a bit as 'not from around here.' Do we want people to know I'm there?"

"Um. Good point. Are you able to not let people know you're there? Because if so, there's only one person who I really need to know you're there, and I can just, you know, tell her."

"Yeah. As long as no one's got any magic true sight or something it won't even be hard. I kind of specialize in this sort of thing."

"None of the cops are going to have the Sight, no. - Uh, by the way, most people don't... know that magic exists? Kind of just realized nobody actually told you that. It's not a huge secret, but."

"Oh. All right. I will not do anything magic related in front of people, then. Thanks for the heads up, that might have been awkward."

"Might have."

Harry starts toward the ladder. Bob clears a nonexistent throat.

"Oh, yeah." Harry pulls a trade paperback from the interior of his coat. On the cover, a bedraggled-looking woman in an unreasonably tight bodice clings to the muscular torso of a larger woman with a sword and a breastplate uncomfortably reminiscent of the Valsharess'. He tosses the book toward Bob, who telekinetically seizes it and begins to read intensely.

"We should probably get going," Harry says. "He's gonna start heckling the fictional lesbians in a minute."

"Yep, let's go," he agrees, and then there is a flicker of shadow and he is up the ladder and waiting on the floor above, because nope.

Harry's not far behind him.

"The crime scene's not far from here, we can walk," he says. "Or you can, uh, shadowport, probably, but then you'd get there before me."

Snort. "Shadowstepping actually still involves walking, from my perspective. Or running. It's like a faster way to walk to where I'm going instead of actual proper teleportation."

"Ah. Fair enough, then."

They start out the door. True to Harry's word, it's only a few minutes before they come to the crime scene.

Harry assumed wrong. There's no corpse, unless you count the slag heap in front of them. It's surrounded by pristine office buildings, none the worse for wear apart from a couple of broken windows from flying bricks. It looks like a giant came out of nowhere and stepped on it, then flew away.

"Hell's bells," Harry whispers.

"Huh. Weird," says Veron, eyeing this. "Well, I'd better go be sneaky before we get any closer. I'll keep an eye out for weirdness and let you know if I find anything."

And then he casually turns and disappears down a nearby street.

"...Okay!"

Harry meets up with an exceptionally tiny woman (though possibly not up to Veron's standards for "exceptionally tiny", given that she is neither a halfling nor a dwarf) in a dark blue uniform. "Sergeant Murphy!" he says brightly.

"Dresden," she replies tiredly. "You wouldn't happen to know of any supernatural nasties with a particular grudge against overpriced office buildings, would you? Because 'gas explosion' is a classic but it's not actually true, and 'very weird terrorists' is possible but worrying."

"The Overpriced Office Building Dragon wouldn't be worrying?"

"It would," Murphy explains. "It also wouldn't be my problem."

"Well, I don't have an immediate diagnosis," Harry says. "But if you've got any clues, I'd be happy to take a look at them. And, uh, we have a visitor. He's possibly invisible, but friendly and very good with a sword."

"I like one of those three adjectives. But I'll try to trust your judgment. Come on. Both of you, I guess."

Veron would say something polite to Sergeant Murphy, but he's being all stealthy. It would be unprofessional to say something while he's being stealthy. Also people tend to freak out when strange invisible shadow men say hi from out of nowhere.

He ghosts around the crime scene to where no one's looking. He keeps half an eye on Harry in case he needs something, but otherwise he can investigate the place. Who knows, maybe his life experience will help him figure out what happened here. No reason not to look.

There's a strong smell of brimstone as they pick their way into a rubble-strewn alley. "That's not a great sign," Harry notes.

Murphy nods grimly. "Wait 'til you see the bad news."

They come to it soon enough: a five-pointed star, its points resting over the rim of a circle, all drawn in not-quite-fresh blood. Harry sucks in a breath, then coughs at the sulfur.

Murphy snickers despite herself.

(To Veron's trained eye, the alley mostly looks like... well, a wreck. Maybe there's something mystically significant in the patterns of the rubble, but it's not a spike trap, so his life experience is probably going to be of limited use.)

Yep. This sure is not a spike trap, all right.

Hmm. He retrieves his gem of True Seeing and peers through it. Any illusions or whatnot floating around?

Nope!

Meanwhile, Harry is peering at a specific section of the general destruction. "Murph, look at this concrete. Does this look normal?"

"Nothing looks normal here, Harry," Murphy says. She peers at it regardless. "But no. It's... melted?"

"In a semicircle," Harry confirms. "Which was probably a full circle, when this was a full wall. And judging by the angle, I think it lines up..." He traces an invisible line back to the pentagram's circle. "Like so. And there's a second hole in the back wall, there. Judging by the angle, there's going to be four more points like this, a pentagram of pentacles. This wasn't a weapon. This was a... a sorcerous tech demo."

Murphy swears under her breath. "What kind of demo does that?"

"...can't be sure," Harry admits. "A pentagram is a very versatile symbol. But... mostly passive, weirdly enough. You use a pentagram for wards, like the kind when you're summoning something." He shivers, probably not from the cold. "I don't want to see anything that needs some kind of building-demolishing death laser pentagram to summon it."

"How do you know that they didn't already summon it?" Murphy asks.

"Only one building exploded," he says flatly.

Well that's charming. He's charmed. He's also hardly an expert on summoning, so uh. Good job, Harry. He puts away his gem.

Is it obvious what kind of destructive force is at work, here?

From the spot Harry was pointing at, heat. Completely self-contained, capable of melting through metal and stone without even warming its surroundings enough to melt the still-falling snow a foot away. Clearly magical in nature.

"So how's a magic drill bit take down an office building?"

"There was still an actual explosion," Harry clarifies absently. "Probably just TNT. But this thing is why the rest of the street is untouched. I think... I'm just spitballing here, but I think the explosion itself might have been a test of this thing's containment power. Why this building, that's a question."

Murphy snorts. "Guess who owns it. His name starts with a 'criminal scum' and rhymes with 'repeatedly pissed off the Knights of the Blackened Denarius.'"

"Fucking Marcone," Harry groans.

"Bingo."

"I hate that guy."

"I'm aware."

So, he'll need fire resistance. ... A lot of it. Yeah, okay genius, good conclusion. Very useful.

He drifts around the crime scene, then decides he's too unfamiliar with the world to be much use here. Besides, Harry's doing great. Veron finds a comfortable place to perch and listen to the professionals.

"So. Facts of the case," Murphy prompts.

"Probable demo of some kind of containment system, seeing how much power it can hold back," Harry starts.

"Answer: a lot."

"Building ownership and smell of Hellfire implies perpetrators are the Denarians, AKA Nickelheads."

"AKA by you, yes."

"Unknowns include: why now? Why here, in the one city with a full-time wizard detective who can figure out what they're doing?"

"Most importantly," Murphy concludes, "what's coming?"

There's a pause.

"I love doing the CSI back-and-forth thing," Harry says with some glee.

"It is very fun," Murphy agrees. "But I need to get going. Are you and your imaginary friend going to be okay without police backup?"

Harry waves her on. "Before you go, I need a donut."

Murphy's eyes narrow. "That's a stereotype."

"But you have a box in the car."

"But I have a box in the car," Murphy admits. "You get jelly for stereotyping, regardless." She walks over to her vehicle and hands Harry a hand-sized pastry of some kind, then hugs him and drives away.

Harry exits the crime scene at a stroll, waving to various other law enforcement officers on his way out, then walking to a nearby secluded alleyway. "You can come out now," he says.

He comes out now. He doesn't even slowly fade into view, he just... Leans off of a wall, straightens up, and relaxes, and then he is visible. Like he'd found the perfect wall leaning spot that hid him.

"You're pretty good at that," he says. "I couldn't make heads or tails of any of it. My only conclusion was that I should invest in fire resistance potions."

Harry starts a bit when Veron comes into perspective.

"You're not wrong," he says once he unruffles himself. "I'm going to be summoning an associate of mine to tell me if the minor spirits of the area noticed anything odd. Beyond, you know, the giant explosion. Any pressing questions before we get into it?"

"Nah. Unless you need me to be sneaky again?"

"Nah, Toot-Toot's seen weirder."

Holding out the donut, Harry murmurs a few syllables which Veron can't quite hear. Shortly, a sphere of blue light zips into the alleyway and pulls up short in front of Harry, revealing itself to be, in truth, a tiny glowing humanoid figure, male, with a shock of lilac fluff on his head and a suit of armor crafted from various trash. At his hip rests a spear fashioned from an iron nail wrapped in a clear film, with a strange boxy hilt with no visible blade strapped on the other side.  

"M'lord!" the pixie says stridently, with a genuine but questionable attempt at a salute. "You have summoned me!" He notices the pastry. "And you have a donut!!"

"Yep," Harry says, incompletely suppressing a grin. "I need to know who blew up this building, and why. Do the Little Folk have any information? I'll give you the donut if you investigate."

