Questionable Entrance

[Albert Wesker]

It had been several uneventful days since his rather strange travelling with Ornstein. They had parted ways after finally reaching the city, and since that day the former Admiral had seen neither hide nore hair of the dragonslayer, and had settled in to take stock of his situation as best he could now that he had some relative peace.

And during such introspection and information-gathering, he finally had time to properly consider something that had simply never occurred to him properly since his arrival here. A great deal of his power was...well, the best way he could put it was that it was missing, or at the least somehow inaccessible to him. He'd managed to maintain a few of his tricks and skills, in a thankful turn of events, but so much more of the strength he had grown so used to having was just...gone. It was enough to give him a headache trying to ponder the significance of it, but it did answer at least a few questions.

While his choices had seemed natural to him at the time, some of the actions he had taken in the couple of very brief fights he had been in thus far were...awkward, to say the least; not at all the best way to go about handling the situations he had been dumped into. It was as if, in the spur of the moment, he had failed to notice that he was missing some of his preferred methods of utilizing his Hie Hie no Mi powers.

Perhaps the most grievous occurrence was his failure to notice his inability to turn into his Logia state -- something which eventually became nearly reflexive for most of those who had eaten a Logia Devil Fruit. But the more he pondered that, the more his brain started to feel like it was going to leak out of his head, and so he finally, reluctantly, gave up on that train of thought, and turned to a new one: Just what was he going to do, now that he was here?

While a long-term goal of any sort eluded him over his pondering, he received something to do in the short-term rather unexpectedly, when he ran into a familiar face. Or rather, a familiar face ran into him.

The highwayman clad in purple literally fell out of the air, plummeting from a rooftop above, and nearly bowled over the Ice-man. He paused to snarl out a demand that he get out of the way, before seeing who it was. The poor man -- Janning, was his name -- immediately went pale, dropped what he was carrying, and bolted in a surprising display of speed. It looked as if he had a cast on one arm. Guess he'd been injured in that scuffle a while back.

Stooping down, Kuzan retrieved the dropped items, finding nothing of any real interest to him, personally. A moderately-sized bag full of valuables of many types, and what looked to be some type of flyer or advertisement. He turned over the presumably-stolen items to a pair of guards who came by shortly in pursuit of the thief, but held onto the flyer, so that he could look at it himself when he had a moment.

And what he read when he finally did caught his attention in more ways than one.

If someone like that thief was going to show up at an event like this, well...that was just a recipe for plain old trouble and chaos. It was highly doubtful he'd be able to do any real damage on his own in such a crowded area, but who was to know what other tricks or nasty surprises the thief had up his sleeve?

Kuzan's headache started to come back as he considered his options.