Sounds clear so far

You walk quietly onward into the building, stopping now and then to familiarize yourself with repetitive sounds of water dripping or the wind pushing against open doors and windows.

You've also put on your sunglasses as it seems more lights have dropped out since yesterday. The flashlight is more of a camouflaged blunt weapon that would give away your presence if you used it right now. And you probably would have done well without the glasses considering your feline eyes' night vision, but you didn't implement magic detection in your eyeballs.

"Sounds clear from what I can hear," Alex says impatiently as she puts a hand on your shoulder, copying your crouched position.

"Did your idea of an Asian have Elven hearing?" you ask her with a hint of snark.

"Damn, you're right. I should have gone for elf, not Asian. Oh well, at least we can grow old together."

"That's true," you say in a slightly exasperated tone. "Unless this magic ignores that. Which I wouldn't be surprised if it does, considering what we've seen it do so far."

"Damn, the curse of immortality and eternal beauty at our fingertips. What ever will we do."

"Talk when the time is right, which isn't now," you say with a huff of frustration at your lack of discipline. "Let's go," you say before moving up the halted escalator stairs, Alex coming after you.

A minute later you are at the porn store, the security three quarters down so you have to crawl on your knees to get in. The lights are still on in there.

"Okay, let's look through the fence for any signs of magic before going in there," Alex says quietly as she joins you.

You've already begun scanning, but you find it hard to tell if something is different. "Looks clear from here. Where did you find your stuff?"

"A few aisles back, by the backroom entrance," Alex says before kneeling down and glancing at the floor for a moment before rolling under the iron curtain. You take off your makeshift bandoleer, look around you before doing the same. You leave the tools out of sight on the inside of the porn store as you walk in another aisle than the one Alex picked, scanning the various items for any sign of magic.

"Oh, here we go," Alex says in a whisper a minute later, out of sight but not far away between the shelves. "Hm, come look at this."

You join her and see the veins pulsing across various items around the backdoor entrance. most are warm colors, dominated by crimson red with pink highlights, but some are bright purple, blue, green or golden. You lift your glasses to see if there's a pattern and it seems the colors are connected to the sort of artwork and user the various items are meant for. male oriented porn mags with 'traditional' women are very red, lesbian porn pink but still quite red. women's items seem to be purple and golden, and some are harder to explain from a glance at the cover of the items, most of which are unfamiliar to your former introverted lifestyle.

"Now, the question is, this seems to be coming from in there," Alex says as she points at the backroom door, which is slightly ajar.

"Only one way to figure that out," you say as you move up and nudge it open carefully. Inside you see thicker veins flowing across the floor, their colours neutral or iridescent and pulsing much slower than what was outside, their forms slightly jagged and angled like roots of a ancient tree. They were evenly spaced, so you could in theory step between them with relative ease. They also seemed to remain in place, even if they looked like they bulged with power. Immediately you couldn't tell where they originated, but it seemed they bundled together around the rear wall, out of sight behind a few shelves.

"Well, I don't know if I want to touch that," you say, glancing around the backroom without your glasses. There was a lot of debris in the way. Cardboard, bubble wrap plastic, styrofoam pellets and the likes.

"We should try and see where it comes from," Alex says as she slides past you into the room, stepping on an open spot a few steps inside the room and giving you a small heart attack. You both stand still for a moment before she turns around to you. "Looks clear to me," she says with a smile.

Then you notice that a magical vein a foot or so away from Alex' leg slowly begins dissipating small sparkling particles and mist, flowing towards her. She notices you are looking at her feet as if a snake just appeared there and instinctual steps away from it. "Well, that's new," she says as she stops to look, a small drop of mist still flowing towards her like cigarette smoke. "I'm going to touch it."

"What? No! That sounds like a terrible idea!" you say, keeping a lookout at the tendrils, afraid that they'll suddenly wrap around her like she's some japanese schoolgirl. Fortunately they seem to not be sentient.

"We're already covered in this sort of juice," she says as she stands on one leg and puts her free foot towards the errant dot of smoke. As soon as it touches her shoe, it gets sucked in like soap in oily water in reverse. "Huh, looked cool. Can't say I feel any different," she says, presenting herself to you for inspection and slowly turning around.

"Nothing new as of yet, but that was just a small- wait don't," you say as she promptly hovers her foot next to the same tendril. Within a second a puff rises and makes contact with her, and this time you both see the same effect but much, much faster. It looks like a roaring white stream flowing through an ethereal pipe, slow at the root but furiously fast at the bottleneck by her foot. within a few seconds the stream begins to slow down, and a few more breaths it stops completely, a small faint puff of magic floating past Alex.

"Hmm, that tingled a bit, like my foot beginning to fall asleep. but it looked much more dramatic through the glasses. Anyway, I suspect I'm charged up now."

"How do you come to that conclusion?" you ask, somewhat annoyed with her carefree attitude towards magical forces beyond the comprehension of either of you.

"Seems logical from the aesthetics. It looks like water, it flows into cisterns and fills them up until they are full," she says as she puts her foot over towards the vein again. Nothing happens. "And I'd say that supports my theory. Want to double check?" she asks as she holds out her hand for you to grab, her foot still connected to the vein.