The pixie salutes again, this time striking his helmet so hard as to ring the aluminum like a bell. "Sir!!! Yes sir!!!!"

He darts off in a flash. Harry finally lets out a very small giggle. 

Veron manages to keep a perfect poker face all throughout this transaction, then indulges in a smile when the pixie darts off. He is very good at avoiding being rude; comes from practice.

"Well, that was adorable."

"He is, isn't he? He also, um, killed a demigoddess for me with that box cutter once, so I try to stay respectful. Thanks on that, by the way."

"Yep. He's helping you out, figure the least I can do is not coo over him. A demigoddess? ... That armor must be better than it looks."

"She was extremely surprised."

"Ah, I know that game. All right. I'm glad he was there to help."

"As am I! Because I'm not dead, and neither is the entire human race."

"Was this the, uh—daughter of whatshername, or is this a different crisis?"

"No, you're on the money. Something... went wrong with her. Thousands of years embodying growth and fertility and general goody-gumdrops goodness, then one day she just. Snapped. Said she couldn't stand the eternal conflict between Summer and Winter and tried to end it all with an ice age."

Wince. "Ah. I'm sorry. ... Is your associate going to be in any danger from the fallout? Since he helped, and you know they're upset?"

"...he's never mentioned... but come to think of it, I think you and I might well be the only people who know enough about it and think he's a real person to think that way. Most people think pixies are one step up from animal intelligence, think of it as me killing her with a pixie-shaped bullet." He pauses. "That's depressingly convenient."

"A bit, yeah. He should probably be warned anyway, though, just to be safe. I might even have a thing in my endless bag of tricks that could help him out? Or are you sure enough that he's out of the line of fire that I shouldn't?"

"Decently sure - it has been years - but, hell, I'm not going to turn down a boost for the little guy. Wouldn't really be my place. And it is kind of worrying he's wearing armor around now, come to think of it..."

"I think my old ring of protection might be small enough for him, it does a magic resize whatsit. Would that be in the hole or the bag...?" He pauses and retraces his jewelry related steps. "Aribeth had it for a bit, then we switched it out with the better one—bag, then." He reaches into the bag and retrieves a small copper band with a blue gem, then holds it up triumphantly. "Here we are."

"Oh, he's going to love that." The buzzing of tiny wings can be heard, Dopplering towards them. "Here he comes now! Hey, Toot-Toot, you're not gonna believe what-"

"Run!!" the pixie squeaks loudly. "Run away, run far away, run!"

Harry blinks. "What about the donut?"

"Forget the donut!!!"

Harry pales and turns to Veron. "We need to run."

"Running," agrees Veron. He clicks his shoes together, then snatches Harry's hand, darts to the side to carefully catch the pixie with his other hand, and then the world goes grey and still. The falling snow stops in its fall, suspended in mid-air.

"Don'tletgothisisashortcut," he huffs in one breath, tugging the both of them along at the speed of holy shit this man can run.

Harry follows as best he can. Toot-Toot holds obediently still, his wings only fluttering nervously.

Suddenly there's a sharp tug on Harry's side. Like he's found a sinkhole, falling into a different world. He's pulled sideways of reality with incredible force. Harry lets out a strangled yelp.

Veron would like to second that yelp. It is a yelp that is very appropriate to this situation. This is a very precarious balancing act he's doing here, dancing on the edge of the Plane of Shadow and dragging two passengers along for the ride. It's not the kind of thing that can gracefully handle such things as 'one passenger getting pulled sideways of reality.'

"Blighted imp fucker—" he swears, because swearing usually helps with these sorts of things, and he stumbles and trips. He lets go of Toot-Toot to avoid accidentally squishing him or dragging him into the Plane of Shadow if they're going there. He does not let go of Harry, because Harry does not have that squishing problem, and someone clearly meddled with him, and Veron's not abandoning him to handle whatever that is on his own.

The both of them tumble into a heap.

"How very intimate," purrs a voice. Literally, purring; it's the voice of a cat. The woman in front of them - dressed in a gown of woven snowflakes, swirling aurora colors in her slit-pupilled eyes, lips the shade of frozen raspberries - does not open her mouth. There's a cat behind her who's talking instead. "I do hope I'm not interrupting something."

"That's just petty," Harry groans, before he realizes who's talking. Then he freezes. Appropriately enough.

"Mab."

"It's my name," she murmurs. "Don't wear it out."

"Sorry," mumbles Veron apologetically, and then carefully disentangles himself from Harry to look at the snow woman (what is it with him and snow related things lately??) and her talking cat. He considers being a smartass, then decides against it, because he tries not to be a dumbass.

"... Hi," he says lamely, for lack of a better idea.

She turns her head fractionally to stare at him.

"Who in the world are you?" the cat wonders. "Are you why my Emissary was so far from my grasp, you strange thing? For you are strange, stranger, so like myself an age ago. Full of snow, but not yet frostbit... what's your name, child?"

Mab smiles, cold but almost genuine. Nearby, Harry shakes his head frantically and mouths "DO NOT". 

Veron will absolutely not tell this person his name if Harry says he shouldn't. That will be a thing he won't do.

"I'm just a professional lost person that keeps wandering into trouble," he says, ducking his head politely.

"That's not what I asked, is it?"

"It wasn't a fair question," Harry replies steadily, pulling himself to his feet. "He's called Veron. Why did you summon me?"

She makes a face. "Fine," the cat hisses. "I have a favor to ask of you, Harry Dresden, of the three favors owed your godmother that fell of late to me."

"What is it?" Harry asks cautiously.

The snow swirls around them, condensing into a tiny human form. "This man. Marcone. He was in the building that was destroyed earlier today."

Harry sucks in a breath. "Is he dead?"

"Not of that," Mab hedges. "I do not know his current fate. He was in a safe-room in the building, and he was taken away afterwards by parties unknown. The favor I ask is that you find him."

If Veron were some type of dog, his hackles would be raised. He's even a little tempted to growl. Clearly he doesn't understand the full scope of the situation, but he does not like this woman. He would like to be away from her and her implications of power and bindings and debt. Except it doesn't look like Harry can be away from this person. So Veron's not going anywhere.

He lets Harry do the talking, because Harry knows more about what's going on, and Veron feels that this is maybe one of those conversations where it pays to watch your tongue.

Veron may very well be correct. Harry raises his eyebrows. "And if I refuse?"

"You will die," she says casually.

Harry's face takes on a dangerous cast. "You swore that you would not harm me if I refused your tasks."

Then he screams and falls to his knees, clutching his face.

"I swore that I would not harm you for refusing me, and I will not," she hisses. "Your death would be unrelated. Question my given word again, ape, and I will finish freezing the water in your eyes."

His first instinct is to fix Harry's eyes. His second instinct is to stab Mab. He thinks that while these instincts are perfectly justified and reasonable, they're not super useful to the situation at hand.

"Pardon me, ma'am," he says, smoothly stepping in front of Harry, "but do you accept stand ins? Like, if I offered to pick up his favor for him?"

... That was maybe also not super useful to the situation at hand, but oh well the words have been said he'll stick by them.

Mab looks at him as though abruptly remembering he's there. "No, child, the bargain is ours alone. But you are very brave, and I find myself thinking... I wonder, would you take another of his burdens? For a long time I have hounded the wizard Dresden to take up the mantle of my Knight. My former Knight betrayed me, and I will not allow him to die until I have chosen another; he lives in agony, screaming for a death that will not come. His suffering has destabilized the balance of Summer and Winter, the very foundation of the world. Dresden will not end it. Would you take up the mantle? I would save Dresden from his pursuers, release all his debts. I can promise you anything you desire, child, pleasure beyond your wildest dreams and power even beyond what you already enjoy. And if you so desired, you could have me as well. What say you, Veron?"

Her eyes are very hard to look away from. Her unmoving berry-purple lips quirk into the tiniest smile as her interpreter says his name, like she just remembered an almost funny joke. From behind Veron, Harry whimpers helplessly.

Um.

"Um," he agrees, because the narration clearly has the right of it. Why does this keep happening to him. Why can't he attract normal women instead of scary intimidating ladies that offer him a job in exchange for sex. Why is this a thing. Do other people gets these kinds of offers, or is it just him? It is probably just him. What happened to his life. Why this.

He should probably not just leave his answer at 'um,' though.

"I'm—I'm flattered, ma'am," he says, clearing his throat. "I think I'd need to know more about the situation and the world I'm in before accepting or refusing any offers that are that, um—" Extreme? Terrifying? Bizarre? "—serious. Thank you kindly, I will give it my utmost consideration."

There, that was polite without directly saying, 'no' and pissing her off.

She smiles incrementally wider. "Very well. I eagerly anticipate your later response."

