The Legend of William Oh-Chapter 206: Caught Stealing

***Thaddeus Thompson, Level 43 Swift Hand Fighter***

“C’mon Tad, it’ll be fine.” Monroe said, casting nervous glances around the sewer directly below the Lord’s tower.

“Every morning, the Tangled has to un-split to eat breakfast so all of her copies are full, yeah?”

“I guess?” Tad said, not understanding where Monroe was going with that.

“So there’s a short period of time every morning when the Lord has to have an actual person watch it. All we have to do is sneak past them and make a tiny bit of it disappear. Like this much.”

Monroe held his hands apart, indicating an amount about the size of a man’s head.

“The guard will be blamed for it and we get away scot-free with enough to last us a month.”

Resistance could keep a man alive longer while starving, but that just prolonged the suffering. If they had enough flour to make a dozen loafs of bread, that could last them another two weeks…if they didn’t just eat it all at once.

Tad wasn’t confident they wouldn’t just inhale the flour the instant they got it home, cooked or not.

“I mean, maybe all that’s true, and maybe we get some flour, but what about…” Tad glanced back and forth, scanning the length of the sewer to make sure he was in the clear.

“…The rumors?”

“What rumors?”

“About William Oh. They say he can see people’s innermost thoughts. That you can’t hide anything from him.”

“That’s just a bunch of hooey. Not even charm Classes can letcha see into a man’s mind, and he sure as hell isn’t a diviner.”

“But…nobody’s ever gotten one over on him. Ever. He seems like he always know-”

Monroe interrupted with a harsh whisper.

“That’s just a story, Tad, He’s just a damned fatass Lord sitting on his ass while the rest of us starve. He’s locked himself up in that tower of his for more than a week now, and I guaranteed you he’s not coming out anytime soon.”

“Now, they’re gonna change the guard any second now, I can hear ‘em getting up. When that happens, you gotta use that Ability of yours to grab some of this feck’in flour or I’ll throttle ya.”

“Yeah, but-“ Tad muttered

“Shut up, the guard’s changing. The goods are four feet that way,” Monroe said, pointing. “Get to it, Ta-

“Ahem.”

A throat was cleared behind them, prompting the two of them to swivel their heads and reach for their weapons.

Despite the near-darkness, the two Rogue Archetypes could easily make out William Oh’s figure, hand resting on the haft of a tomahawk.

It felt like someone reached into Tad’s chest and pulled the fear right out of him as his heart leapt, rattling against the bars of its cage and howling like a madman. The sudden sensation made him drop to his knees, panting violently.

“Can I help you gentlemen with something?” the Lord of the Burned Stronghold asked.

“Fancy meeting you here, milord…in the sewer…underneath your vault.” Monroe said, gulping audibly.

“We were just…looking for places to scrape out some fertilizer for my buddy’s farm.”

“Don’t lie,” William Oh said, “It makes everything complicated, especially when I know exactly what you were doing. You two had a half-baked plan to steal some flour by teleporting it through the wall. Which one of you can steal things through a wall?” 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Tad raised a shaky hand.

“What’s your name?”

“Thaddeus, but they call me Tad.”

“Alright, Tad. I’d like to see how that Ability works. Join me for breakfast. The other guy:” The lord turned his attention back to Monroe.

“Have some jerky,” He manifested some dried meat out of thin air and tossed it to Monroe. “And if I catch you thinking you can steal from me again, I’m just gonna kill ya. So please, leverage that cunning of yours for the good of the Stronghold rather than taking what’s not yours. Understood? Now git.”

Despite being an accomplished Climber in his forties, Monroe nodded like a child being scolded by an adult and scurried away at the Lord’s dismissal.

“C’mon,” William Oh said, gesturing Tad to follow with a hand that was half-melted and missing a finger. “Let’s hit the shower to get the stink off, then Anna’s making pancakes.”

“The girl from the post office and bakery?” Tad asked.

“Yep.”

“Huh.”

“Pancakes?”

“You don’t want pancakes?” William Oh asked, glancing over his shoulder at Tad.

“Didn’t say that,” Tad said, hustling to catch up.

***William Oh***

Will thanked Anna for breakfast and dug in, while Tad stared at the cheerful blonde girl with a slack jaw.

“What’s the post-office girl doing here?” He asked.

Will frowned.

“She’s a Tangled.”

“The post office girl too?” Tad asked.

“They’re the same person.”

