by Tao Wong
The orphanage itself was a squat grey building, probably built in the sixties when the greatest architectural dream of the masses was cheap, grey, and functional. Frankly, it was depressing even looking at it, but it was functional. The murals the young children had painted on the side of the building and the well-tended flower boxes added a touch of life and color to it, that and the large—for an inner-city building—green grounds surrounding its fenced exterior. Only a small sign over the door, right below the address marker, spoke of the Brixton Orphanage’s purpose.
Still, located as it was on the outskirts of downtown, flanked by tall glass buildings filled with yuppies, club kids, and the nouveau rich, I could start making assumptions about some of Brixton’s troubles. The nun who let me in and had me wait in the foyer for Alexa was charming and kind but firm in keeping me from heading deeper into the building itself. Which was fine by me as it left me time to speculate if this orphanage was another feeder location for initiates. Who was I kidding? They all probably were.
I turned my thoughts over in my mind for a bit, considering how I felt about an organization that went about recruiting children to become trained killers. Generally, this was something heavily frowned upon, an act that was derided the world over for removing the “innocence” of a child. Then again, from the little I’d been told by Alexa, it wasn’t as if they were making the children kill immediately. That was generally left until they were in their teens, about the same age as we’d let others go to war. It was just that the initiates had a much longer training time, and it wasn’t as if they couldn’t back out if they wanted to.
Then again, if all you knew was a certain lifestyle, how easy was it to leave? Cults the world over used the exclusion of the outside world to brainwash and restrict their people, ensuring loyalty. Was what the Templars doing that different? Does intent and good intentions matter when the actions themselves aren’t necessarily good?
“Henry?” Alexa called to me. She walked out of the office and caught me seated on a wooden bench, thinking uncharitable thoughts of her people.
I stood as I greeted her. “Alexa. How are you doing?”
“Good. I’ve cleared it with the abbess for you to come in farther,” Alexa said.
“So what’s the problem here?”
“Two things. Firstly, they have a problem with a local developer. He keeps trying to pressure the orphanage to sell. The orphanage has barely been keeping afloat with the rising property taxes in the last few years, but the government inspectors have been coming by more regularly, fining them for the smallest infractions. Last week, the building inspectors came by for a “routine” inspection and cited a number of code requirements they had to meet—requirements they had been allowed to bypass as they were grandfathered in.”
I frowned, cocking my head to the side.
“Yes, it’s not normal. They’re pretty sure the building inspectors and others have been paid off.”
“Who?” I asked, curiously.
“The developer is named Connor Weeks,” Alexa said as she led me down the quiet hallways. I was surprised that for such a large building supposedly filled with kids, it was so silent. Then again, I guessed it was class time or something. Soon enough, we arrived at a staircase which Alexa took downward, leading me toward the basement. “In either case, the orphanage began the process of having contractors come in to get back up to code and—”
“And ran into something weird,” I said, finishing for her. When we exited the stairway, we entered a simple stone corridor. Immediately, I could feel the slight vibrations in mana that ran through the orphanage grow even more powerful while the small and discreet runic carvings hidden among the stonework seemed even more populous here. I grimaced, reaching out to touch one of the runes. Alexa said nothing, waiting as I let my eyes defocus slightly and traced the flow of mana through the orphanage. It took minutes before I was certain, but when I was done, I knew for sure.
“The contractors broke the runes.”
“They did,” Alexa said and pointed down one of the corridors. I followed the lady with the directions silently, continuing to sense the mana flow, which seemed disturbed by light touches of something darker, more bestial in it. Not human for sure. But at least it wasn’t demonic.
“Do you have a feeling like they want you to fail?” I asked absently.
“Why would you say that?” Alexa said as we started spotting more and more signs of work half started and abandoned. The various construction workhorses, plywood, and tools left abandoned.
