"Jesus Christ." ET muttered. He'd jumped when Void had shown up, but come on: there'd been no one, and then there'd been someone. It was eerie, and spooked his caffeine-fried, sleep-burned synapses.

"Look," he continued, fixing Stardust with a pointed stare. "Don't be killing anyone. For all the bluster and extraneous acting, the shadowman is right. Going in guns blazing is a surefire way to get Carolex, the other big six, and Envoy herself to shred us into atoms. Nobody actually knows what her powers are, or how they work. We're basically planning this fucking heist in the Garden of Eden."

"He's also [i]exaggerating[/i]." ET put a hand to his face and shook his head slowly. Caffeine-withdrawal headache. Fucking great. "Most companies and individuals--even the Big Six--don't have paper-mache nukes. What they might have is a Ritual Circle with a tripwire that...turns us into mummies," he said, nodding acknowledgement to Void. "[i]Usually[/i]," he stressed, "magic is weird, complicated, almost impossible to get right, and more trouble than it is worth." Not in this case, he supposed. Carolex Experimental would have devoted plenty of funds to magical safeguarding, especially if Void wasn't the only magical-criminal in the area. Statistically, there might be...two or three others?

He was going off of experience in the MC: [i]Magic[/i] was a tempting escape for the...challenges of everyday life. In Midwest City, he'd seen plenty of rituals-gone-wrong, or demons-half-summoned, or Wiccan Sex Magic where the unfortunates had been melded at the hips. But he wasn't an expert--ET figured that had been Hex's area of expertise. He paused, then patted down his pockets briefly. Was it still there?

It was. He pulled out the notebook from Addison's body, and flipped it open. "Fuck," he mumbled, as symbols and ancient languages crisscrossed the pages. "So I've got this fucking notebook," he growled, tossing it onto the table. "Judging from it trying to steal my soul, it was from Hex. Might be useful if we're going to have to deal with magic, since Hex was the closest thing to a magical mastermind I've ever heard of."