Roughly a 15-minute drive away from my hotel was a small tea house that opened up two years prior named the Mammoth Café.
Standing on the opposite side of the street from the building sporting a derpy-looking wooly mammoth, I took in the view.
The first thing that caught my eye was the small red-painted building, which stood out like a sore thumb on a street filled with old stone structures.
Taking in the big picture, I had to give it to the owner for creating such a contrasting image on a wide open cobblestone road lined with architecture, which gave people an antique feeling when they observed their surroundings.
As a business that prided itself on being one of the best tea and coffee houses in Edinburgh, it eventually became known worldwide as the place where the ridiculously famous book-turned-movie franchise Henry Potter was born.
As a fan of the series growing up, I knew all of the ins and outs of every page of the books and even the annoying changes that were made when it hopped off the pages onto the big screen.
When I first sat down and attempted to figure out the best ways to earn money, taking over a hugely successful franchise was only the third option on my list, behind the stock market and investing in Crypto Currency early, and funny enough, it ended up being the first of my money making schemes I was going to tackle.
Now, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of different plots and ploys I could use if I wanted to become the new author of the series. Still, all of them involved one singular similarity: killing the original author.
Even if I wasn’t a full-blown villain and instead, let’s say, an Anti-Hero like my brother, I still would have gone after this woman because, frankly, she was a total nutjob who, in the end, tarnished her masterful work by not knowing when to shut the fuck up online.
Her opinions turned all of her adoring fans into a metaphorical lynch mob gunning for her head, and even became a thing of legend in forums and chat rooms, as she turned herself into a proper example of what NOT to do when being a celebrity.
Eventually, things got so bad that even the actors who once starred in her movies, as well as supported her, cut all ties and turned tail to run the moment her name was brought up, protecting themselves from getting dragged into the black hole of drama that the madbitch created.
With the first inklings of a large storm beginning to trickle down, I found myself standing across the street from the café; my mind was filled with a matching storm of scenarios, the most important of which was, "What if someone got to her first?"
While I was arrogant and cocky, I never once thought myself to be the only person with the idea I had come up with. With a little over a thousand other returners walking somewhere around the world, I knew that someone, somewhere, was probably planning something similar to what I had come up with.
The last thing I needed was to get drawn into a battle on the cobblestone streets of Edinburgh, so paranoid or not, I was going to take things slow.
As such, I didn’t bother humoring the thought of rushing in and taking out the author of the famed franchise about a Wizardry Academy.
Besides, it was never going to be that easy of a task to complete.
Since it was already nearly February, only a few short months from the day the first book, "Henry Potter and the Magician’s Stone," was supposed to be published, I knew Rowing had already been contacted by the company which, in the end, published her book series…Shoomsery Publishing, so if I wanted to keep things legal and on track, I would first need to eliminate the original author before heading to London, where Shoomsery was located, and then use my talent to move everything into my name and a pen name I had created.
That way, all the book royalties and rights would go to me instead of anyone else.
Shoving my hands into the kangaroo pocket of my hoodie, I calmed my thoughts and focused on sensing my surroundings for any trace of particle radiation.
If, by chance, any of the returners were, in fact, keeping tabs on Rowing, the radiation steadily leaking into the air would trigger my senses like a bonfire on a pitch-black night.
If we were back in the origin timeline or even an Instance, it wouldn’t be difficult to mask such radiation; however, since there was a distinct LACK of naturally occurring particles on Earth right now, it was absolutely impossible to hide them from someone with keen senses.
Hell, not even I was capable of masking my Particle signature here, as even my best technique for doing so didn’t work for shit so long as I was a literal beacon of invisible to the naked eye radiation.
To the trained eye, my existence alone was like staring at Chyrnoble with a Geiger counter, and I could easily be spotted from a few hundred feet away as long as the person looking was intelligent or skilled enough to do so.
Not everyone I encountered in the Origin Timeline was adept at sensing the particle strength of other beings. As luck would have it, Brenden was one of those people, and till the day I last saw him, the meat head depended on others for things like scouting or checking the strength of enemies, but thankfully, Emilia was pretty good at it, so she made up for his shortcomings.
Closing my eyes, they began rapidly flicking around under my eyelids as I extended out my perception to "Feel" for any other particle generators, for lack of a better word. Unfortunately, to my dismay, there wasn’t one source pinging in my head but three.
’Fuck…’ I cursed while stepping back into a nearby alley and hoping I hadn’t been seen by them yet.
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