"Now just what the hell has that little shit gone and gotten himself into this time?" Matthew Courser, John's father, said. We'd caught him on the way out the door; he had work, and we knew better than to keep him for long. "No, he's not here- been out all night with his new friends, a buncha no-good lowlifes if you ask me. That he'd join the Thieves' Guild, though... When I get my hands on that boy, I'm gonna-"

"Easy, sir," I said. "We'll teach him the error of his ways, I promise. You mind if we go inside, take a look through his room?"

"Yeah, of course, go ahead," Matthew said, nodding. "Now if you'll excuse me, I've got work to do."

Matthew Courser was a factory worker- a laborer who did get paid a decent enough wage, but whose skillset was pretty limited, thanks to being trained to perform exactly one task on an assembly line, and having no practical experience in doing any other part of the process of building a bicycle. It was a dead-end job, without any real path of advancement; if he wanted a better job, he'd have to go to a night school to spend his time after work learning a whole new skillset, and be left with no time to rest, relax, and actually recover from a long shift in the factory.

He was, also, an absolute asshole. Boys tend to grow up like their fathers, and that's fine when their dad is Napoleon Ironheart, Pillar Of The Community, but when their dad is an impulsive, violent moron like Matthew Courser... well. Maybe it wasn't completely John's fault he sucked so bad.

I mean, it was still a little bit his fault, he was still a person with agency who was old enough and exposed enough to other people that he should know better by now, but still. I understood why John was an awful person.

"Alright," Faith muttered, once Matthew was gone, and we could walk inside. "Talia, you gonna go wolf again?"

"Not unless I need to," Talia said, shaking her head. "John's an idiot, so he probably left something incriminating behind."

I opened the door to John's bedroom, to find it looking already-ransacked and quite barren, as though he'd packed all his shit and left.

"...I've been wrong before, though," Talia said, as she turned into a wolf.

---

"Okay, so, whoever came and got John, they had a car," Talia said, turning back into an elf. "Now, I'm not sure if you're aware, but boxes of metal on wheels are not especially fragrant things, and I can't really track those."

"Fuck," Faith said, scowling. "Is that it? Do we have nothing else we can do?"

"Of course not," I said. "We've got magic, hon. And we've also got a few of John's belongings he left behind."

Not many of them, admittedly- a few old socks that had been left behind, plus a comic book that'd fallen behind the dresser. It was the first piece of evidence I'd ever witnessed that suggested John could read, but it was hardly conclusive- comic books did have a lot of pictures in them, after all.

"And as it just so happens," I continued, reaching into my pocket, "I came prepared."

I pulled out a compass- the north-finding sort, not the circle-drawing sort- and the comic book I'd taken. Some Boy's Adventure drivel, starring a plucky thief who went against the law and the Thieves' Guild to forge his own path of nobly taking whatever he wants from whoever isn't strong and attentive enough to effectively resist him. That was probably how John saw himself, all things being equal, but honestly, I didn't really care. My sympathy for this asshole was pretty strictly limited.

"...Is that compass magical or something?" Faith asked.

"It is, yeah," I said, nodding. Admittedly, it looked pretty magical- it was a flat pointer sitting on a pivot in the center of a three-ring gimbal, whose outer ring was suspended from two points by a fine copper chain. It was very much not a typical compass, and had clearly been made by a machinist with time to kill. So, y'know. Me. "I've had this thing ready and charged for a while, so all I gotta do is key it to the book."

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"What did you make a half-enchanted compass for, originally?" Faith asked.

"Because Mom thought it'd be a good exercise for me," I said, shrugging. "I honestly had no idea what I'd end up using this thing for, when I first made it."

"And your mother is a wizard?"

"She's that Ariel Silver."

