Friday, June 28, 2013

Prologue: A Redhead's Monologue.

Immortal wasn't exactly correct.  Just not dying didn't make his flesh and blood any less mortal than any of the other shmucks that lived on the planet.  No, if anything he was what you would call unkillable, and nothing more.  See, while he himself was pure squishy human through and through, he had a tagalong that happened to like his state of living, and had for the past two centuries, and so decided to keep him that way. it was a subtle change in things, like looking at a river for a moment, only to double take to discover that it wasn't moving.  That in itself isn't a great metaphor since the speed at which a body ages is far less noticeable than a river's flow.  Perhaps like a glacier, but those take longer even than humans to get to their destination.  As for the more troublesome issue of a more sudden death, the little tagalong had that covered in various ways, most of which involved fortune cookies and loud explosions.  He tended to move a lot.  The tagalong itself wasn't immortal either, just very long lived, very powerful, and very bored.  Lately he went by the name of Max and happened to like wandering around the world in the form of a cat.

With this in mind, the view out this window at a man sitting waiting for the bus in the rain with his cat on his head that kept batting at the umbrella handle that extended up past it takes on a slightly more entertaining light than it already had.  The fact that the man was your neighbor across the hall who you seldom talked to is what made you stop to look in the first place, and the fact that he doesn't have anything with him along with the fact that the stop he is at is not for the city bus, but rather a cross-country bus is what made you stop at the window to watch.  At first you might have thought he was waiting for somebody, but then he could have done that inside where it's warm.  After a while you saw him pull a piece of paper out of his pocket, right around the dimensions of a ticket, then shove it back in his pocket after a quick glance.  You know that the bus is late because you hear it go by every Thursday around now in the afternoon, so you deduce he must have been checking to see if he got the time wrong.  He hasn't, in fact.  Even after two centuries his mind is sharp enough to elude me.

When you heard a knock in the hall ten minutes earlier and saw me standing there waiting at the door, you thought I looked scary, or else you would have informed me of the location of my prey.  I will take note of this for the future.  You came back in here to look out the window a bit more, and might have gone down to talk to the man if you hadn't lost your own umbrella a week back.  Five minutes ago when you head his door open, you checked the hallway again.  For a minute or two you didn't see anything of note, but the cigarette lighter that was on the floor, the door that was ajar, and a thin sliver of the apartment that seemed perfectly empty.  You remember that it used to have Victorian furniture or something around it, nicely furnished, but you didn't see or hear any of it moved out in the past few days.  It happens to be in a deck of cards in the man's pocket at the moment.

You picked up the lighter, and then I started talking to you about this, telepathically of course.  The only lips on this lighter are the KISS emblem on the side, and they don't talk.  I told you how five minutes ago I opened that door, was about to step inside the apartment, and then what looked like a bucket of water fell on me.  It happened to be a prank spell designed to trigger if I specifically showed up.  Wouldn't have hit the landlord.

You were shocked, I was convincing, and now you're holding me up so that we can watch the man and his cat.  I'll be fine in a day or so, but I find it hard to confront him as a lighter, so I'll catch him at the next place, once I track him down. Look, there's the bus.  Anyway, if you don't have anything else to do, let me tell you about my first encounter with that man. . .

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The King and his Axe: Part 2

Darker the room, light filtering in through the moat in the floor and the flicker of the furnace from the ramp behind the throne.  Cathis sits, head nodding, hand clenching around the axe haft then relaxing, then clenching again until finally the axe clatters to the floor.  Cathis jumps a little.  Stone still, he squints his eyes at the axe and the little glints from the chains at the foot of the throne.  He isn't looking at the axe, not in the dark.  No mortal eye could but begin to see the details beyond a vague shadow of the thing, not that Cathis isn't brutally familiar with the instrument.  He has seen and studied each of the dark black lightning bolts that run through its white marble head, he has counted the bands of sweat-stained leather that wrap the haft.  Instead he observes the idea of the axe, the primal concept of responsibility that is his power over a city of thoughtless peasants, and his burden of conscience for their well being.  A cynical mind's eye studies the smooth curves of the blade that cut through the flesh of the livestock he sacrifices, that he feeds to the hot master that lives below.  Servitude is his task, and in serving he rules.  Cathis' eyes narrow, brow furrowing as the sunlight departs, no moonlight to take its place this dark night.

