“The hotties are back.” Jessfine stage whispered to Pete as she slipped in the employee’s door.
Since the new HR directive came out, every time one of the recruitment teams returned the department was abuzz with gossip. Pete glanced over at Marine and Swami pouring over their tablets, most likely their after-mission statements.
The black woman behind the desk leaned forward. “Are you going to try for one?”
“Jess, they are a couple.” A totally hot couple, Pete admitted internally, trying to pull her eyes away from the men. Powers tended to enhance everything, from physique to facial features, especially when the bearer got a physical package like Marine. His business suit, tailored to his body, still stretched at his impressive shoulders. But it was the slimmer Swami who drew her whenever they were in residence. Glancing up for his pad Swami made eye contact.
He caught her staring, again. Damn it. How does he do that? He was wearing the regulation glasses so his powers had to be contained. But maybe not as much as advertised.
“Even better, two for one.” The irrepressible receptionist prodded.
The musical chime indicated an incoming text. Melissa turned down the television and flipped over her phone.”Joshua?” She tapped open the message, Can I come in? glowed in the dark living room. “In, as in, now? Hmm. I guess.” A quick type of “sure” and send resulted in a knock at her apartment door.
“Agh, I didn’t think this through.” Escaping her carefully created burrito-blanket fort, Melissa pushed back the furry fabrics covering her legs and body. Her two cats and dog made mild protesting noises, deprived of her body lumps, as she tucked her feet into the slippers beside the coach. Shuffling in the oversized slippers so they wouldn’t fall off, Piglet-Too her dachshund-pit mix following, she made her way to the door and opened it to discover Joshua on the other side with two bags of Chinese, a plastic container with mini-cupcakes, and a small container of chocolate chip ice cream. “Hi,” Melissa said, the surprise of a weekday visit from one of her gaming buddies coloring her alto voice.
“Hey, rough day at work. Can I cuddle?” He dipped his head down. “No chill, no cap, I just need human touch. Brought Mongolian beef and your spicy chicken and egg thing.”
“Yeah, I got you.” She stepped to the side and let him in, watching him duck under the door jam.
He ducked again to get into the kitchen, his afro skimming the top of the casing. Melissa let him pull down her plastic bowls while she dug out some forks. White rice on bottom and the dish of their choice on top filled both bowls, with the excess going into her fridge as trade for two beers coming out. The ice cream got dumped into the freezer. She shuffled back into the living room, with Joshua following.
“Big spoon or little spoon?” she joked considering their height differences.
“Little spoon, if I can.”
She jerked to a stop and looked over her shoulder at the man having over a foot of height and nearly a hundred pounds.
“It was a very bad day.”
“Okaaaay then.” Melissa kicked off her shoes, setting her beer and bowl on the end table, then snuggled into her blankets. “Put those down,” she tapped the glass top beside her food and then opened her arms, “and come here.”
He set down his Mongolian beef, toed off his shoes and curled into her arms, a sob escaping.
Melissa pulled him deeper into the hug, letting him wiggle closer on the couch. Chaos, Dimwit, and Piglet adjusted around them. After debating a moment, not knowing how long he would need to cry it out, she changed the channel to her Spotify “No Shade Today” list, set aside her remote, and held him against her shoulder. “A Hazy Shade of Whiter” had cued up when he ran out of steam.
“Ready for food?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think so.” Shifting, he reached for their cooling food. Rearranged to sit on the middle cushion, cross-legged, he started moving the food around in the bowl, getting the rice covered in the beef sauce.
Melissa took a couple bites of her Chicken Egg Foo Young. “You want to talk about it, Josh?”
“Nah, not really.” He shrugged. “It was just a typical day at the call center. It just hit hard today. How about you? How was your day?”
“You see how big my burrito pile is.” She waved a chopstick over sofa and blankets. “And I was watching Beale Street when you got here.”
Joshua grunted a small curse. “Sorry to bother you.”
