Let the age old battle begin!

In the red corner, with bright eyes and a bushy tail, and weighing in at less then a pound, The Squirrel!

In the very very black corner, charging in at a whole shitload of volts, the Transformer near the apartment building!

But, alas, the squirrel took a dive in round one, and that's why I (and the rest of the building) didn't have power for an hour and a half.

fiction

You'd think being out of the wind would have made it warmer, but it didn't. I could still hear the wind howling outside, even though we were several feet underground, in the basement of a tenement building. Maybe it was more then the weather that made it colder down here. Wouldn't be the first time something like that happened.

There was a faint light coming in through the filthy windows high on the walls of the basement. That and a couple light bulbs was it. Forensics would have to bring more light to get their work done, but there was enough for me to do what I needed to do. A couple other detectives from the squad were upstairs, going door to door in the apartment building. No one will have heard anything, of course. Especially if they did hear anything. It's that kind of neighborhood. No one wants to know what's going on outside their door, outside their family, outside their little corner of this particular hell.

The body lay on some concrete slabs, barely higher then the floor. Blood pooled around the body, obscuring some of the symbols in the circle around the crude altar. But enough were visible to confirm that it was victim number five in what weren't being called occult slayings. They weren't being called that because it was being kept out of the newspapers. Kind of hard to keep murder out entirely, and it had been years since anyone had really tried that. But the occult crap, yeah, that was easy to manage. If this was victim five, and there was no reason to believe it wasn't, the symbols would be in chalk, easy to wash away. Easy to destroy.

Because it was better if fewer people knew what really was going on. The only people who had anything close to a clear picture were the squad, and that's the way it stayed. But even we didn't have the whole picture. If we did, we'd have caught the sonofabitch behind this by now, and he wouldn't be out there somewhere, looking for victim number six.

This wasn't even something that could really be taken to the Feds, even if we wanted to. For one thing, the Captain would go ballistic at the mention of it, even though they have to have their own version of the squad. The victims were too different. No common race, age, skin color, hair color... all that shit that serial killers usually focused on. Logically, there should be a pattern, but if there was, we hadn't seen it yet.

"Nothing came through." Had to be McCullough behind me. He's the only one on duty today who would be able to check.
"You sure?"
"Nothing. Nothing at any of the previous sites as well. Either our boy doesn't know what he's doing, doesn't truly believe in what he's doing, or..."
"Or what?" I hated this shit. McCullough always had to drag it out. It was like pulling teeth sometimes. He had to be dramatic.
"Or he's building power. And if he is..."
"Yeah?"
"Then it will be big when it happens. Possibly more then we can handle."
"Then we need to find him and stop him. Permanently."

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Author's note: The idea behind this is basically an "Occult Squad" of police officers. Imagine all the normal crime that police deal with. Now throw in all kinds of mystical shit. The idea for this has probably been kicking around in my head ever since I first played Shadowrun, way many years ago. That was the first RPG I ever played that mixed the modern (well, futuristic) age and magic.

I may expand on this one more at a later date.