Luz's crimes

Hunter was having a good day so far. He had found a few places that were hiring he and the others could look through, he found a nice bird house on clearance for Flapjack, and he found out that there was a community of people that liked Cosmic Frontier that talked with each other through the flat crystal balls called computers. He was still having some trouble getting them to work, but he was looking forward to talking with more people besides Gus about them.

As he was walking down the street towards the historical society he noticed a familiar looking man with glasses and a coat standing on the front steps and yelling at someone wearing a GHS t-shirt and nails painted to look like one of those pride flags Luz had shown him. It took him a bit to remember, but when he did his blood ran hot.

This was the man that thought it would be ok to put Vee in a cage and dissect her. He was a nutjob that was too right and too wrong at the same time for their safety. It would only be a matter of time before he decided to try and get Vee again, and this time he might actually succeed in exposing them.

Camilla could get arrested for harboring them. Luz could be thrown into a conformatorium to “fix” her after her time in the Isles. The rest of them would be locked up and experimented on.

He could not let that happen. He WOULD not let that happen.

He couldn’t do anything now, there were too many witnesses. The best thing would be to tail him back home and then work with the others on how best to deal with him.

Hunter hid behind a small group of trees and had Flapjack fly out onto a branch to keep a eye on Jacob. When he started stopping angerly away, Flapjack signed Hunter and then they started following him through the town. Once they got close to the building sharing walls with each other, he used Flapjack to teleport up to the roof tops and just walked along them to keep a eye on him without having to worry about being spotted.

Unfortunately, that didn’t last too long. Jacob eventually stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and rapidly turned towards the roof. Hunter quickly backed away from the edge and hoped that he hadn’t been spotted. His hopes were dashed by a shout.

“There is a witch on the roof! I saw him. He is trying to silence me because I know the truth about their time machine!”

How can someone be so right and so wrong about the same thing at the same time?

Hunter quickly teleported into the alley by the building and hid between some dumpsters while Jacob was trying to convince the building’s owner to let him climb up the ladder to the roof. As he hid there he heard some people hiding on the other side of the dumpsters talking in hushed tones.

One conversation later

After Hunter left the alley with a piece of paper and either a golden opportunity or a noose around his neck he tried to find Jacob again. After looking around he concluded he must have lost him. He decided to just head back to the Nocedia house and see how Willow was doing with her garden.

“Hunter?”

He turned around at the sound of his name and saw Luz walking towards him.

“Luz? What are you doing here?”

“I just got out of school and decided to check out the book store. They recently got an atlas of the Azura world that I have been waiting for since it was announced. What are you doing?”

Hunter just looked down at his feet. “I saw Jacob and was trying to find where he lives so we could deal with him. But he spotted me and got away while I hid.” He then perked up. “On the plus side, I did find a potential money making opportunity we could try out.”

Luz just smiled at him. “Great job on the money source, and don’t worry about Jacob. I saw him on the way here.” She then pulled out a wallet from her letterman jacket. “And I got his address.”

She then opened the walled and pulled out a Drivers License.

“Jacob Craig Hopkins. Born August 11, 1987, height of 5’ 6”, blue eyes, and lives at 4423 Whitman Court.”

Hunter just looked at her. “How did you get that?”

She just looked at her. “I lived with Eda for 3 months, are you honestly surprised I know how to pick pockets and replace the contents with a live squirrel?”

At that point a high pitch scream rang out. When Hunter ran to look, he saw Jacob in the park swinging his hand around while a squirrel held onto his finger for dear life with its teeth.

“GetItOffGetItOffGetItOff!”

In the Isles

Eda was siting around a campfire with King and Lilith and talking about what to do about the Collector when all of a sudden Eda teared up.

“Eda? What’s wrong?”

“Oh nothing King. I just had a massive amount of pride in Luz wash over me for some reason.”

Back with the butt monkey

Jacob was now running around looking for something to get the squirrel off his finger with. He eventually saw someone walk towards him and his pain addled brain thought the best thing to do would be to hit the squirrel against them to get it to let him go.

He ran over to the guy and raised his hand to start, but fortunately the squirrel decided to just let go and run down the arm and to the nearest tree.

Unfortunately for Jacob, he didn’t notice and just started slapping the guy repeatedly across the face while yelling “GetItOffGetItOffGetItOff!”