“Not a bother, this is what friends are for.” She gave him a slight smile. “Besides, I forgot to eat. Too much trouble. To cook. I would have paid for that tomorrow. Now I won’t.”
“Life was easier in school, we could just pile whenever we needed.”
“But as grownups, we are expected to life alone with no connection. It’s not healthy.”
“Not even a little.” He sucked in a piece of onion.
“Can’t live with your parents, can’t live with your friends, can’t get married, can’t live in sin.”
“Frustrating as hell, no cap.”
Melissa leaned back against the sofa cushions, setting her bowl of leftover rice aside and picking up the beer. “We are human. We need the human touch.” After taking a deep pull, she transferred the beer to her left hand and picked up the remote. “Wanna watch Beale with me?”
“Yeah.” He laid out on the couch on top of the blankets, resting his face on her thigh. “You don’t mind?”
“Stay the night.” Melissa said, “We both could use it.” She clicked back to her movie and threaded her fingers through Joshua’s springy hair.
Knitted woke up, and her first thought was “This is unexpected.”
She had gone up against six adventurers on her own, in the middle of a town the mercenaries had recently saved from a fae incursion. No one in the room but people with other allegiances. She figured if the warriors didn’t gut her, their allies would backstab her.
Going in, she knew she was a dead woman. All she needed, though, was one death in return. The one who betrayed her father needed to die. Draymond. His beating heart throbbing in her hands. A smile crept across her face, mission accomplished. Her soul sang with the victory.
She clenched her right hand at the memory, and a spongey mass gave at the pressure. Knitted eyes burst opened. She still had the heart!
Trying to jerk upright, she discovered ropes across her chest a split second before pain erupted through the cotton encasing her thoughts. Agony raced along her spine, stabbing low across her back. Fire consumed one leg before playing up and down her ribcage like a hammer on a dulcimer. Both arms convulsed against the ropes binding them to her torso. Pain gurgled past her lips despite her best efforts.
Fae always collected their payments. Knitted had acted without approval of the Cap Council. Vigilante justice was expressly forbidden to the fae enforcers. Had they already caught up with her for taking a personal vengeance?
No one entered the dim room in response to her noise and movements.
She relaxed, and after a few moments the pain receded into fuzzy cotton locking it in the back of her head. Whoever drugged her knew exactly what her small stature and heritage needed without overpowering her. Few healers within human space would. Another stone on the scale for a fae capture.
While surprising they found her so soon, the fact they found her had always been expected, that is, if she survived. Which she seemed to have done. Complete with the heart.
A crooked grin cracked her face as she stared up at the stone and dirt ceiling.
Whatever price the Cap Council and the Greater Fae Moot demanded, she would pay.
She had begged them to enforce the broken contract. But nothing happened, even with the evidence the braggart had been spreading the tale and undermining the fae’s reputation.
But the elders had felt her father had been the one dealing in bad faith. He should have never agreed to make a contract with a single hotheaded human in the first place. The Moot did agree that a contract had taken place with both parties of age to agree, so a broken contract penalty needed to be put in place.
They added it to the list for collections. Three from the bottom in priority. A place so low on the list the human would die before anyone got around to punishing him.
“He was human and doesn’t know better,” others had said.
“We don’t have the resources. Too much is happening for us to worry about a contract with just a single human,” others had said. “Maybe later.”
“But my father,” Knitted had begged, “his memory deserves better.”
Now, his memory shined, freshly coated in blood. She would pay any price they required.
The noise echoed out into the darkness beyond the fur-curtained windows of the unnamed bar. Jareek had followed it inside, enjoying the laughter, though not participating, admiring the skill of the bard, who managed to keep her instrument in tune despite the dampness seeping in from the nearby fen with its ghost lights and quiet monsters. What he could do without, is the braggart telling loud stories from where he and his companions held court in the center of the room.
The hooded fae signaled the server for another drink from his far corner where he could watch everyone in the room and all three doors. She dropped the warm foaming beer on her way to refresh the mugs of those closer to the storyteller, scooping up two coins in return. She passed the one bearing the previous king’s face onto the bard and kept the newer, unshaven coin, for herself.
