You continue to passively use your thought detection abilities on the trip to the library and while you can't detect anything other than the existence of thoughts, you are able to pin down numbers and direction fairly well. Distance—well, you're okay at 'near' and 'far', so long as 'far' isn't more than about fifty feet away. You haven't quite worked up to Gamer-level minimaps yet, but it's something.
Setting up in study cubby you do your best to plow through everything due for the next week. In between you continue from where you left of researching things yesterday by narrowing your look at the world down to Brockton Bay.
Some things remain the same—the major gangs are the E88, the ABB, and the Merchants. Oddly, Faultline's Crew has actually claimed space around the Palanquin if PHO is to be believed. They don't really have a huge presence, but some of them have been out protecting their turf, primarily against the Merchants' dealers. It seems that Faultline isn't as hands off in the city as in canon, though the sparse postings you can find about it make it sound almost like a police action rather than claiming territory.
The other major difference is the lack of a couple of capes. With Endbringer attacks fewer in number and less damaging, the PRT and Protectorate have pushed a bit harder than the 'cops and robbers' play acting that Tattletale is always quoted as saying. Both Crusader and Alabaster have been arrested and jailed in the past year. Both were transferred out of Brockton for trials and actually sent to a supermax-like jail. You're not sure how they were kept there for so long but the PRT seems to have successfully kept quiet about it, other than some rumors of tinker involvement. Unfortunately it appears that a month ago there was a general jailbreak and they were among those that broke or were broken out. They weren't the only capes that are now missing, and few if any seem to have shown back up so maybe it's all a Cauldron plot or something.
Honestly though, judging by the heat villain capes gets when they're noticed in public in BB they may actually be back and be laying low or they might've been sent elsewhere—Hooky gets an all-hands-on-deck throw down as soon as he's seen as a known jailbreaker, and the Empire probably doesn't want that kind of heat. Supposedly there are new Nazi capes to fill out the ranks, but you can't find enough information to know if that's Night and Fog, a 'rebranded' Crusader and Alabaster (however they would accomplish that), someone completely new, or lies.
But seriously, the biggest news is that Skidmark was captured yesterday morning. In the early hours of Friday a big cape battle between the Protectorate and the Merchants ended up with Skidmark caught, Squealer shooting off in some kind of invisible vehicle, and Mush barely escaping. You're sure that Squealer is going to do something crazy to get her 'Skids' back, the question is how long it'll take and how quickly the PRT can get Skidmark out of the city. She's no Bakuda, but if she's not caught fast enough there's likely to be a tinker-tank rampaging around turbofucking the landscape.
You're far enough away from the general Merchant-claimed areas that you hadn't noticed yet but apparently the expected pushes from the ABB and E88 have occurred but haven't been too bad. You wonder if that's because neither of the other gangs really wants Merchant territory, most of the gang's 'turf' was otherwise abandoned land. They could also be focusing on finding Squealer to snatch-and-grab and less on land acquisition.
There's nothing you can find that mentions Coil, at least not under that name, and very little you could pin on the Undersiders. Hitting the casino isn't for another month or two and while there are one-off comments about 'huge dogs' and 'clouds of darkness' there aren't any names to go with it.
The ABB has Lung and Oni Lee as expected, but current rumors mention something about a 'rain goddess' that no one has seen, but may explain the unseasonable fog that's hung over parts of the ABB's territory recently. There are also some comments about explosions and fireworks that may be Bakuda or yet another cape.
Uber and Leet were… themselves, having pulled some game-themed bullshit recently that wasn't their notorious GTA stunt. There are a few postings of other capes like Circus doing things recently, but nothing major in the past week.
With a fair chunk of the day over you pack up and wander the campus a bit so you can familiarize yourself with the locations of your classes. You notice during your walk that there are levels to the mental chatter you hear. People who seem to be engaged in something mentally challenging, like study or arguments feel 'brighter' or 'more active' than people who aren't. Sleeping people are almost invisible unless they're in REM sleep in which case they're super obvious beacons. There are also people whose base level seems to be higher than normal—one may have been Sabah/Parian, but that's a complete guess considering she was at the very edge of your range and you barely saw her going in to a dorm. You'll need to be around a known parahuman to compare, so Crystal or Victoria might be your best bet.
