"Found somethin', boss," Columbo called in.
"Report, Columbo," I said, putting my finger to my ear.
"The robots can talk?" Nicky asked.
"Kind of," I said. "They can speak about three hundred lemmas of English and their conjugations. It's enough to have a natural conversation provided you don't get too technical, but if you've spoken to an intermediate ESL speaker, it'd feel familiar. Now hush. Sorry, Columbo, please report your findings."
"Found two Demiurges with a truck, carrying stuff for Skinner. They could know a lot. I have their spirit scent."
"Good work, detective," I said. "Transmit all the technical details to the mainframe, and pursue your next lead. We'll take this one from here."
"Got it, boss."
He hung up, and I sighed.
"Alright, everyone," I said. "We might have work to do. I sure hope you don't have plans next week."
"We're not moving out now?" Lisa asked, looking up from the officially licensed Dark Souls board game we'd been playing for the past hour, and which had taken a lot of time to set up and explain the rules to.
"We are not," I said. "Hunting these two and getting anything useful out of it is going to take at least a week to set up. We're finishing this game this time."
"...Fucking finally," Lisa said.
----------------------------------------
"Holy shit," Lisa whispered, while Akane wheezed in the back seat.
"I'm already in love," I agreed, parking the car.
With the Virtual Machine and modern cell networks, I was able to access the internet from anywhere sufficiently developed, and that meant I could access my scanners back home through that infrastructure... and, also, the metaphorical condom of mad science cryptographic security to ensure that nobody else could access them.
'Conventional' mad science scanners tended to choke on mad science anti-scanning shields, and were generally quite unable to see within their borders. But. Unless you had the knowledge required to travel across dimensional boundaries- not just see across them but move things across them- then your anti-scanning shields would only hide stuff in the material realm. Not even wolfsbane shields would protect you- sure, those blocked spirit powers from working in their aegis, but spirit signatures were far more resilient than spirit powers, and it took one hell of a wolfsbane shield to hide a signature.
And Doctor Skinner didn't have either of those skillsets. She was a specialist in control, scanning, and automatons, just like me. And I knew she didn't have that interdimensional knowledge herself, not just because she had to steal the portal gun, but also because I'd tried spirit-tracking on her before and it worked. When I was on A-510 and had plenty of druids around to work with, I called up Jason Thronebreaker to help me hunt her in the past, and had even gotten a spirit compass made that'd point to her through any of her shielding...
...right up until she found a place to hide that was in the shadow of a stationary spirit of obfuscation and secrecy, and then one of her minions smashed the compass when I was looking for her right before I got isekai'd.
But hey, joke's on you, Skinner. There's no such spirits here for you to hide behind, and now I've got another compass.
Granted, I didn't have her spirit scent anymore, but I did have two demiurges who probably worked for her, and were apparently quick enough on the uptake to realize they're not gonna be able to fight their way out of this one. Now, I just needed to arrange a meeting with them that Doctor Skinner wouldn't be able to spy on, without making her too suspicious.
For this, I'd need drones. Sure, Akane was able to make flying machines, but those were going to be overkill and also a pain for her to maintain, and also, this whole world was already able to make flying machines. So I talked to Valiant about UAV airspace laws, filed a series of algorithmically-generated flight plans with the relevant office, and purchased some off-the-shelf ornithopter drones that looked a hell of a lot like ravens.
Valiant had, in the process of educating me on the relevant airspace laws, informed me that one of the regulations passed twenty years ago- shortly after Doctor Haruna Sakurai accidentally started a drone craze during her time in the private sector- was that the only unattended drones allowed in municipal airspace were drones that had been convincingly made to look like pigeons, crows, ravens, or other local birds that would be reasonable to find flying in an urban environment. This had pretty effectively strangled the drone nuisance in its crib, and while even these days remote control quadcopters were a reasonably common christmas gift for children, on par with remote control planes and helicopters, pretty much nobody besides filmmakers had any practical use for drones in the United States, and nobody here had tried the appealing but very stupid and unworkable idea of a quadcopter delivery service.
He'd capped off that lecture with "And that's why, if you go to the right stores, you can purchase off-the-shelf ornithopter drones that are basically just remote-control birds."
And after that conversation- which Akane probably would've enjoyed more than I did because aerospace was her thing, not mine- I did in fact involve Akane in the process as I set up some ornithopter drones to fly effectively random patterns over the city, carrying with them some anti-scanning field projectors.
The anti-scanning was the point of this whole exercise. If Doctor Skinner saw anti-scanning fields moving around the city constantly- well, obviously not saw them but certainly noticed them- then she would get a little paranoid, but that'd only last, like, a week before she just got used to it. And since these drones were establishing a pattern of flying from random-ish point to random-ish point before landing on a rooftop or in a parking lot for a random duration between two and twenty minutes, this would make for an excellent smokescreen when we needed that anti-scanning field to provide cover for us to approach Skinner's new pet Demiurges.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
So, we waited. A whole week.
And then, one Saturday morning at 10 AM, because Skinner knew I was Jewish and observed Shabbat, we all geared up, loaded into Akane's car- which itself was invisible to mad science scanners and also now had tinted windows- and followed the spirit scent of our quarry, who seemed to be... well, for lack of a better term, our people.
