Eric had found an abandoned storefront to hole up in temporarily. He'd spent most of the day after finding and disabling those muggers searching, and he'd discovered the remnants of a closed electronics store. Breaking into an abandoned place hadn't been hard for someone of his particular talents. He'd begun a long period of research using the advanced phone he'd stolen from the first mugger he'd encountered.
He'd been perfectly fine in the abandoned storefront. It gave him a roof over his head. He didn't have nearly enough on him for a motel. He’d been going over possible ways of making enough money for a place of his own. There was his old standby, bouncer. There was also the possibility of joining a band or playing on the street for money, assuming he could get his hands on a guitar. Unfortunately, the band possibility was scratched off his list pretty quickly. Eric’s transformation left him more or less recognizable. Yeah, at first glance people probably wouldn’t get it, but if anyone got more than a glancing look at him while transformed and got the same kind of look at him outside of that, they would figure it out. Attention was a bad thing right now.
There was also the possibility of using his empathic and memory powers to put on a fairly convincing psychic routine. He’d convinced the Port Columbia police that he was a psychic under Albrecht’s employ on more than one occasion. But those times, Albrecht was never actually paying, and somehow Eric thought there might be a little bit of cosmic backlash if he used his powers for personal gain. Sometimes, he really did hate the cosmic rulebook.
He was in the process of coming up with a more thorough list, researching various possibilities on job sites he’d found on Google, when his spirit crow, perched on an old shelf, let out a loud caw. Eric glanced up at it, waiting for it to go anywhere, but it didn’t. It just kept looking at him. He sighed and glanced down at the phone. On a hunch, and with some difficulty, he switched over to the boards and peered at them on the screen. It took him a second before realization hit him, but when it did, it hit like a mac truck and forced all other concerns out of his head.
Sarah was here.
His priorities shifted right then and there. Yeah, he didn’t want to swallow his pride with that Buffy girl, even if he didn’t dislike her. Yeah, he was perfectly fine in this abandoned storefront, especially since it was only temporary. Yeah, he was fine without whatever protections they could offer at that commune he’d read about in the FAQ that Rory girl linked him to. Yeah, he was perfectly fine without food, because he didn’t eat or drink or breathe or any of those little things that the living often took for granted.
But Sarah wasn’t fine. She would need a real place to sleep, with a real bed. She would need food. These were all things that Eric didn’t currently have the money for, and probably wouldn’t for a while. So as much as he didn’t want to trust a bunch of mysterious strangers that seemed to have all the answers – hello Lazarus Group, how are you today? – he didn’t have much choice. Sarah’s welfare had to come first, and while Eric didn’t really trust these people, they hadn’t given him any reason to distrust them. So he would get Sarah and go to their little commune. He would extend that much trust, so that he could give Sarah the kind of place and care she needed.
He slipped out of the abandoned storefront through a back door that exited into an alley, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his everpresent long, dark coat. He was dressed in his usual black, black, and more black. There really wasn’t a lot of complexity to his wardrobe. He moved out from the alley and blended into the people on the sidewalk, deftly swiping an umbrella from an outdoor stand as the group he’d blended into passed it by. The seller probably wouldn’t notice until they came out to bring the stand in, and even if they did have someone watching the product outside, it would be hard to tell exactly which member of the group Eric had slipped into had stolen the umbrella. To that end, Eric twisted his fingers and tore the tag from the umbrella, holding onto it until he could flick it into a nearby trashcan.