A brown cloud rose up on a sigh of moist air and hovered over the machine that stretched the width of one end of the former Administrator Queen's chocolate warehouse. Guber watched the cloud, amused at the awareness that anywhere else, especially in the Human realms, that cloud would be considered pollution. Here--especially in a warehouse filled with every kind of chocolate possible in ninety-seven percent of the realms where Fae were able to live--that cloud was chocolate.
"Eat your heart out, Willy Wonka," Guber murmured.
He watched one of the lab technicians in his lavender lab coat lean forward into the cloud as it descended around him. Guber almost envied him, being surrounded by clouds of chocolate for as long as the testing--
What was he thinking?
It was pollution in the worst sense of the word. As in, poison.
"Don't inhale!" he shrieked, and flung a handful of half-coherent spells at the technician and his six buddies who looked on the verge of following his example. The seven froze, their lab coats turning from lavender to gray as time froze and a bubble of scintillating electric blue magic formed around them.
"Nice touch," Kevyn muttered, coming up behind him. "I think we probably should have adapted some gas masks before we got the first round of tests going. What were we thinking?"
"It's too deep in our brains," Guber said, as he wiped the sweat from terror off his forehead. "Even knowing about carob, it's hard-wired into us to think chocolate equals good and safe and healthy."
"Got them!" someone yelled from farther down the floor, after they used four fork-lifts to move the frozen lab technicians out of the settling cloud of gas.
Guber gagged, seeing how all seven of them were coated in a fuzzy brown film. His magic had included an impermeable skin to keep that possibly poisonous fog from actually touching their skin. However, that assurance didn't do much to fight the nauseating mental image of poison seeping through their clothes and skin, into their bloodstream. There wasn't enough antihistamine in all the Fae realms to handle--cancel that thought. There wasn't any antihistamine in the Fae realms, period.
"Yeah, and we think we know what we're doing?" he moaned, as he conjured up a couple of shipping crates of Benadryl and other equivalents--pills, capsules, and liquid form for swallowing as well as intravenous application. Just in case.
"Nobody got hurt," Kevyn assured him, as they watched the forklifts take the seven chocolate-coated statues to the decontamination chamber. "That's the important part."
An hour later, the seven technicians were back to work, and everyone in the warehouse walked around inside semi-permeable bubbles that filtered the air. For added protection, their controlling spells were Ether-wired directly to the computer controlling the tests on the chocolate in the warehouse. Every time new information on carob was found, another spell adapted the filtering spell implanted in the bubbles. Even if half the chocolate in the warehouse was contaminated with carob, and flash evaporated in an industrial accident into fog that filled the warehouse, it wasn't going to poison anybody.
Not on Guber's watch, anyway.
At the half-hour mark, the first batch of carob-tainted chocolate set off the alarms on the testing machine.
After three hours, nearly three hundred pounds and sixteen different levels of contamination by carob had been identified.
At the six-hour mark, all the bells and whistles and flashing lights had gone off and all the different messages Guber had programmed into the data display screen had been used. There was nothing more to see. His gizmo was working exactly as he had planned.
It was getting boring, quite frankly.
After an exhausting double shift of work, Guber watched Kevyn's cousins leave, one by one, and decided to be the hero this time around. After the third cousin popped back to his own enclave, he turned to his best pal and threatened to be the evil Faerie godfather for Kevyn and Sophie's first child if his old friend didn't go home to his wife for at least a couple hours.
"Yeah, domesticated and hog-tied and tied to the wifey's apron strings," Guber muttered, when Kevyn didn't even pretend to argue with him. He waited a good five minutes after his advocate popped out, then he let himself relax and grin.
He was definitely jealous. If Kevyn wasn't his absolutely best pal in five different worlds, he knew he might have been tempted to throw a few monkey wrenches into the mix--keep his friend working late or interfere when Sophie tried to make contact.