Kingship his for nothing, no pleasure in it, and no reward, none even bittersweet.  Just a life of feeding the flames, listening to the crackle that seems to taunt and scream and laugh at him as it eats up bone and flesh and blood.  The satisfied hiss of the fire, the cold judgment and stinging amusement at his shackles.  The city may use the furnace to stay afloat, and he may use the furnace, but each day he feels more of him is taken than what use he takes from it.  Cold wind rises from the moat, grasping and dragging at his robes, throwing them first towards the furnace, then dragging them back towards the sea.  Cathis had toyed with that, though he hadn't thought himself serious.  Tonight the darkness had come into the throne room, and the fire had taunted him overly this past week, turning a mad fancy into his only light of salvation.

He had heard the laughter, the scorn.  A tedium-rattled mind had no way to tell if he imagined the voice that came from within the fiery maw, or if the furnace was home to some malignant creature.  Either way, an urge from deep within his heart moved Cathis to change this.

Long before, he had tried the axe on his chains, and the chains would not yield.  The axe had come away no worse for wear, but he had felt ashamed with himself for the thought for a year afterward.  Freedom did not lie within edge of the axe.

As Cathis rose, the chains rattled and hissed over the ground.  No shame held his legs still this night.  He walked the full way forward to peer down into the depths of the sky, though it was a black void with nothing to see.  A sharp turn and steps with a purpose brought him to the ramp, heat rising out from below.  Cathis hesitated.

Walking forward would place him face to face with the furnace, he would be baked in the heat one more time.  Avoiding it during the days had left him frightened to hear it, to let the fiery mouth talk to his face.  Each day away had made the fire's laughter pierce farther into the silence of the throne room.  He had to descend though, had to face it.  Slow suffering that his status piled on his back, the doldrums of dread that pounded at him, body, mind, and soul, it pushed him on.

Cathis descended, chains sliding down before him to the foot of the ramp, announcing his arrival.  As if on cue, the fire before him flared up in greeting.  He could not hear the voice, though he knew it was waiting.  Step by burdened step he walked forward, a quick glance to the sides, though he knew the room was just as he had left it.  The fire sputtered, chuckled.  Cathis looked forward at it again, locking the metal mouth in his gaze.  Rattle thump. Thump. Rattle thump. Thump.  Closer still.

"I am leaving."  Cathis voice cracked from disuse.  "I am leaving, and you are helping me, you eater." Hissing laughter, then silence.  Cathis stopped in front of the mouth, then stooped, grabbing a handful of the ankle-chains.  "Your final meal from me, eater."  Easily he hefted the shiny links in his hands as he rose, staring deep into the fire.  With a toss, they disappeared into the flames.

Silence at first, then a quiet whine, like steam escaping a small hole, growing louder and louder.  The flames went red, then white, brighter than the sun reflected on the water.  Cathis stumbled backwards a step, then caught himself, the chain jerked taught.  Heat billowed out of the furnace, coming in a wave.  Flecks of sweat roe up from Cathis' skin only to be blown back in streaks away from the fire.  He began to feel light headed, gasping for breath as the air emptied from the room.  Then a sound like thunder and he fell down, the chain now free from the furnace.

He fled, not noticing the weightlessness on his leg, not registering the familiar heft of the axe in a death grip in his hand.  Cathis just ran, and when he reached the moat, he fell.  The glowing end of the chain trailed behind him, drops floating off in the air.  All in front of him was blackness punctured by small dots of reflected starlight as he approached the water.  Wind rushed by him, ripping away at the madness and fear that remained from the fire, replacing the scream of the furnace from above.  He felt peace filling him, air refilling his lungs.

Then he hit the water.

Hard.

Friday, June 21, 2013

The King and his Axe: Part 1

The axe hung heavy in Cathis' hand.  At the end of the axe's hilt, a short chain bridged the gap between it and the manacle around Cathis' wrist.  Down at Cathis' feet, a similar, but much longer, chain coiled messily on the floor.  It's ends were attached to his ankle and the large, stone throne upon which Cathis sat.  The room was stone with a large vaulted ceiling and a deep trench in the stone between the throne and the door.  From the edge one could look down it and see a mile of sky below them before the blue sea glittered up at them.