“Oh. But there’s more than one of them. I seen ‘em.”

“They split into multiple bodies.”

“They can do that!?”

“Yep.”

“Is the guard girl all over town a Tangled too?”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Same person,” Will said, his voice muffled by a slab of pancake. Tad seemed like he might not be the sharpest tool in the shed, which explained how his friend convinced him to do something as stupid as trying to steal from a Lord.

“You guys dating?”

Will nearly spat out his pancake.

Just when you think someone’s clueless.

“…Something like that.” Will said after clearing his throat with some water.

“…” Tad’s eyes clouded over with confusion for a moment before a glitter of understanding crossed his expression. “Okay, so-“

“Look, that isn’t why you’re here.” Will said, forcibly changing the subject. “You’re here because you have an interesting Ability. Tell me about that.”

“Well, the Ability is a secondary called Pickpocket, I got it when I was a lot younger, kicking around Akul. It helped me stay afloat long enough to get my levels and catch a ride up to the Flotilla, but it took a long while.”

“How’s it work?” Will asked.

“Well, I can move small objects from one container to another container I’m holding.”

“You ever upgrade it?” Will asked.

Tad shook his head. “Always more important things to do, ya know?”

“What’s it scale with?”

Tad went on to simply read the Ability aloud for Will.

Pickpocket

Active: 1 Charge

Discretely transfer a tiny object or group of objects from one container to a container on your person. Distance and size scale with Acuity.

The charge cost is very low but there are a lot of limitations built in. How many upgrades would that take to make into an actual teleportation Ability?

Remove ‘tiny’, “Object’ needs to be expanded to include creatures, remove ‘container’ x2, scale up the size and distance drastically…

Maybe five or six upgrades, just to be safe? and even then, there’s no guarantee.

Tad would have to upgrade Pickpocket when he hit Advanced, and then dump a ton of rare sacrifices into it.

Will wrote off the possibility. Tad seemed like an okay guy, but by his own admission, he didn’t have great starting sacrifices, so four upgrades to pickpocket was probably the theoretical limit even after making it a primary, and he had tried to steal from him.

If I have someone who could teleport me out to catch Attrition, that would make it SO much easier. Anyone other than Orev Harti.

Teleportation Abilities were few and far between, especially ones with a low enough cost that someone could just spam them like Orev.

The problem with Orev was that he had tried to kill Will on multiple occasions on Caddock’s orders, and was currently working as a scout alongside June guiding locals and paying visitors through level fifty.

Orev didn’t really have any personal investment in killing Will. Despite nearly achieving that goal, Will had let him live because he knew the man wasn’t a zealot dead-set on seeing Will killed.

He, like June, simply killed what he was told to kill by his boss, which put him on the wrong side of the battle for the Burned Stronghold.

Will had publicly forgiven Orev because the Advanced Scout was too useful to kill, but Will would be damned if he let the bastard teleport him anywhere.

No matter how much Will rationalized it, he was never going to be completely at ease around the raven-feather wearing scout, and that was just the way life shook out.

Will thought it would be nice if he could create another teleporter to move people and supplies around instantly, but Tad wasn’t going to cut it.

I suppose I’ll have to commission some teleporters from scratch, but not in a Frederick Wyrd sort of way.

In any case, Will thought, glancing up at the Rogue archetype stuffing his face with pancakes. I should get the Miasmatic Structure imprint.

Once breakfast was over, Will took Tad upstairs to one of the clean rooms that weren’t in use, having the thief use Pickpocket to transfer coins from a bag on the table to his own pocket.

Will missed the first activation of the Ability because he was watching the space between them.

“You actually did it?” Will asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Do it again.”

Will peered directly at Tad. He saw the Charge well up inside the Climber, head for a particular knot of Miasma and then…nothing.

Discretely transfer. Will thought, mentally underlining ‘discretely’.

Will had never actually seen an Ability designed to be hidden from magical senses, but it made sense that pickpocket would behave that way. Wouldn’t be much use if people felt it being done.

Looks like I might be able to get more than I bargained for. In fact, this might help with sneaking up on Attrition.

Looks like Tad’s going to be working off those pancakes.

“Okay, Tad, I’m going to call in my lab assistant and we’re going to do some tests. None of them will be dangerous to you, although they may be a bit awkward.”

“Okay.” Tad said with a shrug.

“GHOUL!” Will shouted.

“What’s up?” Ghoul asked, poking his head through the door.

