For her first disguise for her new Rabbit of Justice urban legend, Elise chose to simply fly around as a bird and see if she could spot anything worth justicing. In the future, she would use humanoid disguises, but she wanted to scout around and get an idea of what she was doing first. There were countless doves flying around the city, many of them white, so when she transformed into one herself, she wasn’t conspicuous at all. Well, her red eyes looked a little odd, but no one looked quite close enough to take notice.

Her Charisma was still at work as she flew, and she drew more eyes than the average tier 1 bird, but given how otherwise ordinary she appeared, most of the eyes she drew looked away after no more than a second. It was oddly freeing, being able to move around like this without drawing attention. She actually spent the first half hour or so just enjoying the experience before she started seriously looking for places she could enact justice.

Unfortunately, it was fairly early in the morning, and most criminal activity didn’t happen early in the morning. She saw a few thugs hanging out in some back alleys, but they weren’t doing anything. They were just hanging out. She couldn’t just start beating on people who were minding their own business.

After an hour of not finding anything, she conceded that there was a good chance that she wouldn’t find anything to do in this session, but with her new inconspicuousness, she did have an opportunity to do some scouting she might not be able to do otherwise.

She did a pass over the city, using her bird eyes to look around for places that were interesting. The area that she and Sophie had gotten lost in the previous night was somewhat appealing, but now that she was seeing it from above, she saw that it wasn’t truly a slum. It was more of just a working class neighborhood in a mild state of disrepair. Perhaps it would become a slum in the future, but it was lacking the necessary filth and unsavory characters to truly qualify.

The area on the southwest side of the city though was another story. In fact, it was probably a step beyond just slums. Even from high in the air, she felt like she could smell it, and that was where most of the obvious thugs and gangsters were hanging out. She wondered for a moment why Oberon allowed such a place to exist in what was supposed to be his perfect tourist town, but she suspected she already knew the answer.

“It’s more interesting this way,” she imagined him saying.

Aside from the southwest part of the city, the rest was in fairly good condition, so after doing one final fly-around to double-check, she flew down toward the slum area and started looking closer. She had skirted the edges of this area when flying around earlier, so most was as she remembered. People with criminal or criminal-adjacent classes hanging out in alleys, chatting, napping, snacking, and basically not bothering anyone. She could have done something about them just based on their classes, but she felt like that would be overreach, and she was a bit paranoid about misusing her powers.

She flew a bit deeper in, looking around for something to do when motion from below caught her eye. It wasn’t much motion, but it was concerning motion, since it was a man pointing at her. His companion followed his finger to where Elise was flying, narrowed his eyes at her before also pointing. His pointing was different though, and by the time Elise realized why, it was almost too late.

She used {Move} at the very last moment, just before the small fireball enveloped her small and highly flammable body. Even with the skill, she almost didn’t make it out. She hadn’t thought much of it before, since she didn’t expect it to be a problem in the peaceful city, but she was currently transformed into a tier 1 monster, meaning her stats were very low.

I almost just died

.

With that sobering thought, she used the rest of her charges of {Move} to dive down behind a building, narrowly avoiding a second fireball. She settled down on a wooden balcony, which was thankfully unoccupied, and took a moment to calm herself.

What was that guy’s problem?

Now that she had gotten over the shock of the experience, she was angry. Why did he try to kill her? She was just a dove! Did he just do that for fun? Did he roast every dove that flew by? She thought back to his facial expression when he fired at her, then shook her head.

He didn’t look like a sadist. He looked grim, and even a little bit annoyed. As though shooting her was something he had to do, rather than chose to. She paused to look around and listen a bit, and realized that there might have been something to that theory. There were no other doves around. None on the roofs, none on the ground, none flying overhead… A voice from below confirmed her suspicions.

“Where did it go?” said the voice.

Elise felt a brief wave of mana pass over her.

“On that balcony,” said a second voice.

Shit!

Elise used {Move} again as she flew away through the alleyway. For a split second, she thought her reaction might have been a little excessive, since even if they knew where she was, they couldn’t see her, but that thought was banished from her mind almost instantly as the balcony exploded behind her.

Should I just transform back?