She circles around to crouch next to Harry, who has watery red tear tracks down his face. "Hear me, wizard. I have chosen to ask you to find the Baron Marcone as a favor, but in truth, it is more for your sake than mine. Summer's mercenaries will not stop until you are dead. Find the Baron, and you will find answers... answers that you need, if you are to survive. Now, we both have business to attend to. If I were you, I would rise and leave this place immediately."

"Why?" Harry manages to grit out.

"Because when your little retainer warned you of danger, he did not refer to me."

She vanishes in a whirl of snow, and the bleating of goat-men can suddenly be heard outside the alleyway.

He is not going to think about the possible implications of 'eagerly anticipate.' Nope. Nope nope nope nope.

Right. Of course they get dropped right back into danger. Why wouldn't they be. Time to resume running. He turns to pull Harry to his feet so they can get on that, this time without the shadowstep shortcut. He's not touching that again for a while.

"Is this what your life is normally like? Because I'm feeling this uncanny sense of deja vu," he mutters, darkly. He notes that a blind wizard is a very bad thing to have right now, and that he still has that ring from Drogan that does minor healing once a day. Usually it's for saving someone at death's door, but he thinks that having a wizard that can actually aim will do a better job of that. "Sano!"

One of the many rings on his fingers glows a bright blue, and Harry's eyes are a bit less bleedy. Not fixed, Veron bets that they'll still sting a bit after being half frozen over, but better.

"Thanks," Harry gasps. "Yeah, this is pretty typical. Eye-freezing's new."

There's a series of muted cracks, and snow puffs into the air around their feet. Harry staggers into a run, pulling his coat around his ears.

"Goats with machine guns," he groans. "Hell's fucking bells."

"This is more like a tavern in Hell," he says conversationally, "after having just lost a game of cards. What with the running."

Speaking of! Running! So much running! Actually, where is Toot-Toot, is he still around or did he make a break for it?

If he's around, it's not obvious. Which might be a good strategy in general, come to think of it.

Harry overturns a garbage can to slow pursuit; the gruffs hop over it easily. They continue chasing behind, but the gunfire stops. Harry looks to have a sudden realization.

"They're herding us," he says sharply. "Forzare!" he shouts, pointing the tip of his staff toward the entrance of the alley. A near-invisible bolt of force flies through the air and crashes into a gruff rounding the corner, who bleats unhappily and staggers backwards. He then takes the staff itself in a two-handed grip and smashes its ankle, eliciting a shockingly human scream of pain.

"Oh. Great."

Veron takes advantage of the opening Harry opened up with the gruff. By stabbing them. Then he retrieves a tanglefoot bag from his bag of holding and tosses it behind them, in the path of their pursuers.

The gruff who is stabbed crumples to the ground, bleating in agony. The tanglefoot bag explodes, covering the gruffs in quick-hardening tar. One of them founders, his legs trapped, and finds himself practically cocooned in the alchemical concrete. The other two avoid the tendrils, opening fire as they do so.

Harry and Veron round the corner half a second before the bullets bite into the wall. There's a door with no visible handle, presumably barred from the other side. Harry closes his eyes and focuses, and there's an audible clunk as a push-bar on the other side of the door depresses and the door opens out. Harry pulls Veron in, then swings the door closed behind them.

It's dark in here. Then there's a flare of light and a steady glow emanates from the pentacle necklace around Harry's neck, illuminating a bare concrete hallway.

It's a bit close for two people. Harry makes an apologetic face.

Veron actually doesn't mind either the dark or the closeness. He can see in the dark just fine, and the closeness is only weird if they make it weird. He reaches into his bag of holding to retrieve a trap for the door, then pauses.

"... Iron," he observes, finally connecting the dots and feeling a little like a dolt. He recalls the bit about faeries and how they react to iron. "Right. Running?"

Harry might be a little bit weird about the closeness, but he's handling it admirably!

"Iron. Uh, we've probably got a minute with the running, but let's move with purpose and all that." He looks around. There's a door to what looks like some kind of storeroom, equipped with a rusted padlock, along with a shining metal double-door at the end of the hall. "Can you open that lock? I'd like to see what resources we've got, here."

"Yeah." He knocks on the locked door; a silver band on his fingers glimmers, and the padlock clicks open. "After you, I'm going to figure out if I have iron things on me."

Ex-Enserric might be, but also eats souls. Aceleka is made out of ice, his other short sword is made out of adamantine... maybe some of the throwing knives..? He starts investigating his person for iron or steel throwing knives.

Harry enters and begins efficiently rummaging through the supplies. After some thought, he appropriates a box of nails and a crowbar, leaving a small piece of faded green paper in the box where he found them. He also picks up a device similar to the one Toot-Toot wore on his belt and clicks out a tiny iron blade. "Think you could get any use out of this?"

Meanwhile, Veron starts to despair over not having any normal metals on him. Adamantine, ice thing, adamantine, silver, adamantine, solid... gold...? He peers with utter bewilderment at the gold throwing knife. Why does he have this. Where did he get this? ... Oh, right, Undermountain. He flicks it a couple of times, in case it's under some kind of illusion. It is not under some kind of illusion. Damn. Back to searching.

Adamantine, adamantine, why did he get so many throwing knives from the drow, shadowsteel... Maybe shadowsteel will count?

"Maybe, but I'd hate to leave you unarmed." He holds up a couple shadowsteel throwing knives. "Think weird transformed shadowsteel counts? It used to be steel, anyway."

Harry hefts the crowbar. "I'm covered. Those look like better knives, though. And as long as it was steel, it should be at least okay. The box cutter makes a decent backup if it turns out they don't, I guess." He clicks the blade back into its boxy sheath and tosses it Veronwards.

Veron catches it easily, and then the box cutter disappears into his sleeve. "Thanks. Now if there are no objections, I think I'll go poke my head out of the door and see what they're doing."

"...Objection: They'll shoot you and then you'll be dead."

"Counter objection: I will be invisible and intangible."

"...I see. No further objections."

He smiles at Harry warmly. Then he turns on his heel, touches his hand to his orphaned earring, and disappears.

He then turns intangible and pokes his head through the door. What are their pursuers up to?

One is watching the door. Two others are arguing quietly in a strange language, full of grunts and glottal stops. The one Veron stabbed sits in a snowdrift, being bandaged by a pixie barely larger than the bandage roll she carries, and bleating softly with pain.

The argument between the two gruffs breaks off. One of them backs up and takes a running charge at the door. He slams into it hard, shaking the frame and sending brick dust in a cloud around it, but fails to dislodge it. He sprawls away from it, his horns smoking and his fur badly singed, and his conversational partner gives him an I-told-you-so look.

Veron ducks back inside before the gruff hits the door, then pokes his head out again to investigate the damage. ... Hm. That's an awful lot of force brought against the door. If they put it in a place that was not the iron door they might actually get somewhere. Which means they don't have very much time. He makes an estimation of the most likely place they'll burst through, then removes his head from the door and returns to Harry, dropping invisibility and intangibility. He only has so many minutes of either, no sense wasting them.

"They're going to break through the wall, probably through right there," he informs Harry in a business-like tone. "Those are iron, right? Can I borrow them?" He points at the nails.

"Yeah they're iron, sure you can borrow them, oh shit they're gonna break through the wall. At least I can get a shield up this time, not having my eyes destroyed is great."

"Yyyyeah you're going to want to have a shield up. And maybe be a bit further down the hallway. And also maybe take this and put it on immediately." He tosses the ring of protection he'd planned to give to Toot-Toot to Harry. ... Then, upon reflection, his necklace, too. "I'm going to be mean."

He retrieves his earlier trap and combines it with the nails, through a complicated and very technical process that only a professional can accomplish with the proper tools and training. That is, tying the nail container to the explosive trap with string. He sets up the trap against the wall in question.

"Right, so. Vague plan outline: I go invisible and intangible, walk through to behind them for an ambush. They burst through and immediately experience regret, we introduce them to even more regret before they can shoot us. Alternatively, we just run, but I don't think these guys are going to stop chasing us, so."

"No, yeah, good instincts. Whatever's going on here, they're persistent. And I think that sounds like a plan."

Veron nods, and tries on a smile.

"All right then. Lady Luck watch over us when we can't watch out for ourselves, and please don't get shot."

"Igualmente," Harry says with an answering smile. He fiddles with a shield charm on his bracelet absently.

Right then, to work. Invisibility, intangibility: go. Time to sneak back around behind the gruffs and get ready for an ambush.

The gruffs are themselves doing the same thing! Well, less "ambush" and more "frontal assault". They gather in formation behind the one who argued against targeting the door, who is in a sort of digitigrade runner's stance.

The elected battering ram (no pun intended) smashes through the wall with a roar. Then there's a BOOM and the roar turns to a panicked scream. Nails fly everywhere; one nicks the ram who is still smoking from his door-related encounter, and he rears back in horror. The other raises his submachine gun grimly and gets ready to advance.

