Money spoke louder than words. That was probably an expression. The experiment holds the human steady as it walks over the balance beam between the scrap metal and place that would literally buy a stick for tree fity. Attempting to follow the human who has clearly decided that money is more valuable than being aware of their surroundings, the creature is once again betrayed by gravity and falls off the wooden plank. It probably should have remembered to use the stick as a center of balance lowering device again, but sometimes it just forgot basic things.

At least it wasn’t much of a walk up to the roof again. This had been pretty much the first stop it had made when it had started the canvassing of the area, and it wasn’t hard to find the way back up onto the roof going around the long way. After it got there, it remembered that it had actually given up balancing across this thing the first time it had attempted the crossing, which was why it knew how much an ordinary stick sold for in the first place. With a sigh, it steps gently onto the bridge once again, at which point the bridge itself betrays it by shaking and knocking it down to the street below.

As it hits the ground, the usual poof of dust generated by its impact is joined by the entire street blasting a layer of dirt into the air as a pressure differential suddenly manifests above, localized entirely on the plank spearing into an overpass. The piece of wood shoots off into the sky, so the experiment just pushes itself up to its feet once again.

Figuring that it was probably easier to tell what was going on if there wasn’t a giant cloud of dust covering everything, it grabs the particles directly in front of it and moves them out of the way. Floating down into the street, the human from back when they were at the mountain brushes a little bit of sawdust off of their robe. Apparently, they had something to do with the sudden lack of footing the experiment had just experienced, which was not exactly appreciated. Last time, the human had decided to attack it, but only after throwing a rock. It had made an entrance according to standard protocol; make an appropriate display of power, then address the subject. None of it got an actual response, so it had no idea what the human’s motivations were.

They seemed content to just stand there for a while until it made the first move, so maybe it was time for the human to do their introduction. They had been rather rude in their last encounter, just going straight into attacking it, but putting off an introduction wasn’t the worst thing in the world. On the other hand, the human just looked up instead of doing anything interesting, and that was a shattered chunk of panel falling at terminal velocity straight toward the human’s face. Another shard of wood smashes down on the scrap top roof, smashing the construction and causing the building to implode; a fraction of a second between that and the ground, the experiment grabs hold of the other falling splinter.

Fortunately, all its telekinesis cared about in regards to holding objects was how much said object weighed. The momentum was irrelevant. That probably ruined the universe in some way or another, but it wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t casually making everything worse.

“Now is not the time for you to die,” the experiment says, making clear that it was well assured of the fact that humans weren’t able to survive a thin piece of wood going through the brain. They had gotten sensitivity training for that kind of thing.

Turning their head, the human looks at the experiment. They don’t do anything, or say anything, so the experiment just puts down the wood chunk against the doorway to the tree fity place, and goes on to make a peace offering.

“I'm not at full strength, and you aren't either. Let’s not fight, and loot the place before the world finds me.”

Shooting forward, the human pulls the bottle of poison out of the experiment’s hand, and ducks quickly into the weapon shop.

“You weren’t supposed to loot me, you jackass!”

Easy come easy go. It wasn’t likely that the poison was going to have any interesting effects anyway. Taste was the most it was ever going to get out of it, and it really never had a real desire to imbibe on the finests of poisons. The bulk produced desserts were more than enough.

Going into the shop after the human seemed like a sure fire method for escalating the situation into a physical conflict, so it went back toward the split off point again. Obviously it wasn’t going to be able to actually get across that beam now that it didn’t exist anymore, and also that the building it was connected to was demolished, so it was going to have to find an alternate route toward wherever it’s human was headed off to. Hopefully it didn’t forget the whole pockets concept. It had done that kind of nonsense more than once before, generally with things it didn’t actually care about, and it was fairly certain that the human didn’t care much about pockets. If it did, then they probably would have had a way to hold things in the first place.

From its experience, humans just did whatever they needed to in order to reach their desired end, and nothing could stop them.

Oh heck, it had forgotten all the money on the roof of the building that suddenly stopped standing. Hopefully whatever it had put in front of the human was enough for the rest of the trip around here, otherwise it was going to have to search through the entire rest of the town and loot a whole pile of cash, which it hadn’t found on the first pass. That might be somewhat problematic.

Figuring there was no harm in trying it again, the experiment checks the ambient energy for any remnant traces of the miasma. Surprisingly, it finds a trace of the energy still hanging around just a bit to the left. Just a few steps, and it finds the alley where the human had been loitering earlier, covered in blood.

There was less blood covering the walls and ground, and it seemed that was the source of the miasma. As time passed, the material evaporated into an invisible density of the purple gas. That implied that the matter was entirely forged from that weird night gunk. Given that the experiment had stuffed a huge amount of the stuff into the helmet, and that had been over the human’s face. The human had mentioned that they needed to beat something to death that hadn’t fought back, which was likely the source of the blood everywhere. Judging from how the creatures both were born from a power that was held in close proximity to the human, being inside the lung and whatnot, and didn’t attack, that implied that the miasma could be attuned through keeping it in close contact with a human. The experiment was going to have to dump all the gunk it could reach into the human next time the sun went… around. This weird orbital structuring was very annoying to keep straight.

Just a bit off to the right, the roof access it had come down was still there, but from what it could tell the human had already gotten past this point. Setting aside the possibility of tracking via miasma for the time being, by which it meant for now rather than for the enemy, it decided to go for a more ‘brute force’ method of locating a human. If it were to go into each shop and start yelling at everyone, someone would try to locate whoever was responsible for it. That usually worked.