The spirit scent was three spirit scents, tangled tightly together. The one we could currently see was a decommissioned (or stolen) and subsequently souped-up Bimbo brand bread delivery truck, with "Down With Cis" semi-sloppily spray-painted on the side of the box trailer, and parked at a gas station on the edge of Bee Cave. On top of it was perched one of our drones, looking for all the world like a raven that had simply landed on top of a parked truck to take a break from flying- one of the most normal things in the world, and barely remarkable unless you were two years old and had learned to speak from parents pointing at random everyday objects and saying "Look, an object!" and subsequently developing the extremely annoying belief that this was simply how people talked to each other, because you didn't know any better.
The other two spirit scents, as far as we could tell, were the people who drove that truck, and they were inside the gas station itself, probably buying food and drinks or maybe even just using the bathroom.
"Scanner's ready," Akane said, having composed herself.
"Shields are up," I said. "Hit it."
Anti-scanning shields weren't perfect. Powerful, charged up, directed, and unsubtly active scanners could punch through them, at a short enough range. This wasn't great for finding people, but it was good for figuring out what was inside a black box that you had already found. And, while we'd normally be hesitant to use an active scanner, because those produce very distinct noise that other scanners are pretty much designed to pick up on...
...If we were using it inside a tuned anti-scanning shield we controlled? Well, that would contain a hell of a lot of the noise.
"That truck is mad science," Akane said, reading the scanner. "Capable of very high speeds... as well as jumping, a hundred feet horizontally and fifty feet vertically. It's also armored, and very durable. We'd need artillery just to scratch the paint. And... the box trailer contains a bunch of ray guns on autonomous turrets. The autonomous turrets feel like they were built by a different person than the rest of the gadgets I just mentioned, and that same person modified the box to unfold, retract, or otherwise open up to let the turrets actually shoot the ray guns at targets. Ooooh, and there's also some scanners on the turrets, built by the same person as the turrets, that lets them see in the dark as well as detect hostile intent towards the truck or its drivers."
"Sounds to me like two new-ish Demiurges," I said. "One specializing in weapons, vehicles, and armor- a pretty common package, honestly- and one specializing in scanners, automatons, and transformation, which is a less common package, and seems almost like a hybrid between you and me."
"That sounds reasonable to me, yeah," Akane said, nodding. "Anything you can glean from that?"
"The weapons one is going to be driven, deep down, by anger," I said. "Which is usually righteous fury- some great wrong has happened, and they're pissed about it. The other one... could be curious like you, or they could be a Hopeful, which would probably mesh better with Fury."
"How the hell do Hope and Fury go hand in hand?" Nicky asked.
"Hope, when it's a demiurge's driving emotion, is the hope for a specific better future," I said. "They're also called Visionaries, and their thing is that they see some better future for the world that's specific to them and only them, and are almost always hellbent on making it happen."
"And when you combine that with someone who's incandescently pissed about the right thing..." Nicky said, connecting the dots.
"Yeah, I'm willing to bet they get along like a house on fire. Anyway, I'm dressed inconspicuously, so I'm gonna get out and look like I'm gassing up the car," I said, finally climbing out of the car and doing precisely what I said I'd do. Well, kinda. I did actually gas up Akane's car, because she had not yet made it into a mad science car and it was still just an ordinary decade-old Honda Civic- quick reminder for everyone, it's 2022 and 'decade-old' means this car was made in 2012, when some people thought the world was going to end.
Anyhow. I stood there, gassing up the car, and while I was doing that... our quarry emerged together from the gas station. Automated mental scans fired off and told me everything I needed to know about the pair of them, including the fact that, yes, they very much were Our People.
Xyr name was Tooth, and xe was black and nonbinary, with bright blue dreadlocks and an undercut. Xe wore a baggy dark grey hoodie that concealed whatever build xe might have had, but the short pleated plaid skirt came down only to just above the knee, leaving xyr perfectly normal, if not terribly toned and photogenic, skinny little stick legs exposed, before they went back into a pair of ordinary white socks that came up to just above the top edge of xyr combat boots.
Her name was Nail, and they were Chinese and also nonbinary, with bleached-yellow hair and a curvaceous build that looked exaggerated despite, objectively, being smaller than Akane, thanks to the framing of their clingy hot pink minidress. She took conscious pride in the 'bimbo' aesthetic, and had apparently just posted a very cleavage-y selfie on Twitter with the caption "#ABG except the B stands for Bimbo and also I'm not actually a G."
Tooth roiled with anger. The world was diseased and corrupt, seized by those who would carve it up and sell it back to us in pieces. The only solution, in xyr eyes, was to burn it all down, to sear away the rot and disease without mercy. To accelerate the inevitable collapse and death of this wretched world so that a new one can arise from the ashes, like a phoenix out of the flame.
Nail, meanwhile, had a dream of the future that was incredibly vapid, superficial, and poorly-constructed, which wasn't uncommon among the Hopeful, but what was uncommon was the understanding that this dream was vapid, superficial, and that in fact this was a good thing. She was an irony-poisoned moron who had decided that the bimbo aesthetic was actually valid political praxis, and that being an idiot who did not know or understand a goddamn thing was good, actually.
"Now," I said to Akane over our telepathic link.
Before Tooth and Nail could get back into their truck, Akane rolled down the window and shot a bright green beam of energy at it, shrinking it down to roughly the size and scale of a little electric rideable toy for small children.
"Relax, relax," I said loudly, stepping across the parking lot towards them. "We're just here to talk. I'm not interested in fighting Tooth and Nail."
"Just 'cause you're funny doesn't mean I won't whoop your ass," Tooth threatened.
"Can you, like, get to the point or whatever?" Nail demanded.
"I just need to know everything you know about one Doctor Beatrice Skinner."