Correction: the other is stabbed in the back with a box cutter. Or, well. Stabbed in the neck by a box cutter, to be more precise. It's just that Veron happens to be behind him so he doesn't get shot, because he is no longer intangible and thus not immune to getting shot. Now to get the submachine gun away from the gruff. Hey, shadowsteel dagger, how do you do when sliced along the delicate part of this gruff's inner elbow? He hopes you do well, so that thing that shoots bullets can get dropped.

It works pretty well, though it's almost irrelevant; that neck wound is spilling gouts of green flame like nobody's business, and the gruff is mostly preoccupied by screaming. (The shadowsteel doesn't do as much damage, and it elicits less flame, but oddly, its flames are purple.)

The second gruff recovers in time to level his gun at Veron before a bolt of pure air-blurring force collides with his side, slamming him against the alley wall. The gruff comes out of it somewhat battered, as does the wall.

Harry steps out from the cloud of brick dust that was once the wall the gruffs broke down, hand outstretched with a shimmering force-shield hovering in the air before him. His staff glows with power, and his expression is more than a little frightening.

... Huh. That's definitely an expression that Harry has.

But now is really not the time.

What was that, second gruff? You would like some new shadowsteel piercings? Why, Veron is happy to oblige! Here, have three shadowsteel daggers.

The gruff gurgles his way into unceremonious death.

His compatriot, despite his unresponsive right arm, manages to fire off a left-handed burst of gunfire at Harry before recoil forces the gun out of his hand. The bullets strike against the shield and drop to the ground, their energy spent. Harry reaches into his jacket - 

- flinches with some invisible pain -

- pulls out a gun of his own, and shoots the gruff in the head. Green fire blazes from both sides of the wound. The gruff topples to the ground.

Harry exhales heavily. "Well, that was invigorating."

"No kidding." He drops the invisibility, looking Harry over. He has no injuries himself, unless the blooding and gnawed upon arm from the dragon counts. "Sorry, thought I got that one, you okay?"

"Got what?"

Harry takes a look at Veron's arm. "Also, have we been running around all day without getting you first aid for that bite wound? I am very disappointed in myself."

"The one that shot at you. I thought I'd stabbed him enough that he'd been persuaded not to try it, sorry. You flinched, I was a bit worried something actually hit. And—oh, yes. That." He looks at his arm. "Should be fine, one of my many accessories does slow regeneration. It's healing."

"Oh. It was probably mental strain from the magic, that stuff can hurt if you put too much into it. And, uh, good. Regeneration is good."

"Yeah. It'll probably still scar but, eh, what's another." He looks around at the carnage. "... Do you um, have some way to clean this mess up? I feel like people might find the site of an explosion a bit, ah. Alarming?"

"I... do not. Um."

There's a strange howling in the distance, an unnaturally regular up-and-down wailing sound. Harry winces slightly.

"Shit. That would be the constabulary. Uh, let's walk briskly but unsuspiciously somewhere else?"

Veron considers this, and how well Harry is likely to be at being sneaky. ... Not the worst, probably not Valen bad, but. Not up to Veron's level of sneak.

"Better idea," he says, reaching into his pack and retrieving something that looks like black silk cloth. "Why don't I just put you in my portable hole and then run off with you." ... There were definitely better ways to explain that. "Um. Since I'm really good at being sneaky. And the portable hole is perfectly safe."

"Okay. That is... conceptually terrifying, but I really don't want to be arrested on terrorism charges today. So... go ahead."

"Perfectly safe. I've done this sort of thing before. Practically a staple of being a lost person, really. And you'll have air!" He notes that he's really shit at selling this idea, and also at being reassuring, and changes gears. "And I will get you out the minute we are away."

He unfurls the circular sheet of black silk on the ground, and the silk fades away to reveal a hole in the ground, six feet in diameter, and about ten feet deep. It's filled with what could charitably be called 'junk,' and doesn't look particularly roomy. Nonetheless, a ladder has been conscientiously placed at the edge, for anyone that would like to descend into the hole.

"Nothing will fall on you, probably," Veron assures, because for some reason he's trying that again. "I cleaned it, recently." It does not look like anyone has cleaned this thing in centuries, which probably says a lot about what it was like before.

"Your marketing is impeccable," Harry notes, descending the ladder. "Don't worry, this is actually kind of cool now I think about it. I'm not gonna get jostled or anything, right?"

"Nah, doesn't work like that. You'll be able to hear things on the outside. It'll get dark, though, so you might want to turn on your light thingy."

Harry flickers his amulet on as he touches down, its blue-white glow casting stark shadows across the piles of junk. "Roger wilco. Ready for action."

"Bang on the ceiling if you need out," says Veron, and then he peels up the edge of the cloth and rolls it up to return it to his bag. From Harry's view, the open top fades to black silk, and he is left alone in darkness. With a lot of junk.

And now it's time to sneak away! Which is easy enough, he's in charge of the sneaking for a reason, here.

Harry, for want of anything better to do (like considering who might have taken Marcone and why) elects to look through the junk. Very carefully, in case he finds another one of those explosive traps.

No explosive traps! Probably. There are no explosive traps where he can see them immediately, anyway. A whole lot of junk, though. Some of it looks safe, but some of it doesn't. There are books written in an unfamiliar language, a box of stakes and holy water, several instruments, a few sets of boots, armor in a really ugly shade of red, an array of knives, fishing tackle, a jug of water, stale looking travel rations, several wands...

The list goes on. There is a lot of junk in here.

Neat! Harry will leave those wands the everloving hell alone, because unfamiliar magic! Frankly that's what he should be doing with all of this, everything in here is unfamiliar magic. He sits down to await his release.

...do any of the books have pictures?

This one book has anatomical pictures with drawings of where to surgically insert stones into a human body for... some reason! And also how to vivisect someone. Does that count?

Nope! Harry is putting that book down now. And sitting back down. Far away from it. And shaking his head with his tongue out a little bit to get rid of the gross feeling.

The book does not sprout legs and crawl towards him, insisting that he should read more about it. Though, 'far from it' is rather hard to do, he doesn't have a lot of room in here, but he can hide behind a pile of junk, next to the ugly red armor.

He can still hear some sounds from outside of the portable hole. The sirens are more distant now, and there's a faint shuffling—

—and then sunlight, from above.

"We're clear," says Veron, poking his head over the edge of the hole.

"My savior," Harry says brightly, kipping up and starting up the ladder. "But, seriously, thanks. Also, what the hell is up with that creepy surgery book in there?"

"Sure, anytime. Creepy surgery book...?" Blink. "... Did you find the creepy Netherese books. Were you reading the creepy Netherese books. Because the pictures did not fill me with warm fuzzies and I didn't want to leave them where I found them for other people to find, it's not, they're not mine. I just. Have them. Because I don't know what to do with them."

"I can't read Nether, I was just looking at the extremely unfuzzy pictures. I'm not accusing you of being some kind of mad vivisectionist, that's a perfectly reasonable explanation. The amount of crap I've got lying around for that exact reason, I swear."

He surfaces and Toot-Toot zips up to them, vibrating with nervous energy. "Milord! Are you well? Are Summer's agents duly thrashed? Do you still have that donut??"

"I lost the donut," Harry apologizes. "But we did thrash the gruffs, and we're both well, thanks to your warning." Toot-Toot puffs up with pride, though still somewhat crestfallen about the donut. "And Veron was going to give you a shiny thing before we got distracted." He perks up further.

"Hello! I was, yes. Though I think Harry still has it, so if you would please?"

Harry blinks. "I totally do, uh," he starts rummaging through the pockets of his greatcoat, "here!"

He proffers the ring, in all its copper-and-glass glory. Toot-Toot buzzes his wings excitedly and swoops toward it, plucking it from Harry's palm and fitting it around his right shoulder. The pixie inhales sharply as the protective field extends over his skin.

"This is powerful," he breathes. "I can keep it?"

"Yep, it's yours. Figured you also needed something if Summer's agents are running around, doing things, requiring thrashing. It can change size if you, uh, sort of push it together or pull it apart? Not sure how small it goes, though, it might not go small enough to fit your hands, sorry."

Toot-Toot nods firmly, takes the ring off, and manipulates it until the band serves as a metallic belt, the gem riding eye-catchingly a few millimeters above his crotch. Harry does his level best to avoid looking at it.

"Thank you," Toot-Toot says seriously. "I am in your debt, milord Veron."

"You're welcome. Don't worry about it, I just. It seems like you did a brave thing for Harry, and like it'd help you to have, uh, that." Veron suddenly feels vaguely bad for just giving the little fairy a slightly cheap (for him, anyway) ring. "You're not in my debt, I just. Like doing good things for people when it seems like they might need it."

Toot-Toot shakes his head. "Harry pays us to be brave. With large quantities of pizza. This is different. A kindness."

"Don't worry about it," Harry advises. "Fairies like to formalize their goodwill by framing it as a debt. He's kind of telling you that you're friends now."