The axe and the throne were of a similar style, each carved with great precision out of a white marble with black veins running throughout the stone.  Neither were ornamented overly, both of simple shapes that were both elegant and modest.  The axe was half a man's height in length and the throne a full man's height.  Cathis sat slouched in the throne with the axe in his right hand, not seeming to notice the weight with which it pulled down at his arm.

The room was silent besides his breathing and the whistle of the air from the moat.  Nobody came to visit the throne room, to talk with their bored king besides the weekly ceremony of sacrifice, and that had been yesterday.  The women were busy with their cooking or weaving, or tending to the children.  The men and boys were out tending to the animals in their pens or out in balloons hunting prey in the sky.  The children were in the fields with the crops, at least when they weren't goofing off.  When the children were goofing off, they did not visit the king because their parents either told them he was "too important to see them" or that "they should not play around in the throne room and were forbidden to go in."  So the door stayed shut.


Cathis' stores of food would last, as they always did.  He did not need to farm or hunt for his meals.  His robes would be replaced yearly at the harvest festival.  He would cut his own hair and beard, though he had not done so in months so that it lay in black locks down his face and his back.  Most of his days were spent pacing around the throne, keeping his legs fit, or swinging the axe in practice to strengthen his arms.  His mind was the hardest thing to exercise, he thought.  If he walked the ten paces forward to the edge of the moat he could stare down, perhaps to catch a glimpse of a balloon wandering across the sky.

He would wonder how many of the men and boys thought that the weapon of the city was the spear that they hunted with, long thin cord connecting the shaft to the side of the balloon.  Once he had thought so too.  Now all there was for him was the axe, and it seemed to be much more drastic a symbol than the spear had ever been for him.  The axe was the judgement of the city, it was the ritual of the city, and it was the burden of the city.

Back behind the throne was a ramp cut into the stone.  Down the ramp was Cathis' sleeping quarters.  Surrounding his bed and food stores was great furnace of the city.  Mostly it was a great metal wall that he could stare at, but the mouth of the furnace sat a few men's heights in length in front of his bed.  Actually created to look like a mouth, the fire inside danced and played constantly.  It had stayed lit for generations back so far that no man alive had heard of a time when it hadn't been lit.  All it took was a slaughtered animal, prepared on the alter right in front of the mouth and then thrust on through.  Once a week one animal was killed from each of the eight clans from the eight islands.

When Cathis had slaughtered the animal with the axe and tossed the remains into the fire, he would look at the respective tube tube, half a man's height in diameter, that led off to the sacrifice's island and think to himself "not today."  No tube had been cut since two kings back when one island had decided to stop paying tribute.  The supply of hot air to fuel their balloon had been chopped off and the island had fallen into the sea.  In the next king's rule another island had been woven together and hooked up to the newly fixed pipe.  So the cycle continued.  There could never be more islands than pipes, and there were rarely less.

In his early years as king, Cathis used to sit down near the furnace or sleep in his bed.  Eventually the nightmares and the feeling of eyes staring at him from inside the furnace had driven him out.  In the past weeks he had even taken to sleeping up on his throne, only going down the ramp with the sacrifices and to fetch up a bite of food.

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

The Free Way.

I needed a contact in the city for this shit, but I didn't really have one up my sleeve for anything like this.  Leastways not anyone who would know what to do besides refer me to somebody else.  Might have been a good idea in any other business, but the criminal world doesn't really smile on people who leave to hot a trail.  This was the main reason why I was driving along the freeway to a town a few miles over.

The other reason had to do with the tiger that may or may not still be after my ass using its spooky ghost powers to track me by ectoplasm or some shit.  I obviously have no idea what I'm dealing with here, so cut me some slack on the terminology, oh judgmental inner me.  The highway gave me some time to think though.  There are a few places that are my best bet for offloading something like this, and a few more to get me laid low enough to hopefully avoid getting my guts torn out, at least for the right price.  If I'm lucky, I'll be able to make a little cash from the piece of jewelry stuck to my hand.  It glows, seems like magic, and somebody out there is probably collecting shit like this.  Then I can live easy, go on the run, and maybe make a nice home somewhere in another city a few states from here.

