Delta - 15.2

No one.

That was the fucking answer.

There was absolutely no sign or trace of a body hanging around on the outside of the portal. Leo ran his hands over the bumps and spikes on his head. If there was no body hanging on the outside of the portal, that meant it was either still in the stream, with the possibility of shooting projectiles out at them. Or it had been blown apart by the force of impact when hitting this world from the previous star bounce location.

“Or there’s still someone else in the house beside No Hands upstairs.”
“No Hands?”
“It sounds like a classic villain name. And I assume anyone who is bouncing through illegal portals into the basement of a man smuggling gems for alternating mafias, is probably a classic villain.”
“That’s fair, yeah.”

Harry disappeared from his line of sight for a bit, limited as it was in all of this smoke. It was starting to get into his lungs and cause a bit of pain, but he pushed it down and muscled through while examining the scorch marks on the ceiling. The soiled (but still fluffy) insulation kept falling down on his face, placing God knows how many toxic chemicals into his lungs and onto his skin. He turned around to hear the portal crackling and the blue light completely disappearing from its shell. Harry stepped through the empty ring while kicking at the joints supporting it.

“Shine that light down here so I can disconnect the power and reconnect the fans.”

Leo followed that direction. It seemed right to listen to her, when all the times before he insisted on working alone because teams always led to weird dynamics. And the people he had always met before who pretended to leaders always ended up being dicks he shouldn’t have been giving the time of day.

“What do you think happened to the partial in the stream?”
“The partial?”
“If the one you call No Hands is upstairs but relatively intact, wouldn’t the failure down here mean there was another?”

Harry kept working with the wires on the floor, cutting out certain bits and then slowly fusing them back together. Leo kept the light steady the entire team even with the fleeting thoughts in his head that were telling him to run away because of possible danger. He had worked in this building. He knew that Bitty had consistently paid off the inspectors and nothing in the system was up to code.

“Be careful, Harry. This isn’t the best maintained electrical system.”
“Yeah, I figured from this hookup. They did try to hook it up nice but never place an interdimensional portal for star bounces into the socket for a washing machine. The only place I’ve seen worse than this is when someone took a replicator, merged it with a microwave and then was running it on the outline of a lamp so no one would notice the charges.”
“What happened in that place?”
“They blew up the city block. Now let’s see if this will clear up some of the smoke so I can locate the fuse box and shine some brighter lights on the whole situation. Do you know if they have a pump in their basement?”

The fans kicked on and soon the fumes were going out through the main exhaust pipe in the wall. They started to be able to see the shapes and objects around them, a bit of smoke still hanging in the air, but the majority of the toxic scents had left the premises.

“With this neighborhood on this slant, he probably does have a pump. I was never allowed to go into the basement but I’m slowly learning the reasons why there were so many rules in his business.”
“You know, this still isn’t entirely on Beit. It could still be something that the Fiacre or the O’Calley have been pressuring him into maintaining and just kept that dangerous hookup because they didn’t want anyone to notice the charges.”
“He could be partially innocent but there’s no way that he’s entirely innocent either.”

Harry looked at him in that way people look at mournful puppies, sad that they’re sad but not really aware of how to interpret the emotions. He wasn’t expecting any sign of comfort from her, certainly not even when she held open his hand and put a small water droplet in the palm.

“Where did you get that from?”
“Just pulled it from the air. It’s very humid down here and there’s six inches of water on the air. It’s just enough for my powers to be functioning, doing the whole act of speaking to the water and that craziness. The droplet should remain self-contained and it won’t roll off your hand or anything, but whatever your powers are, you should be able to do something with it.”

She turned back to working on the fuse box, trying to find where everything led to and make sure the place didn’t catch on fire. Again.

Leo just kept his gaze on the water droplet, while keeping the light shining on the area where Harry was working. He had never met someone from Nerot, especially from Tanis, before this point. That’s where his mother came from and his father from Hebrine. All his father had ever taught him was to suppress powers that weren’t useful for manipulation, weren’t useful for making money.

Creating plant life instantly from a seed and a droplet of water was useful for making money, just not enough for his father. Leo dug around in his coat pocket and pulled out his mother’s capsule ring, moving one seed with a blink into the palm with the water droplet. She had always shown him the flowers of different worlds through the seeds she kept in her collection. And Leo always kept a few seeds with him just in case the moment might arise.

“Alright, Leo. Let’s head back upstairs and make sure there’s no more bodies crawling around up there. I’d hate for someone to wreck their car over a dick bouncing through a portal. Nice flower.”
“Oh, thanks. You’re not surprised?”
“If I had seen a ball of smoke, I would have been. But no, I’m not.”

That reaction had never happened before. People had never just brushed off creating flowers out of what looked like nothing as being perfectly normal. They either thought it was a horror or focused on it too much. But never this.

As they marched back up the stairs, Leo could hear her grumbling about some “fucking electrician” and “why did they keep blowing up the fucking city blocks”. Slight fear rose back over him, recognizing the danger that could be had from hanging around with Harry’s company.

“So, where was your mother from? Tanis?”
“Yeah, Tanis. She always said she wanted to take me there to see the Gardens or something.”
“The Gardens of Orchidaceae?”
“Yeah, I think that’s the one. My father said that you came from Tanis. Is that in truth?”

Harry turned her back to him and continued up the next half of the stairs. Maybe he shouldn’t have mentioned that to her. They came into the back room to find that No Hands was still there, still quite dead and missing some of his appendages.

“I think the fact that I’m from Tanis is quite blatant. Whether by my thorns, or the color of my skin, or the siren song that can call up all the hurricanes in the sea. And Tanis is beautiful in its ancient gardens, so you should try and make it there sometime.”

She disappeared out of the room again and Leo was left to guard over the dead body while gathering up all of his thoughts.