flicker veil

So I ordered my thoughts, made a small effort of will, whispered a word, and vanished.
Veils were complex magic, but I had a knack for them. Becoming truly and completely invisible was a real pain in the neck: Passing light completely through you was a literal stone-cold bitch, because it left you freezing cold and blind as a bat to boot. Becoming unseen, though, was a different proposition entirely. A good veil would reduce your visibility to little more than a few flickers in the air, to a few vague shadows where they shouldn’t be, but it did more than that. It created a sense of ordinariness in the air around you, an aura of boring unremarkability that you usually only felt in a job you didn’t like, around three thirty in the afternoon. Once you combined that suggestion with a greatly reduced visible profile, remaining unnoticed was at least as easy as breathing.
As I vanished into that veil, I also called up an image, another combination of illusion and suggestion. This one was simple: me, as I’d appeared in the mirror a moment before, clean and seemingly perky and toting a fresh cup of creamy goodness. The sensation that went with it was just a kind of heavy dose of me: the sound of my steps and movement, the scent of Butters’s shampoo, the aroma of my cup of coffee. I tied the image to one of the rings on my fingers and left it there, drawing from the energy I’d stored in a moonstone. Then I turned around, with my image layered over my actual body like a suit made of light, and walked out of the coffee shop.
Once outside, the evasion was a simple maneuver, the way all the good ones are. My image turned left and I turned right.
To anyone watching, a young woman had just come out of the store and gone sauntering down the street with her coffee. She was obviously enjoying her day. I’d put a little extra bounce and sway into the image’s movements, to make her that much more noticeable (and therefore a better distraction). She’d go on walking down that street for a mile or more before she simply vanished.
Meanwhile, the real me moved silently into an alleyway and watched.
My image hadn’t gone a hundred yards before a man in a black turtleneck sweater—a servitor of the Fomor—stepped out of an alley and began following it. Those jerks were everywhere these days, like roaches, only more disgusting and harder to kill.


Brief Cases, Bombshells, Page 230-231