He sure was!  It identifies him as Samuel Lane, age 43, picture and description consistent with the guy you just killed.  It gives his address, a street in Raymond, New Hampshire.  He's got some keys, too, do you want those?

Nico's never heard of Raymond; the GPS says it's about an hour and a half away.  Sure, let's give that a shot.  If it doesn't work out, he'll just find a nice graveyard and do his declaration there.

He'll scoop up the license and the keys, plus any random cash, and start driving south.

There's not much traffic in this direction, in the afternoon on Easter Saturday.  In not much time at all, you're pulling into your enemy's driveway.

It turns out that the heart of your enemy's power is a little one-story house, painted yellow with a sunken garage.  The windows are arranged in groups of two, all across the front facing.  The blinds are all drawn.  There's only one obvious door, facing the street.

(twos, stable strength, growth out of fertile soil, the joining of opposed forces to a common purpose, dominion...)

Nico probably shouldn't bring more of his magical tools across this threshold than he has to; then again, there are some things he can't bear to leave behind.  He'll fill his shoulder bag with just the three Tarot decks, two high-precision thermometers, a lighter, a candle, and a half-full water bottle.  The rest of his tools can wait in the car.

He'll pull in his aura all the way, just so none of the neighbors pay him any attention, and breathe through a few breaths to make sure he's got it stable.  Then he'll get out of the car, walk over to the one door (one, ace, first force, fixed point, pure unshaped potential...) and try out his new ring of keys.  Do any of them fit the dead wizard's lock?

The keys are a little clumsy in your fingers, but the third one works.  The door opens onto a picture-perfect American living room: big comfortable couch and recliner chairs, oriented around a huge TV.  There's a bookcase over the couch; at a glance the titles are all classics and pop sociology.  Through a hallway to the left a kitchen is just barely visible, gleaming white.

He's had this body for three weeks how are the fingers still a problem?!

But OK, fine, this setup is less wizard-y than expected but on reflection it makes sense.  This is a small town in New England; Nico doesn't have to meet the neighbors to know that they're curious as cats, behind their bland Yankee exteriors, and they wouldn't be put off by something as simple as a set of closed blinds.  The more occult stuff, the real heart of the house, won't be out in public view.

He'll shut the door and walk around the living room a little bit, trying to read the traces of the old owner's attention.  He should be able to do that much, even through this crappy body.

Sure.  But in this room there's not much to find: a few traces of attention on the TV, a little more on one of the recliners.  Nothing on the bookshelf.

The kitchen is a little better.  Everything's painted a sterile white but he does use it, especially the big four-burner stove.  The dishwasher is about half-full of dirty dishes, mostly glasses and little bowls.

But the bulk of his attention was focused on something under your feet somewhere; you can feel it even through the floor.

Oh really now.  Okay, let's look around for the basement stairs.

It turns out that they're in the pantry.  The door isn't hidden, exactly, just sort of not obvious in the shadow past the shelves of dry goods.  It's locked, but one of your new keys unlocks it.

Yeah, let's see the wizard's lair.  He opens the door and walks through, all senses on alert.  There probably aren't any traps -- it's hard to set a magical trap that will outlive you, and dangerous to set a mundane one in your own home -- but there are any, they'll be right here.

No traps, just a warm, earthy smell, like an old forest on a warm spring day.  Narrow stone steps with a clearly home-made wooden handrail lead down, weirdly far down, into a wide unfinished basement stuffed with rough wooden shelves and tables, covered with books and papers and bags.  It's lit with a dozen rock-crystal lamps, not arranged to any plan you can see, powered with a sprawling octopus of power strips and extension cords.  As your eyes adjust you realize that while there are lots of shelves and work surfaces, there's only one chair, a cheap little folding job in front of an animal cage.

There are a lot of animal cages, actually, strewn throughout the space, and they're all occupied.  All local animals, it looks like: just at first glance you see squirrels, magpies, a goose, and two small housecats sharing a bigger cage near the stairs.

All of them are watching you, unblinking.

Okay that's wildly impressive.  Nico isn't an animal expert but he's pretty sure that if you put this many animals in a basement, it doesn't smell like an old forest on a warm spring day.  And it's still working!  Crazy.  Unless they're constructs instead of real animals, he guesses, which would be wildly impressive for a totally different reason.

Nico will wander around a little bit, peering at any books or papers that happen to be visible, checking on the animals-or-constructs-or-whatever-they-are.  Do they have food and water?  Is there more around for them?  Does everybody have enough?  Are any of them thirsty?  And, ah, what of the inevitable consequences of feeding and watering your animals?  Or is there a magical solution to that?

All the animals have water, but some of their food dishes are empty.  Some of the bags turn out to be animal food, just standard pet store fare.  Wandering around you find even more animals: a sparrow, a fox, and a family of rabbits, too, kept in another large cage with a sort of hamster-maze construct to hop around in.  But again, they're all just watching you.

The books are mostly in Latin, with a little Hebrew thrown in for spice.  Lots of diagrams: some anatomical sketches of the brain from various angles, a few of the top bit of the sephirot, some totally obscure.  Almost everything is in the same handwriting.

There is no magical solution to animal poop, or at least this particular practitioner didn't have one.  There's a plumbing hookup in one corner of the basement, with a big industrial sink, that seems to be the basic plan.

Nico's Qabalah sucks; there's no way he's going to understand this in any depth.  If he had a week to translate everything, and check his own sources, and read the experiment logs (this guy obviously kept experiment logs, measuring the exact amount of divine light shone onto each brain area, or whatever Qabalistic magicians do), then, honestly, probably he still wouldn't get it.  On the traditional wizard-to-psychic scale Nico is mostly a psychic, whereas this guy was obviously pure wizard.