"Oh. Okay, sure, we can be friends now."

"Excelsior!"

Harry turns back to Toot-Toot, his eyes firmly up and to the right of the pixie's head. "Did you find out anything about the explosion, by the way?"

Toot-Toot nods vigorously. "Yes! The Baron Marcone and his guard had entered the building, minutes before the blast. Then the pentacle went up in flames! Then, a few minutes later, the Baron was rushed into a car by some creatures, smelled like sulfur. They drove away, seconds before his compatriots left the building. One of them was wounded, badly. Disemboweled. The woman. They drove off too."

Harry makes a face. "Don't suppose you know where either party went?"

"Nope! I only know this much because there was a salamander watching, but she got bored after the fire died down and she went to sleep."

"Well done anyway," Harry says. "Now we know we're up against demons. I think I know which ones, too. And you, my friend, have earned yourself a donut. To be redeemed at a later date, because it's very late and I have no idea where the hell we are."

Toot-Toot snaps off a salute and zips away.

"Hooray. Demons." says Veron, with a complete lack of enthusiasm. "Are we thinking of the same demons, here? Uh, come from the Abyss, bunch of evil bastards, locked in a very stupid eternal war with fellow evil bastards called devils, to the relief of various good-aligned folks?"

"Different demons. Used to be angels, decided for some reason that horrible puppy-kicking villainy was more fun. The specific breed I'm thinking of is the Knights of the Blackened Denarius. There's thirty of them - some of them are currently held prisoner instead of running around kicking puppies, but I don't have an exact number at the moment. They're all strong, fast, and damn near impossible to kill. Most also have magic, particularly a kind of magic called 'Hellfire' - fire, but more so. If you do manage to kill one, it'll drop a tarnished silver coin, called a Denarius. Do not let it touch your skin. That's how they - 'spread', for want of a better word. It'll worm its way into your head, try to get you to let it take over. It'll control your perceptions, offer you power and control and anything you want, in exchange for just a little bit more of your soul every time. I went through that once. I don't want you to have to."

Pause. "Also, the thought of an amoral demon with your powers is pants-shittingly terrifying."

"Shit. Yeah. Let's. Not have me become a demon, that sounds like a bad time for everyone. Though..." He trails off, looking faintly thoughtful. The syllables of a name echoes in the back of his mind. Could something like that actually manage to change his nature? His nature is—well, it's a fair bit more stable than most people have it. Knowing one's own True Name does that. He can't be sure without actually encountering one of these evil coins, but if he knows to look for its influence and invoke his own Name to tell it to get out, he might just be fine. That might just be that.

He shakes his head. It's not like he wants to ever test it. "Nevermind. Don't let it touch my skin, got it. Sorry you went through that."

"Worked out all right in the end. Sort of."

Harry looks around. "Also, I may have mentioned this, but do you have any idea where we are?"

"Uh. I went, uh." He checks the sun. "North east? There are some signs thataway but I neglected to read them." He points. "Other than that, no idea. I could find our way back to your car if you need me to, though."

Harry shakes his head. "It's late and it's cold. Executive decision: I'm calling David."

He inhales for a second, holds his breath for a second, and exhales for a second, then he removes a metal box from one of the pockets of his greatcoat. He clicks it open to reveal a boxy little device couched in padding, which he removes with great care, flips open with greater care, and presses some interior buttons with greater care still. It buzzes, then emits crackling, speechlike noises.

"Hi David - yeah, yeah. Listen, I need a pickup. - because you're my brother and you love me? - yes, but it's convenient. Anyway, we're at thirty-fifth and Church. - I have no idea. - new friend from another universe. - shut up, David. Thank you, David." He clicks the phone shut with more force than he had intended, then winces and places it gently back in the box, still blushing slightly. "My brother. The comedian."

"Brothers often think they are," Veron says sagely, not actually having grown up with any. Maybe he has one, somewhere, but he vaguely recalls his father was well on his way to drinking himself to death, so. Probably no siblings. Co-prentices probably count, right? Xanos definitely thought he was a comedian.

"It's fine," he adds, noticing the blushing and attempting to sound soothing.

For some reason Veron's soothing tone causes Harry to blush harder! What a mysterious bodily mechanism.

"...I think that corner across from us has a pizza place," Harry says after a little while. "Do you want to get a slice? David's gonna be a minute, and I'm just now realizing I'm super hungry."

"Oh. Right. Food is a thing that I need to regularly have, isn't it." He considers the state of his stomach. ... Yep. Also super hungry. "Sure. I don't know what pizza is, but I have probably eaten weirder things."

"It's mostly bread and cheese, you'll be fine."

Harry gets them both across the street and subsequently orders two slices of sausage and pepperoni for himself.

Veron considers trying to navigate a foreign toppings system while trying this strange foreign cuisine known as pizza. ... Eh. He doesn't actually care enough. He makes a token effort by picking the one topping Harry ordered that he actually recognizes. He will have the sausage.

He gets: a triangular flatbread, covered with cheese, with pieces of sausage! Harry's flatbread, in addition to sausage, has thin slices of a different kind of sausage. He eats it somewhat ravenously.

The triangular flatbread is cautiously tested, then deemed to be pretty good. He eats it with the efficiency of an adventurer, which is to say, also ravenously.

He ends up finishing off four in total.

For which Harry will agreeably pay!

Outside, there's a sharp beep. Harry startles, looks out the window quickly, then stands up. "Our chariot awaits," he says gravely.

"Our chariot has good timing," says Veron, much less gravely, sliding out of his chair and to the door. "Do you want me to pay you back for the food? I don't have any of the local currency, but there's probably some way to convert it somewhere."

Gold's valuable here, right? Right.

"Man, I like paying for people's food, it's fine. Though come to think of it I wouldn't mind one unit of your currency for magic reasons. I can't think of any spells right now that would use it, but 'coin from another universe' is the kind of thing I'd like to have around just in case."

Harry leads him to another vehicle, this one somewhat nicer than the model seen previously (or at least less cannibalized). Without preamble, he gets into the back seat, ducking significantly to get under the doorframe. "Hey, David."

A man who looks very, very much like Harry waves from the front seat. "Harry. And mysterious guest. Hello."

"I have coins in a couple currencies, I can get you some units in all of them." He slides into the passenger seat, since Harry's taking the back seat.

"Veron Chandler, professional lost person, pleasure to meet you," he says, offering his hand to David and trying on a smile.

"David Aleister Livingstone Dresden, ostensible sibling; also a pleasure, but I don't shake."

He smiles, possibly at a private joke. His gloved hand taps against the steering wheel.

"I understand," says Veron amiably, taking his hand back. He glances between Harry and David. "Are you two, uh, identical twins, or do the genes run strong...?"

David glances at him. It's a very piercing glance. Then he starts snickering.

"You could say that," he says after a bit, "if you didn't mind being wrong. I'm his soul. Charmed to meet you."

Harry yelps slightly. "Is that not privileged information anymore?!"

"You haven't Seen him properly, have you. It's very... illuminating. In every possible sense."

Veron blinks. He peers at David confusedly.

"His... soul. I thought those needed to stay on the inside for everything to be hunky-dory. But okay, sure, walking around and talking and things. Uh. Thank you for your trust in me?"

"I'm still connected to him. I'm just... being sociable. You should try it sometime, lightbringer."

"Why do people keep calling him that! And being creepy!"

In lieu of response, David turns to Veron. "Would you be alright with my brother taking a look at your soul? It'd make him much less confused."

"Lightbringer's just kind of a thing I get called now, it's not just your circle of acquaintances," he says, to Harry.

Then to David: "Uh, yeah, sure? It can stay on the inside for this, right, I don't need to stop being an only child?"

"Don't worry, it'll stay right where it is."

David catches Veron's eye. His own eyes are deep and black. Like a gateway into nothing at all.

There's a sensation of falling. When it clears, Veron is on a hill, David standing regally next to him. They overlook a tower, toppled a thousand times and built back up every time. The stones are blackened with lightning strikes, cracked with cannon-fire, covered with ravenous ivy. But still, it stands strong.

"It's been a while since I've been here," David muses. "That's his soul, if you were wondering. Me. Not so pretty as yours, but we make do."

Veron attempts to say something like, 'It's a perfectly nice soul,' or 'Wait how do I know the history of this tower so well,' or 'You didn't mention the soulseeing would be mutual.' Instead, what comes out is a, "Bwuh?"

