Gilded Blue Theft#4

Steele lights the path of truth

Most people think of genies as magical wish granting beings that inhabit rings, lamps and other such items. They don’t really dwell within such things, in truth they use pure jewels and rarely other things as conduits and connections to their magic glut home dimension, and while to the unversed they may seem to just grant wishes, the reality is a bit different. Truthfully most of the genies that people encounter are considered garbagemen in their home. The trash in this case is magic, as the genies have to keep pumping magic from their dimension to keep it from bursting.

Tough Snaps was like the majority of elconic denizens, quite uneducated, thus he had no idea of the true nature of genies, or their relation to all other dimensions. However, like the majority of elconic denizens, Tough Snaps knew that genie objects can make kings of paupers, thus, they were quite valuable, certainly worth stealing, especially the larger objects.

“Ey, Mistah Snaps, you don’t think Goldie got his stuff from a genie do you?” Oranna mused.

“I shook my head, and told Oranna that it was unlikely, there was a number of things ruling it out, one of which was that Goldie was still quite composed in spite of the loss of the jewel, I asked her what another reason was”

Oranna frowned, and looked about the room that they were in.

It was in comparison to the rest of the mansion that they had seen, quite drab. The walls, ceiling and floor were wood, some manner of pale brown wood with a hint of red. It was, in short completely ungilded. There was only three things of note about the room, the doors leading to the balcony, and the pots of candlewort that provided lighting for the room. The candlewort plants had quite a lot of their stems left to burn through.

The final thing of interest was a cabinet, it was a cheap shoddy looking thing, with a single lock on it, two doors and a plush velvety black cushion inside. The cushion looked like it was of higher quality than the cabinet.

“I guess if it was the source of his wealth and success, he’d have had it more hidden and secure, right Mistah Snaps”

Tough Snaps nodded.

“I told her that was some sweet sleuthing, Golds clearly had the jewel most for display purposes, the ungilded room would bring out the look of the jewel, whatever it looked like. None of this helped that much with thinking about the case. I wasn’t that happy about having to look at the scene before checking things with witnesses”

“Aw, don’t worry about it Mistah Snaps, you can just talk to them after, and check the scene again too, you’ve done that a few time you’ve told me” Oranna pish poshed.

Tough Snaps was pretty much a self taught investigator. Police is not really a concept that Elcon has, laws are usually enforced by soldiers, hired goons and anyone with the might to back up their words. There was not really such a job as investigator, but Tough Snaps had taken to trying to make his living investigating things for people, so it wasn’t as if Tough Snaps was an enforcer of law, but more a seeker of truth… one for hire.

Regardless, Tough Snaps’ methods were mostly self taught, though he applied a few things he had learned from his time as an adventurer to his investigation techniques. Tough Snaps grumbled about not getting his preferred order of action while he began his analysis.

The first thing he did was a check for magical activity. He pulled a small bag from his coat, he took a handful of a luminous green dusty substance from it and shook it over the cabinet and around the room. The dust was made from what was called sorcerer’s steel, a kind of metal that reacted strongly with magic.

The metal was formed from the buried bones of half-rate magicians that had died of natural unmagical causes. It wasn’t that uncommon of a metal in elcon, what with there being an abundance of talentless mages. Among mages it was considered shameful to have one’s remains become sorcerer’s steel, not that the dead usually cared. Another name for sorcerer’s steel is steele.

Steele would glow in reaction to casted magic. Snaps used it to get an impression of what magic had gone on in a place. Snaps’ efforts revealed a trail leading to the balcony from the cabinet. It was not a terribly bright glow.

“I always liked it when the steele gave clear results, from this I could tell that no magic had been cast, that the genie hadn’t been called upon, the thief came in, stole the jewel and left all without using any magic, now I had to see how far I could follow our thief”

Snaps marched over to the doors that led to the balcony, he opened them softly. Spread out below was a not so breath taking view of the white cube buildings of Cozzlanga, it was an underground city so there wasn’t even sky to look up to. Snaps looked down over the balcony. It was quite the drop and there wasn’t much in the way of handholds. There was a few windows and balconies not too far away though.

He threw out another handful of steele dust.

“As much as I like it when it works, when it doesn’t, I feel like I’m throwing wealth to the wind, that didn’t reveal much, but then it would have been unlikely to have gotten much of a reaction from an outside space.”

“Oh, and because it’s outside, you can’t rule out magic being used, but the impression would have already left, right? Well Mistah Snaps, if there was no magic used, that be some amazing climbing skills.” Oranna said.

“I agreed, it would be really hard climbing on the outside of the building while carrying the jewel, and going by the size of the cushion and cabinet it was fairly big”

“Oooh, yeah that’d be right hard, so what you going to check now?”

“I told her I wanted to take a closer look at the cabinet, hopefully that’d rule out a few possibilities”

“Big lot of possibilities at the moment, Mistah Snaps” Oranna said.

The lock turned out to be quite helpful. While the cabinet was deceptively shoddy, Snaps found it to be of very sturdy make, and the lock in particular could only have been picked by a master thief.

“I was satisfied I had learned enough to prevent Golds from doing something nasty to us, it was time to see if what I’d figured out would stand up strong enough.”

Thanks for reading, this snowflake will melt soon! Subscribe for free to receive notifications of new posts and the ability to vote on Quest polls, subscribe paid to vote on an extra story and get to vote on events for the daily Quest!