“Then we chased those evil fairy-kind back to their trees, reminding them to stay out of the plowed lands of men.”
Most of the humans and the handful of non-humans present, roared in approval, stomping feet.
A few understood the plowed lands of men would keep expanding until those within the trees could retreat no more. And when that day came, a steep price would be paid. The fairies always demanded a price. Those humans were more respectful of that coming day.
The local tree line had been cut back during the winter while the tree-bound slept. The price demanded for the treaty violation had been avoided by Springdale hiring these mercenaries to protect them. A debt avoided is not a price paid.
Jareek had been in human lands long enough his green skin faded to human brown, and his bark roughened skin matched their thin smooth hides. He was not the one to demand the price. He didn’t enough know the local treaty blooms. Still, he had been called to Witness – the same calling which pulled him on and on. From one end of the continent to the other, to witness and add it to the Memory of all fae. The gift of Memory wasn’t kinder than any fae gift, but it was more lonely than most.
“Another story Warrior Draymond! Tell us of outsmarting the Cap!” The request came from a dwarf. They and humans didn’t fight over land, yet. The small folk lived underground and the humans above, but humans liked the shinies the hunched creatures found. In other parts of the world, the youngest of the races have started to hunt out underground treasures on their own. Memory only knew of one incident where humans and the underground fae had crashed over their hunger for riches. It hadn’t ended well for the dwarves.
Jareek pulled a sip of the nutty beer.
Pity the dwarves refused to work with their fae brethren, thinking above and below are two separate energies, not understanding the trees reached deep and stood tall, connecting sky, land, and the dark.
“Ah, the Cap. That is a story and a half.” The bearded man nodded. “I’ll need food to keep my stamina up.”
More coin landed on the table than had passed to the bard all evening. A smaller fellow beside the hulking man scooped it up before waving four coins to cover the roast beef the bar was serving this evening. The six mercenaries would eat well on the braggart’s tongue and bluster.
Meanwhile the harpist underlined the story with some of the best satire Jareek had enjoyed in a while. Av Manag Dirlick. Sounded like a lovely tune, and the songs the humans and most fae sing to the tune are about lying in the grass with your love and watching the cloud go by. For the Caps, though, the song they sung, half a key lower, is about rolling in fields of blood after a battle and claiming those closest in an orgy the likes of which humans would never understand.
Silently laughing, Jareek had to stop drinking otherwise he would spray beer everywhere.
The other songs played through the night could have been a human being the typical unaware of other communities. But this was too perfect.
Jareek lifted his second lid, releasing his sight, his fae eyes glowing if anyone looked under his hood. A glamour covered the harpist. The fae Memory Gatherer closed his both lids, calling deep within to his gift giving him not just the sight many of the fairy have, but All Sight needed for Memories. He could feel it was nearly time for what called him here to begin. He didn’t reopen his eyes, but now he saw everything in the bar, and in the kitchen beyond the bar, in the floor above, and the cellar below, and out in the street.
The harpist was a Cap, the punisher of treaty breakers. The glamour’s red hooded cloak hid her blood-soaked cap, the leather vest and legging dyed in the blood of her kills. Her red hair curled close to her chalk-white cheeks. Her scent – cinnamon and iron – burned into the Memory alongside her song of warning.
“Our deal struck, a heart for a hand, we shook and the Cap joined us on our mission into the Reedy Swamp.” Draymond paused to take a bite of the beef.
“Stupid Cap should have got paid up front.” The dwarf declared. No dwarf ever took credit. As they said, the ground doesn’t wait to settle.
After washing down some bread with the local beer, the mercenary agreed. “But if he hadn’t joined us, we wouldn’t be here to tell the tale.” He launched again into his story.
The harpist changed her tune so subtly when the fighter betrayed his ally, Jareek nearly missed it. Av Truist y Pae.
Inside his head, the unsung lyrics all children are taught buzzed.