After 6 slaps he finally realized that the squirrel was off and he could stop. He then noticed that he had been whacking a police officer across the face multiple times.

A 6’ 2” police man that hand bulging muscles and a look of anger in his eyes.

Jacob decided to respond the way most idiotic people would. By pulling out pepper spray and spraying the cop in the eyes. Two big factors however prevented this from working.

1: the nozzle was turned around and aimed at him.

2: his glasses had fallen off after the squirrel attack.

In this case, 1+2= Jacob rolling around on the ground and clawing at his face while yelling about how it burned. He then crawled over to the nearby fountain and dunked his head in to try and was his eyes out. The officer then walked over and lifted him up by the scruff of his coat with a mix of annoyance and pity on his face.

Hunter and Luz just staired at the display with poorly concealed delight before Hunter turned to Luz. “How much of that did you plan to happen?”

“I just expected the squirrel to surprise him and then run away, maybe make him look like he was smuggling animals into buildings at best. I am so going to tell my currents events class about this tomorrow. The teacher can’t say it isn’t relevant because it did actually happen in town and can be a warning about a potentially dangerous person living in town.”

Luz’s entire face lit up as she got a idea. “In fact, I am going to go over and give him back his wallet. If I’m lucky we will soon have a restraining order against him.”

She then took a picture of Jacob’s drivers license with her phone (she got the camera fixed when she got back) and then put it back in before walking over to Jacob who was trying to explain what happened in a way that didn’t make him sound like the nut job he was.

While Luz was doing that, Hunter noticed that multiple other officers had exited a large number of cars and vans nearby and were watching. When they noticed Jacob’s reaction to the teenage girl walking up to him a few moved over to get involved.

While that was happening he walked nearby to look inside, and saw several plants in pots. He immediately moved to a nearby alley, which he then noticed was contently next to a small storm ditch that had a running stream of water in it. He smiled as a plan formed in his mind and he pulled out Flapjack.

“Flap, remember that deal we made earlier? I am thinking one of those would be useful for us. Do you think you can fly inside the van and make the van roll backwards over here?”

Flapjack just chirped in response and few over.

While he was doing that, Hunter edged to the side of the storm ditch so that he could act as soon as the van showed up.

He was rewarded when he heard the sound of people shouting “runaway van!” as the vehicle backed into the ditch and spilled its contents all over the stream. Flapjack flew over to Hunter and the shifted to staff form, who then grabbed him and flew over the water to grab the smallest plant he could before teleporting to the roof.

As the police swarmed the site, Jacob sat in the back of a car, and Luz just looked on with a small smirk, Hunter teleported to the next alley over and just calmly walked to the Noceda house with a full backpack.

Later at the Police Station

“So you are telling me that the reason you slapped an officer repeatedly was because you didn’t notice the squirrel had let go and the only thing you could think of was to use him as a object to knock it off with?”

“Exactly!”

“And you then panicked before your still pain addled brain told you to use pepper spray on the same officer, only you sprayed yourself instead?”

“I admit that was a dumb idea, but I think we can all agree that I punished myself for that. Someone recorded the whole thing and posted it to MewTube. Putting me in jail would be a service compared to the public shaming and I would get just by having to interact with people for the next few weeks.”

“Oh don’t worry, we are all in agreement on that. But then you used hate speech against a teenage girl who was just returning your wallet.”

“She wasn’t a human! She was a shapeshifting lizard demon form Mars that came here to steel our teeth to power their time machine!”

“Right… and the van filled with evidence from a recent raid that happened to be by your stunt was just a coincidence?”

“There was a van there? I was too busy dealing with the squirrel, the pepper spray, and the inhuman monster to notice.”

“And the fact that the brakes were deactivated when no one was looking and had it back up into a ditch was also a coincidences?”

“What else would it be?”

“I don’t know, how about a deliberate distraction to allow your buddies to get back some of the contraband we stole from them.”

“Hay, if you want to silence us from telling the truth of the Earth being flat you are going to have to try a lot harder than this. We have people everywhere spreading the news.”

“We didn’t raid the Flat Earth Society; we raided people growing drugs.”

“A likely story. I am on to you bud! You can’t silence me! YOU CAN NEVER SILENCE ME!”

“I really wish we were allowed to gag him.”