Stories of monsters called vampires who live off of human blood? You really must avoid this trashy pulp fiction your highness, next you will be telling me that werewolves are allergic to silver instead of the well known wolfsbane ivy that has been academically proven. It’s more fun to imagine you say? Well whatever does that have to do with being Royalty? Now sit up straight and read off to me the primary, secondary and tertiary exports of each nation including the yearly average of each.

-Chief Royal Governess Tillybrook Maebus

4993 A.D. Sixth day of the fifth week of Autumn, First Bell of the Morning…

Sylvia crouched in a shadowed nook on the roof opposite her target, no perching on isolated spires for her, despite the melodramatic allure it held only fools gave away their presence so readily.

Sylvia only rarely gave into her melodramatic impulses, and never on the job.

Justin and his crew had scoped out the location for the last couple days, supposedly it was a small magitech core facility, owned by some small rural noble that Sylvia bet was not even aware the documents were under his name, Fodlesmarch something or the other.

It was not a bad cover, and word on the street was that it served to conceal a Joombla purification lab, the word they paid for had been expensive, mostly to keep it anonymous, and had revealed that three odd weeks ago the Joombla supply lanes had shifted, no more came from this facility, yet it was clearly in use.

Unmarked crates still entered and exited, but watching the transporters revealed that these crates were incredibly heavy and lacked the distinctive whiff that clouded so many dens of iniquity these days, they also headed not to the pleasure district but to the crafters.

Everything matched, Sylvia had her target.

It was quiet now, and it had been for some time, so Sylvia slunk out of her nook and stealthily approached, keeping low and within the depths of shadows, using her wind magic to stifle even the tiniest of sounds she created.

Stringing a silken cord across the street two houses down she sprinted across before using an air cushion to slide into the next shadowy overhang underneath a chimney and kill her momentum.

Sylvia lay motionless, listening for any indication her movements had garnered attention.

After a few minutes and the guards doing nothing but pass wind and small talk Sylvia recovered her cord and once again started moving.

Before long Sylvia hung upside down outside the first floor office window, having disabled the magitech sensor with a quick poofing she extended a claw and expertly cut a small hole in the low quality bubbled glass of the window pane, slanting the cut so the section fell outwards into her waiting palm.

Sylvia then reached in and undid the latch before carefully opening the window and flipping herself inside.

Landing silently Sylvia again paused, waiting and listening, slowly looking around the room she had infiltrated, even twitching her whiskers as she smelt the air for inhalants or other dangers, some people were just flat out paranoid and a couple days of sneezing and wheezing after a face of pepper gas was no joke.

The room gave off the atmosphere of a down trodden and out of luck merchant, the rug was frayed, the furniture worn, the safe by the desk rusty.

Sylvia doubted there was more than a few pouches of copper in there, accompanied no doubt by a false ledger, just enough to withstand a casual, or surprise inspection.

No, if what she knew of this operation was even slightly correct then there had to be another,better hidden stash, now where was it...

Sylvia moved, avoiding no less than three pressure pads as she approached a drink cabinet whose bottom half seemed a little too sturdily built to her experienced eyes.

Carefully running her claws along one side she felt them catch and using the leverage swung the false side open, revealing a craftily concealed safe.

Sylvia poofed it to be safe, she took a moment to silently snicker at her punny thought before retrieving her picks from their thigh holster and inserting a correctly sized hooked one along with the torque bar.

She pressed her ear to the safe and listened attentively as she carefully maneuvered her tools within the lock.

Click, click, click, click, clunk. A five pin ‘Rodger Unbreakable’; child’s play to her.

As the last tumbler fell into place Sylvia withdrew half a pace and cracked the safe open slowly. Nothing wrong with getting a little bonus on the job after all.

Sylvia’s grin stretched from ear to ear as she spotted slender bars of gleaming metal, ~Jackpot~.

Someone was skimming alright, no middle manager got this wealthy through ordinary means.

Sylvia quickly transferred a decent amount to her pouch, sadly she had to leave a good deal of it there, even though her pouch had a weight reduction enchantment cast upon it there simply was not enough room in it’s relatively small interior.

It was only when she had emptied half the safe that she heard a small click.

Sylvia watched in horror, noticing and moving all too late, as a secondary panel fell open at the back of the safe and a tiny magitech array lit for a second before she poofed it. Damn.

Sylvia’s ears flattened, this was not good, she tested the hidden panel, quickly ascertaining it’s composition as a soft sliver was gouged out by her claw, lead, it and the copious amount of gold must have blocked her initial cautionary poofing.

Fiddlesticks.

Sylvia’s brain whirled as she filtered out options, no doubt that array was some sort of alarm, a personal one no doubt as she could not hear the two guards storming up the stairs.

Probably sent to some trinket the owner kept on him, a small comfort.

In that case she had ten minutes, maybe less, before he made it here.

