The Misadventures of the Man Formerly Known as Victor Heart

I was walking home, read abandoned warehouse, with various supplies that I planned to turn into assorted essences that I managed to get with the money I scrapped together from my exciting new startup business. Said business currently only involved making and selling various metal ingots created from the metals I found in abandoned buildings that were not cost-effective to extract with conventional means.

I was about to reach “home” when a scruffy man emerged from the shadows with a knife. That was the downside to needing a cane, people saw you as a target. The Black Smoke Ring did help though by preventing my attacker from noticing that I was drawing my gun and putting it against his throat. This gave me time while he was p*ssing himself to pull the same trick as I did with the clown victim, memory extraction and knock out. A simple robber did not warrant being murdered. While I needed more apples, I needed standards more.

While a bit odd, I made a thousand dollars off that interaction. I figure the man probably kept his savings on his person for whatever reason. You know what that means, I get to sleep in a bed not surrounded by rats.

While not the most strategic of resource allocation, I was effectively a dying man living on borrowed time and I was tired of sleeping in a building infested with rats. The downside of my new senses is that they were not based entirely on the physical plane and thus closing my eyes did nothing to block out the rats.

I promptly turned around and headed to the nearest hotel that looked relatively nice.

As I walked down the street, I was excited to not be sleeping with rodents even if it was only for the night. While walking, I saw a creature heading towards the way I came. It looked like a beautiful woman with jet black hair and ice blue eyes. It was the next set of features that told me she was something that went bump in the night, a set of horns and a pointed tail covered in black smoke. We exchanged glances and both decided that our businesses had nothing to do with each other. I couldn’t help but stare at her though as her appearance seemed perfectly designed to attract attention. It was a supernatural beauty, naturally sculpted perfection.

After she left, I decided to follow the energy trail to where she came from in case there was something of interest to me there. It was probably nothing, but what if it wasn’t. I had literally nothing to do except play around with my powers and look for targets. Hell, if I’m lucky I may have just found one.

Entering the room at the end of the trail, I saw a mummy lying on the floor draped in what I could only assume were his clothes. It seems that someone, presumably the woman that I was starting to suspect might be a succubus, drained all this guy’s physical and mental energies. Fortunately for me they/she left the mummy’s soul intact.

I put my hand on the mummy’s chest and extracted the glowing blue sphere that was their soul.

The soul provided me with several things that were of critical importance: information, abilities, and supplies.

First was information provided by a member of a secret branch of the FBI dealing with mystical events. This granted me vital information about my environment and more importantly my situation.

Turns out that Agent Cole here called in a code F aka a code Frankenstein due to my extraction of the clown’s innards. It turns out beings searching for multiple disparate body parts are not so uncommon in this world. Since most beings are balanced with strengths and weaknesses and Frankensteins only collect the prior, if left unchecked they develop into a super being aka a Grade S or god forbid Grade EX entity. All this to say that the magic FBI put them as a top priority.

The fact that I was not going to use it that way was irrelevant. I could not just call off the code F using his phone as Cole did not have that authority. The only way to do so would be to provide a body or an explanation, but really a body.

There are bright sides to my situation though. The first is that soul manipulation at my level was an ability so rare so as to be nonexistent. This had multiple positive repercussions for me. The first was that they don’t know that I now have a fair amount of information on their organization. The second was that they don’t know that I could create a key to the city’s wards out of his soul and list myself as the location head in his place as he had yet to do so. It also meant that they did not know I could create a fake body with false evidence of foreign soul and body integration.

This plan was further helped by the fact that due to Sunset City’s remote location Cole was the only member of the Sunset City’s MFBI office. One only needs one agent for a small remote city isolated on one side by the ocean and the other by dense woods.

Making a fake code F body would be a challenge to my abilities, but I can’t blame anyone but myself as this situation is the result of my carelessness. I left that clown corpse just lying there while in no way hiding what I had done. I could have easily burned or buried it, but I was sloppy. While I could point to the fact that it was my first murder or that I didn’t know about the magic police. It was careless, plain and simple, and now I have to make a fake corpse that can hopefully trick experts.

In addition to his soul itself, I acquired what was inside it, his skills and experience as a magic FBI agent. While he was just an inexperienced investigator lacking advanced training or experience, he was still trained to deal with mystic situations, close quarter combat, and basic firearms. All of which are critical skills to me. I grouped them up into a pink sphere that I would absorb before I went to bed and then integrate them over night.

I also saved his ability for later use. According to the magic FBI, every individual has the potential to develop powers with little in the way of rhyme or reason. Agent Cole had the ability to read psychic imprints left at locations by individuals. Which will come in handy with my new job.

I then took stock of the dead agent’s possessions: a standard FBI badge, a laptop, keys, clothing, a Glock, silver and iron bullets, a knife made of the same materials, and several thousand in cash.

The clothes, consisting of largely of dress shirts, slacks, and dress shoes, were a cause for great concern as they fit me perfectly, practically tailor made. This gave me a sinking suspicion which I immediately grabbed the agent’s laptop to confirm.

I found that it needed both a retinal and fingerprint scan to access it.

I created two key chain artifacts to access the phone, Glass Eye and Green Thumb. While they cost me some time, it would be worth it just to confirm or reject my suspicion. They were designed to mimic a person’s eye and thumbprint respectively. Glass Eye had the appearance of a stained-glass lens that looked like an eye. Green thumb had the appearance of a wooden thumb. They were both only barely Tier Zero artifacts but did the job all the same.

While the laptop could not access all the information of every agent it did contain some files. These files revealed something troubling, Cole was not the best man nor the closest man for the job but was still sent here where he died his first night leaving me with critical supplies, knowledge, and a chance to end a major problem before it became one, the code F debacle.

Normally I would attribute this to fate or the world’s will, but I was not bound by either. Which meant someone wanted me here for a reason and I don’t have the faintest clue as to who or why, but I was going to find out one way or another. In the meantime, I now have a job and an apartment.

Current Equipment:

Head:

[]

Earrings:

[]

Necklace:

[]

Clothes:

[]

Rings:

[Black Smoke Ring]

Bracelets:

[]

Shoes:

[]

Armaments:

[Weaver’s First Armament]

[Sense Cane]

Storage:

[Various Essences]

[Murder Weapon: Axe]

[Green Thumb]

[Glass Eye]