The fireballs were dangerous, but that was mostly because she was in such a weak form. In her base form, Elise suspected that {Magic Missile} was comparable in power, and she wasn’t even a proper mage, so this guy couldn’t have been too strong. Either that, or he was actually strong, and was simply not being a dumbass and using big spells in the street. Either way, it would have been much easier to escape in her rabbit form.

However, she didn’t want to expose herself just yet. It would completely ruin her urban legend mystique if her first appearance was fleeing from some back-alley mage. So, she decided to stay in her dove form, and hoped she wouldn’t regret it.

Fortunately for her, the urban terrain gave her a distinct advantage in avoiding the mage, since she could just fly over rooftops and break line of sight, but that soon became more difficult as a second, then a third mage joined in on the chase. They didn’t stop until a few minutes later when she managed to maneuver herself back out of the slums and into a more respectable part of town. Once she was out of the slums, they stopped chasing and stopped firing spells after her, but they stayed on the edge, keeping watch. She flew around a bit, but every time she regained line of sight to the slums, she saw them keeping lookout, waiting for her.

What did I stumble into? she wondered.

Clearly, this was some kind of organization. There were a full dozen of them visibly watching to prevent her return now, and all of them were in pairs, one [Fire Mage] and one [Sentry]. Whatever they did though, she had no idea. Since they seemed to be headquartered in the slums, she doubted it was anything legal. In fact, it was probably extremely illegal, given the fact that they wanted to keep even birds from seeing anything further in.

Well, this might make a good start for the target of my justice.

Elise waited a few more minutes, hoping that the sentries would return to where they started out further in the slums, but they didn’t move. Since she was on a time limit with now less than two hours left in her transformation, she wasted no more time waiting, and flew deeper into the clean part of the city before circling around and trying the slums from a different angle. There were no sentries waiting here, so she made it in without issue, but she didn’t go very far. Not at first, at least.

She took her time, hopping from building to building and waiting for any kind of alarm to be raised by her presence. In the beginning, nothing happened. In fact, there were even a few other doves around near her, unlike the part of the slums she had been in before. However, at some point when she went further in, something changed. It was subtle, but when she jumped from the fourteenth building to the fifteenth, she felt like she had crossed some kind of invisible barrier. For a split second, she felt the vaguest hint of an urge to turn around and go the other way, but it vanished instantaneously, and she was left on the new building, half-confused.

A few seconds later, she saw a sentry and mage pair running down one of the streets, and she made a hasty retreat before they started lobbing spells at her again. When she returned to the safe part of the city, she stopped to think a bit. She had definitely just stumbled upon some kind of organized criminal organization. Or at least, what was likely an organized criminal organization. She supposed it could have been some kind of legitimate group trying to work in secret, away from prying eyes, but she found that unlikely. She couldn’t think of many groups that would want to work like that. Criminal was much more likely.

However, she wouldn’t be able to approach as a dove. They had some kind of barrier around their territory to keep pests out. It was quite clever, actually. She suspected that the strength of that subtle urge was just strong enough to turn away the weaker tier 1 doves, and perhaps even tier 2 but anything that made it past was either too strong to be affected, or they had a stronger urge to go in, meaning they were either a threat or a spy. Elise’s high Charisma made her more or less immune to that urge, so she was immediately flagged as an anomaly, and they tried to eliminate her.

Since she had no idea exactly how the detection part of the barrier worked, she had no way of slipping past it, meaning that if she wanted to get in and see what was going on inside, she would need to be brought in. And if she wanted to be brought in, she likely needed some kind of humanoid disguise.

Well, Oberon did want me to work on those.

She spent the rest of her time as a dove flying around the edges of the barrier and trying to figure out where it started and stopped. She also experimented a bit with elevation and discovered that the barrier was a dome. Or at least a cylinder with a top. It was hard to tell without being able to see it, but she could fly over it without issue as long as she was high enough, and diving downward triggered it.

She was well aware that her behavior was incredibly suspicious, and that by continuing to poke at it, she was probably putting them on high alert, but any chance she had of disappearing without a trace was lost when she entered the second time. Since she was already conspicuous, she might as well gather information.

That didn’t last that long either though, because soon, she saw an older man being led out of a building by a mage-sentry pair, and she knew she had to leave. She didn’t get close enough to {Inspect} the newcomer, but based on the way the other two deferred to him, she had no confidence she could safely get away in her dove form. He was most likely at least a tier or two higher than them, and if they had brought him out after not being able to catch her, she doubted he would be weak.