Sylvia spared a thought in gratitude to Justin’s meticulous planning that even scoped out the target’s living arrangements and travel time.

So not enough to rescue and escape together, but maybe enough to pass on a message?

Sylvia determined her course of action swiftly, she pulled out a cheating pick and raked the office door, bolting out and down the stairs with as much speed as she could stealthily muster, no need to alert the door guards just yet after all.

Down the stairs, through the still stinking work room, down more stairs, rake that lock, then this one, avoid that magic, no poofing allowed now, they could not know she had been down here, and a row of failed magitech arrays would give the game away for sure.

So Sylvia ran on the wall to avoid all fifteen spelled steps, sliding down past the first entrance room and landing before the final door.

Open!

…………………………..

Guppy was woken from a dream of an alcoved inn where she had met someone by the creaking sound of the door opening. Was it already time to work? It did not feel like she had gotten enough sleep yet.

A hissing and the words “Wake up princess.” bugged her enough to rise and look into the darkness in front of the prison bars, she heard the orc stir behind her and knew he had awoken too.

“Who ar-” Guppy barely got out before she was interrupted.

“There’s no time missy, listen closely, I was supposed to rescue you but it seems I messed up and set off a silent alarm. There's no time to make it out with you in tow, know that I will get you out one way or another...I’m sorry, but keep your spirits up and do not tell them of my visit here. I left evidence to make them think it just a burglary.” The small hooded being spat out in a hurried and soft voice.

The visitor sniffed the air then, their facial cloth moving visibly, then they shuddered for a second before shaking their head.

Guppy felt a little insulted, she may not have had much more than a cloth and cold water to wipe herself down for the last few weeks but she was sure she didn’t smell that bad, wait, focus.

Guppy quickly grabbed the figure as it turned to leave. “Wait” She desperately called “Does a master rogue such as you have a way of disabling this collar?”

“And mine too?” spoke the orc, his gravelly tones causing their lithe visitor to flinch backwards before they caught themselves.

They were clearly torn between immediately escaping and..pity? Guppy would take it, pride mattered little to one in her position.

“Please.” she entreated them, pressing the plea, “Can you?”

The figure sighed after a moment and beckoned them forward. “I can try disable them, but I won’t unlock them, you will need to keep them on to fool the key holder, and try not to tempt them to use it or they will quickly discover that it is broken.”

The rogue reached forward, placing their fingers on the inside of the collar and doing...nothing?

Guppy felt nor saw any magic happenstance other than a brief glow of two silver strips from underneath the being’s face wraps. She hoped it had worked.

Their visitor then moved on to the orc, who had lain down to get his neck close enough to the bars to be in reach, repeating the same mannerisms before they swiftly turning and rapidly beat a retreat up the stairs, only pausing to close and lock the door behind them.

Guppy watched them depart before turning to the orc. “Do you think it worked?” She asked.

A shrug was all she received in response, the orc rising and returning to his corner once more.

Guppy returned to her pallet and pulled her blankets up, but she couldn’t sleep, and her magic was full.

……………………………...

Sylvia ran, cursing herself as she did so for a fool, she had wasted two precious minutes burning out the magic circuits in their collars.

Closing and re-locking the last subterranean door she knew she was out of time, she could hear yelling approaching, cussing out the guards, then the slamming of the door as the shop entrance opened.

How would she extricate herself from this steaming pile of zugzug droppings? Think, think, think

Sylvia watched from behind a plant juicing vat as armed and armored men ran into the main room of the ground floor, the workroom she currently resided within.

She pressed herself further into the lee ward shadows of the vat as the beams of their magitech lamps swept pass.

There, three of them including the one in charge sped up the stairs to the office, of course, that was where the alarm had come from and the man was probably and quite rightfully worried about the fortune stored within.

That left Sylvia with one grunt in the room with her and one standing outside still guarding the front door.

This she could work with, but Sylvia knew it wouldn’t be long before the others came down once more to check on their captives.

So Sylvia very, very carefully snuck from shadow to shadow between grimy tools and desks until she had bypassed the grunt in the workrooms center and entered the store front.

No time left, she heard angry shouts and orders, followed by footsteps treading once more upon stairs.

Sylvia ran forward, her soft paws silent against the slate floor, gathering her momentum she bunched up her muscles and lept upwards, twisting in the air to travel feet first, then grasping the inner doorway ledge and using it as a fulcrum as she through the small gap over the back of the door grunt’s head and flipped upwards, at the same time preventing him from noticing her passage by using her wind magic to keep a buffer of still air between them.

Sylvia used her momentum to vault upwards, landing on the signage pole and causing the shop sign to swing and creak, but by the time the guard registered the noise and looked upwards she had already reached the roof and was safely out of sight.

Taking a breath Sylvia took a small measure of pleasure at the angry shouting she heard from within the building.

Time to move, they would be checking the roof soon.

Sylvia left as she had come, a shadowy blur over the rooftops in the night, watched only by a circling owl.