Why are you special?

Eventually, of course, my unknowing spy awakens… gets dressed in a plain brown woolen robe, brews herself a cup of tea… Night Tea, I notice; regular use prevents a woman from getting pregnant, as long as magic isn't involved. Well… she's a spy. It's a tool she has.  Not a great choice… but maybe she's just using it for fun?

Regardless, I watch as she goes about her day, setting herself down at an intersection, writing things in a book with a feather quill. I'm watching through her eyes, so I see everything she does… she's tracking movements of people. Name, time, and a letter for the direction, over and over and over, for about fifty different people… just based on who she writes down. Huh. With a few dozen such, you could keep surprisingly close tabs on people… or at least, get a good picture of their movements once the spies all report in. Which also tells you who's meeting who and… oh boy. Surveillance state. They have some gestapos. On the plus side… that means organization. I just need to ID a handler to go up the chain.

I watch for the day, helping out with milking Wanda while I play "I Spy" with someone else's eyes.  I'd say it's dull, and it would be, except that I have Wanda my wonderfully warped pet, David the dragon, Oscar my spellcasting Dragonflesh Golem, Alfred my intelligent cyborg "animal companion" in dragon form, and Buttercup my Sprite familiar… plus two mindless Adamantine Golems.

And they're all good for fun and games… the constructs don't care but they're willing. So I spend the day watching through someone else's eyes and making fun use of my hands. And mouth. And toes…. I can't safely make use of Shapechange, but Buttercup can, and she inherited my tastes, so I get good railings from… well, everyone except Wanda (who also needs to not shift shapes)... while I caress, grope, fondle, kiss… lots of fun. So I blindly enjoy my companions' bodies as they enjoy mine while I watch the spy, and the constructs stay on guard.

It's a good day, really.

Eventually, though, my remote eye goes to make a drop… a dead drop, she basically leaves the notebook under a table for someone else to pick up. Which I expected from the brain reading. Yeah, I was hoping I could swap targets, but that’s hardly my only option.

So I inform my companions, "Thank you… fun part is over, now I need to actually watch a dead drop." One Fleeting Spell Invisibility on myself, and a Greater Teleport to the location, and I am laying invisibly on the ceiling above the dead drop. The False Gravity spell is fun, it lets me define my own down within certain limits, so a wall or a ceiling can be a floor for me.

Waiting alone is not nearly as fun as waiting with 'friends with benefits'. Still… I watch people coming and going… and my choice of location - which was purely to keep me out of everyone's way, mind - also affords a view down dresses. And I still have the constant feed from my other selves observing literally everyone in the world who's doing something that might lead to making a baby… and there’s a lot of people in this world. And apparently here, female/female pairings can occasionally produce a child, if only very rarely. As can male/male pairings, which is even less common but still possible here.  Biology here is WEIRD.

So it's not so bad, really, other than that I need to keep reminding myself to keep my hand out of my skirt and off my very sensitive chest, as the moaning would give me away.  Invisibility plus the "Undetectable" option on Mythic ring will stop all direct detection methods, but if I make a deliberate noise or drop something, well… that's not so great.

Fortunately I don't have long to wait.  It's a planned and scheduled drop, so there's also a planned and scheduled pickup. A bookish looking woman in a plain brown dress - quite modest, not an inch of cleavage showing; her dress almost long enough to reach the floor as she walks, long sleeves, gloves, and a wig… oh, it's a disguise; that's a young male with an androgynous face under all the women's wear, going out of his way to be drab - sits down at the table, orders some tea, pulls a book from his purse, and starts reading. I follow along - it's a treatise on… huh. How to finely measure the strength of the soul, using the Magic Jar spell. OK, so… the Magic Jar spell allows a person to take over a body, but while you're in the jar looking for a body to hijack, you can sense differences in the strength of nearby souls (hit dice, in the rules). Now, you can only detect large differences normally (four or more hit dice, which also equate to levels under most circumstances), but apparently the author of this particular paper discovered that if you have a good set of references in range for comparison, you can identify a soul's strength much more finely by how many of your references are stronger or weaker. So a regular dog (one hit die), a riding dog (two hit dice), a monitor lizard (three hit dice), a dire bat (four hit dice), a brown bear (five hit dice), and so on (I have my other me check my library: Yes, they can fine tune that with animals of hit die one through eighteen, which lets them precisely read up to level twenty-one… after that, there's gaps in available animals which fuzzes the results), in a prepared lab, identify exactly how many levels someone has.  The experiments even corroborated this with how strong of a blessing a priest could grant, although they limited those tests due to the availability of suitable adventurers.

I take a note of the author and publisher. I may want to visit them some day. I'm unclear if people unraveling the underlying mechanics is a problem or not… but this is magic-as-science, and that's… well. Not something I expected.

After he's read for half an hour, sipping his tea, he puts away his book - and slides the notebook into his purse at the same time - pays for the tea, and leaves.

I follow, of course.  He does the same routine at a few other inns, having a meal at one instead of tea and reading, picking up more notebooks… he has an even dozen in his purse by the time he's done for the day, of which I watch him pick up seven.

I follow him to a large mansion in the Thatchers' district, where he curtsies at a guard wearing crystal lenses, stationed at a side door made of iron, who removes a bar from the door (on the outside? Strange…) and then lets him through said door into a small room, sliding the bar back into place afterwards. I look around the small room: It's a killbox, really; I can see murder holes in the ceiling and hear people above. The far door is also iron, and has a small window. In there, the man stands in the light of a cold-iron bullseye lantern (it radiates faint divination magic) while another man wearing a pair of goggles consisting of two perfect prisms held in place by golden frames and affixed to his head by a black leather strap stares at him through the tiny window in the far iron door.  After about twenty seconds, the guard on the inner door slides out a heavy bar and opens the door. My spy goes through, and I follow.

They're a little paranoid. I'm pretty sure that outer guard was wearing Eyes of the Eagle to better recognize mundane disguises, that the bullseye lantern is a Lantern of Auras, which highlights magic auras for anyone to read, and that those goggles the inner guard is wearing grant True Seeing, which gets through magical disguises and Invisibility. They really want to know who they're dealing with, and be sure their agents aren't compromised.

It's a good thing my Mythic Ring foils all of that when I'm invisible, or this would be hard.

The log collector pulls the notebooks out of his purse, hands them to the inner guard, and leaves the same way he came in.  I stay, and watch as the inner guard pulls a chain by the door, triggering the sound of a bell deeper in the compex. A minute later, a three and a half foot tall woman who looks to be half-mouse … well, more like half-rat, but very well cleaned up… scurries in wearing a pink frilly dress, fur dyed to match. She actually has her chest completely bare except for some strands of gold cloth criss-crossing her chest to hold her girls in place which also just barely cover her milk taps, but I imagine less furry folks would have trouble telling due to the matching colors. And she's… technically covered.

And it's not like her role is public - it hardly matters if she's flashy… or flashing, I guess… when she spends her time behind some very secure doors.

But I want to know where the information goes, as the folks higher up that chain will be the ones reporting to the bosses. So I follow her, watching her tail wiggle as she walks, right past security.

I follow her through drab stone walls, until we get to something of a library….