When I opened the door, there stood Bob and two Caucasian guys carrying several plastic bags and cardboard boxes.
“Some of the things you had ordered, sir.” – Bob explained: “Forgive me, clothes will take a little more time.”
I nodded and pointed inside the house: “Bring it in. Just leave it in the big room straight ahead. Anything else?”
One of the white guys wearing a rastacap wanted to say something, but was sharply elbowed by Bob. Bob stayed at the door while the stuff was brought in, fidgeting under by gaze.
I used the opportunity to study the flow of the energy inside him. As far as I could see and feel, the energy flow of an asanbosam was slightly different from that of a human. Most notably, there seemed to be extra channels the energy followed in the limbs, heart and head. There, these channels or chakras or whatever these are called, were coiling like endless snakes forming an odd, but harmonical three-dimensional reinforcing structure.
But even such observation was pretty useless for me, as I still lacked the understanding about the involved processes and theories. What currently interested me, was the question if the other supernatural races have different energy flow patterns or not. If yes, it would allow me to easily recognize them even when they were disguised. And if not, it still held the potential for all sorts of possibilities I could not even estimate yet.
—
After the goods were brought in, Bob and his lackeys left with the speed that brought the word “fleeing” into mind. I shook my head as I used my senses to observe them driving away. Not too surprisingly, in a few seconds another car followed them. The tailing car was full of people, so I guessed that those were not police, but some rival gang instead. Not my problem anyway, so I ignored it.
I walked into the dining room where the packages were left. There I found two different laptops, three tablets, a phone, several keyboards, mice and other accessories. Even an extra SIM card package was there. From that pile, I fished out a random laptop, phone, SIM card for it and a stack of top up cards and moved upstairs.
In the office room, I formed a sharp scalpel from the matter that was part of my poleaxe, and effortlessly cut through all the seals on the packaging. After a quick check and basic preparations, I plugged everything into chargers. While the tech booted up, I suddenly remembered to sweep the house for hidden surveillance.
Luckily for Bob, I found nothing suspicious. But for some reason, I felt disappointed. Movies or books would definitely make everything more dramatic. With big blinking red countdown dials or something at the very least.
The laptop managed to boot up first and immediately demanded the Internet access for registrations, updates and whatever. I left it there until the phone was ready, then quickly topped up the phone’s balance and set up a protected hotspot. Finally, I let the laptop to connect to the Internet and finished the setup process, ignoring all personal information requests and randomly filling in the unavoidable forms.
I spent almost half an hour silently cursing and cleaning the system from the pre-installed bloatware and promotional trial products that festered on the “world’s most popular operating system”. My amateurish knowledge and skills were enough for that, although the number of suggested registrations and account linkages had clearly increased since I last remembered doing that. Somewhat funny was the fact that I was typing and clicking faster than the programs could process and a brand-new high-end computer felt slow and laggy due to my much shorter reaction time than before.
Annoyingly long took the necessary time to browse all sort of tutorials and manuals when I searched for the secure anonymous networks I had heard about. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too hard to get a basic Tor client running, and after a few adjustments it seemed to work well enough. Everything was disposable anyway. Including the house and Bob.
—
Finally I could easily access most of the common knowledge available to mankind. I silently praised the Internet as I opened the world’s leading search engine.
There were several words I had to find the explanations for. I had thought about in which order should I search them, but then simply settled on a reverse chronological. After a few minutes of furious typing and clicking I had some basic results.
“Asanbosam”, which was the species Bob admittedly belonged to, was found to be a type of vampire or blood-sucking ogre from the myths of Ashanti people of the forest regions in Ghana and Togo. Supposedly, asanbosams had hooks for hands and legs, which was similar to the claws Bob had shown during the fight. According to the almighty Internet, there was another type of blood-sucking monster known as sasabonsam as well, but it was supposed to be a winged one. I also carefully committed to memory that “bonsam” is a word for “Devil” in these parts. Might come in handy some day.