Tad stifled a shriek upon spotting the rotten corpse.

“This guy has an Ability that says ‘discretely’ which allows it to mask itself from my senses.”

“Oh, wow,” Ghoul said, stepping the rest of the way through and approaching

“At first I wanted to study the teleportation structure, but the concealing is interesting me too.”

“Show me.” Ghoul said, peering at Tad.

“Go ahead,” Will said, nodding to the rogue.

Again, another faint shift in his internal Charge, and then…nothing.

Tad reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin with a shrug.

“Wow, I barely felt him activate it, but nothing else.” Ghoul said, rubbing his decaying chin in thought. “That Ability truly does mask itself. Interesting. We have to add it to the collection.”

“Agreed, but don’t rub your chin like that, you’re getting skin flakes all over my floor.”

“Bah,” Ghoul grunted, waving Will off.

“What do you think?” Will asked.

“In my time, there was something called ‘imaging contrast.’ There were medical Relics that could allow doctors to see inside people, but the Relics had a hard time distinguishing one kind of flesh from another, so we would use minerals that different kinds of flesh absorbed at different rates to increase the detail.”

Will frowned. “We could put up some miasma fog that the ability has to pass through.”

“I’m not certain the Ability is ‘passing through’ anything that we can perceive.” Ghoul said, almost rubbing his chin but stopping himself short.

“I think the Ability is creating an extradimensional bridge between the two places, which means the only places we will be able to see any miasmatic structures at all are at the target and his pocket.

“…What?”

This devolved into a lecture where Ghoul explained ‘dimensions’ and how higher and lower dimensions perceived their worlds.

The students: William Oh and a confused dimwitted rogue he’d pulled off the street.

“So you see, We, as three-dimensional beings, can lift up away from the two-dimension plane and see everything at once. We can also change our location relative to everything on that plane effortlessly.

“Tim the stick figure here could never get past Bob the stick figure because they can’t go through each other and there’s not enough space to go around, but we can do this.”

Ghoul lifted his finger and placed it behind Bob.

“Similarly, we can see what is inside the room here, while Bob and Tim cannot. Similarly, a fourth-dimensional being would be able to see everything in the entire three-D universe all at once, both inside and out, and that four-D creature would be able to effortlessly choose where it wanted to manifest itself.”

“Only a small portion of itself, though, right?”

Ghoul smiled.

“Yes, just like our fingertip would create a small flesh-colored line to the perspective of the stick people, a four-dimensional being would look like a three-dimensional being to us, but there would be SO MUCH more of it outside what we can see. and It could do things like this:”

Ghoul put all five of his fingers down on the blackboard, surrounding Tim the stick figure.

“I am one singular three-dimensional being, but Tim the stick figure sees five separate entities, because I am interacting with his dimension in multiple places at once. A four-dimensional being could even seem like multiple ones, when in reality, it is simply one bigger creature that can’t all fit in our dimensions.”

That’s so godsdamned cool, Will thought.

“My head hurts.” Tad said.

“That’s good, means you’re learning.” Ghoul replied.

“How does this have anything to do with my Ability?”

Ghoul began drawing two coinpurses his blackboard, then connected them with a piece of string.

“Because your Ability isn’t sending a pulse of miasmatic structures through normal spacetime, but instead moving outside of our three-dimensional universe in order to connect two places in space without drawing a line between them.”

“uuh…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Will said, turning to Ghoul. “Let’s see if we can get a good imprint.”

Will turned back to Tad. “This is gonna get a bit weird, but you’ll be out of here in a couple hours.”

The rogue gulped.

***Thaddeus Thompson, Level 43 Swift Hand Fighter***

“So, what happened next? What did he do to you?” Monroe asked, peering over at Tad as they sipped watered-down pulque.

Tad shook his head.

“I have no idea.” Tad mused, staring at the bar. “What I do know is I got lucky and you’re not convincing me to try and steal from William Oh again.”

“Oh come on, he’s a child. He gave us a slap on the wrist. He fed you pancakes! This Lord’s got no bite. I’ve got this surefire way we can skim some-“

“Fuck. Off.” Tad said, staring straight into Monroe’s eyes.

Monroe snorted and dragged his pulque off the bar and retreated to another table, where another three men were whispering, not quite quiet enough to escape Tad’ Acuity.

“Yeah, he’s out.”

“Screw him, we don’t need him for this one anyway.”

Tad glanced over his shoulder, memorizing their faces.

He never saw them again.