Back at the apartment you dig around for some Defense-related books and try your hand at a few. Some spells will need practice on actual targets or at least outside, because you're unwilling to even try a fire-whip in the space you have available, and your attempts at expansion charms are giving you an additional five feet at best. There's a reason that even Hermione thought them tricky.
You do manage a decent incarcerous, getting force and distance like a bolas, as well as the Impediment Jinx, Revulsion Jinx, and a smattering irritating and annoying hexes like the stinging hex. You also practice two curses, the Conjunctivitis Curse and Flagrante, both of which you got pretty good at aiming. The Orbus jinx and Jelly-Fingers jinx will have to wait until you're outside or targeting something with fingers, because you're sure as hell not practicing on yourself, counter-jinx or no.
You're at something of an impasse here—you need a location where it's safe to practice more damaging spells and you need target dummies (or just targets) to practice on. Actual experience in a fight might be useful too, but given the hive of of shit Brockton is, you'll get that one way or another.
Finishing off the day with a bit more Occlumency, you use part of the time to sort your thoughts. You'll have Sunday and Monday free but classes will start again on Tuesday, so at least some of your time will be taken up daily, not to mention travel times and such. Perhaps you should look in to studying apparition or portkeys or something.
AN: Please note that all you're really getting is publicly-available information. Which could even be wrong, willfully or otherwise.
Secondly, note that you know more than the spells listed here—on something like the HP wiki, anything listed as third-year or below you should be fairly familiar with.
Thirdly, Sunday and Monday (MLK Jr. Day in-story) will be per-day choices. Tuesday-Friday will be a lump vote where you choose three or four items and they will occur over the course of a couple of days in-story. Weekends will remain per-day for now.
Finally, excuse any hurriedness, I wanted to get something out before Christmas. I'll be cooking a roast and figgy pudding tomorrow, so voting will continue until I come out of my eggnog-induced haze.
After waking up and getting some tea into yourself, you spend a bit of time reinforcing your mental barriers before practicing both the switch between keeping yourself shielded and projecting a false seeming and the false seeming itself. The nightly mental practice has shown that you do have some very vague memories from before your insertion into Earth Bet so you lean on them heavily to construct a facade of 'just a college student with a sad backstory'.
The speed with which you switch defenses isn't anything to write home about at the moment but you do lose the awkward feeling that occurs when you first tried switching—it felt like going from thinking in English to thinking in a foreign language. You keep up the practice while going about your morning, popping the trunk open to the fourth compartment. When you had first opened the trunk and looked through it seemed like there was no theme to what was in there. After starting to pull things out, it seems more like there was a theme, and it was 'things for the Gentleman Wizard Adventurer'. Yes, there is the chess set, two brooms (Cleansweeps), and the foe glass you saw at first, but looking a bit farther back shows a small library table with a thin silvery-colored dagger and sheath with runes stamped or carved into it, a man's ring in a light-colored metal, a form-fitting suit of darkly scaled armor, and a mask. The mask immediately makes you think of a Death Eater mask, as it's steel-colored and very ornate with intricate scrollwork but the forehead marking is a very obvious symbol of the Deathly Hallows set in negative crossing through and erasing the designs with its placement.
You're tempted to poke around right away but caution has been your friend so far. Backing out to your library, you find a spell that reveals curses and hexes on items in—of all places—a book of household charms for pureblood ladies. Perhaps witches needed to know because their husbands left cursed things around all the time?
You start casting on everything in the compartment and while there are spells on things, nothing is returned as being cursed or hexed. You're not yet versed in the subtleties of what the detection spell returns other than harmful or not harmful, but repeated casts and lots of referring back to the book allows you a decent guess. The suit looks to have sizing charms, the knife has some kind of enhancement to the edge—probably durability or sharpness—and the mask has a sticking charm and a voice charm of some kind. The ring comes back completely clean of any spells at all, the simple silverish band could have come from any jeweler in the world from what you can tell.
With some assurance that you're not going to have your dick shrivel off if you happen to touch any of this, you move the foe glass into the apartment and it immediately spawns lumpy shadows. You end up getting in really close to try and figure out what the hell it is and can't. Maybe it's some kind of representation of Scion? In any case it's fuzzy, faint, and not anything you can glean information from at the moment so you place it aside.
You go back in to the compartment and shift things around so you can get to them easier if you have need of something quickly. You also manage to uncover a Quidditch ball set and a couple of beater's bats, what seems like some kind of stick-on wand holster for the inside of jackets that don't have pockets and a small container that contains dungbombs and Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder.
