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.

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."

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.

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.