Verrin waited until the heavy rain had stopped, replaced by a dull, persistent drizzle. He emerged from his crawlspace around 3:00 AM, the city's noise slightly muted by the hour, but the electric lights still burning with unnatural intensity.
He walked toward a nearby convenience store, a glowing beacon of manufactured light and processed foods. The internet had informed him that these were nodes of high-speed human interaction and concentrated, low-denomination currency.
He watched the few remaining human patrons. They swiped cards, exchanged polite, meaningless sounds, and left. They moved with a casual confidence that Verrin found profoundly disturbing—they never checked their surroundings, never monitored their energy levels, and never seemed aware of the millions of potential threats surrounding them.
He went inside. The automatic door whooshed, startling him badly.
The air inside was warm, artificially scented with coffee and plastic. The rows upon rows of packaged, colorful goods were a dizzying display of human excess.
He ignored the food. He went directly to the back, to a small rack of discarded reading material and cheap clothing. He needed an identity upgrade. The worn black hoodie was insufficient.
He found a cheap, dark blue baseball cap and a pair of simple, black sunglasses. These would help disguise his eyes, the most unstable part of his Glamour. He touched them, and immediately felt the faint Imprint—the trace emotions of the last person who had worn the cap, a fleeting sense of frustration and minor disappointment.
Easy conversion target.
But he couldn't convert them yet. Not here.
He needed money. He scanned the floor, the aisles, the trashcans. Nothing. Humans were obsessively good at retrieving their currency.
Then, his eyes caught the gleam. Behind the counter, near the register, under the small, transparent plastic mat where the human cashier worked, was a single, crumpled 1000 Yen note. It must have been dropped and missed during the chaos of a busy shift.
It was his target. It was valuable, structured, and possessed an extremely strong, collective Psychic Imprint of value and desire. It would convert into enough Ether to stabilize his Glamour for days.
He analyzed the cashier: a young male, tired, focused on a communicator in his hand. Complacent.
Verrin walked slowly down the aisle nearest the counter, pretending to examine a shelf of carbonated, sugary drinks. He focused on the cashier, sending out a minute, highly refined pulse of Ether—a subtle shift in the localized gravity field around the cashier's head.
The cashier blinked, shook his head slightly, and rubbed his eyes. The momentary disorientation Verrin needed.
Verrin moved. It was a fluid, silent motion—a blur of shadow that was invisible to the human eye unless specifically sought. His hand was a phantom, sweeping over the counter, lifting the plastic mat, snatching the crumpled note, and retreating, all in the span of 0.4 seconds.
He was back in his initial position, breathing shallowly. The cashier looked up, yawned, and then went back to his phone.
Verrin had committed his first act of theft.
The psychic cost was immense. A cold, alien shame flooded his core. In the Aetherium, the concept of acquiring something without earning or deserving it was an aberration. He, a being of complex shadow, had stooped to the level of a scavenging animal.
He fled the store, the note crumpled tightly in his palm, and returned to the alley. The Glamour was momentarily reinforced by the stolen object, his eyes dulling immediately.
He performed the conversion in the crawlspace. Holding the note, he focused the Psychic Imprint, bypassing the complex atomic structure of the paper. He didn't transmute the paper; he siphoned the human concept of value bound to it.
The note dissolved, not into vapor, but into a brief burst of warm, golden-violet light that Verrin absorbed instantly.
Ether Reserve Status: Stabilized (150 units).
The clock was reset. He had fuel. Now, to build the lie.