For his part, his soul's less... object shaped. He is certain of what he is, and unfortunately this does not easily pin itself to a single building metaphor. People are flexible, and so is he. A lighthouse on a dark shore, burning bright and brilliant for any ship that has decided to come to port. A warm inn in a shadowed wood, a heart with room for travelers that need an understanding ear and a place to rest. A candle in a vast expanse of ice, small and fragile and stubbornly lit despite the frigid wind. Tied to ice and shadow and just a smattering of prophecy, and belonging to none of them. 'Lightbringer' is an appropriate enough title, in cases where dark is evil and light is good, for he does leave little bastions of light and warmth in his wake. It's missing some nuance, though. He is fit for such extraordinary titles, but they do not quite fit him. 'Candlemaker' is perhaps closer. Simple and apparently ordinary, but saving the people he visits from the dark that haunts them, leaving them with something to light their way, if they only have the courage to ignite the wick.

And they're back.

"Huh," Harry says dizzily. "Lightbringer, okay. You're very something."

"I, um," he says eloquently, blinking rapidly and feeling a bit like he just did something rather intimate. "Thanks, I, um." Words sure aren't coming to him, are they. Instead what he's got is a stutter and a faint pink coloring to his cheeks. What a shitty trade, he'd like to switch back now. He decides to stop rapidly blinking like a dolt, in favor of closing his eyes entirely and remembering to breathe.

"I don't know about that—that thing about your soul not being as pretty as mine. I don't think they work that way. It's a perfectly nice soul, you have a lot to be proud of, let's not, not make this into some kind of contest." There. Actual words that came out of his mouth. Excellent. Go him.

"Aw, thanks! I- don't get that a lot. Yours is really nice too." Harry's not blushing. That would be stupid. 

David raises one eyebrow very slowly, then effortfully slides it back into place and starts the car. 

"Thanks. I um. I try." Awkward pause. You know what it is a good time for? It is a good time for a subject change.

"So, um, what's. What's it like having your soul walking around, being a person? Were you just always this way, or did David decide that he wanted to be an outside soul and then it just. Poof, out he is, walking around and being a person?"

"I am atypical," David clarifies. "Most people's souls aren't sentient when they're still inside. But for unknown reasons, I was. I served as a representation of his subconscious and played devil's advocate, sometimes literally. But then he walked into an interdimensional bar and used the inherent magical properties of someone else's universe to externalize me. It's one of our more inexplicable misadventures. And you can't just decide to have a daemon-" he hesitates. "Editorial 'you'. You-as-in-Veron... maybe. You've got a lot of potential for metaphysical change you're not really using."

That would make sense, with the knowledge of his own True Name. He has some impressive power over himself, it stands to reason he could use that to do the weird soul thing. If he wanted to. He's not sure he wants to.

"... Huh," he says. "I maybe could do that. If I tried to. And probably also put my soul... back. If it wanted to go back, anyway. I wouldn't want to make my soul a person and then later try to stuff it back in if it didn't want to go there." On the other hand, the thought of his own soul silently screaming at him about things, completely unable to affect the world or be heard is... definitely a thing. "Are there downsides to this thing? It seems like a very personal thing, to have running around out in the world."

"There are what you might call downsides. The obvious: if your daemon dies, so do you. The less obvious: unless you go through a rather painful process of separation, they won't be able to be more than a few feet from you without severe discomfort. The really unpleasant: if any other human touches them, you will both be consumed by a sensation for which 'pain' is only a pathetic euphemism. I think the ability to tuck one's daemon back inside would neatly circumvent most of those problems. Of course, my own method is only usually effective, yet I still prefer to exist."

"It'd neatly circumvent those problems if my soul wanted to go back inside. If it didn't then I might be looking at those downsides, which sounds uncomfortable. But I guess my soul would be... me... so it'd ultimately be what I wanted? What we wanted?" He makes a face. This is confusing. He doesn't feel like he contains two people. "I don't think my soul wants to be an outside soul, but I don't know how I would check. I mean maybe my weird whatsits could let me ask my soul. I could try that?"

"Judging by the other person we met, typically daemons are less, ah, independent than David. Path really seemed more like... I don't know, almost a subroutine of Amariah. They were totally in sync. I think you're safe."

"You have the advantage that barring some highly unusual circumstances, your soul will not have been awake for thirty years growing more and more bitter every time you fucked yourself over because you couldn't or wouldn't take their advice. That seems to have something of an effect on the relationship."

"Um." Veron considers whether he'd have this kind of relationship with his soul or not. He hopes not. It sounds uncomfortable. Reflexively, he feels kind of bad, just in case he maybe has accidentally been upsetting his soul by ignoring its advice. Is he enough of a dolt to accidentally ignore and then offend his soul? He doesn't think he's that much of a dolt.

"You know, when you put it that way I think I would like to check."

"Alright. It's within your capacity, I'm pretty sure; just look inside yourself."

Veron resists the urge to say something sarcastic. It's probably not productive, anyway.

"Right," he says with a small sigh.

He has the creeping feeling that Valen would make some kind of disappointed expression at him for meddling with the fabric of his soul, just because some guy he recently met thought it'd be a good idea. It'd probably be followed up by a lecture on recklessness, which Veron... honestly probably deserves, really. Despite this, he doesn't think this is a bad idea, precisely. If the state of his being would prefer to be in two parts, body and soul, then he'd like to know that. Just sticking with the way he's been because he's always been that is certainly safer, but less of an informed decision. Veron likes making informed decisions. It feels incorrect to base his self on an uninformed one, and just assume that it'll be fine like it is. Like it doesn't matter that a part of him might be quietly screaming on the inside.

Well. Once he puts it in those terms, it's pretty clear where to go from here. He has the logic, it makes sense to him, and the only person he has to convince is himself. Metaphysically. Luckily for him, he has more than read access to his own soul. The syllables (and not-syllables, this is a name that cannot be spoken aloud without intent and a certain degree of power) of his True Name echo through his mind, and there's no need to say it out loud. He knows who he is, even if he sometimes tries not to think about it, because it scares him a little. To be this (Lightbringer) kind of person, to have this kind of power over himself. Greater beings than he have had this power and fallen, twisted themselves into knots and came out lesser for it.

If it were an actual change to his core self, he would flinch away from it. It's not. There is nothing to change. The pieces are all already there, there's nothing to edit. Instead it's like flexing a limb he just noticed for the first time, stretching out the arrangement of himself so it takes up just a little bit more area, into two bodies instead of one.

A warm golden glow fills the car, and then dissipates...

... And a small dragon about the size of a cat sits perched on Veron's lap. Her scales are a dark and subtly shifting violet-black, the membrane of her wings dark and transparent and faintly edged with something that looks like it might be pale blue-white frost, and her eyes burn a brilliant sunlit gold. A small barb sits at the end of her tail.

She wraps her tail around herself so as not to accidentally stab anyone, and considers the nature of her existence.

"I'm not sure I was asleep," she says, thoughtfully. "Once, yes, but he learned how to listen to me in the Plane of Shadow, and has not stopped since."

"Um..."

"Oh, yes, hello. No, thank you for the concern, I'm quite all right. No screaming of immediate importance. I think I'll probably prefer to be an inside soul most of the time, it's really much more convenient, but I don't mind this either."

"Hi. Glad to hear it. You're a dragon?"

She gives him an amused look.

"Veron, no one is surprised that I am a dragon. They," she inclines her head towards Harry and David, "just met you today, and they are not surprised that I am a dragon. You are not even surprised that I am a dragon. Of course I am a dragon."

David smiles at her briefly, but turns back to the road, because he is a responsible driver. (Privately, he is very pleased to have another daemon around. It gets kind of lonely acting like a whole person.)

"A fine dragon you are, too. You don't look much like the ones we've read about, even accounting for the bonsai effect; are you a species from your world?"

"Thank you. I'm not sure, but I think so. All of the dragons we've encountered don't have a barb on their tail." She inspects it, thoughtfully. "My, is that a venom gland? I do believe it is. Well then. I suppose we have always been thorough when decide that we must kill. Oh, one moment, there's something I forgot."

She looks at Veron. "Bag."

Veron blinks. ... He produces the Bag of Holding and holds it out to his daemon?

"I have him so well trained," she says proudly to David, vaguely conspiratorial. "Thank you."

She delicately opens the bag with her front claws, and counts out four coins. Two look like they're made of gold, one is messily stamped like it's from a pre-industrial era, the other is perfectly circular, with a picture of a horned being and a tidy alien script. One is made out of what looks to be some kind of dark metal, and another made out of a shimmery metal that is a strange shade of lavender. All these collected, she flutter-hops into the back seat, landing neatly next to Harry.

"These are coins from four different places." She points with a claw at the messily stamped one. "Toril, our home plane, above ground." She points at the dark metal one. "Toril, from the Underdark, which has a very different culture." Lavender metal gets: "Plane of Shadow," and the final gold coin gets, "Cania, which is a layer of Hell. Is that everything you need for your magic thing?"

"Yeah, sure - I wasn't even talking about a specific magic th-"

Harry blinks slowly.

"Wait. Yes. I'm now thinking of a specific magic thing, and that would be great."

David adjusts the rearview mirror. "You're grinning diabolically, Harry. I hate it when you grin diabolically, that's supposed to be my brand."