“Really? There’s no way you’d be able to complete the second quest without me in two weeks, not with everything else. And as for this one…” I sighed. “It doesn’t seem like something a typical squire would be expected to do.”
“It isn’t,” Alexa said. “But then, I’m not your typical initiate, am I?”
“No, I guess not.”
We finally made it to the end of the corridor, coming to what looked like a simple storage room to the untrained eye, but I noticed the numerous runic carvings over the door and along the hallway arches, some of them now marred and broken. I had to frown as some runes, even untouched, had lost their glow, seeming to have faded in their usability. “What’s in there?”
“Storeroom,” Alexa said and opened the door. The blonde began to step in and then visibly hesitated, her brows creasing together. “What?”
“You feel it too,” I stated and pushed past her to step within. I ignored the way the hair on the back of my neck stood up, the way my stomach roiled when I walked in. I felt my muscles tensing, my shoulders tightening, and my breath shortening as an existential dread filled me. The room itself was an empty storage room, nothing to mark it from any other room except for the small runic carvings lining the ceiling and floor. Except, a number of these carvings were chipped. I stood within the room in silence, tracing the flow of mana within.
“What do you see?”
“Unlike outside, where the runes, the ritual are all passive and part of one massive spell, there are actually multiple spells here. There’s a glamour hiding the majority of these runes from sight, but it has been damaged,” I said, pointing to runes as I spoke. “And there’s another runic set taking the ambient mana in to power these runes along with the mana that the external runes feed it. But on top of that, there’s a containment rune too. These rituals…”
“Yes?” Alexa prompted me.
“They’re out of my ballpark. They’re significantly more complex than anything I know,” I admitted. “I’d need to do some studying before I could even hope to fix this.”
Alexa grimaced, but, seeing I was done with the room, happily stepped out. The moment we left, she began to relax slightly like I did. Even then, I sensed that the leakage of mana and, for want of a better word, intent from the failed containment runes were beginning to permeate the air.
“Is it dangerous?”
“Not in the short term,” I said, tapping my lips. “I wouldn’t necessarily want to be here in a few months, but the containment spell is chipped, not broken.”
“Good,” Alexa said.
“So how do we want to do this?” I asked, gesturing within. “That’s a big job, but we’ve got two other quests to handle too.”
“Let’s start on the mushrooms first,” Alexa finally said after some consideration. “We can work on it immediately while we brainstorm about the dual problem. I’ll ask the abbess to have the contractors work on other areas for now, and we’ll try to figure out what to do about Weeks. As for the drug, we’ll need a sample of the Foot if what you told me is true.”
“There might be someone I know,” I said slowly, thinking of Andy. The orc lived in the right neighborhood, and I’d run into him a few times while doing deliveries for El. While he preferred to keep things “clean” with protection rackets, gambling, and gun running, he was in the “life” as it were. Of course, Alexa looked at me strangely, but for once, I decided not to answer her. Sometimes, it was good to be my
sterious.
Chapter 5
Hunting down magic mushrooms was, frankly, a rather boring task. The challenge in acquiring the mushrooms was in the quantity required. Each location we hit only had one such stalk, which was often surrounded by other, non-spotted varieties. Of course, since we were penniless drones, we scooped up the non-spotted varieties as well while we were at it, but at the end of the day, we’d only managed to get half a dozen stalks. Most of the day itself was spent in transit as my magic led us from spot to spot. Picking the mushrooms themselves was relatively simple as their defense mechanism was passive, forcing most supernaturals to ignore them.
At this rate, collecting the mushrooms seemed to be an easily doable quest requiring only a few days. Except this was the start. Each mushroom spot was quite close together, easy to reach, but as we harvested more and more, we’d be forced to travel farther and farther, adding to the time taken. And of course, we had another pair of quests to deal with. Still, of the three quests, this seemed to be the easiest, even if it was somewhat draining for me to constantly keep Link active.