It was actually a little funny; since Ariel was the archetypally common name for elf women (among elf men, the archetypally common name was Artorias), and Silver was a surname that was taken by anyone who disowned their family for whatever reason, there were a lot of Ariel Silvers running around the former Rosewood Kingdom, some of whom were mad that they kept getting confused for that Ariel Silver, the very-old-even-for-an-elf archmage who the other Ariels Silver were not.

"...Ah," Faith said. "Well. That makes your skill as a wizard a bit less impressive, if you had a woman like that as your mentor."

"Hey now, I would not be this good at wizardry if I didn't have the right personality for it," I protested. "My dad's every bit the archmage that Mom is, except with primal magic rather than arcane, and I have never once been able to call upon the powers of the Living Earth."

"I can!" Talia said.

"Yes, Talia, I'm aware you're a druid," I said dryly. "You don't have to rub it in. My point is that the student matters just as much, if not more, than the teacher. Both are important, obviously, otherwise education would be pointless, but still. I'm not a talented wizard just because of who my mom is."

"I mean, personalities tend to be kinda hereditary," Faith pointed out. "You are your mother's daughter, after all. I mean, son. Son."

I rolled my eyes, and focused on the compass. It only took a few moments to link its latent charms to the comic book, and soon, the needle started pointing a different direction, hopefully towards one John Courser.

"So," I said, gently swinging the compass from my fist. "Let's see where this leads us, yeah?"

"Hang on, do you still have a real, north-pointing compass in there?" Faith asked. "Oh, and a map of the city?"

"Yeah? Why?"

"I've got an idea."

---

Faith's idea had proven pretty clever. Despite only knowing which heading John was from us, by taking multiple readings from different parts of the city and plotting some lines on a map, we'd been able to pinpoint his location with surprising accuracy, tracing him to a cluster of warehouses in what was, funnily enough, often called the Warehouse District.

Once we had that information to work with, we could make a more detailed plan to catch that rat bastard and get what we needed from him. We'd need even more information for a real plan, but, well.

Who'd be suspicious of a crow flying overhead, hm?

Talia flew back to our little corner where we waited with my bike, and turned back into an elf, rattling off details about windows, possible lookouts, how many people she thought were inside, and how many people there were in nearby warehouses. Most important, though, were the entrances.

"Knock knock," I said, after blowing the door off its hinges with a force bolt. Once upon a time, the spell had been called 'magic missile,' for the old version's resemblance to a thrown javelin, but ever since, the spell had been refined, and new spells that incorporated magical elements beyond mere kinetic force emerged, thus necessitating a renaming of what was, in modern times, a different sort of spell. "John Courser?"

"You son of a bitch!" I heard someone yell from within the warehouse.

"Shut up!" someone else said, trying to be quiet, before thumping John with something hard.

A thief stepped out of the shadows, a knife in her hand as she cleaned under her fingernails with it.

"We might know a guy who answers to that," the thief said calmly. "What's it to you, coppers?"

"John Courser is wanted for questioning regarding the burglary of Magister Brown's office," Faith said firmly. "We don't care about anyone else here, unless they had anything to do with that."

"A compelling offer," the thief said, nodding solemnly. "However... Rock Salt?"

"Orders from the top, sorry," a thief who was presumably named Rock Salt said, up in the catwalks above the warehouse floor. "John's ours, and we can't let him go for questioning."

"Well, you heard the man," the first thief said. "No can do, coppers. Unless you think you can take all of us?"

"Or if that elf with you happens to be Joseph Ironheart," Rock Salt added.

"What's that matter?" I asked mildly.

"The boss wants to talk to you, Mr. Ironheart," Rock Salt said. "Now, Sandpaper, if you wouldn't mind breaking Mr. Ironheart's legs so we can arrange that chat?"

Before Sandpaper- the thief who'd greeted us at the door- could do anything, I powered my ring back up, and put a force bolt through her kneecaps, sending her crumpling to the floor like wet paper that had been cursed with the ability to scream bloody murder.

"...Nobody told me you were a wizard," Rock Salt said mildly. "Well, shit."