Sunday Bloody Sunday

[Bjorn]

Cadfael carefully makes his way closer, splitting his attention between dodging the other pedestrians, watching for any other suspicious-looking people, and trying to listen to his tail.

[Carthrat]

"..no, he's gone. I think he noticed me."

The tail is speaking in English instead of German, and he has a very American accent. He slurs his voice a little, but speaks quickly and hurriedly.

"Yes.. yes. I'll watch out for him, but he's just one guy. It's hard enough to pick him up the first time."

The person on the other side of the phone, to Cadfael's perceptions, is shouting back.

"...no, I think I'dve noticed if they found him first. I don't think he'd go down quietly if they showed up. Right. Bye."

The tail puts away the phone and starts massaging his temples for a moment.

[Bjorn]

Cadfael stands still for a few silent minutes, thinking, and then nods to himself.  No plans for the rest of the evening anyways.  

His mind made up, he prepares to start tailing his own tail.

[Carthrat]

After spending a few moments looking around, the hat-clad man peeks into the cafe, then steps inside, and questions the waitress, giving Cadfael's description and asking if he came inside.

"Yeah, then he, like, vanished," replies the waitress, irritably. "Didn't even pay for his coffee. Bastard."

The man thanks her, then walks out the dreary cafe, Cadfael on his tail.

He starts just wandering around the locale area, constantly glancing around. Worry starts to paint his face, and he sticks mainly to the local downtown area for a couple of hours, frequently asking people if they've seen someone 'of Cadfael's description'.

However, about an hour into this search, Cadfael feels a sudden flare of magic coming from down an alley- detection and locating magic. The man in the white hat gives a start, and slips a hand into his pocket.

[Bjorn]

Bad.

Cadfael immediately begins to move away, heading towards the heart of the nightlife activity.  Once away from the tail (a few blocks and turns between them), he lets the Obscuring dissipate.  He hesitates briefly, considering, and then, No.  Haven't worked out that rune yet.  Bad time to experiment.  

Instead, he tears up the notepaper with the rune, and with obsessive care, throws three quarters of the shreds away in a total of five different garbage cans, and lets the others fall down to the street as he goes along.

He takes a wandering path, but his goal is the bus terminal on the other side of Berlin.  Munich?  Yes.

[Carthrat]

A crackle of electricity visibly slashes through a power line, quite a few metres above Cadfaels head. A sensation slides across his mind, like water passing over hot metal; slipping across, and not affecting. A sensation he has often felt of late; that of a divination spell bashing itself uselessly against his formidable mental defenses. The crackle, to the best of his knowledge, is probably a physical manifestation of such mystical powers. The natural- and often man-made world around mages can be made manifest in strange ways through magic, often completely unexpected.

Either way, Cadfael realises he's safe- for now. At least until they try the spell again. Generally, such spells have a relatively small effective range- only about twenty to thirty kilometres. Nothing like the crystal balls of old, which could reach far out across vast distances. But certainly enough to cause considerably worry, for these magics are highly accurate.

When they work, anyway.

[Bjorn]

Let them look, Cadfael thinks.  He triggers the Rune of Mana Flare he was carrying, and drops it into the litter filling a nearby alley before resuming his course.

[Carthrat]

A bright flash hits Cadfaels magical senses, as he sees the rune start to do its work. It'll easily confuzzle any divination attempts nearby.. but it won't last forever, so it's not wise to hang around for too long.

[Bjorn]

Cadfael quickly makes his way to the nearest bus terminal.

[Carthrat]

To Cadfael's knowledge, the nearest bus terminal is a good twenty-minute walk away, so off he goes!

There's still that tingling feeling of magic in the area, but no direct spells being cast on Cadfael. However, every now and then, there's a crackle of lightning across the powerlines, emphasizing that magic *is* being done, and a lot of it.

However, he's not dead yet, so it's probably not targeting him.

<->

Upon arriving at the bus terminal, Cadfael sees a clock that states it is 7:30pm.

Assuming it doesn't matter where he goes, the next bus to anywhere (in this case, it's actually going cross-country and will eventually arrive in Spain) leaves in about half an hour.

[Bjorn]

Taking quick inventory of his cash, Cadfael checks the schedule for the next few buses after the first one.

[Carthrat]

Buses seem to leave in half-hour blocks, thus ridiculing the very concept that more than one could leave at once.

8:30 - Munich.
9:00 - Vienna
9:30 - Tyrol
10:00 - Paris.

Yup, this is primarily an inter-country terminus, it seems.

[Bjorn]

A ticket is in short order purchased for the Munich bus.  Muttering something about purchasing a coffee, Cadfael steps outside the terminal.

Outside, he pauses for a second, looking up and down the streets, and then sets off towards the edge of the city.

[Carthrat]

The terminus isn't exactly near the edge of Berlin itself, but as Cadfael proceeds along, there's a markedly less amount of noise in the area.

There's a better selection of cafes around here, some of which use coloured paints inside. They smell a damn sight better, and they're more frequently clean than the ones seen in the downtown area.

[Bjorn]

Cadfael has, in the past, done this sort of thing before, and while it's never all that much fun, at least it has come close to routine.  Once he reaches the edge of the city, he'll circle around, and then head to Vienna.  Sometime early tomorrow, when enough time has passed to make a search area prohibitively large, he'll use Stone's Steadfastness to keep himself going as he trudges overland.