Luck isn't really running my way though.  More likely the thing is cursed something fierce, I have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to get it removed, or even just chop my hand off, and then the tiger comes and eats me anyway after I've gotten rid of the thing.  Only upside to all of this is that there's really nobody to disappoint after I'm gone.  Part of the criminal lifestyle tends to give you loads of connections and no real connections if you dig my meaning.  People who you see in bars and on the street for business, but nobody you'd wave to or smile at in a chance meeting.  Not like you'd ignore them or anything, gotta know where people are and who they're talking to, mark their presence, but not be friendly.  That's my creed that I live.

Some guys don't stick by it, they get chummy, and the lucky ones might even make it years before it blows up on them.  Them and everyone around them even.  They make loose cannons, people who are disturbingly hard to work with despite the fact that they have such good people skills.  You can at least trust a duplicitous bastard to stab somebody in the back for you for the right price.

Anyway, I don't have any close contacts in this next city, nobody I'd seen in the past two years, but you hear stories thrown about by some of the more traveled people in the business.  There are three possible places I've heard of that would deal in weird shit.  I've got the general mafia bazaar that sets up in warehouses on the sides of town.  I'd have to sulk around and get the scoop of the where and when and the who exactly for that deal, but they would almost certainly have somebody who deals in strange heists.  That gets to be plan C.  I've done that deal before, so it's possible, but it's not my best option for a rush job, and it's not the most comfortable experience.  Plus they scalp you.

Option B is the magic hands man.  They say he can move all the illegal things he wants from place to place none the wiser by any authority because he struck a deal with the devil.  Anything in his "hands" so to speak is one of the safest places in could be.  I used to crack it up to running a tight ship, but who knows.  If he doesn't know anything, I'm likely not going to get a better buyer.  Trouble is, I may have ripped off a guy under his wing a while back.  He wouldn't hold a grudge, I'm sure, but it was a sloppy job on my part.  There's trust of a person to do you good will, and trust that a person won't screw things up for everybody.  He's a cautious block so that personal reputation plus the nature of my problem might push it over the unworkable stage for him.  That and once it gets out that I came to him and even he didn't want to move it, well, things get a bit hairy with the less organized bits of the city in respect to my prospects.  That's why that is plan B.

My plan A is not a great plan, especially since it's based on rumors and hearsay, that and it's not a totally criminal line of business in the first place.  It's a pawn shop.  Take anything you have type pawn shop.  A very specific pawn shop.  Some blokes back two months ago were talking about getting rid of a hot package that dropped in their lap and how they stumbled on this weird old shop in this city that they managed to get a pretty good deal to fence the stuff.  They said it didn't give a good price, and it seemed a bit sketchy, but it helped them move the stuff.  Really strange stuff too.  Real bone necklaces, human, and antique are pretty hard to get rid of.  Museums can hunt that stuff down fast.  Blokes didn't read the placards when they were burglarizing the place, so they ended up with a lot of loot that they couldn't keep and couldn't get rid of easy.  Said this pawn shop had taken it.  Since they didn't end up in jail for that bit of crime, I am inclined to believe that it's not total hogwash that the operation is legitimate and secret.

So that's where I stop first, a little pawn shop down a back alley halfway down the main street of the city.  A few hours more of driving, tiger free, and I'll be in the home stretch, hopefully.  Then I can be rid of this thing on my hand, which hopefully won't give me cancer, and go back to more petty crime, less spooky mystery novel.

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Sometimes you need a Holiday, and Sometimes the World gives you one.

Out on his boat, in the middle of the river, away from it all, Chris stewed in the sun.  It was a hot day, just a few clouds, and it happened to be spring.  Chris was under the boats roof though, lying down, and trying to forget why he needed a day out on the river in his boat by himself.  This part of the river didn't get much traffic even though it was in sight of the city on such a nice day.  All the boaters were out downriver where just a few miles away the mouth of the river opened up into the ocean.  Just a little wind for sound, along with the waves, the birds, a splash or two from fish and the faint drone of the highway off to his right hand on the shore.  The anchor was down and this was where he would be lying for the next few hours, half napping with a cooler of soda and few bags of chips.  He didn't drink, not on his boat.

He was a cautious guy, unlike most of his relatives, in spite of most of his relatives, or more likely because of most of his relatives.  His cousin had almost drowned when Chris was six.  They had been visiting out at the house, and Chris and Micah had gone swimming in the ocean and Micah wanted to get to the island that was a mile and a half out.  Thirty years later Micah actually did drown out there.  The funeral was last Friday. Chris hadn't gone.  Chris had been dealing with his boss, who may or may not have bankrupted the company.  At this point it was a toss up of if they could move the stock.  Who really buy's fuzzy cup snuggies?  His boss it seemed.