"Hush, you. This is going to be great."

He holds out a hand for coinage.

She delicately drops the coins into his hand, then hops back to perch on Veron's shoulder.

"Sorry about that," she says to David. "I didn't want us to forget and wasn't inside to remind him."

"Um." Veron looks at his shoulder daemon. He does not actually know how to phrase his next question, which is something like 'Should I be concerned?'

His tiny dragon nuzzles him affectionately.

"It's fine. Wizards, you know, give them whatever they ask for and then don't ask any questions until they're done thinking." She looks back to David. "How long until we get to our destination?"

David rounds a corner. "About... now."

They pull up to the apartment building, wheels crunching over the snow carpeting the driveway. David hops out, snowflakes instantly insinuating themselves onto his long black coat. "I love this weather," he confides to the tiny dragon as yet unnamed. "Justifies me dressing like this all the time."

"You'll be fine without me, I've got things to do," she informs Veron, and then she hops from his shoulder onto David's, turning insubstantial and flying casually through the car to do so.

"What, being human shaped?" she wonders, a little wryly.

"Um," says Veron, after his dragon hops from his shoulder and flies out of the car. "... I am tempted to say 'what have I unleashed upon the world,' but actually I think I know."

"I'd be more appropriately dressed for the weather if I wasn't human-shaped; my natural form is a wolf. No, I meant the coat and gloves."

"I know the feeling," Harry reassures his human compatriot.

"Ah, I see." She nuzzles him in a friendly manner. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I bet you do." He considers. "So is she about to hit the few feet of—" he makes a face, "ow, yep, there she goes."

"—wait, ow, hold on, one moment, forgot you were separated and I'm not—" she flies back to Veron lightning-quick, poking her head back through the car casually.

"Hi I'm gonna do a thing it'll hurt sorry!"

"You realize it's freaky when you—"

The dragon flickers and disappears, then reappears back on Veron's shoulder.

"Ow!"

"There done sorry bye!" She pecks his forehead as if in a kiss, then flies back to David's shoulder. Through the car. Again.

Veron has a faintly pained expression.

"I am seeing now why she prefers to be an inside soul. I am seeing it very clearly."

David has not quite been able to move since that last question.

He shakes his head. "I'm fine."

"Apparently we are both very atypical people," Harry says, exiting the car. "It's usually the human who has to do the separating, daemons are supposed to be affected worse by it."

"You can be fine without being okay. Wanna snuggle? You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

"I don't think she's unaffected, precisely," muses Veron, as he also exits the car. "I think she's... working. She said she had things to do, I think she was serious. And she couldn't do it without being separated, so she did that. Flickered to the Plane of Shadow and then back, which I did not know she could do, but makes sense when I think about it."

"...yes. I would like that."

"David probably could use some work. And, yeah, daemons can do what you can do, far as I can tell. Though David's not as good at magic, for some reason."

The little shoulder dragon carefully curls around his shoulders like a scarf, nestling under his jacket so she can be scale to skin. She makes a little purring sound that is faintly soothing.

"I mean, I'd guessed she could get to the Plane of Shadow on her own, since she can fly through the car. The weird part was getting back, but I guess I'm an anchor to let her do that easily. The Plane of Shadow doesn't like separating things from themselves. It makes sense that it'd help put us back together. Which is freaky but neat."

When they enter the apartment, David shrugs out of the majority of his clothes and transforms into an enormous black wolf, shedding the remainder in the process. He curls up around the tiny dragon, looking somewhat tragical.

Harry looks confused, then turns to Veron. "...I need to do some magic with my shiny new coins. You wanna stay up or come down?"

David is going to be so very snuggled. As snuggled as this little dragon can make him. Snuggle snuggle snuggle.

"It's okay, I'm here, I'm not going anywhere, I'm here," she murmurs, snuggling.

"Uh," says Veron, looking at their cuddling souls. Does that... have implications he's not aware of? That seems like the kind of thing that might have implications. Also David is a wolf now??? Okay??? Sure??? If he wants to be a wolf he can be a wolf???

He is not entirely sure what's going on with the souls, but he gets the impression that they maybe want some space right now. He definitely wants to give them space right now.

"Yeah, sure, I can come along," he agrees.

"Great!"

He shifts the rug to reveal the trapdoor to the basement laboratory. Then he descends the ladder, taking the rungs two at a time less out of excitement than because his legs are so damn long.

"Bob! I figured out how the Gruffs were finding me! And how to fuck with them in a really hilarious way! Wake up!"

"Ooh!" Bob's eyelights flicker on. "Also: hi, Veron! I see you've done something fucky to your soul! Excellent!"

"Hi, Bob," says Veron, descending at a more leisurely speed. Entirely due to his legs not being so damn long. "I did, yep, you're very observant. I'm here to, uh." Supervise? Avoid thinking about awkward implications of the souls upstairs? Get things from the bottom shelf, because Harry seems like he'd probably have trouble with that? Make impressed sounds? "Fetch things, I guess?"

"A noble calling."

"That's not entirely fair. You're also here to receive exposition."

His mouth twitches, then he decides to play along. Why not. He draws his feet together, straightens to his full height, and sketches a formal bow.

"I'll do my utmost to pay attention."

Harry giggles chuckles manfully. Then he turns to the shelves and starts taking miscellaneous objects, including something that would, if Veron knew that trains exist, look remarkably like a model train set.

"So, context: Last year, I smashed my way into Arctis Tor, the personal stronghold of Mab, queen of Winter and general creep, to rescue Molly, my soon-to-be apprentice. This pissed off Winter. As a rule, anything that pisses off Winter makes Summer happy. So Lily, the current Summer Lady, gave me..." He pulls a leaf-shaped badge from his coat and tosses it onto a workbench. "This. The physical representation of a favor owed me by the Summer Court."

"Shiny," Bob opines.

Blink. "So they're... tracking you down through the favor they owe you, so they can kill you?"

"Gold star!" Harry places the token gently into the model train car. "And I don't think they even get the irony. Faeries are weird."

After a bit of tinkering, a track is set up that will take the train in a long, looping circuit. Harry spaces the coins at the cardinal points of a circle around the track.

"And when I cast this spell, the favor will, from Summer's perspective, be taking a sightseeing tour through your home universe. Which they have no idea how to get to, or even where it is. I predict some very frustrated billy-goats."

Veron snorts, amused.

"Clever. You realize one of their sightseeing locations is a literal level of Hell, right. The very, very cold one. So if they do figure out how to get to other planes, they have a one in four chance of having a bad time. ... Maybe three in four, the Underdark and Plane of Shadow aren't always very nice."

"What, the Underdark and the Plane of Shadow aren't fun for the whole family? Say it ain't so."

"I'm sorry to break your heart, mate. Hope you don't have to cancel any planned vacations."

Bob's left eyeflame leaks a single spark of a tear, juxtaposing oddly with his skeletal grin.

"Hopefully it's a moot point anyway; I think breaking through the walls between worlds is a little past the Gruffs' capabilities. They haven't seemed that smart so far."

"Eh. Best to be careful, I think. Actually, speaking of." He retrieves the Bag of Holding and comes up with another gold coin. "If you have not started the magic yet, I'm gonna switch out one of the coins, so it can be four for four on awful places to land. I know exactly where this one was minted."

"Ominous. I like it." He flips the Toril coin bagwards and replaces it in the diagram with the new one. "Alright. This part's gonna be kind of boring."

He closes his eyes and begins chanting in an unfamiliar language. The train starts rolling along the track, and the coins hover a few inches into the air. The air fills with a faint bluish glow.

This continues for a couple of minutes. It is, in fact, kind of boring after a while.

... Yep. Kinda boring after a while.

Veron decides to do something productive, and flips the Toril coin a couple of times to see if it lands heads or tails. It lands heads five times in a row. Yep, Tymora can in fact reach here, neat. He quietly offers her a mental thank you, then flips the coin into the air and pushes it into the Plane of Shadow. He has no idea if this will actually get the coin to where he would like it to go, it's more luck than anything else. That's kind of the point. Maybe the coin will be shuffled through the ever shifting Plane of Shadow and find its way to Tymora. Maybe it won't. Either way, with the Plane of Shadow meddling, it'll wind up somewhere it belongs. It's kind of hard to tell without talking to (or being) a cleric, but he's pretty sure Lady Luck appreciates that kind of thing.

This completed, he waits patiently.

Meanwhile:

"...I'm not generally... like this," David says after a while. "Emotional. It's rarely a good idea."

"It's not a bad idea to be emotional here. You've seen me. You know it's not." Little dragon nuzzle. "And I think it's good to not bottle everything up."

"Maybe when there's someone around to snuggle with," he says bitterly. "I'm kind of used to being alone. The only person I could touch besides Harry was a figment of his imagination, and then she died. Emotions get in the way."

