32

You smokejump to an empty roof and pop to your lair. You've gotten smart about the quick costume changes and set up an armor stand so a flick of your hand and a switching spell has you re-clothed, and one more has you disillusioned.

Returning to your apartment you transfigure yourself a perch in the corner and pull a Batman as you stare at the door. It had taken a couple of minutes to excuse yourself and find a quiet spot, so you really only have to wait a minute or two before you hear a key slide into the locks.

The guy that comes in is wearing a jumpsuit with a patch that proclaims he's from 'Betty's Plumbing', and his name is supposedly 'Ralph'. He has a toolbag in one hand that he sets down, along with a little wheeled cart that has various repair supplies—some PVC pipe, toilet repair kits, etc. He doesn't look at you, hidden as you are, but you force a connection when he looks your way after locking the door.

David Begum is one of Coil's mercs. While he's no slouch at the rooty-tooty-point-and-shooty part of the job, he much prefers the sneaky parts. And he's good at it, as you browse his mind. He's placed bugs in the Undersiders' hideout, and at least one of Tattletale's personal hideouts, along with multiple other more public locations that Coil's directed him to bug.

This is something of a rush job for him, as some of the people Coil has doing intelligence gathering pointed out that you were on video as being out in public. David was called in, given your address and the job and dispatched by a curt and somewhat tired-sounding supervillian. You wonder if all of the recent craziness with the gangs isn't straining Coil's shard's binary timeline emulation-thingy. It'd be hard to time everything so you could always have one safe timeline while you do just one thing differently.

In any case, Dave-o is supposed to bug your apartment to get audio. Typically the audio recorders don't connect to the internet or transmit live—that could lead to them being detected too easily. Instead, a spy van will cruise up and park while all of the audio gets copied to the recording equipment inside at some ungodly hour of the night. Some basic testing will be done to make sure the whole thing works, but it's always possible that the connections won't work all the way to the street and he'll have to come back out and do some more work. Also, while it wasn't in the directions, he's planning on including a video camera of his own pointed at your bed, because why spy on people if you can't get your jollies at the same time? He's done it before, and it makes perfect blackmail material.

Mr. Begum is unarmed, and expects to throw a handful of recording devices in various spots and be in and out in half an hour or less. He has an apartment of his own where he keeps the video recordings he's not supposed to have, and knows Coil's base location, which jives with the general area you thought it was from scrying Tattletale.

You…

[X][Spy] Let him put everything up, disable it later, stay hidden

[X][Spy2] Mark him to track down later

You flick a tracker on Dave and—as much as you'd prefer not to—let him put things up. You do make some nudges in his brain telling him 'you're out of time, hurry' and 'that's a perfect hiding place, he'll never notice', which will make things easy to pretend to find later. Browsing his mind while he works, you also pull in some knowledge of counter-surveillance that will make it difficult for him to come back in later, and you could even pass it off as 'found the cameras, got paranoid'. Honestly, the simplest and most blatant will be getting a security cam pointed towards the door. It'll go off on movement and alert you via text message. Workable and obvious, so that even getting rid of the camera doesn't mess with the evidence.

Dave finishes up in less than 15 minutes with you pushing him along, and makes some obvious changes to things in the apartment so you can 'discover' that someone's been in there. While you're at it, you make a note to move one of those cameras you got for testing your disillusionment over when you're done shopping.

After connecting back up with the ladies they drag you to a… well, it's like Hot Topic was a fancy boutique store. With the help of a mohawked, multiply-pierced saleswoman, Crystal hunts down a pair of (fake) leather pants and presents them to you.

So you change. Her disappointed face when you walk out with your shirt hanging loose and hiding your ass makes you laugh. You proceed to peel the shirt off by stretching your torso and flexing your abs and pose, stalking up to and around your girlfriend, pushing her mouth closed with one finger, winking at Susan and raising an eyebrow at a furiously blushing Taylor before doing your best strut back to the changing area and flipping the door closed behind you.

When you emerge again you are told those pants simply must be purchased. You do, although who the hell knows when you'll have a chance to wear them. That seems to cap off the shopping, and you're dropped off at your apartment while the girls go to help Taylor deal with her new purchases.

You take the time to fix Taylor's backpack and enchant it to repel liquids, as well as put a mild notice-me-not keyed to the girl herself so hopefully her stuff will be ignored by the Trio.

With that done you get stuck in to learning some more warding. With the intrusion earlier you'd like to be able to slap wards up that are a little more… vigorous than just detection.

And what you find is that with the increased Runic knowledge you've gained from the ritual magic dump is that things really click this time. Pulling out the notebooks you used for your original notes on warding, you immediately find improvements in the rune schemes on the warstones which would make stones more powerful and able to handle more spells, as well as allowing you to tune the distance that items bleed from the ward stones better. Now you actually might be able to put up muggle-repelling wards and not affect your neighbors!

You also figure out how to add exceptions to wards so you could put up the same repelling wards but add Crystal or Amy to them so they wouldn't be effected. Well, you still need to check if squibs are effected, but the idea is there. But the major breakthrough is cracking the logic of adding Unplottability. You don't know how useful it will be on an apartment that people already know the location of, but you could add it to your lair so no one would be stumbling on the join