Chris's answering machine had been mostly filled with the past two problems.  Darcy from accounting letting him know that as the VP he really ought to come into the office and look over what had happened on Wednesday when he had taken time off to go to the hospital.  The family telling him to be at the hospital because Micah had broken his head open, torn a giant gash through his stomach, and ingested a jellyfish.  The president of the company calling back to complain about Chris trying to sell back the fuzzy cup cozies.  The family calling back to tell him that Micah had died in the night.  The Japanese retailer calling back to inform him that on no accounts could they cancel the order because, as it happened, the order had already shipped.  The family lawyer calling to say that his cousin had listed him as the recipient of his mostly poisonous sea creature aquarium, and that his cousin's brother wanted it out of the house that he had gotten as soon as possible since it scarred his wife.  The boss calling back to say that Darcy had talked to him along with marketing, and he wanted Chris to come in on Friday to help brainstorm how they were going to sell what he had now been informed was a "bad purchase."  The Ex calling to tell him that Will, his son, was going to be in a play on Thursday evening, and that he wanted his father to come.  That one was Thursday morning, and she lived two cities over.  He figured she wanted to show off her new boyfriend or something equally petty and realized that the play was moderately good bait.  Finally, the last call was from the marina informing him that his sail boat had finally gotten the hole in it's hull repaired.

It had an outboard motor on it to go upstream, and he just put down the anchor when he was far enough away from everything.  A little off to the side in case of any traffic coming downstream, but that didn't happen much.  Chris sadly didn't have anything besides his troubles to occupy his mind.  The weather was gorgeous, but it was also soothingly bland.  The river itself was too quiet.  So he stewed in the shade in the cabin.

About quarter to three, after a good three or so hours of this, the river decided to do something about the rather annoyed man that was sitting in a boat on top of it, so it gave him a shove.  The way that Chris experienced it was a sudden lifting sensation accompanied by a rather unexpected change from stationary to moving.  What observers from the highway just off the river saw was a large wave from upstream wash up to the boat, pick it up, and carry it downstream.  What the boats downriver noticed about thirty seconds later was a much larger wave with various sticks, hats, and a few swimmers rocketing towards them, topped with a very surprised Chris Levens in his sailboat with a can of root beer in one hand and the other wrapped around the mast.  Three minutes later, the people and boats in the ocean saw roughly the same thing, plus more boats and floaties, minus the root beer.  What the people on the beach saw as the wave cleared the river proper and headed out to sea was a large number of boats, people, and various flotsam all left around the harbor with a single, slightly smaller wave carrying Chris and his sailboat farther out with a can of mountain dew in hand and a very confused look on his face.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Not an Interview with the vampire.

For Clint Hardwood, a normal day on the job turned up nothing.  Magic just wasn't that common with everybody packing into the sardine cans we call cities these days.  It like room to breathe, move around, stretch out.  Not that magic was really alive, not any more than water or air was.  So Clint spent most of his days wandering around, grabbing lunch where he could find it and just kinda smelling the air for anything magical.

Trouble was, the last week wasn't normal.  A hint up in one of the 'burbs had led him on a long trail.  A few whisps of energy here and there, a smudged out run drawn in chalk, and the faint leavings of an unfamiliar aura, he'd checked it against the known practitioners list at the office, and he ended up here, in front of what was left of an old, abandoned apartment complex on the edges of the city.  This either meant they were homeless, criminal, or had a flair for the dramatic, and Clint owed a slight limp to the last time he ran into someone with all three.  A decade to heal it up had done wonders though, he was back up his old agility, or nearly, in the past year.

Digging through his trench coat pocket, he produced a half empty pack of cigarettes and a lighter.  With a few quick motions, tossing the lighter to his other hand and flicking the paper box open, he had it lit and in his mouth in a little less than two seconds.  Just long enough for him to consider exactly how bad this business could get.  That's why they hired him though, because he was good enough for the bad business, or maybe just bad enough to get along with it.  As he stepped into the interior, he muttered to himself, something very arcane and showy as was his taste in magic, and only magic, and his cigarette lit up as bright as a flood lamp.  This was one of the many reasons he always wore sunglasses.