Funny thing was, every time he got an image of Kevyn going home to Sophie after a hard day in the advocate's robes, the picture morphed into Guber trucking down a yellow brick road where Epsi waited at the end. To make the image even better, she sat on top of a glass hill, holding the world's biggest goblet of diet cherry cola out to him in silent invitation, with a mischievous grin on those gorgeous lips of hers.
Okay, so he was mixing images from several different faerie tales, but he doubted anyone bored enough to monitor his thoughts would be irritated or offended.
The upshot of his noble gesture was that Guber was entirely alone when the last lab technician rolled out the airlock doors and popped his life-support system bubble to leave for the night--and a newcomer who had to be an Eraser rolled in through the airlock door.
"Man, how are you guys going to take over the multi-verses, when you don't pay attention to details?" Guber groused softly.
Case in point: the lab coat on this newcomer was lavender shading toward rose. And the life support bubble wrapped around him had a bluish sparkle in its sheen, when the bubbles Guber created were peacock green.
"But we do," said a raspy, tending-toward-adolescent voice from behind him.
Guber ducked and rolled, and then called up the battery of self-defense spells he had kept tucked into a side pocket of reality. Being semi-sentient, they were permanently activated and raring for the chance to incinerate someone or something.
In retrospect, he realized he should have done that in reverse order--activate, then evade.
A flash in several dozen nearly invisible colors three-quarters blinded him and stunned all his other senses. Guber felt like he was drowning. His eyes nearly popped out of his skull as air pressure all around him fluctuated wildly. Sounds warped toward both ends of the scale, and time itself stretched like taffy in the middle of a vicious pulling party.
The initial attack was strong enough to shatter his life support bubble.
Chocolate fog was his first thought. Then a nasty chuckle bubbled out of him--which wasn't good, because clean air was in short supply--when his second thought was Carob.
Then it was a little hard to think for a few seconds as his self-defense auto-bots went into annihilation mode. The nice thing about creating spells that were semi-sentient was that they were fiercely loyal, and they got highly infuriated when their originator was damaged or even made slightly uncomfortable. Guber hadn't figured out yet if they thought of him as "Daddy," or if they had reasoned out that if he was destroyed, they ceased to exist.
And if they had reasoned that out, he might need to do some revisions to his auto-bot defense spells. Why? Because every science fiction book he had ever read warned that when computers or anything that was semi-automatic started to think, they soon evolved to the point where they considered themselves superior to the Humans--or in this case, the slightly rebellious, tinkering Fae--who had created them.
But that was a consideration to leave for later. Right now, he had to follow up on that brilliant-yet-nasty thought that had tapped him on the shoulder, but that he hadn't quite turned around to look square in the eyes yet.
His senses started to clear up and settle back to normal levels as he propelled himself away from the zone of batter-to-a-pulp-but-not-quite-before-subduing-the-enemy-and-alerting-the-proper-authorities. His self-defense auto-bot spells were only dealing with the two Erasers who had snuck up behind him. There was a third, and were probably more, sneaking through the warehouse.
The carob-contaminated chocolate had been sorted and sto
red by the ratio of carob-to-chocolate in each contaminated item. Some of the lab technicians working with Guber had nearly wept when they found the best quality of dark chocolate intermixed with carob. It was like dribbling mud into a bottle of five hundred-year-old brandy to give it body and texture. Right now, Guber was willing to bet that his attackers would only see chocolate in front of them and not realize they were walking into the equivalent of a poison ivy bath, until it was too late.
He had to work more on instinct than sight, trusting that he had his bearings straight while his physical eyes and sense of direction were still clearing up. Guber reached with his magic for the tank of carob-laced chocolate syrup and sent a streamer of it toward a patch of warmth on the other side of that literal forest of chocolate trees, bushes, and flowerpots, liberally interspersed with a menagerie of chocolate statues of birds, deer, unicorns, hydra--whoever sent that one needed some serious psychological therapy--cats, and of course, the requisite hordes of chocolate bunnies. After all, Administrator Queen Mellisande had been elected just at the start of what was the Easter shopping season on Earth, and procuring chocolate bunnies was easier than breathing.