Strike a deal, make a pack
Trade the thing, no one lacks
Price for price, common costs.
Good transactions together
Are tree to moss.
False faith, stolen skill
Never do, the act is ill
All suffer, feel the loss.
Call the Caps, demand the fee
Attack those who disagree
A broken charge is impure dross.
Treaty words must bind
When by hand signed
Otherwise, trust is lost.
Trust is the only currency of a civilized society. The fae adage was so ingrained into their species, it become part of them. Lying among the civilized ceased being possible long before the gods crafted humans. The fact dwarves could still lie said a lot about them. The ability to lie meant they had more dealing with Caps than most of the fae races and hated the enforcers in the amount equal to their interaction.
A few of the patrons around the crowded room were humming along, before the words in their heads overcame the bluster of the blowhard’s narrative. They started turning their heads toward the bard. One by one, the laughter and movement of the boisterous crowd faded. The harpist strings vibrated deep, hitting with almost bruising strength as the tune carried in the gathering quiet. A few of the smarter ones slid out the doors to the front and back. The server and her kin made themselves scarce as well.
Jareek would need to see them reimbursed if the damage exceeded the normally expected price of a public establishment.
The red-haired fae winked at him when Draymond finally realized he was losing his audience. She ended the song with a loud flourish, overriding his complaint about her music. Flush raised up the human’s throat as he pushed away from the table and approached her on the other side of the central fire.
She placed her hands against the vibrating strings, instantly silencing them.
“What to hell, girl?” Draymond rested his hand on his sword hilt, not in a threatening way. Anyone who wore a sword knew the ease of the stance, and the need to always be aware of position of the sword within a crowd, which having a hand on one end helps. The fact the mercenary carried nearly four feet of iron, plus various other weapons on his person, and remained half-armored, the heavy metals plates removed before the night’s drinking began, plus likely outweigh the harpist by a factor of three, that was the threat.
The red hood fell back. Jareek knew the human saw a gorgeous redhead on the younger side, old enough to travel, young enough to be enticed to staying in a town if the offer is good enough. The cost of the road is heavy until one is so used to paying it, the traveler soul forgets the burden. Older human entertainers Jareek had met seemed to delight in the rootless life. He hoped to reach that age someday, though two hundred years of hard travel had not brought him the inner peace humans seem to find so easily.
The strikingly beautiful fae plucked a few notes, this one strictly a human love song. Her voice mixed in, words holding promise, as she looked up at him under her lashes. “I come, I come for a warrior’s heart.”
The song spoke of longing of a woman left behind when her man went to war. She follows him until they are reunited.
“I claim, I claim my warrior’s heart.”
“Look girl, if you want to bed…”
The Cap’s voice grew louder. “From my father, a hand, to a warrior’s cause. I come to claim a warrior’s heart.”
Jareek’s opened up both lids.
Draymond might have realized the danger he was in, before the Cap dropped her glamour. His sword had been pulled nearly three inches out of the scabbard before the Cap’s claws ripped through his chestplate, ribs, and lungs.
“A heart for a hand, A deal agreed. Betrayed, betrayed. Call the Caps to claim a Warrior’s heart.”
The vibrato of the Cap’s voice, stung with revengeful joy, as she pulled her hand out of the mercenary’s chest, holding his still beating heart.
As the man toppled, the Cap looked at his five companions. “Betrayed, betrayed, a contract undone. Those who participated shall die, every one.”
The Memory Gatherer felt his heart flip watching her leap across the fire at the other mercenaries. Flames, red, orange, blue, and rust reflected against her well-oiled leathers. The Cap was lethal beauty in motion, matching her gift of Song.
Never let a Siren sing her words. Words have power. Backed by music and magic, they become reality.
Today’s flash is based on a sign I saw while delivering mail today, “Not all who wander” and below it was a painting of a RV. And I thought to myself, “Not all who wander, leave home.”
