Just a little closer, and it could get to the shiny thing. The rooftops of this place were incredibly precarious. It had already found an easy way up through the inn, and it had been taking a winding path across various buildings. So far the worst part had been balancing on a beam that bridged the street between the card and weapon shops. At least that had been close to the inn and out, since it had fallen off about six times. There wasn’t exactly much to loot up on top of the building, as, surprisingly, stores didn’t generally stock their merchandise outside of their walls exposed to the elements, but it was definitely learning the layout of the place.

Inn back where they had split up, which was close to the card shop. The inn had a few coins laying on the ground, but it was at that point it had realized a major flaw in its split up plan. It didn’t have any pockets. At the most, it would be able to hold one thing, other than it’s balancing stick, so it couldn’t just grab all the money and run. One more reason to prioritize finding the torso piece.

There actually was a box hidden on top of the card shop, but all it had was playing cards. It was tossed up there along with a giant pile of scrap metal and junk, which defied all logical possibilities it could think of with the very little thought it was willing to allocate to that mystery. Any time spent trying to figure out why people put trash in places was time not spent trying to find things that weren’t trash.

It was past this point that the rooftops gave way to a yawning gap of road, and it was forced to try to balance its way across a wooden beam to get to the other side. Using the stick as a horizontal balance allowed it to lower its center of balance somewhat, but mechanical assistance could only help so much, particularly when it was nowhere near a long as the type of pole someone who was actually prepared for this type of event would have used.

The sixth time that it’d fallen off, it just went into the weapon shop and found that there was a rooftop access.

Trying to chat up the shopkeeper didn’t do much, particularly since they were just trying to sell it stuff and it didn’t have any money, and also it didn’t have an outgoing translator. It had lifted up it’s stick to indicate that it already had a weapon-like item, and the shopkeep jumped to the conclusion that it was trying to sell the stick.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

They offered three fifty, however much that was.

At that point, it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to get anywhere through words. Instead, it just ran through the back of the store to climb the stairs and jumped out a window. That brought it to some sort of pharmacy’s roof, which had unmarked bottles aplenty inside. That’d be a good landmark for returning to once it had the ability to carry things; medicines were always in demand. It couldn’t stop there though, the weapon shop-keep seemed at least mildly irritated by it’s completely reasonable actions, and it would probably be the subject of retaliation of some sort should it stick around.

Fortunately, there was an empty building just a few roofs over that it could swing down into. There wasn’t much inside it, hence the empty appellation, but it seemed like a good place to lie low. That was always important when you had a good deal of mayhem to cause; not being able to escape could lead to very boring times.

It gave it about two minutes for people to lose interest in whatever it may have done, and clambered back up to the roof. There were a lot of places that it could probably bust into for looting potential, but for all it knew any given thing was just a hunk of junk. The next time it ran into a building with unmarked bottles, it just pulled one up with telekinesis and drank it to find out what it was. Turned out it was just poison. That still didn’t tell it anything useful though!

Which brought it to this shiny thing. Whatever it was, it was just outside of its reach, and barely sparkling off in the distance. If it could climb onto one higher roof, it might be able to get to it, but every time it tried to get onto that particular part of the structure, it slid off. At this point, it was going to have to resort to drastic measures; getting the human to do this for it.

Jumping down to the street, the experiment checks to see where exactly this tiny bit of potential loot was hidden. From the look of the shopfront, it was some sort of compounding pharmacy. Considering that it had run across three of these places already, medicine being valuable was the theory with a good bit of weight behind it. Definitely better to come back later with the ability to carry things though.

Testing the air around the area for irregularities, there was a gradient of miasma off to it’s left. Figuring that was probably its human, it heads over to collect the extra carrying capacity.