With that arranged you switch back to the second compartment and summon out some books on healing. If you're going to learn how to apparate you'll want to be able to reattach your parts if you get splinched, and some general healing wouldn't be amiss anyhow. After indexing them with your library spells you get down to studying. Reattaching splinched parts is done with a variation of the Reparifors spell. You can practice it, but actually using it would have to wait until you splinched, so you hope you never really have to use that theoretical knowledge. The next couple of spells are a general health-monitoring charm, a local anesthetic, a 'headache charm', and Episkey. You don't particularly want to cut yourself or break a finger or toe to test, but you finally slice the tips of a couple of fingers both with and without the painkiller and manage to heal everything up fine. Picking up Ferula and Tergeo are quite easy by comparison.
At this point it's mid-morning and you don't feel like eating leftovers or making anything so you decide to head to campus to make use of your meal plan as well as practice a little external mind detection and hopefully Legilimency as well. You're only a half-mile away from campus so you walk the distance and realize why the bus trip took so long the past few days—it might be a short walk to get on to the grounds, but it puts you at the back end where all of the facilities maintenance buildings and the like are. You're going to have to walk quite a way to get to the areas you recognize.
After a half-hour of walking you finally come upon buildings you recognize, a collection of the older dorm buildings that are slated to be refurbished in the next year or two. You swing around to walk between two of the buildings, slowing down and concentrating on what minds you sense through the walls. Stone must cause issues with your mind-sense because as you walk you find you can sense only the people in the wall-adjacent rooms but when you move in front of a window you can detect farther in. A bit of discreet pacing back and forth tells you that it's something about actual stone because detecting through cinderblock, even if it's filled with concrete, doesn't attenuate the mind signals nearly as much as the denser stone of the outside walls.
Once you've satisfied that curiosity you head towards the cafeteria, slightly off the main quad. It's not super busy at this point in the day but does have a steady trickle of people going in and out, standing around chatting, or smoking off in the corner. You pull up a bench and pull out a small book you had found earlier this morning when you tried summoning information about Legilimency from the book compartment. It hadn't come when you asked for 'books about Legilimency', but 'notes about Legilimency' summoned this hand-bound set of pages by Corvinus Gaunt that contained exercises he had found over the years to accomplish various abilities. The writer was incredibly bigoted against muggles and muggleborn and most of the notes contained an explanation on how he had used the exercise in question to get the better of the 'filthy swine'. With the help of a spell that caused people to see the book as something other than what it was, like a novel, you spend a bit of time reading and trying out various bits from the book.
Drawing your wand discreetly, you unfocus your eyes a bit, make a small figure-eight with your wand and cast Legilimens. What you get isn't the dive into one person's mind, but instead almost a summary of the mental state of the people in your field of view. Happy here, irritated and in pain there. Making a note of one guy who's blasting suffering everywhere you cut off the wide-angle, push your sunglasses up a little higher and hit him with regular Legilimency when he looks up from the coffee he's nursing.
You don't know if it's the fact that you've been practicing your other mind magics or that this guy isn't hopped up on something like Randy was, but you can actually make some sense of what you see. Completely unsurprisingly, he has a massive hangover. It's really fascinating to poke around because you can easily tell if you've pushed too hard—the guy is incredibly sensitive to additional pain and you feel bad about causing it. Not enough to actually stop, mind you, but you do take it slowly.
With a connection established you can angle your head so you're looking back at the book as you browse through his memories. Trying to work your way backward is like swimming up through a murky swamp, his mind becoming clearer as you go farther back and he gets more sober. In a way that helps you to focus on filtering the memory stream into something you can actually parse. You're super glad you're sitting down, because otherwise you'd either be stock-still and looking super suspicious or flopped on the floor and just as suspicious.
Your target seems like a pretty friendly, agreeable drunk though. He's a business major in his last semester named Craig, member of a frat, plays guitar, dating a sorority girl. There's nothing super exciting otherwise so you break the connection and look around for anyone else who might be hung over. No use in wasting easy marks, right?
Three hung over students later and you're feeling better about your mind-reading skill. One trick that you used from the book involves opening a connection with Legilimency and linking with your own Occlumentic barriers to filter out thought and only sense emotion. It certainly makes it easier to maintain awareness on what you're doing and lessens the flood of information to a simpler interface, like having a mood meter on a dating sim instead of a firehose of thoughts and images beating you in the face.