Guber made a mental note to test all the bunnies in the morning--if he survived until morning--because they definitely had come from Human factories. Why hadn't he thought of that before?
Forget asking about what you didn't think of, he scolded himself as he grasped fist-sized boulders of contaminated chocolate using magical streamers, and flung them like pebbles in multiple slingshots at his invisible enemies. Just think, period!
Squawks and sounds of slipping and banging into heavy objects, and then the thuds of other heavy objects falling, and causing other, less heavy objects to fall in succession, gave Guber a better idea of where his enemies were. And gave him a good idea there were at least six more. Well, that was more like it. At least eight Erasers had been sent after him. He would have been insulted if they had only sent two or three.
Which meant that next time, they would send more, because he was proving right here just how strong and talented he was, and how good at multi-tasking. That was a sign of strong royal talent. Which gave him an even bigger shot at the throne, if it was ever re-established. Which it wouldn't be, if he had anything to do with it.
He briefly wondered if exposure to the carob in the air was causing brain damage. Maybe his particular allergic reaction was scattergun thinking. He would have to check into that.
Later!
Now he could see them--seven dark brown, stumbling figures emerging from the falling aisles of stored chocolate in all their weird and wonderful shapes. Guber semi-melted the chocolate he flung at them, aiming at their faces now that he could see them.
To a man--or a woman, in the case of two of them, he found out later--they all licked their lips as they cleaned their faces. He shot more warmed, adulterated chocolate at them, taking his ammunition from the seventy-five percent carob bin, and made facial masks. Just like he thought, and like he would do if someone insisted on slapping soft chocolate practically into his mouth, they all ate some of it.
Several--and he made mental/magical note of which ones--reacted to the taste, showing some shock. That marked them as more sensitive and alert than the others, and probably the brains of the operation.
Then someone screamed and started clawing at his face. Guber nodded in somber satisfaction and finally pulled the alarm that would bring in the Council's security forces. A moment later, he called for the medical team that had been on hand to take care of any industrial accidents during that day's work.
The medics arrived before the security forces, and they had all nine Erasers subdued and spluttering in the decontamination showers. At the same time, they started administering Benadryl intravenously to three who had puffed up like Violet Beauregard in both Willy Wonka movies.
Kevyn and two of his advocate cousins showed up about five minutes later. He thought of administering a genetics tracking test to the ones who showed the most violent reactions to carob.
It was like frosting on the cake for Guber, when one Eraser learned he had ninety-four percent royal blood. His anguish turned to terror when he looked around and saw four of his cohorts giving him that easily interpreted look: You swore to destroy all claimants to the throne. Do your duty, starting with yourself.
"The problem with those one-track minds of theirs is that they realize one big glitch--if they start with themselves in purifying the gene pool," Kevyn said with a smirk, "they won't be able to continue with anyone else." He settled back in the lounge set aside for the testing team and raised a half-empty beaker of diet cherry cola in toast to Guber. "Have you ever thought of going into security systems for a living? You're a one-man destruction zone."
"Thought about it. Then I realized I was basically lazy, and fighting for my life is too much work." Guber was surprised to see that the level of celebratory liquid in his beaker was only down about two swallows. "It'd make a great video game, though," he offered, more to distract himself than Kevyn.
He couldn't evade the thought that had just occurred to him: Epsi had a large percentage of purple blood, too. Not as strong as his, but enough to make her a target. What if some Erasers had managed to infiltrate themselves into the detention dimension where she was staying until the investigation cleared her of suspicion?
"How soon until we meet up with Epsi again?" he asked, in as casual a manner as he could manage.
Then he realized that was a mistake, because he had never mastered the art of fake casualness in anything. Kevyn sat up straight in his thick, puffy-cushioned lounging chair, put his beaker down on a side table that materialized about half a second before he let go of his drink, and narrowed his eyes at Guber.