She flew straight back to the castle after this, and as she passed over the walls, she noticed a very similar barrier around it. There was a vague urge to leave, and a slight ping of mana on her, but unlike in the slums, this did not raise any alarms. She made it back to an empty training area and transformed back into her rabbit form before heading back to her room.

She spent the rest of the day relaxing, eating, reading, and thinking about what she would do next. The first step was obviously to figure out exactly what she was dealing with, and what the group was hiding. To do that, she needed to get in, but that put her in a bit of a catch 22, because it was hard to get in if she didn’t know what they were doing. In her mind, the worst case scenario was that this organization was involved in human trafficking, in which case pretending to be vulnerable would probably get her a ticket in. If they did anything else though, that wouldn’t work.

It was also possible there was no way to be brought in inconspicuously. Or that she had ruined any possibility of that with her dove shenanigans earlier. She could always brute force it by using some {Charm} and {Suggest} and {Forced Feeling} and a more attractive form, but that felt crude. She would keep it in mind as a last resort, but if possible, she would want to make a functional disguise instead. She knew now that Oberon didn’t actually have any preference for how she did things, but she also knew that she was probably too reliant on {Suggest} and wanted to work on her other Skills and lowercase s skills for the times when {Suggest} wasn’t the best option.

Later in the afternoon, shortly before dinner, she went to Oberon’s office for another lesson with him. She didn’t bring up her questions about what she was doing, because she felt like asking him would defeat the purpose of the exercise, but she did make sure to pay extra attention to his pointers on acting and choosing roles. Despite his laid-back attitude and how little he seemed to care about anything but his own amusement, Oberon’s lectures were surprisingly good. She attributed that to his enthusiasm for his subjects. Her favorite teachers on Earth had always been the enthusiastic ones. Though for whatever reason, that didn’t apply to when Freddy was teaching about law…

Regardless, it was a productive lesson, and Elise took many mental notes on ways she could apply it to what she was doing. One part of the lesson was especially helpful, and she was glad she heard it before she went out and did anything else.

“I didn’t mention it before because I didn’t realize you had the skill, but I saw you using {Forced Feeling} on those carpenters the other day, and realized that you might have a misunderstanding about the skill,” said Oberon.

“You were watching?” asked Elise.

“Of course! It was very funny! Anyway, the misunderstanding that I think you have about the skill is that you believe it can be used subtly.”

“It can’t?”

“Not at all. Even when weakened as it was when you used it before, it was not subtle. {Forced Feeling} is a mental attack, emphasis on ‘attack.’ When your target experiences the skill, they know they are being attacked. Even if the forced emotion takes over momentarily, as soon as the skill wears off, they will know exactly what you did.”

“Oh.”

“It worked out in that circumstance, since you were trying to intimidate, so showing that you could force them to be afraid was quite intimidating. However, if you try to used it like you would use {Suggest}, you will get yourself into trouble.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Also, since it is an attack that can deal some serious psychological damage, it uses significantly more aether than {Suggest}. That means that if you want to hide your aether capacity, you should never use it more than two or three times on any target you don’t plan on killing or memory wiping.

“Speaking of memory wiping…”

He went on to give her tips on the proper applications of memory wipe curses, and the lesson continued from there, but Elise filed the information about {Forced Feeling} away as “highly important.” She had been fully ready to use it similarly to {Suggest} while trying to sneak her way in, but that plan was now dead. It was a bit disappointing, since she had been hoping it would work as a stronger version of {Suggest}–and it would for combat at least–but it looked like she would need to stick with the good ol’ original.

After the lesson, she had dinner with Oberon and the others before returning to her room so she could look in the mirror as she fiddled with her disguise. Once she was satisfied, she switched back to her rabbit form to wait out the cooldown, then turned into a dove again to get near the slums. Once she was close enough, she changed back to a rabbit to once again wait out the cooldown, after which she transformed into her final disguise. She felt a little silly now that she was here, but hopefully, her acting skill would be enough to pull it off. If not… well, Oberon would probably make fun of her, but no one else would know.

Operation Little Match Girl begin.