"Well, I am not a figment of Harry's imagination, and I am also snuggling you. It sounds like you've been through a lot, that'd make anyone emotional." Snuggle, snuggle.

"I don't want to- develop habits. That would be inconvenient when you go off to your own world. I already did that once, with Lash - the friend. Who died."

"I understand not wanting to become co-dependent or whatever, but I don't think your choices are 'rely exclusively on me for your mental health' or 'be alone forever'? I know at least one person that can do planar transportation. Even without me and Veron, you don't have to not be touched. The multiverse is a big place, there's lots of stuff in it, and I bet some of it can solve your problem. And, um."

She considers how to word this delicately, decides that her other half's the eloquent one and he's kind of shit at it too, and goes with: "We don't have a home. Returning to our own world is like... yeah, it'd be nice to visit, but I don't know if it'll fit us anymore. We have been away for years, and the first time we tried to go back we got roped into an adventure that involved us going to Hell. I don't think there's a, 'We go home and open a bar in Hilltop and live out our days in domestic bliss' ending for us anymore. We're too big now. So. That's not a 'when.' Or, not in a permanent living situation sense, anyway."

David chuffs thoughtfully.

"You weren't kidding, about the lost person thing."

"We really weren't! It's kind of tragic!"

"Well. For what it's worth, I'm glad you're here."

"Thanks! I'm glad we're here too. I get to snuggle you, I am flying around and talking and stuff, and honestly this latest adventure has been kind of fun so far. No 'Hey go wander into the deadly murder maze' or 'Hey your teacher is dying go find a thing so you don't disappoint him' or 'Hey here's a geas you can't get out of, have fun with that,' or anything. It's nice to be able to just leave! We're not gonna, but a lot of our adventures were not, strictly speaking, optional."

"The feeling is not unfamiliar," David says drily.

"Yeah. We get that impression." She nestles slightly further into fluff. There is a lot of fluff, and she is such a small dragon. "I just thought you'd appreciate if I stepped away from talking about you for a bit, you know?"

"It's appreciated," he reassures her. A paw comes up to pat her between the wings. "Don't worry, I appreciate what you're going for. Also, the snuggles."

"Oh, good. The snuggles are nice for me too. And the uh, the empathy. That is also nice."

Paw-based pats are inefficient. He shifts human unselfconsciously and scritches between her ears. "Empathy's pretty great, yeah."

"Yes! It is!" She pauses thoughtfully. "Ooo, hold on, I think I can be fluffy." She closes her eyes and hums to herself, then abruptly shifts into an opossum.

"Ha! There I go! And now I am fluffy, carry on, sir."

"There's a neat trick," he says, carrying on the scritches. "I do hope you realize I had to work on taking this form for over a year with the personal help of a three-hundred-year-old shaman. You, my friend, are cheating."

"Yep!" she says, without a sliver of guilt. "I can't just shift into anything, though, my cheating self knowledge doesn't extend that far. Just things that I can be, one of which is apparently a possum. I can't turn human, I checked."

"Pity. Opposable thumbs are a great delight."

"I have opposable thumbs as a dragon," she says, amused. "As a possum too, actually. They're just on my feet, which is super weird."

"Well, that's good."

Downstairs, Harry comes out of his trance. The model train is chugging merrily along, passing by a different coin every few seconds. The enameled leaf sits sparkling in the conductor's seat.

"Well, that should be fun," Harry says, dusting off nothing in particular from his hands.

"Should be," agrees Veron, amused. "I'll give a head's up to friends in the areas I have friends in. I don't think there's much reason for them to land on anyone I know in the Underdark, but I'd hate to catch anyone off guard. And if they land on anyone I know in the Plane of Shadow they will be, uh, in my territory." He coughs. "I expect them to have a bad time."

(Bob begins humming a repetitive chiptune under his "breath.")

Harry starts clambering up the ladder, head still turned to face Veron. "I think our next step should be to investigate Marcone's disappearance. I think I know where to start, too; he operates a secret brothel nearby, and it's run by one of the few people I've ever known him to actually trust."

"Sure, sounds good," agrees Veron, following behind Harry. "Should I be sneaky like last time you were investigating? That seemed to work out pretty well, and I don't think I'd be all that helpful with it."

"Yeah, probably a good idea. It did work out, and why," he says, entering the living room, "are you naked."

"Clothes are mortal bullshit," David says mildly.

"... Um," says Veron. He conscientiously covers his eyes, rather than get an eyeful. "I acknowledge your stance there, it is probably real uncomfortable to be a shapeshifter with clothes getting in your way, but we mortals sure would appreciate it if you would please put some pants on."

  "Oh! Oh no, they do care about you being naked or not, don't they. Sorry! It was convenient for him to have opposable thumbs!" says the not-a-dragon.

That sure is an expression Veron is making, isn't it.

David rolls his eyes, but retrieves and dons his boxers.

"I'm decent now, you can stop squeaking at me."

"Much obliged, thanks." He uncovers his eyes, and...

... that sure is a Harry Dresden lookalike that is just in boxers, isn't it. Maybe. Maybe it would have been smart to wait until David had on more clothes before looking.

Um.

It takes a couple seconds before he remembers he should probably not be looking.

"... So I'm just going to, I'll, be right back I have a thing to do," he says too quickly, and then he disappears into black smoke.

"David."

"I genuinely didn't know that was going to happen." He pauses. "I remain agnostic on whether I would've done it anyway if I had. That was funny."

"Oh no," his soul giggles. "Oh no, I'm sorry, poor Veron. He'll be back, really, he's fine."

"And when he does, David will have put his damn pants on."

"Fascist," David grumbles, acquiring pants.

"Do you know when he'll be back?" Harry asks the nameless opossum.

"Uhhhh... A couple of minutes, maybe? It won't be long, he just. Needed to be away."

"Well alright then."

Harry sits in an armchair and retrieves a book from a nearby end table.

  The nameless opossum snuggles David and frets, very quietly.

Then: here is Veron, appearing out of nowhere and pretending like that did not at all happen.

"Right, places that might get things dropped on them have been warned, and my soul walking out and about means I can go handle it in the Plane of Shadow while having a way to get back," he says, without any preamble. He is not looking at David. Or at his soul. Harry, though, Harry is safe to look at. Harry has all of his clothes on.

He totally does! He's nice like that.

"Excellent! Let's get going, then, the club isn't too far from here but we might as well get there as soon as possible."

"Yeah," he agrees. Then, at last, he looks to the souls. "Uh, are you two coming, or..." He waves awkwardly at them. "... Sticking around for important soul business that I probably don't want the particulars of?"

  His soul makes a little possum shrug. "If you get into trouble I'll notice and can go help. I'll be more helpful as an inside soul than out and about. So, no rush to go for me, up to David."

"... Also, you're a possum now?"

  "I'm very talented!"

"... Okay."

"Oh, I'm coming along," David says, getting up and stretching. "Harry has a severe problem with emotional regulation when it comes to Johnny Marcone and his associates, especially the one we're visiting. I don't want him committing any unnecessary property damage."

"Thanks, Mom," Harry grouses. 

"No one wants us to go there," David says sardonically. "Get your coat."

"I can also avoid being all sneaky if you'd think I'd help," says Veron. "I am unlikely to cause unnecessary property damage. Necessary property damage is more of a hit or miss, but I'm hard to piss off. Last time it took an Archdevil."

  From David's shoulder, his soul adds, "We did cause a lot of property damage, though."

"I thought we didn't do too bad, that time."

  "No, we partially destabilized the entire level of Cania and broke its hopelessness metaphysical thing, possibly forever. It is now possible that the entire thing will slide right off the rest of Hell and split off into being something less evil. At some point. If the good guys work at it."

"Oh," says Veron, not really knowing what else to say to that. He'd say 'oops,' except he doesn't really regret it, and it wasn't really an accident.

  His soul gives a little happy purr and snuggles David.

"Congratulations," David comments, heading for the door. "He mostly just ends up burning down buildings."

  "Thanks!" she chirps, brightly. "It's okay, sometimes things really do need to get burned down. When appropriate."

"So uh, sneak or no sneak...?" asks Veron, a little disturbed by his soul being so cavalier about burning things.

"I'd say sneak, if you don't mind. If it goes bad, it's nice to have a hidden ally in reserve."

"Sure," he shrugs. To the car!

To the car.

David drives fast, even in the heavy snow. They make it to the place in record time.

There's no big sign over the door; that'd be tacky. Indeed, it's difficult to tell what the place even is, from its exterior. David swipes a card and walks in, Harry following behind. The room is full of exercise equipment and a small number of extremely wealthy-looking men and women using said equipment, each accompanied by a personal trainer. The personal trainers range from beautiful twenty-year-old girls in excessively tight tank tops to beautiful twenty-year-old boys in excessively tight exercise shorts.

(Harry looks around in disgust. Well, mostly disgust.)