One of the students you used it on was in the middle of an argument with a girl, probably his girlfriend. You're no good at lip reading, but the wash of anger, betrayal, disgust made you think of a breakup. The girl pleaded with your target before he turned and screamed betrayal, revenge. Switching back to normal you check on your read of the situation and find you're pretty spot-on. The guy got drunk and fell asleep, his girlfriend was flirting with another guy, they hooked up, and she tried to tell him it was a simple mistake and it would never happen again. The drunk due in question, Kevin, had a previous girlfriend from highschool cheat on him and you follow the link in his mind back as he conflates the two in his head. Kevin's super pissed and spoiling for a fight with his girlfriend's hookup. You consider using the connection you have with him to moderate his feelings a bit, but you're both unsure about butting in in the first place, and wary using it to manipulate memories or emotions freehand on a random angry guy. Perhaps letting him go and studying and using the memory or false memory charms would let you get an idea on how it works by mind reading someone after you've charmed them at a later date.
[X][Legilimency] Try to calm Kevin's feelings of betrayal and revenge
[X][Legilimency] Leave Kevin's mind alone.
As one final test you legilimense a random, healthy looking student fairly far away. She's pretty happy at getting a decent grade back from some class she's taking—history of some sort—went dancing with her friends and flirted with some guys at a party on Friday, ships Legend/Eidolon/Scion as her OT3…
Oh, she writes yaoi fanfic. Holy shit she writes stuff about mpreg and cape babies flying out of their father's body via the—
Nope!
Cutting the connection you wander in to the cafeteria and lose yourself in the selection of something for lunch. You check in on your false seeming and it seems to be holding fine. Your mind sense is the same as well, although the range may have increased a slight bit, you don't have someone you can ask to walk away from you until you no longer detect them, so you're limited to guesstimating distance. After getting your tray you grab some silverware while you look for an empty table when someone waves you over. He looks vaguely familiar, blandly brown hair and light colored eyes with slightly-large nose. You can't remember a name but you've seen him in at least one of your classes. You throw a nod his way and fiddle with your tray to disguise your legilimency. As soon as the connection is good you dial it back as much as possible and mentally shunt it to the back of your mind so you don't trip over your own feet as you walk.
When you get to the table, the guy gestures you to a seat. "Hey, you're James, right? From the Monday and Thursday Macro class?"
Ah, that's why you got a wave-over. "Yep. D'you have your paper done?"
"I do, but I think it's crap. You've answered questions in class on similar stuff when the TA calls on you, could I get you to look it over for me?" He wipes his hands on a napkin and holds one out to shake. "Sorry, Derek Winter by the way." You're unsurprised to notice a small twitch when he meets your eyes but he seems almost unable to look away before you do.
"James Peverell, and sure. I didn't bring any of my stuff with me and I don't want to have to walk back to my apartment to get it, so I could look it over now if you just have some simple questions or we could meet at the Library tomorrow to go over it."
So far his feelings have been pretty mellow, but that sparks a bit of interest. "You're a freshman, right? We have to live on campus."
"I skipped a year due to family issues and already had the apartment—it was my parents'. I couldn't afford the upkeep on it and pay the housing tuition cost so I got a waiver."
His face falls and he looks away. "Damn, sorry dude. Family's a big thing with me, that'd mess me up a lot." An odd emotion flickers though his mind. "Was it the gangs? I don't normally go down towards the ABB or Merchant territory and I'm too pasty for the Empire to bother, but I hate what the gangs have done here."
You chew for a moment, swallow, and look off into the distance while keeping him in your peripheral vision. "It was the Riots."
There's no flinch visible on his face, but the sting of guilt is plain through his emotions. "Ah, shit. I'm from Pennsylvania and the Somerset Riots were front page news for weeks."
You sense the faintest trace of an accent, the name sounding more like 'Zumerzet'. You wonder if he's actually part of the E88 or just tangentially related. A scout, maybe? Perhaps it's unrelated and he's just from a really German part of Pennsylvania. Shaking your head you give a one-shoulder shrug. "It's a thing. I'm not really past it, but I'm not letting myself wallow either." Flicking your eyes back to him you continue, "Super off topic, though. I don't see your bag with you and I was going to do some grocery shopping right after this, so how about tomorrow?"
