I DID IT!!!!!!!! It was so much fun and SO easy! Remember that shop that I wrote about earlier? The one that the old black lady and the ancient dusty old chinese man wouldn’t let me into? I figured that I’d probably learned enough from Kierun to try breaking in, and I DID! Not that there was ever any doubt that I could…..

Anyway, to start at the beginning, I went just after dark yesterday night (yes, I KNOW ravens aren’t nocturnal…but breaking and entering is a LOT harder when the owner of the place is sitting a few feet from where you’re going! And considering the musty way he smelled last time I saw him, I don’t mind him being far away!) I checked all the obvious ways to get in first…the front door’s lock was so rusted that I’m amazed that anyone could open it. Honestly, I don’t know why people don’t take better care of their stuff! How do they expect people to break in if the lock is so rusted that you can’t even turn the RIGHT key?!?

Well, obviously that wasn’t going to work so I checked out the back of the shop and saw an old rusty fire escape. It looked a LITTLE too convenient so I stepped sideways to check the layout over in the umbra and got a bit of a surprise. Evidently old Mr. Miagi (you know, the old dude from those stupid karate kid movies?) had a few secrets of his own ‘cause the place was CRAWLING with all sorts of nasty wards to keep people out. I mean it had KEEP OUT practically scrawled in glowing letters of fire across it.

Of course, being as clever and tricky as I am, I wasn’t going to let a little thing like magic scare me off! I decided to fly up to the top of the fire escape to check out the situation there. There was NO way I was just going to climb the thing…who knows what nasty traps that guy had rigged to it? When I got to the top I cleverly checked the windows to see if any of the were open and went inside to this room filled with lots of old junk. I mean, hasn’t the old dude ever heard of dusting, for crying out loud?!? The place was filthy!

Okay, so I stealthily crept through the room like a ghost or someone from one of those silly ninja movies that my first foster brother loved so much (He was such a creep….he deserved to lose the fingers I cut off of him….as IF I was going to let him touch me THERE. His screams were so entertaining though! Pity it was before I changed…could have been a nice snack.) I picked a few lovely trinkets on my way through the room and opened the door across the room to enter the hallway.

As soon as I opened the door I could hear that old nasty man sawing logs. I mean it was so gross, he was practically shaking the walls! As tempted as I was to go in there and stuff something in his mouth to shut him up, I just snuck quietly down the stairs to the main room and examined the locks on the back room. (There were an AWFUL lot of them…I mean, geez, talk about paranoia!) They were really simple locks though…with my vast lockpicking skills I had them open in no time, and opened the door to see the WEIRDEST room. I mean, there were these strange circles drawn all over the floor, and across the room there was this black skull with glowing runes on it! I mean it was very creepy!

Other than that the room was filled with books and things. The books were all talking about magic and demon summoning…things like that, and there was this truly ratty parrot in there too. I didn’t go to close to it since I really didn’t want to catch the mange that it had! I did briefly think about killing it so that it wouldn’t make any noise, but I didn’t really want to leave traces of my presence so I left it alone.

So anyway, I took a close look at everything and made sure to remember as much as possible….I don’t know much about magic and stuff yet…Kierun isn’t interested in it, and none of the other family I know have time to teach me stuff yet, so I don’t know what any of it meant, but I’m going to learn!

After looking around for awhile I decided I’d seen enough for the moment, locked everything up and made my escape undetected. I had SO much fun….I’ll need to do something like that again sometime! First I have to go find out what’s hiding in the sewers though…WITHOUT Snowmelt or whatever his name is!

Morganna