The Google also confirmed that Sir Richard Francis Burton really lived in the years 1821-1890 and had no recent namesakes. I could not find any references to Bob/Ebo or the curse Bob had mentioned, but even the apparently adjusted history of his adventures was impressive enough. I felt a tinge of melancholy as I thought how a witness of great historical events had become a criminal gang boss in some downtrodden London ghetto. I spat out some choice words at the online book previews that kept the most important and relevant information hidden and kept redirecting to Amazon or other online store services. Greedy bastards.
“Ruah” after several misleading results turned out to likely be written correctly as “ruach”. It was a transcription of Hebrew word meaning “wind”, “breath”, “mind” or “spirit”, although some more casual sources also indicated it as a possible word for “God”. As I lacked an impressive beard, I doubted that Rabbi Es mistook me for Yahweh. I also assumed that being recognized as wind, breath or mind would not merit the reverence he showed me. Therefore, by the method of elimination I was left with “spirit”. Unless it meant alcohol, I realized as I mentally ran through the dictionaries I remembered since my school years. Damn homographic words.
Annoyed, I kicked the cardboard box that used to contain the laptop across the room. The fact that I had to be careful so as to not blow it into smithereens from the impact got me even more frustrated. It was much easier to retain calm and clear mind while stuck inside a grey and dull ancient pyramid rather than in one of the world’s greatest megalopolises.
With a sigh I turned back towards the computer. And to distract my overly free mental capacity, I focused some of my remaining attention towards the weapon and armor shape manipulation practice. Making all sorts of shapes and uneven surfaces was a great way to train the ability to easily take the required form and was also a great way to occupy my mind.
“Taistealaithe” was confirmed to be the word for “travellers” in Irish. We got that translation right with Eala. As I thought about the white-haired elf, I pondered about the possible difficulties in finding her considering the current situation on Earth. I already knew that space and time outside the boundaries of the world did not work everywhere in the same way. And as we got separated before passing through the boundary, I was forced to conclude that she could be anywhere. That left me with the only option of building on my own a massive network of contacts. But that required time, authority and at least some sort of starting point.
Most of the names and words Eala were confirmed to be of Gaelic origin, mostly finding connections to Irish. But as I had expected, the words from the ruined magic civilization of Bial like the names and “vol’iez” or “shagor” found zero results.
—
After a while, I managed to familiarise myself with the basic structure of the Tor network. I thought, what would be a better place for covert communications of supernatural entities than an anonymous network full of underground activities? With such reasoning, I randomly registered at one of the free email services and began browsing while randomly switching between nodes and connections.
Unsurprisingly, the next hour was spent on digging through hundreds of dead onion-links, dozens of pot and other drug dealing boards, numerous cryptocurrency laundering services and occasional extremist and organized crime portals. I even managed to find a few global conspiracy theorist forums and a bunch of harmless New Age amateurs, but nothing that would look legit enough.
To be on the safe side, I bookmarked some magic-sorcery-demonology groups that did not use too many flashing 3D skulls and pentagrams in their website design. However, that research direction did not look too promising, so it was really hard to muster any sort of enthusiasm for that.
—
I stretched my back, more out of returning habit than anything and looked out of the window at the unchanging grey February sky. Then a new idea came into my mind – museums. I could visit some, for example British Museum to check out the artifacts and the library. There I would use my perception skills to find something out of ordinary there and then follow the trail to the local paranormal community, if there was any.
Nevertheless, I still had to wait for a while. I was disinclined to leave the house in my current, slightly ragged and messy clothing. So I continued browsing through the Internet, rapidly looking and committing to memory all sorts of maps and online language dictionaries. For the current me, learning the words was easy, and would definitely be of great help in the future. For my short-term goal i set committing to memory the greatest possible diversity of Old Gaelic, Old Norse, Latin and Ancient Greek.
I was half-way through the third or so Old Irish dictionary (with examples and commentaries) when I felt some people approaching the back door.
Circle of Shards 