Policeman and the cat

74 - Shady tree HQ

For the time of the training, Ian hadn't really left the house at all, so he was surprised to see that the old HQ building was outright gone. Knox said that when she has time she'll grow some normal giant oaks around these three so they blend in the same as she had done around her house back in the previous place. Ian hadn't gone outside so he didn't know just how well Knox had masked her previous dwelling, but Kenneth said he wouldn't be able to find the place.

Knox said only elves from Bluemeadow tribe stepped by from time to time to buy certain potions their own alchemist didn't brew. His non-elf clients found the place by taking encrypted teleportation circles at various undead gathering spots. Encrypted in a way to prevent the use of tracking spells, location detection spells, divination spells, etc. only gemheart SOS signal artifact had broken through everything and given away his location, other than Purple and elves no one knew where he lived regardless if they had visited him or not. Purple, too, had sent him clients not by direct teleporting, but by sending them to the encrypted circles not to compromise Knox's safety measures.

But Knox hadn't grown a forest just to hide her house, giant oak forests often grew on rotting leylines to purify them, so most astrals stayed away - regular ones not to get sick from the potential leyline rot - dark ones to avoid the oaks feeding on them, it was a good method to 'make the backyard safe', but something she did only because she was a homely person, giant oak forests were not the best places for undead to linger in.

But, Knox mentioned, passing paladin parties camped near her house pretty often, one party had even used the side of her house tree as a tent anchor. They took the risk of a potential leyline rot to regenerate a wound of their teammate. Giant oak forests were commonly known as 'no astral zones' and no one sane would burn or destroy one for ten more different reasons. Among them - giant oak acorns were tasty. Elves found Knox's house while gathering those and left Knox gifts in exchange for taking the acorns, figuring it was Knox's planting, which got them talking eventually.

As for how Knox grew the house - made a hefty sacrifice and summoned a Hollie to do the work, Hollies complete their contract and happily die in peace on their own, they were that kind of beings and dead things tell no tales.

And then Ian got to finally look around the new Police HQ they had grown and, lookie here, they had even gotten August to set up a pair of portals in it. Kenneth filled in that they ditched the underground parking lot plan, August set up the portal to clean up a mess of his treants in parks all around smacking normies for littering and his colleagues now sat with sunglasses and typed something on the table.

"Uh, Aheal technology," Kenneth said and got out sunglasses for all of them, as they put them on they discovered that-- there was a lot of stuff that had gone digital, there was a huge map floating above them with pointer markings of missions in progress-- all the colleagues who did type, typed on hologram keyboards looking into hologram screens and the sunglasses did not block out any light. Virtual reality, huh?

It was amusing how they had become like a certain movie team of people in black suits dealing with odd happenings. And in this virtual reality space of screens and maps and floating pages of information, they looked like they all had regular transparent glasses on, probably just to imply they all saw the same thing.

Ian got a lot of smiles and waves, true it had been almost forever since they had time to just share a meal and talk, after the raid he had spent almost all his time with other people and they hadn't managed to catch up on the wedding pre-party either. But it was early so not many were around, they'd only show up in an hour at breakfast time.

"Only this floor is like that," Kenneth said taking off the sunglasses and walked upstairs - pointing to seven doors, "Nothing interesting here, we replicated the rooms so well it's almost disappointing, just that there's a lot more light in them and wood finish," Shower rooms, Sparring rooms, Kenneth's workshop, Potion storage, and Archive (that had changed from being on the same floor with office to moving up).