The next morning, I brought Alexa with me when I visited Andy. This time we were headed to the southwestern part of the city, where the old docks lay rotting. Without the constant flow of business, the neighborhood was a mixture of rundown warehouses, squat concrete buildings, and crumbling docks along with a few over-burdened homeless shelters. Dotted throughout the neighborhood were failed attempts at revitalization, the scenic concrete-and-grass walkways along the river unkept and littered with debris, a pair of soaring condos looming over their older cousins. It was, frankly, where I’d expect the sale of Leprechaun’s Foot to do the best.
When we pulled into the neighborhood in Alexa’s tiny hatchback, we received more than one interested look from the neighborhood’s denizens. Hunched over, hooded figures slunk from corner to corner, hands in baggy clothing, maybe one in eight of them sporting inhuman features—snouts, whiskers, fur, and more. The others, the human denizens, were your mixture of the homeless, the working poor, the downtrodden, and the Samaritans who worked these streets. No big surprise that the pair of us—Alexa in particular with her good looks and muscular body—drew so much attention.
“You sure my car is going to be okay here?” Alexa asked softly, eyeing the individuals around us a bit worriedly. While the car itself had been mildly reinforced with a few enchantments, it was only mildly. After all, the kinds of questions you’d get for driving around with the enchanted equivalent of a tank was not worth the marginal increase in protection most of the time. It wasn’t as if our lives involved car-chase scenes with machine guns spraying bullets everywhere.
“It will be,” I said, looking around until I spotted a familiar face. I waved the slouching orc over, him glaring at me with the solemn defiance of a teenager. “Want to earn fifty bucks?”
“You want me to watch the chica’s wheels?” The teenage orc slurred, giving Alexa an obvious once-over. I watched Alexa straighten slightly, anger flickering in her eyes.
“Do that again, and it’s forty.” I pulled out a twenty and waved it in front of the kid. “Twenty now, the rest once we get back and the car’s in one piece.”
“You going to see Andy?” the kid asked, eyeing the money with interest.
“Yup.”
“Okay.” The kid nodded and snatched the twenty from me. Afterward, he moved over to slouch on the car itself, glowering at everyone who looked at it. As Alexa eyed me dubiously, I grabbed her arm and dragged her along.
“You sure—”
“He’s just a visible marker. Now that people know we’re visiting Andy, they won’t touch your car,” I explained softly as we walked down the street to where the orc ganger normally hung out. His stoop with his buddies, if you will.
“Are you going to tell me who we’re meeting?” Alexa asked after a while.
“Patience, padawan,” I said with a chuckle. When we turned the corner, I spotted a group of orcs hanging out beneath the rectangular apartment building, chatting and drinking. Out of curiosity, I eyed the street, grateful to not see any police presence here. Of course, with the way the police patrolled the streets, you never knew when things might change. As we neared the group, an orc ran in our direction but came to a stop when he noticed the pair of us.
“Henry.” Andy greeted me with a toothy, tusky smile. Amusingly enough, orcs in this world came in a variety of forms. Green and grey skin, big and small tusks, with overhung foreheads and more “human” miens, there seemed to be a variety of them. Truth be told, they had distinctive species traits, but because we could, humanity had lumped them all together as orcs and called it a day. And because they were lumped together, they had decided to group together themselves. And so, the group before me was a wide variety of orcs, arising from different locations of the world. Really, only a nerd like me would recall their species’ traits. After all, for someone like the Templars, all they needed to know was that the orcs bled like humans.
“Andy,” I replied, gesturing back toward Alexa. “This is Alexa. She’s a friend of mine.”
Andy nodded slowly, eyeing the muscular blonde. His friends had parted when we arrived, the group letting us in and surrounding us in a loose semicircle now. This made Alexa tense slightly, a hand resting on her pocket where I knew she carried her extendable baton. Still, no one was drawing which was a win, at least for me so far.
“Well, if you’re vouching for her…”
“I am. We aren’t here for long. I just need some minor help,” I said and smiled slightly at the orc.