"So that's what it is," his friend muttered. "I was wondering."
"Wondering what?" He winced when his voice cracked.
"Don't worry. My folks thought of the danger to the purple-bloods under sequestering right after the Heredity group made contact with you. They have round-the-clock monitoring." He chuckled when Guber relaxed and sank back in his chair--and guzzled half his beaker of diet cherry cola without thinking. "You and Epsi aren't exactly two of a kind."
"Yeah, well, you know what they say about--" Guber choked when he realized he had been about to say "in-breeding." Which meant he had been thinking about breeding. And all the preliminaries. Including dating and courtship and commitment.
Yeah, but this is Epsi you're talking about here, that usually-silent voice of common sense whispered in the back of his mind. You really like her. She's an uber-cool chick.
Yeah, but this is the Epsi you haven't talked to in decades, and you only realized today she was a cool chick. Don't rush into things, another voice whispered back, from another portion of his mind.
Guber decided he had too many voices back there. It was time to evict some of them. But which ones?
Later!
"Speaking of too much work, I'm thinking we need to set up a better line of defense for anybody with more than forty percent purple blood," he said, sitting up again. He tossed his beaker of diet cherry cola into the air and it winked out before it splattered. "I'm thinking we shouldn't incinerate that carob-tainted chocolate when we find it."
"You're not suggesting we store it, are you? It'll end up being more of a problem than nuclear waste back in the Human dimensions," Kevyn retorted, frowning.
"Not store it. Use it. Like for self-defense." He grinned, replaying in his mind the streamers of carob-tainted chocolate he had shot almost directly into the mouths of his attackers. Eventually, criminals would catch on that there was something wrong with that chocolate, but until that happened, their automatic reaction would be to eat some of it. Between their varied allergic reactions and the effects of really strong Benadryl, they wouldn't have a chance.
* * * *
When she finally went to bed, Epsi slept for more than a day. She found three messages from Guber waiting, encased in delayed-message globes hov
ering over her bed when she woke up. The first reported on the testing that had begun on the warehouse of chocolate gifts. Epsi felt something go warm and gooey inside her when he said several times he wished she could be there to see his gizmo working. She told herself not to dither over whether he wanted her there because he wanted her to be proud of him, or if he just thought she should be there since she had been instrumental in the genesis of the gizmo. Trying to decipher how Guber felt and thought would give her a headache, and she didn't need any more right now, thanks very much.
So far, over six hundred pounds of carob-tainted chocolate had been detected. A large percentage of that came from the same cut-rate factory that advertised itself as a gourmet chocolate supplier. It claimed to ship from Switzerland, Austria and France, but the chocolate actually originated in a building that straddled the border of Texas and Mexico. The packages were falsely labeled, not even using FDA double-talk hidden coding for carob.
Guber gleefully reported to Epsi that the factory had been reported to the FDA and the truth-in-food-labeling authorities. Everyone who had purchased the gifts from that tainted factory was clearly innocent.
The amounts of carob present in any of the chocolate was so minimal that even a highly allergic Fae would only have hives and shortness of breath. It seemed that even carob was too expensive for those particular manufacturers to use, so they had adulterated their chocolate even further with materials that were nowhere near chocolate or carob. In this particular instance, the presence of carob was a harmless and unavoidable mistake, on the part of the Fae.
Epsi spared a moment to wonder if that factory would soon go out of business, since no more Fae would be going there to purchase truckloads of chocolate at a time. Even if that didn't harm them, the FDA and other Human authorities would soon be breathing down their necks.
The second message dealt with her present in particular to Mellisande. The cargo in her boat was all pure, high quality chocolate. The boat itself, however, was laced with carob. It was necessary, according to the manufacturers themselves, to introduce it into the chocolate to help with the structural integrity and weight-bearing members.
Death by Chocolate Page 6
