If you live in the US, you've probably noticed a lot of abandoned or vacant buildings on your trips around different towns and city centers. Strip malls with a store front or four that shuttered due to a lack of need for a seventh nail salon or lotto bar, an office complex that had one too many shady companies that went under, or an industrial park that built up too fast for demand. A lot of empty shells and unpopulated rooms.

Now I'm not necessarily talking about the kind of urban decay that you'd see in places that are left unattended and uncared for, where vagrants and all kinds of folks can mingle if they felt like. Those sort of places are too noisy, too busy for what I deal in when it comes to my kinds of "housecalls". These more optimal locations for such anomalous entities are even more lonely. Maintained structures, modest security. Like they're keeping a candle lit for the next prospective buyer. I mean, of course they are; that's how the system of ever-rotating business ventures works nowadays.

It's this variety of quiet, unnoticed and out of the way that attract darker beasts to appear.
Sometimes I plan ahead if I already know of a problem. I get a report from The Foundation, or one of my local contacts tips me off with plenty of time to spare. Gives me time to get proper gear together and either convince the owners to let me in or simply plan a clean break-in. Occasionally, I'll get a more urgent call to action. For example, I might be out club-hopping and get a call from one of my sources that a place nearby might be housing something quite dangerous that could cause something of a public panic. Cuts my fun short, but I do kinda get a silly sort of satisfaction of doing my job in plain clothes.

I'm fairly desired for my ability to solve cases involving incorporeal and extraplanar activity, on account of Ajna I got during the incident in Bavaria back in 1943. To keep it simple, this allows me to see things that either don't have a perceivable terrestrial form, or are impossible for most beings to perceive without severe damage to one's sanity. It's been rough to learn to live with, especially with a lot of its caveats, like having to deal with hyperthymesia of all events from 1943 onward, or the obvious slowing of my age. I just had my 102nd birthday, so be gentle.

Besides affecting my body, my service sidearm also got affected by said incident. In fact, I'm pretty sure everything I was wearing then was also affected, but none survived the tests of time like this M1911. Somehow, I'm able to channel Ajna through it, allowing me to affect these creatures that normally wouldn't be affected by anything on our plane of existence. A pretty helpful tool, even though I'm really not that into firearms. Getting shot a few times in my life has put me off from treating them as anything but a tool.

Oh, and I did name the gun out of a bit of pride. You might think of "TMKF" as good old Woody Guthrie's signature phrase "This Machine Kills Fascists". Wrong tense for my use; for this machine did kill fascists. In particular, I bagged me a Bormann, a Stumpfegger, a Krebs, and a Bergdorf when I was on special assignment in Berlin. But that's a story for another time when I'm not having everything I put to word being watched by some nerds from work.

But here I am, in the dead of night, searching these empty rooms. My quarry is being hard to detect; even my abilities can be countered with the right skills. What are they? What is their motivation? How will this all go down? Judging by the signs of violence I've found, it's probably gonna require a bit of clean up afterwards. Nothing I've not dealt with before.

***

Here's another look at the alternate timeline Rudoji I've been working on for a while now. While regular of furry Rudd is my age and has a more fun and relaxing life, this Rudd has a bit more baggage and lot more experiece with messed up crap.