"Sure man, my two classes are 9 and 4, so anytime between then? Like I said, I've done it, but something just isn't clicking. I feel like I wrote fifteen hundred words and half of them are crap."
Pulling out a pen and some scratch paper you scribble down the two reference books that helped you the most and the search term that found you a decent scholarly article and pass it to him. "You can check those over if you have time, if not we'll refer to them tomorrow. The guy who wrote the article should probably be shot because of how boring he made everything, but if you search for 'demand curve model' you can skip to the actually useful stuff."
The conversation changes to inconsequential stuff after that although you have to profess a love of oldies music because you're not sure if all the same bands from the post-Scion era were butterflied. There's nothing wrong with loving classic rock, but not knowing if mentioning Pearl Jam or Nirvana would get you weird looks tells you you need yet more research. You should probably break down and buy a smartphone and a data plan.
Derek takes off after you both finish up your lunch and you head out to do some scouting of Brockton. It's quite a hike to Cooks Ave, and that's kinda Merchant territory anyhow, so instead you hop a bus towards the Boardwalk. Before you even step off the bus you have your false seeming firmly in place. It would be completely random to catch Tattletale's attention, but there's no reason to tempt fate.
The Boardwalk itself screams tourist trap. You arrived about halfway up its length and headed north in order to hit the Lord Street Market and everywhere you look things are overpriced. Three bucks for a soda? A t-shirt with a silhouette of the Rig? $25. The one acceptable deal you find is a small tea shop that sells a variety of loose-leaf teas. The prices seem a little inflated but not so bad that it stops you from picking up some mid-priced Formosa Oolong and a second-flush Darjeeling.
Once you leave the Boardwalk all of the shops and lights seem to evaporate within a couple of blocks. Here and there are offices for tow companies, welding shops and the like. Coming up on the Market there's suddenly well-cared-for trees lining the sidewalk, the road has fewer potholes and the amount of foot traffic swells to almost triple the size.
The market is a huge jumbled mess. There are vague—really vague—clusters of booths, but even within the electronics section you'll stumble across someone selling knitwork or blacksmithing tools or something equally random.
Finding a shop with used phones is easy, you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a booth selling them. From a bit of Legilimency you find a place that seems pretty legit and offers a decent price on a older smartphone. Data plans are cheap, so that's not really an issue.
[X][Phone] Buy a phone.
[X][Phone] Don't buy a phone.
You're coming to the end of your discretionary funds for the month. You do have food stocks back at your apartment that should last you even without attempting to duplicate it, and you do have a meal plan at school. With that in mind is there anything else you want to search for while you're here? You have about $100.
[X][Market] Write-in.
Leaving the Market you go west a bit and encounter Cooks Avenue. There are indeed brownstones here, most of them completely boarded up. There's nothing that screams 'Merchant Territory' offhand, but the street itself is eerily quiet. You also can't detect any minds, but just in case you find an alcove where you can't be seen and attempt a Homenum Revelio and get no response. The house on the opposite side does have people inside, you pick up three signatures as soon as you cross the street. Poking your head into the alleyway behind the houses shows some lights coming out of windows farther down the street as well as what looks like the cherry of a cigarette from a house with no visible lights.
It's getting on towards dusk, so you could sneak around as you are, change in to your newly-acquired but untested suit, or head back home now that you've scouted the area. Once you master apparition that alcove you found would work fine as a place to teleport to.
[X][Cooks Ave] Sneak around looking for the stash house.
[X][Cooks Ave] Change in to your armor and sneak around.
[X][Cooks Ave] Go back to your apartment.
AN: Bleh. Plastic trees for me in the future, being allergic to the mold or something has me all fucked up.
As I said, there was a tie, but part of that was not tallying everything together because of typos and such. Nevertheless I covered what I believed in my antihistamine-fueled haze were the winners and hopefully I'll be a bit more on the ball with the next vote.
If you have any questions on the items you found that you want answered before you vote, I'll check in tomorrow. For now, in the immortal words of the Dead Milkmen: "I'm all messed up on cough syrup now, so just like, never mind."
Pick at most four items:
[X][Sunday] Study Magic
-[X][Study] (Write-in) Specific subject, otherwise general study
[X][Sunday] Look through your trunk
-[X][Trunk] What'cha looking for? (See character sheet for trunk compartments)