The Chained Watcher

Rooftops

~~~

Cold weather makes for such a convenient excuse.

As interesting as the natural sights are in magical worlds, tech civilizations truly do know how to make interesting cities. Pretty much all the rooftops have low walls and a way to reach them easily, even though most of them are empty most of the time.

Currently lounging on top of a previously empty roof are the Hermits, enjoying the cold weather while drinking hot chocolate and chatting quietly. They're still dressed up to hide their nonhuman traits, but without any non-players nearby they're not too worried about it.

Apparently some other players hadn't been quite as careful hiding things like ears and tails as they should have been, so the local internet is chock full of conspiracy theories about how the government is experimenting on people and giving them animal traits, or there are aliens walking among them, and let's not get started on how the government is actually handling this. There have been some contact attempts, but usually the players who are approached bail and activate their enderporters.

Makes sense though. Sure, there's a fair chance some of them are just looking to talk and figure out what hidden intentions the players might have, but he wouldn't put it past them to try to tranq someone and bring them in.

Breathing in the chilly air, Grian sighed. It would be nice to go flying right now, but he's gotta hide his wings to keep trouble away. No magic either, since with his suppressed senses it's hard to tell Listeners apart from normal people. Using magic near one of them? Just a disaster waiting to happen.

Over on a somewhat nearby rooftop, though it's a bit lower down than theirs, there looks to be some kind of party going on. Probably a birthday party, if the dinosaur cake is anything to judge by. There's balloons, streamers, and a table piled with presents, along with an area presumably for the adults to chill over to the side.

From what he can tell, the kid whose birthday it is is somewhere around 10 to 12 years old, as are most of the other kids present, though there are a couple teens and younger children, probably siblings. The teens look to be entertaining themselves with their phones, but some of the younger kids look pretty bored. Their parents probably couldn't find a babysitter to watch them while at the party, so they were forced to come along.

Honestly, if their parents dragged them along, they should at least bother to supervise them. One kid got hold of a plastic knife and started poking holes in the plastic tablecloth, another is drawing on their chair with a sharpie, and one is balancing very precariously on the low wall around the rooftop, out of sight of the parents because of the stairwell.

Watching the 7 or 8 year old kid wobble along the wall, he frowned at the idle parents, not that they would notice at this distance. One wrong step or gust of wind and their kid could fall, and that's not a fall a normal human can survive. These buildings are very tall, after all. It would probably take some ten seconds to reach the ground in free fall.

(I'm not sure exactly how tall that would make the building, but this civilization is advanced enough to make skyscrapers. It's a little more advanced than ours.)

He knew the wind was coming before it reached the rooftop party, having spotted flags and fabric blowing around on other more distant rooftops as the gust drew closer. Yeah, there's no way he's gonna let a kid go splat.

Pulling out an invis pot, he elbowed Xisuma to draw his attention to the teetering kid and downed the potion, discarding his oversized coat and funny glasses while waiting to see if the kid would get down off the edge before the wind arrived. They did not, and Xisuma's intake of breath let him know that the admin had noticed what he had.