Traditionally this is one of the big drawbacks of killing a fellow practitioner: they'll never get a chance to explain all the cool stuff they were working on.  If Nico's plan works...but it's too early to think hard about that.  Stay with the checklist, focus on what's in front of you.

The wizard/psychic divide is deeply false, as you well know.

Well, yes, but it's shallowly true.  Nico has ever written an experiment log, when he absolutely couldn't escape it, but in the back of his mind he still wonders what he lost by making it.  He's not worried that knowledge will get away from him if he doesn't write it down, he's worried about chopping off all the parts he doesn't know how to frame in human words.

A true alchemist, of course, would just fuse the two halves of the binary and do both.

Speaking of that, Nico will go around refilling the different food bowls, if he can figure out which foods go where.  And he'll clean the cages too, he guesses, if any of them are in really bad shape.  Then he'll address his audience:

"Okay, everybody, here's the deal.  I need you to witness a ritual.  It should take about ten minutes, unless something strange, ah, unless a different strange thing than I expect happens."  Something about this is taking him way back, to class presentations in school, total enforced attention without any sign of interest or understanding.  "All I want from you is your attention, just like you're giving me now.  After that, I'll make sure you're taken care of."

Any reaction from his audience?

"Total enforced attention without any sign of interest or understanding" sums it up pretty well, actually.

Good enough.  Nico will clear a space on a table, somewhere close to the middle of the room, and start laying things out.

First the two startlingly expensive thermometers, on either side of the workspace. They take a little fumbling, before he figures out how to turn them on, but they have to go first to give them time to calibrate. Second the water bottle, set on the far side of the table, in plain view. Third the candle; Nico thinks a minute, then clears all the books and papers off of his chosen table, instead of just shoving them to the side.

Last, at least for this step: one absolutely worthless Tarot deck, as a control.

The deck is cartoon animal themed. According to the packaging, it's suitable for children five and up. Nico cuts the deck, and gives it a few slow riffle shuffles. The cards are awkwardly big, maybe so the intended audience can't choke on them, but this body should be good at handling cards, even if it's still clumsy with keys (after three weeks).

He lights the candle, shuffles the deck overhand while the smoke curls up to the ceiling, then deals himself three cards, face up.

UUUUUUUGH. Why does the raccoon look like it's floating upward? Why a fishing pole? Why is everything apparently happening in a hurricane? Why a crown of fishbones? FISH LIVE IN WATER, THEIR BONES INVERT THE WHOLE MEANING OF THE CARD!

Tarot cards can be dangerous. Even a glance at a card from a powerful Tarot deck can damage a person's psyche, if they're vulnerable in the right ways. Apparently exceptionally weak cards can have the same effect! What a great thing to know.

But really, it's good that Nico feels this way. Each card is supposed to represent an Archetype, one of the big, simplistic mental entities that make up the human psyche -- or were created by the human psyche, no one really knows -- and that exist outside this layer of reality. They pay attention to things that resemble themselves, is the key. If you make a good symbolic representation of the Thing humans call The Fool, then that Thing will start to focus on it, and Foolish things will happen. Put several such representations together, and they'll interact, often in ways humans find hard to predict. But that's still the best way to use them, because the Archetypes by themselves are usually more trouble than they're worth. The Fool walks along the edge of a cliff -- unguided he inevitably falls. The Ace of Wands pours out power -- but doesn't try to channel or control it. The Eight of Cups walks away from a nourishing situation, just before it collapses or dries up -- but you can't spend your whole life doing that.

Anyway, the key point here is that there's no way in the world that any of these cards are drawing any attention on their own. The only way that could happen, he thinks, glancing nervously at the candle smoke, at the water bottle, at the thermometers, is if some of the Archetypes are already paying attention to him personally. If that's the case, then the fact that he spread the cards tonight, cards bought with the oldest and purest money there is, ought to provoke a reaction.

There are simple things that happen, when that attention begins to gather. Water that doesn't quite sit level. Candle smoke that puddles in the center of the table. Unexplained chills and drafts.

Well?

The water is flat in its bottle, the candle smoke is curling upward, the two thermometers are reading a steady 74.2 degrees.

Okay.  Good.  Great.  Nico sweeps up the cards, hopefully forever, and puts them back in his bag.  On to the second test.

The second pack he pulls out is one he's used many times before, one of the first he ever painted himself, based on the classic Rider-Waite deck from the early 1900s.  These designs were the gold standard for decades; Carl Jung is supposed to have treated a depressive, once, by showing him a Ten of Cups from this deck at an appropriate moment.  But it's still an old deck, not powerful at all compared to the third one he's carrying, and he's seen the symbols too many times to be worried that they can push him around.  And just in case, he's wearing that borrowed body.

The first spread was just Nico scouting out the psychic landscape, doing a little dowsing.  This time it's real divination.  He alternates riffles and overhand shuffles, slows down his breathing and clears his mind of everything but his question.  Splits the cards into four even piles, a quarter at a time rather than three half cuts, and lays them out in a diamond, north-south-east-west.  He flips the top cards over, one at a time, and asks:

"Where shall I open the gate?"

The Northern card turns easily, almost pops off the pile into your hand:

The Southern card is slower, smoother, like it wants to flip but only along the exact trajectory it's already chosen:

The Eastern card is just heavy, turning in your hand like long, skinny lead brick:

The Western card doesn't fight you, but as you turn it you have a sudden sense of vertigo, as though the whole room is turning with you.  The water in the bottle sloshes sideways, so strongly that it wobbles, tips, and falls sideways.  As the card falls into place the sensation vanishes.  The water bottle jolts a little, and rolls onto the floor.