Camden Town was one of the most vibrant and eccentric areas that London had to offer and that was no more obvious than when we were driving down the main high street, stuck in traffic. The buildings were all brightly coloured and the shops that lined the street leading up to the main marketplace had all gone incredibly over the top with their sign designs. One building had a giant dragon on the front with blinking red eyes. Another featured a giant shoe, one had an aeroplane nosediving toward the ground and a third was bright yellow with a massive ceramic elephant’s head poking out of the front. It was also incredibly busy, especially considering today was a random weekday and still the early afternoon. Nevertheless, there were hundreds if not thousands of people hustling and bustling along both sides of the street, which meant that it was only going to be a matter of time until we witnessed a crime. That being said, we weren’t waiting for a crime to be committed on the street.

We walked back to the car without saying a word to one another. It was as if Sophia was giving me a little bit of space after what had happened, though how long that was going to continue I had no idea. In a way, I wasn’t sure if I wanted it to continue. All I could think about were the memories that I had absorbed from the man I had drunk dry and then thrown into the river. They were separate from my own memories, my new Immateria brain could pick apart which memories I had made myself and which ones I had absorbed from someone else, and they were already beginning to fade from my mind. I could feel that when they had faded completely was when I was going to need to feed again. “So what now?” I asked as I sat down in the driver's seat. With no job to rush back to and my newly acquired vampiric thirst sated I felt a bit like a leaf blowing in the wind. “Now we get you registered with the Immateria Council,” Sophia sighed, “Right now you’re basically illegal, so we need to sort

The undercity was a marvel. I had been expecting a dingy and disgusting place, with leaking walls and rumbles from trains passing overhead, but I couldn’t have been further from the truth. Magic, it turned out, was just as magical in reality as it had been in all the storybooks. While my scientific mind was having trouble understanding everything my eyes were seeing, the little boy in the back of my head was whooping with unbridled joy. The ceilings were high and had been charmed in some way to display what was essentially a holographic display of the outdoor sky. Though unlike my technology there weren’t any telltale signs that what I was seeing was fake. I’d never managed to eliminate the slight shimmer that occurred whenever an image updated itself, kind of like scanlines on an old CRT, there was nothing like that present in the illusory sky. Alongside that were all the different types of people that I was seeing. It was hard not to want to run away screaming the first time

Sophia shot me an ugly glare as I stepped forward to speak, but she didn’t order me back in line so I felt free to continue in my course of action. “While you may be safe hiding down here now, I know through first-hand experience how easily all of that could come tumbling down,” I said, “And while the Immateria are the strongest thing in the world right now that may not always be the case.” “Preposterous!” The Immateria at the centre of the table said, “Not even their nuclear bombs could threaten us, in centuries or millennia in the future that won’t change!” I crossed my hands behind my back and shook my head, I needed to play this just like I was trying to explain technology to some tech inept businessman back in London… because that was basically my entire plan. “What do you know of technology, sir?” I asked the man, “I imagine in this world of magic that you have crafted for yourselves the mere notion of mundane human technology is something that barely even crosses your mind,

After explaining my plans to Sophia I explained that I would need a space in the Immateria undercity to work on my experiments and technology making. I could, of course, have had a lab up in London, but if we had taken that route I would have needed to constantly be zipping up and down between the overworld and the underworld, and that sounded like an awful lot of effort. It had taken the better part of an hour, but after calling in a few favours from some imps that Sophia knew she had managed to sort me out with the perfect space. Or at least it would be the perfect space in the future. At the moment it was little more than a dusty basement tucked away underneath a tavern that one of Sophia’s friends owned. Nevertheless, the space was big. It had good ventilation thanks to a few high-up windows. It was in a spot that was well-connected with the rest of the city. When you consider the fact that I had started my original tech company with nothing more than a dream and some spare p