I blame Dorothy.
No, I’m being serious here. I saw the Wizard of Oz. Everyone did in some version. It is where we get our concept of what tornadoes look like if we haven’t had the misfortune of seeing them in real life. When Jack conjures mana and calls upon the spirits of the rivers and the ocean to aid him he does so based on his mental representation of how that drek looks. To Jack it looks like the Wizard of Oz. Guess who I am in that scenario?
In a matter of seconds I was whipping across the East River like the ice cream sloshing around in the middle of a frothy cone of dark water. It was small enough that it slipped the notice of anyone who was directly paying attention. He cast a low fog over the water to further aid the illusion of invisibility. Inside the swirling water tornado (there’s an actual name for such things, isn’t there?) I was desperate to cling on to something but painfully aware that there was nothing to cling onto. So I wrapped my arms tightly around myself and tried very hard not to scream.
Being an off the books detective is not an easy life.
I landed in a bush. In reality I landed on a bed of pressed leaves and padding disguised to look like a bush just below the highway that runs along the edge of the FDR drive.