Nothing much held his interest in the foyer.  He paced around the corridors, sniffing every so often, only getting the scent of cigarette smoke and old cigarette smoke for his troubles.  It wasn't a bust though, he had a sense for these things, and his wanderings, as always, eventually led him to the right spot.  At least an interesting spot, that is.  Right wasn't always what you thought is was, so he tried to keep it out of his mind.  It was a stairwell, ground floor, leading down into the basement.  Not that worn, but a bit of disturbed dust sitting around tipped him off.  That and the glow from down in the darkness.  It was a clue, so down he went, as was the nature of his job description.

Pillars, as one might imagine in a parking garage, though this was obviously a cellar, cast long shadows back into the darkness.  Empty crates of what most certainly used to contain toiletries, food, essentials sat around with no clear order about them.  Down in front was an open doorway into a lit up room.  This time Clint didn't walk straight in; he'd had bad experiences with pillars in the past, so he did a sweep of the room first, casual style.  Then he went in, at least sure that anything coming from behind him was sneaky enough that negligence wouldn't have mattered, not that he wouldn't win anyway.  It took more than one shot to bring him down, but it would still hurt.

Anyway, there was light.  Looked like the place had been a kitchen before, ovens and a freezer in the back, plus a dumbwaiter off in the corner.  It had been redesigned to look more like an operating room, now.  Scalpels and knives sitting around everywhere, an operating lamp over the island in the center, causing most of the light.  On the counters around the edge of the room were a few candles, non-scented at least, that flickered a little as Clint stepped in.  He cursed under his breath.  It was either necromancy, or demonology, and likely some kind of perversion of both; the two subjects tended to mix a bit.  That and he could taste the tang of something not quite right in the air, dirty magic.  This was why he was around.  When you didn't quite know what you were doing, it was lucky if nothing bad happened, never mind if anything you wanted came out of it.

The freezer door swung slowly open.  It was a blond man in a light blue bathrobe that was dotted with little splotches of reddish brown.  To call him a man was more to err on the side of responsibility though, he looked like he could have been in his last stages of teenagerhood.  He was smiling a bit.  That little way that seems oh so smug yet everyone else is sure that they overlooked something.  Clint stared him down for a while.

"You crazy, kid?" Clint's hands were in his pockets, his shoulder leaning against the doorway to the cellar.

"Beg your pardon?" A raised eyebrow from the blonde, leaning against his own doorway.

"Crazy, as in insane." He supplied, gruffly.

"I shouldn't think so, but I hear that that's how one would usually describe oneself regardless.  What makes you ask?"

"Well, seeing as you don't seem to have a license to practice in the area, you either don't think the law will come get you, or you're too stupid to know we exist."

"Oh, right, law enforcement" He stood up, trying to smooth out the bathrobe a bit. "I had a thought that there might be something like that, but I figured that I'd deal with it when it came to it, err, me."

"Did you now?"

"Yes, quite so, or maybe after I'd run a few more tests and experiments, really."

Craig looked from side to side, then fixed his gaze back on the blonde.  "Don't suppose you'd tell me what tests exactly you've been doing, will you?"

"Well, I mean, there have been lots, like that one back a few weeks ago with the mice and"

"Generalize."

"Mostly into raising the dead, really."

"Doesn't look like you had any luck, due to the fact that you seem to be in one piece, and I haven't had to play cover up for any. . .incidents."

The boy laughed.  It was a very boyish laugh.  Not menacing, not too high, but not filled with much bass yet.  Just a twinge of smugness.  Then just a grin.  Something moved behind the boy though.  It was instinct.  Clint's hand popped up out of his pocket, flipped the safety off of the pistol, and shot the boy in the chest.  Clint shuffled forward, waiting for the zombie to walk out of the freezer, the zombie the boy had animated and had likely controlled with some demonic pacts of some sort.  Then he saw the birdcage.  It looked like a normal bird.  It was eating birdseed.  It was not trying to break through the cage with feral rage to devour his flesh and rip out his brain.  It still smelled way too magical though, this whole place did, and it was all very rough magic.

"Ow, what did you do that for, man?"

