The Slave World Abductions Ch. 02

A tesseract weapons pack looks just like any other folded, but keeps a wide variety of weapons in a pocket dimension. Useful for less bulk, easier storage, and lighter carry. It's more impressive when spread out. Applies to the vest too.

"One Midgard M107 sniper rifle with Mark 6 scope magic-infused and one hundred rounds high velocity cold-iron tipped bullets. Ten fragmentation grenades with silver pellets. Ten high explosive phosphorous grenades. Fifteen Elven throwing knives. Ten Smith and Wesson Model 66 speedloaders. Note further pockets for cash and extra weapons. Sign here please."

I signed the manifest and rolled up the pack. The next stop was my locker for my personal weapons. My Smith and Wesson, katana, Mithril body armor, oculus scanner, and bottle of glamour to hide some of my tatts.

I usually keep my tatts covered on Earth, and rarely use weapons there. Less problems with the police, and counter spells just require a word or two and a gesture.

The place I was going crawls with sorcery. My tatts are wardings; concealing them might put enemies off guard, or encourage overconfidence and draw them out.

Next stop was the paymaster. The Old Lady authorized twenty gold sovereigns (about a thousand bucks), twenty silver (half that), and ten coppers (rare on Slave World and equivalent to ten dollars each). I supplemented with equal amounts of gold, silver, and copper from my own account. I nice amount for a long tour.

The final stop was the transit station. Pentagrams to the different Realms were located there.

The place was packed as usual. It's always busy. Magistrates, spies, couriers going to or coming from some mission or other. You might have three or four to a pentagram on different missions. The Slave World pentagram was usually empty. No one wants to go to Slave World. It's a shithole. The least favored assignment.

I'm usually talking about agents, magistrates, and diplomats when I say least favored. Discreet merchants, smugglers, slavers, risk-taking young elves and humans from the academies, organized criminals (yes, Alfheim has those too. "Light" is more a metaphor here), and dumb tourists use their own (mostly illegal) pentagrams.

Academic elves have to take special care. If a light elf is attractive physically (and light elves always are), he or she are like as not to get slaved ("slaved" being the preferred term to enslaved), unless they're rich, in which case their families pay a hefty ransom (or they can hire an expensive mercenary. The Department is less reliable in this case. They're more inclined to interfere where the victim is taken from another realm. Otherwise, people going to Slave World voluntarily take their chances).

Magistrates and agents operating on Slave World need to be three things: tough, mean, and brutal. I qualify. They also have to be smart. I qualify there too (I guess. I don't like tooting my own horn).

I used to take Slave World trips all the time when I was young (well, younger. I'm still reasonably young. I just crammed a lot of living into compact space). The things I saw... well, I didn't react well. It caused some trouble.

The Old Lady brought me into the Department, trained me, and sent me back. Basically to expend my outrage through havoc. It got tiresome after a while; brutality and violence wears you down.

I asked the Old Lady for a relief of duty. She didn't want to let go. It's a problem with her. We compromised. I'd move back to Chicago (my hometown), keep an eye out for Compact violations, and only get called back for special situations. The current one qualified.

Special problems didn't happen often, so I was left alone, mostly. I built a life, trained as a Midgard (U.S. Army) soldier, then a policeman (CPD in a blink-and-you-missed it career), even got a psychology masters (including para), set myself up as a P.I and hung out my shingle.

That's my life, more or less, with a specialty in supernatural kidnappings. Now the case is a big abduction, and I'm about to get into the shit again. I stepped on the pentagram, chanted the transit spell, and a second later, I was on Slave World.

To Be Continued.