***
Becca stood, leaning against the tree nearest the cliff’s edge, to watch the specular Aurora Polaris, doing her best to ignore the black hole in her field of vision on the left side stating the game simulation number, the companies involved in programming it, and all the other required matter so people never forget virtual reality is not actually reality. She could hack the credits spot to non-existence, but then she would spend another six months in rehabilitation without VR and there was no way she was going through that again just to get rid of the annoying spot.
She did have a list of things she was willing to get banned for, but not for simple credits. Getting rid of all credits … maybe, be people deserve to get paid. Especially – Becca glanced over to the credits space, expanding it for a moment – Northern Reaches, who developed the Northern Lights visuals. She snapped her eyes back to the green and blue curtains dancing across the sky.
“There you are.” Garret dropped on the ground next to her.
“Here I am.” She agreed, nodding at him.
“I just wanted to thank you for your help in the underground fortress.” The fighter, and leader of the gaming party who hired her character, plucked at the grass, not meeting her eyes and somehow shrugging down so his nearly seven-foot half-giant frame didn’t tower over her while he sat beside her. “Virgay and Daph wouldn’t have made it through without your healing.”
“De nada. You paid me well for that task.” Becca waved a green hand, the Aurora lights sparkling against her scales.
“I was…” Garret coughed to clear his throat, “I was wondering if you would like to join our band of adventurers.”
Startled, Becca made eye contact. “Um, well.”
“I mean, not to take you away from your normal group-“
She cut in. “I don’t have a normal group.” Rocking against the tree, she tried to decide what to say next. The last three days had been awesome, especially Garret. He made her laugh more than anyone had since, well, more than anyone ever. They talked late into the night. But that didn’t really change the reality side of her life. Better to bite the bullet now, because as idyllic as this episode had been, VR recreation time would end soon. “What I do have is a very unpredictable schedule. I mean I like you peeps well enough …” Becca switched the cutoff mid-stream. Her life had enough lemons, and Garret-time had made the normal lemons feel like a souffle these past few days. “and I really liked you. But I don’t know when-“
An internal alarm went off.
“You are kidding me.” Becca glanced over at her personal dashboard. “Already?”
“Becca?” Garret glanced in the direction of her stare.
“Garret I’m so sorry, I’m… will you shut off! I heard you the first time…about to have my Unplug Time.”
He stood to reach out to her, she could see the protest in his golden eyes.
“Look, I don’t know when my next…Turn Off!” Becca stabbed the air until the alarm stopped. “Look, I really like…Damn it, it’s pulling me out.”
Garret blinked as the dragon-kin cleric disappeared. Triple Zed. He really liked her. And his party was going to need another cleric soon. That had only been the third chapter of the adventure. The half-giant fighter meandered back to the rest of his party.
***
Becca carefully touched each finger on her right hand to her right thumb while waiting for the VR tube to open, then did the same with her left hand. Success. Every finger worked!
She waited for the medical bot to unhook vitals, help her swing her legs over the edge, and do the basic tests. Becca couldn’t feel her toes today as the bot checked. You win some, you lose some. Still an improvement over the state she was in before she started the most recent round of therapy. The new VR suite cost triple what a normal one would, but it pumped her full of medications and worked her muscles throughout her Hookup to the specific therapies her doctors recommended instead of just the standard maintenance of health. Before her degenerative nerve condition had her to the point of not even being able to move her head. Now she had motor control of her hands, arms, and shoulders.
“Did you have a nice time Becca?” The robot asked. Its base programming included minor companionship interaction. People didn’t react well to a tool moving them around.
“The rec time went well, thank you for asking R9.” Becca rocked with the robot as it transferred her to her mobile-chair. “What is on the program for today?”
The medical robot reviewed the two doctor visits for the day, as well the food orders and other basic maintenance normal Reals needed to do during their required Unplug day. While listening with half an ear, Becca did something she had never done before. She sent a Contact Card to Garret’s dashboard. He could now message her outside the game if he wanted.
Not meet her. Never meet her. Who would want to deal with the medical trainwreck of her life? But … maybe … be a virtual friend?
