Being in the know meant a lot of things, most of them a little horrifying. One of those - maybe the main thing, depending on who you ask - is that you stop taking things for granted. Nothing's innocent. No coincidences.<br/><br/>Where there's smoke, there's fire.<br/><br/>Jake leaned back against the glass door of his balcony, soaked to the skin and wincing as the heavens split with light and fury. The storm was so loud he almost didn't expect to hear it, but he did, and felt it, too. The thunder's percussion followup resonated in his bones. It made him uneasy. A storm like this was hell on practitioners: drowning the streets in running water, grounding almost everything. Water magic got to cheat, and he knew a fair amount of it, but not everyone was so lucky - and even in his case, water was far from his best footing, magically speaking. Like light, it was a secondary element, one he could command with surety but not quite confidence.<em>Which means a night where we're vulnerable.</em>Humans weren't the only ones to suffer, plenty of beasties and bugaboos had trouble with running water...but not all of them. An ill omen, and he was in the business of taking ill omens seriously.<br/><br/>He headed back inside, crossing through his threshold. As he did he called power and sent it shifting slowly and carefully through his clothes, driving the water out of them and then sending it rolling across the carpet without sinking in until it could climb his spartan kitchen counters and vanish down a drain. He stood for a moment as the process completed, taking stock.<br/><br/>'Spartan' was an aesthetic that defined just about exactly half of his uncomfortably large studio apartment: the simple, spotless white carpet had little to landmark its expanse, a bedroll here (no frame), a desk with a prayer mat there, scattered notebooks, three tables with an assortment of raw materials placed in unlabeled tupperware containers and stacked neatly. No phone; there was a laptop on a short pedestal against the wall near his bedroll,  guarded by a half-circle of unworked copper and water stirred by one of those cute little endless fountains. The other half all started above shoulder height, a riot of artwork ranging from traditional paintings, murals, and one ancient-looking tapestry to a variety of carefully-supported sculptures and fixtures, including a massive hanging garden that stretched through the whole of the apartment with a handful of bubble terrariums hanging from it. Heaven below, a clean white sky, with earth above. The inversion had power in it, confusing and off-balancing hostile forces, preventing them from bringing their strength to bear properly. For him, the complicated mental arithmetic needed to navigate the local metaphysics was as familiar and easy as his times tables, or as his times tables would be if he practiced them every day. He padded over to his desk after the water had drained away, looking over the items there and then collecting them one by one.<br/><br/>A gun. Snub-nosed revolver, large caliber, slit in its holster for its relevant paperwork. Three rounds hollowpoint, one round streaked with blessed silver (whole rounds of silver were expensive, which wasn't much an object for him, and often impractical, which was), two rounds cast iron.<br/><br/>A keyring to a motorcycle that had never actually finished the assembly line, which had required a lot of interference and paperwork-shuffling to arrange; the symbolism was worth it, though, and it could call together Jake's ride half again as fast as the first set of ordinary keys he'd enchanted starting out.<br/><br/>A red amber amulet. Where the keys to his bike built it up out of whatever was laying around, this was more esoteric: it was also a key, linked to a chest of red amber buried somewhere nondescript in the Nevernever, and in that chest was a singular and terrible axe. Jake wore the gun to warn the unwary off, a precaution, a polite request to the world to avoid stupid decisions that might give him cause to draw it. He wore the amulet for very different reasons. There was nothing precautionary or polite about it, and you could get the sense of that from the way it caught the light, if you knew how to look.<br/><br/>The other things were newer, untested and unstoried. A little piece of mirror-polished steel he'd used to signal other kids as a kid himself, charmed to take in a fifty-foot radius and send a luminous, miniaturized, illusory copy of it to a foot-wide hoop of similar metal with a pair of unmarked leather grips; as close to a magical camera feed as he'd been able to rig. A pair of novelty handcuffs with a shiny-smooth river stone set into the chain, capable of drawing a "current" of flowing water around the cuffs. A cracked fossil from a Paleozoic predator whose magic would be burned away in its first use; after about ten seconds of working itself up to the task it'd act as a kind of specialized grenade, one that would wreak terrible damage on stone, metal, concrete, glass...but not organic life or materials of any kind, although of course one's glasses exploding in one's eyes or a car crumpling around you tended to be pretty damaging. And one last thing: a plain white umbrella. There was nothing special about the umbrella, but it would keep the worst of the rain off. The water trick wasn't exactly inconspicuous, after all.<br/><br/>Tools of the trade. Man's comfort was ever in his arms and armor, Jake knew, just as he knew how little that could count for against the things that would make of man an enemy.<em>But then,</em>he thought, feeling the reassuring weight of his holster as he buckled it,<em>they take the same comfort in their claws and scales, right up until the moment they remember whose world this is, and who has a <strong>right</strong> to be counted in it.</em>He smiled at the thought, and it wasn't a very nice smile.<br/><br/><em>I should see the Collins-Myer girl on my way to check in with the Old Man. If this turns out to be out of my league - and I've got that feeling - it couldn't hurt to see about enlisting backup. She seems like she's into killing things. More importantly, the RIGHT things. Maybe swing by the apothecary too, see if there's anything on offer...</em><br/><br/>Jake Merigold, lieutenant Warden to a man soon dead or dead already, stepped out and locked the door behind him. He headed downstairs, took the first left through the hall, and then he was on his way to storm-chasing.