“Har. The mage needs our help. Need someone beaten down? An office ransacked?” Andy leered at me, and for a moment, I could not tell if he was pulling my leg or actually offering—which, come to think of it, might’ve been the point.
“Nothing of the sort. Well, maybe a little,” I said, considering what I wanted. “I’m looking for a sample of Leprechaun’s Foot. Actually, possibly more than one.”
The moment the drug’s name hit the air, the atmosphere changed. The casual friendliness and ribbing disappeared, the group tensing around us while Andy’s eyes narrowed.
“Why are you looking for that, Henry?” Andy asked, his voice a low growl. “You ain’t going to use it, are you?”
“Not ingesting it,” I said, raising my hands quickly as if to ward off his words. “I’ve got a quest, to look into the sudden increase of it on the streets. I can Link the samples, maybe get some research done then.”
“So your first instinct is to buy some illegal drugs.”
“Uhhh—”
“Rather than say, talk to us?” Andy asked angrily.
“Oh. Ummm—”
“Mages!” Andy harrumphed angrily and then shook his head. “The Foot’s coming down from the Skulls. Green Skulls.”
“Green Skulls?” I frowned.
There was a loud sigh from one of Andy’s friends, who got shut down by a look from Andy, but even the orc leader seemed slightly exasperated with me. “They’re another supernatural gang, werejackal based. They’ve been peddling that garbage for the last few weeks and expanding their base of operations aggressively. We’ve had a few clashes in the last few days.”
“Huh,” I said slowly, then glanced at Alexa for a moment. She shrugged her shoulders, a gesture I couldn’t actually read. Still, I saw no reason for Andy to lie to us, so I probed for a little more, getting what information we could before we were quietly “escorted” back to our car. It was only when we were in the car itself when Alexa spoke again.
“That was… different,” the initiate said.
“Oh?”
“They were a lot politer than I expected. And helpful.”
“If the Green Skulls are after their streets, I’m not surprised,” I said softly, rubbing my chin. “Andy’s not a huge fan of people moving in on them.”
“Perhaps,” Alexa said doubtfully. “But are you sure they aren’t lying to you?”
“For what?”
&
nbsp; “To point you at an enemy? An enraged mage can do a lot of damage.”
“Andy wouldn’t—” I paused, then sighed. “Fine. He might. But I wasn’t planning on going in guns blazing.”
“How were you planning this?”
I paused, considering. “Maybe we should grab a cup of coffee and talk about this.”
“You think?” Alexa asked with a snort.
She guided the car toward the curb when we found a coffee shop. Yeah, perhaps some planning made sense.
Once we had the basics of a plan down, we put it into action. We faced a few problems. Firstly, while I didn’t have an outsized reputation, I had gained some notoriety in town. There just weren’t that many competent mages, and even fewer willing to do work for those not swimming in cash. It meant I couldn’t exactly saunter into the middle of Green Skulls territory without potentially being spotted. Alexa herself was not much better—even if no one realized she was an initiate, she was, for all intents and purposes, a mundane.
The first step then was a glamour. Unlike illusions that were static projections which altered how they looked in reality—like holographic projections—glamours worked on an individual’s mind. Because illusions worked on reality, they were harder to control and thus mostly utilized on static objects, while glamours were much simpler. Unfortunately, because they affected an individual’s mind, it was also easier to beat in some ways. Someone particularly perceptive, awakened, or mindful of their thoughts could beat a glamour. It was the reason why, even without trying, my mage sight cut through most glamours and showed me the true face of individuals around us.
To cast a glamour that “beat” whatever was out there, I needed to take more care and put more oomph than the stock enchantments peddled by apprentice mages and sorcerers on street corners. Thankfully, my glamour spell was significantly better than what most enchantments were made from, Lily having scoffed at the current state of the industry. Then again, most glamour spells were meant to deceive mundanes.
