But Hasty Planning

As soon as he entered his home he headed for his office, shucking off his jacket in favor of a sleeveless tank top. He unloaded his bags onto his desk and arranged them in a pattern so familiar he could probably do it in his sleep. Once they were all laid out he soaked them in his incubus and fox energy, slitting his palm and bleeding over the camelia as he did. They set the camelia under a heat lamp to dry and moved over to his steel and used his energy to bend and shape it into a bowl. He boiled some water and poured it in to clean the steel before grabbing his flowers and grinding them into a powder. Once everything was complete, he dumped the dust over his computer.

Not all of his work was done by way of mystic powers granted to him by a griffin being housed in his body. Xinyi's nose wasn't as strong as he would care to admit, meaning he couldn't track someone without a particularly unique scent that he had never smelled, and that after a few hours when your scent became dull, you were lost to him. He countered this problem by way of an enchanted computer that he had made himself. It would never do anything as grand as give him the exact location of a person, but by using his incubus vitality sensing ability, his foxes illusion ability, and his engineering degree, he could get pretty damn close. The computer showed him a wide radius of where they had been in the past week, using lingering lifeforce to trace movement. The further someone was from him though, the wider the search radius was. Unluckily, the guy was no longer in the city. Luckily he was still on the continent.

They spent the next few hours doing their thing, looking for ways to narrow down their search radius. They started by checking banks, any account that hadn't been used in a while was opened across as many illusions as he could make, those acting as computer screens with live access to the info on his computer. It took a while for anything to turn up, but after finding an account that had recently been used after being near frozen for a while his suspicion and curiosity peaked. He opened a new illusion and logged into the city's security footage, opening every camera in the area, as the transaction was made at the bank directly. It took two hours of looking, but eventually he got a face match! The man had an ugly, scruffy beard that wasn't shaved correctly, a valiant but terrible attempt to hide his identity was Xinyi's guess. He looked tired, but the makeup he was wearing served to hide as much of that as it could. His hair was disheveled and it looked like he hadn't seen a shower in weeks, but that couldn't be it because he had only been gone from the city for a maximum of two weeks, so drugs then. He opened every camera the man walked by until there were no cameras left. Reza Street, Stelem City, street camera number two. After checking the date and time, he cursed. It had been roughly a week since he had been to that bank, and he only appeared on a few other cameras in the week after he was at the bank, so he was likely on his way out of the city, and if Xinyi had to take the detectives along with him, he'd miss him. He shoved at the table, upset about this and the likelihood it would fuck up his perfect track record. They'd need a plan for how this was supposed to work, because even in full griffin form, he still wasn't big enough to carry both detectives, and he was in no mood to argue with them if they refused to go without each other. He had, at most, two days before the man left the city with the way he was moving around. He sighed as he removed himself from his chair, time 03:52. He debated grabbing a gun from his arsenal, because some people requested video evidence instead of the bones he usually gives as proof, and from his information, magic and mythic bullshit was not something the general populace was aware of, but that familiar note suggested he wouldn't have to.

He once again read the time, they probably wouldn't be at the office right now, and if he hunted them down right now he'd probably would lose the target, so the only course of action left to him now was to take his ass to sleep. He'd wake up in an hour or two, the DIU would be open, and he could get the mission done and collect his payment. Yeah he overslept, but he was still going to make it!

" I'll actually be collecting my payment right now!"

" You completed the job?"

" No! But I need to know something in order to complete the job in time and I can smell it on you, that smell that tells me eating you would be interesting in more ways than one. You smell not of sin, but of other. Humans don't smell like you do, so, what are you?"

They looked a little taken aback, but he was used to getting that reaction from beings who thought they were hiding their non-human scents well. They probably were in all honesty, he just had a stronger nose than most, and they were close. The first to answer him was Mr. Orange, a nice change from Tweedle Dumb.

" I myself, am a rather old black shuck. Came here from North Blink."

This seemed to serve as permission for the other two to tell him about themselves.

" I am an elf, from Desim." Tweedle Dumb went next, and this time Xinyi didn't mind when they opened their mouth!

" I was summoned upon this land and am now very stuck. HI, I'm a demon!"

That meant that he could carry them both as long as Tweedle Dee was the type of demon who could shapeshift. It seems they were in luck as Tweedle Dee made himself into a hamster and Tweedle Dumb stuck him in their pocket. Cheering internally, Xinyi took the two up to the roof where he had enough space to shift.

The flight was smooth, years of practice, and multiple accounts of falling during said practice, paying off as Xinyi smoothly adjusted to the extra weight on their back without killing the two of them.