Ughhhh okay I don’t actually remember if this is how it happened and my brain is way too mush to go hunt for references in my own campaign.

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Don’t get involved, the strange detectives told Simon, after witnessing him disappear into thin air, after seeing how magic was second nature to him. You’ve stumbled into dangerous people.

It didn’t seem that dangerous, at first. More odd than anything – people searching the walls and cellars of an old house, someone digging up the earth in the old memorial park.

The detectives also told Simon to send word if he’d seen anything weird. So Simon watched, and watched, even when he wasn’t sure what he was seeing.

Still, when all the suspicious people left, Simon knew something was wrong.

He’d packed lightly, hopeful enough that his mother would put him up back in the city. He asked casual questions, he followed the trail, and for several sweet, glorious days, he thought he was doing a good job of it.

It didn’t last.

“So he’s the one who’s been watching you?” The man in the white mask spoke evenly, almost as if bored. Simon’s shoulders ached from the way they were turned out to keep him on his knees, and he suddenly felt very, very afraid.

“He’s a sneaky bastard,” the man Simon had been following huffed. “We only caught him on the way here.”

The man in the mask grabbed Simon’s hair to turn his head up. Behind the mask, the eyes were shining an eerie, unnatural blue, and then the man suddenly tore Simon’s cloak away, only to drop it after picking up the small black brooch Simon had been keeping hidden under the collar, shaped like two crescent moons entwined with each other.

Simon jerked, trying to get away from the hands restraining him. He couldn’t claim the brooch to be his, exactly, having found it in a secret place that had whispered its existence into Simon’s head, but it felt important.

It felt like something that Simon was supposed to have.

“How fortuitous,” the man sad, still without a hint of happiness or even sarcasm. “So much searching, and you deliver it to me on a silver platter.”

He turned away and threw over his shoulder. “Search him. Who knows, maybe he isn’t as much of a nobody as he seems.”

Simon watched as his leathers and boot-trees were strewn around, carelessly thrown against the stones of the road. He barely struggled as someone patted around his pockets, poking through every hole and inspecting every scrap of paper or thread found there.

“Obscura?..”

At his goon’s voice, the man in the mask turned again. For the first time, his voice sounded mildly interested. “What of them?”

“He had a card with their address.”

The man in the mask came up to them and took the card. Simon remembered being given it, along with a bunch of others, by that lady detective – just in case, she said, for an emergency.

The masked man crushed the card between his fingers and turned to Simon. “Most fortuitous, indeed.” Then two fingers were pressing into Simon’s forehead and there were dark hazel eyes boring into his.

“Show me what you know,” the man said. Something probed into Simon’s mind, and he felt a whine form in his throat. What he knew? Simon didn’t know anything.

The probing turned into a relentless pressure. Simon still resisted, just out of the principle of things, and he breathed out a sigh of relief when it finally subsided.

Then something exploded in his mind, as if his brain was collapsing on itself. And a cool voice, soft, without malice, “Show me what you know.”

Blurred images of watching someone from the rooftops. A cafe. Glimpses of white hair, of weapons, the clinking of glass.

Someone’s concerned voice.

Don’t get involved.

Don’t get involved.\

So that was what she’d meant.