Clint lept back, looked down, and pointed his gun at the blond who was just pushing himself up off the floor.  There was a bigger red stain on the bathrobe, and a bullet hole through it, but not as much as you would expect for a person shot through the heart.  A lot more mobile than that too.

"What the hell."  It was monotone, mostly because Clint did not actually have a reaction for this yet.  First time for everything.

"Oh, right, the not being dead bit.  I moved my heart, right?  It should be common enough, and with the extra room I had when I took out some of the non essentials afterwards, I even had space for some backup organs.  I think that was an extra kidney that I'll need to replace now?"

Clint just stared.  The blonde had pulled the robe to the side a bit to show some scars on his chest.

"Keep talking kid."

"About the operations?"

"Yeah, those, and why you'd have non essentials, as you put it."

"Is becoming a lich that uncommon?"

"A lich."

"Yeah, I found some books on the procedure, though they were a bit out of date with current scientific knowledge, so I tried to piece it together myself.  The problem with it that is.  The books all talked about how hard it was to do right, and how mostly you just ended up with mindless zombies and so I"

"Alright that's enough.  I need to get you into custody for unregistered magic use along with practice of necromancy."

"Is that very bad?"

"Well, I shot you when I thought that bird was a zombie, didn't I?"

"Oh, she is, waitwaitwait, a lich though, no bloodthirstyness, I checked."

Clint glared at him for a few moments.

"But like, prison bad, or execution bad?"

"Prison, normally.  Might make an exception on extenuating circumstances though.  You don't have any of the bloodthirsty ones around, do you?"

"Well, no.  I was using rats for the initial experiments, but I screwed up the first one I managed to get working, which is why I switched to the bird.  The ones that didn't turn out I smashed the heads of and performed the right rituals on."

"Describe them."

"Salt the corpse, burn the corpse, then salt the ashes, right?"

"That's a good one, yeah.  And you made sure to get all of them?"

"Of course.  I can't very well run the risk of them getting away and harming anybody, can I?"

"Good.  Anything else around here, besides the bird, that is dangerous?"

"The books, maybe? Other than that, not really"

"Alright, grab them, I'll wait here."

"Right away, but, uh, can I get dressed first, there's kind of a hole in my bathrobe now, and I wouldn't want to walk around in public with it on."

Thursday, June 6, 2013

A great way to spend summer vacation.

There were five surefire ways to die on a spaceship, and lance was just about to try one of them.  It was a bit of desperation, a tad of boredom, and a whole hunk of inexperience that pushed him in that direction.  He was about to go to sleep.  Might seem harmless to a surface dweller, sure.  Sleep was solved with a pill, a simple compound that overclocked the brain, shuffled around some hormones and somehow got you rested all in the same eight hour period.  Couldn't be on it constantly, but it solved having to sleep.  It also meant that spacecraft were designed for people who were awake constantly.  No day or night, just work and play and more work.  It wasn't like they weren't as capable as pre-pill machines, it's that they got much more done for the sacrifice of having to sleep.  There were fail-safes; rudimentary AI and self-regulating life support systems were standard.  A few winks of real sleep would not in theory kill you.

Spacefairers are a suspicious lot though, and tempting some cosmic karma to strike you down in a moment of inattention would scare most half to death before they even tried it.  The fact that most people who would think of a nap happened to be inexperienced enough that they undoubtedly screwed something up that needed fixing, and consequentially exploded did nothing but reinforce sleeping's position as third of the five deaths.  Lance however, was not yet a veteran of space, his second trip up after lengthy training on the ground.

The ship itself had already violated the second rule against death though, and so having to deal with his sister for hours on end without ceasing helped push Lance over the edge.  Never share a ship with a person who you already find annoying on the ground.  The only thing to trump that is the prohibition of drugs(sleep pills excluded) in space.  Trying to figure out which door to open that didn't end in an airlock happens more often than not after say, alcohol.  Modular spaceship design at its best one might think.  Lance had at least seen the wisdom in the first rule, and would have held to the second rule if he hadn't been forced into it by her whining back home.  Some might call it blackmail, but that's not the important part right now.

Lance had shut his eyelids, drifted away into a land of blissful ignorance to everything around him.  To say his dreams were enjoyable would understate exactly what he felt then.  They were the best dreams of his life, they were jewels of sanity among the chatter that his sister had been on about since the first day.  It's a shame they were the last good dreams he had for years afterwards.

