I landed near the Trainyards. That was where all the action was going on after all, and started setting up shop. I'd packed in a hurry so everything was just kind of... jumbled together. I'd barely spent the time to insulate the delicate electronics by wrapping them up in my sleeping bag before tossing it in with the tent poles and the like so finding everything would take a while.

That however turned out to be a good thing.

You see if I had managed to get the laptop running right away I would probably have been distracted from the two dozen or so people with duffle bags suddenly heading out of the front door and piling into vans.

I was not the most observant or fastest thinking of individuals but well, a whole bunch of people piling into vans in the middle of the train yard? Either an AA meeting just ended or something interesting was going down.

After they went two blocks without any of them breaking off I pretty much discarded the AA idea. I'd mostly had it because well, if these were Merchants, why were they driving normal vehicles and not some tinkertech abomination? The Merchants had two tinkers now, and their first one, Squealer, even specialized in vehicles.

Practical limits maybe? I mean the Merchants were fairly large, with territory comparative to both the Empire Eighty Eight and the Azn Bad Boyz before I went and kicked over the ant-hill. Since they hadn't held a lot of cape muscle either in quantity or quality and being a bunch of burnt out drug heads lacked the discipline and reliability of their two more militant 'rivals', they had probably had to make due with quantity of idiots the could pressgang in return for getting their fix.

Or at least that was the best theory I had. Maybe I was wrong and the Neo Nazis and Asian supremacists had just decided to start recruiting people of African and Hispanic decent alongside their ethically Caucasian and Oriental members.

I mean that could happen right?

I'd give the merchants one thing, they didn't care what color your skin was, only that you were willing to inject their crap into it. It didn't make them better then the other assholes making life hell for everyone, but it at least provided a different flavor of it.

Unfortunately while they had a sharp tendency to be drugged out of their minds didn't change the fact I was not keeping pace with motorized vehicles any time soon. Air superiority or no. I could keep pace with them moving at in city speeds, barely, but only at the rough equivalent of a sprint. I could out pace them if I went into a dive, but didn't have the raw experience moving airborne to make full use of the wind and thermals to get the continuous altitude boosts needed to pull that off.

Thank goodness for traffic lights.

Back on the bad side of things, being able to fly like a bird did not mean I was able toseelike a bird. And to keep track I had to keep a relatively low altitude. This presented the dual problems of both needing to dodge skyscrapers any time I wanted to turn, and well.

Being in there visible range.

I wasn't sure when I was spotted. My anima was actually fully receded at the moment, with me just keeping the mutations active by effortless act of will but I was still a man sized object with a good fifteen or so feet of dragon like wingspan floating up there a little lower then the tops of more then a few buildings. I think I managed 'stealth' for at least a couple of blocks before they noticed. Either way a little past the third one, some idiot had the bright idea to start hanging out of the window holding up what I think was some kind of rifle.

How the hell they managed that I don't know, maybe they had a friend hold onto them. Maybe they just had mad truck gripping skills. Either way I had no idea what they hell they though they were going to manage sitting outside of a moving vehicle shooting up at another moving target but either way they took the shot.

In raw spite of the law of drama they missed by miles but I was still spurred into action.

At this point I doubted that they were going to lead me to whatever shindig they were headed to, so it looked like I'd just have to head there myself.

After politely asking for directions of course.