Neri crept along the moonlit alley, lurking in the shadows of the cloudy night, setting her feet one before the other, methodically, slowly. She was suppressing all her sounds nearly perfectly with [Rogue’s Step], but skills were no excuse to neglect the basics. And besides, if she couldn’t pull off a job like this without her skills, she would have to renounce her title. Sure, she gave that title to herself and no-one actually used it, but it was a matter of honor. Zolnre’s Queen of Crime was good at what she did.

Sidling up to her destination, Neri took note of the building’s wall and shook her head in disappointment. Cracked stones, held together with greytar, in a wall that sloped inwards just a fraction of a degree. In her early days, this would have been the highlight of her week. Now it was just a mildly amusing thought, memories of a time when things were harder. With a last, forlorn look at the most perfect climbing wall she’d ever seen outside of a gym, Neri crouched down, then jumped, flinging herself straight up to the open second story window that was her destination. Grabbing the windowsill, she pulled herself up, slipping through the opening, and landed inside the house. The floor was hard wood, and more polished than an heirloom sword. Undoubtedly creaked worse than her father-in-law’s knees, too, not that Neri would ever hear that. She hadn’t made a floorboard creak since she was five, let alone after she started leveling up. And the Sibyls were sure, confirmed with the Auspex himself – no-one would be here tonight.

After a short pause with no guards appearing out of nowhere to punish that fate-tempting thought, Neri crept forward, slipping in and out of rooms as she hunted her prize. The good Circleman certainly liked crystals. The things were growing everywhere, and two-thirds of them were entirely mundane. The place was a probably a sparkling mess of fractured light in the daytime. Neri knew that replacing plants with crystal growths in decoration had been a fad among the wealthy a few years ago, but this was excessive. Come to think of it, though, this guy might have started it. He was quite prominent back then, after all. But unless he was growing unregistered dimensional shards in his house, it wasn’t likely that the crystals were hiding what she was looking for. [Valuevision] wasn’t much help here either, as it dealt in metal and magic, revealing things like piles of gold and enchanted weapons. Things with more subjective and transient value, like art, stocks, and, in this case, information, didn’t show up at all.

Those things did tend to be stored with the gold, though, and that was how she found it. A hidden safe underneath a cabinet, cleverer than most, but it wasn’t even lined with clotlead. Granted, few people expected thieves as high level as Neri was. With a heave, she moved the cabinet out of the way, and easily opened the safe with a practiced combination of skills and training. Inside, she found what she was looking for. She stuffed the papers in her storage rod, moved the cabinet back, and managed to take one step on her way out before she heard it. A creak of the floorboards.

Stolen novel; please report.

With a thought, her [Shade Shell] flickered into place, and Nerisse slunk through the darkness, heading toward the window as fast as she could. She saw them, as she flitted between patches of darkness. Dressed in sharp uniforms, dark gray on slightly-lighter gray, soft black buttons holding impeccably tailored jackets closed, and as many different weapons as there were faces shrouded in shadow. A phisteel mace, round lightning arcing between the spikes. A mountstone wand, flickering runes along the side indicating its remaining charges. Armored hands, coated in green power. A book bound with troll flesh, pulsing with an eerie purple light that was clearly only pretending to be purple. A frostgold sword, floating point-down, with no apparent master. Nerisse didn’t usually plan on combat, but she was confident in her ability to take down what underleveled guards she may happen to encounter in her work. Here? Against whoever these unidentifiable, prophecy defying, obscenely powerful people were? She was confident that she had no chance. She could almost taste the raw power in the air. These people knew that they could be seen. Their equipment was starkly visible, and the message was clear. These were the things that would end her life.

If she got caught. With a run, a jump, and a [Dramatic Exit], Nerisse crashed through the window, flying out across the alley. She would never have made it to the roof of the building across, owing to the fact that the window she had jumped from was barely at 2/3rds that structure’s height. Obviously, her pursuers had planned for this. With that complacency combined with [Dramatic Exit] stunning them, she had plenty of time. Nerisse gathered her legs, and used [Air Leap], springing onto the roof with room to spare. She landed with a roll, and took off running. If she had read the mysterious assailants right, a dramatic rooftop chase with no witnesses would be just their style. Too bad Nerisse didn’t feel like obliging them.

Out of the corner of her eye, Neri caught a golden-blue streak flit across the night sky, and received several bumps for her misplaced attention.

“Watch where you’re going!” One of the colliding pedestrians advised, and Neri took that suggestion to heart. [One of the Crowd] had never failed her yet. Those people may have been well-equipped, but they never even saw her face, let alone grabbed a thi signature. In a Zolnre crowd, even this late at night, they didn’t stand a chance, if they knew she was here at all. It was harder than it seemed to land safely from a rooftop.

With her successful escape, Neri was free to turn her attention to other things. The information in her storage rod was obviously more important than she had expected of her target. Improperly defended, though. Perhaps… An attempt to find the Sibyls? Maybe. She’d have to look over the information herself, and stay away from her usual haunts, for now. Things people wanted to hide this badly usually weren’t given up on that easily.