No he didn't die.  Many people who had a malfunction just exploded, some in more remarkable fashion than others.  Lance had the fortune of a longer adventure in the stars than he really had been comfortable with.  See, when a warp drive fails, it doesn't just explode, it tends to start working a bit erratically.  Meaning random jots across the universe until the ship is left dead with naught but emergency power.

This is why the warp drive has a dedicated manual disconnect attached to it.  A manual disconnect that one is supposed to pull if any strange activity seems to be happening with the drive.  A manual disconnect for a problem that, unlike most problems on a space ship, is not accompanied to a warning light and sound that might wake up a sleeping pilot with theoretically enough time to fix the problem before the ship exploded.  Yes, one would expect less volatile equipment aboard a space ship, but that just happens to be how some of the more complicated things tend to work.

As it happened, when Lance woke up next, fate had chosen him to be the first great explorer of a planet we like to call, Perseus XII, or more descriptive in nomenclature, the green dot of death.

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Tea as in Tiger

Groggily, hazily, old man Li woke up.  He thought of himself as Mr. Li, but the world just happened to fit him for an authentic Chinese shop owner who deserved the title of old man.  He had no ancestral roots in China, his family having come over from India one or two generations before he was born.  He hadn't kept in touch much.

People who actually lived in Chinatown knew immediately that he was some sort of impostor, but they didn't want to let out how much of a scam the rest of the area was by outing him, so he kept his shop peacefully, raking in the tourist money and a few commissions for "authentic" "Chinese" "calligraphy" which he ran out of a room on the second floor next to his bedroom.

He was also a heavy sleeper.  The digital clock next to his futon read nine am, an hour after he should have been up, but his alarm clock had not decided to wake him up this morning.  Not exactly a great start to a day, but worse had come for old man Li in the past.  He followed his normal routine, not rushing as he kept his own hours.  A hot shower, hygiene, a slow walk down the stairs to set the tea pot on the stove, a slow walk back up the stairs, dressing up to fit his role as an authentic Chinatown businessman, a slow walk back down the stairs, then relax and drink a cup of tea before opening the shop up.

This routine was going a bit faster than normal, and he got to setting the tea pot on the stove before he realized that his alarm clock was not bugging him at all as usual, which was far enough outside the norm to rouse his curiosity.  He checked the kitchen with little luck.  Nothing turned up in the upstairs.  When he got to the storefront, he found his alarm clock curled up, pouting in front of the door.  Old man Li's alarm clock happened to be a large, astral tiger.

When he had left the family home halfway through highschool, the family tiger, a prideful mark of their noble line yadda yadda had decided following the sane one would lead to a much nicer existence.  He assumed that was it at least.  Astral tiger or not, it still couldn't talk and tended to be as inscrutable as regular housecats.  It ate more than a regular housecat though, which is why old man Li still ran this shop instead of being retired in the country.

Old man Li didn't take long to figure out that something was amiss besides a finicky tiger though, as there was a black dufflebag with two of the display swords sticking out of it sitting in the middle of the floor.  The swords were utter crap, overpriced and prone to snapping in transit.  He had four boxes of them back in storage since they sold like hotcakes.

The fact that there had been an attempted burglary and evidence was left at the scene of the crime was not a problem.  It tended to happen every year or two.  His alarm clock was very good about waking up and finding a free meal out of it.  The strange part was the fact that the cat was sulking instead of the usual deal of holding a severed hand over him in the morning looking proud of itself.  Also, there wasn't any blood on the floor.

And then the tea kettle started whistling and old man Li figured he'd need a cup of tea before he figured any of this out.  It was only sensible.  It was on his return to the shop with a cup of tea that he followed the tiger's gaze up behind the counter to the display only shelf when he realized an old necklace heirloom was missing as well.  It was the one the family had pushed on him back when he was six to "test his chakra alignment."  Supposedly it did something if you had aligned chakras or that type of bullshit.  The only magical thing about him was his tiger.  He didn't really even know why he had kept the necklace, really.  It was a remnant of his past that he held onto to let him know how far he had come.

Still, it might be worth investigating how something managed to outrun his alarm clock.  He sipped his tea, then absentmindedly walked over and scratched the cat behind its ears.  Maybe he'd ask Mr. Kim about it after lunch.