But the fact remained that neither their advanced science nor magic itself could remake me into something even slightly more “normal”. At least not so much as I could determine from my research. Maybe I needed to do more than research. Maybe I needed to travel to Starhaven myself. If nothing else, they might be able to tell me why I felt so lousy.
Then again, I had no idea of how to get there.
Just thinking about it made me more depressed than ever. I didn’t even bother to turn around when I heard the door open behind us. I did, however, glance up at Jack, whose eyes had widened considerably. So I leaned over slightly and peered in the mirror behind the bar to see who had entered.
What I saw struck me momentarily dumb. It wasn’t, as I expected, another one of the regulars.
The image of the woman who nearly filled the foyer caught my eye, a vision of womanly curves and great expanses of dark flesh in black leather. She lifted her lovely face and met my gaze. She strode up the ramp, a rustling of black like a cloak at her back as she shifted her wings.
An Abyssian. Here. I’m uncertain as to which of us—Jack or myself—was more stunned by the sight of the beautiful winged woman striding across the edge of the dance floor toward us. She flashed a dazzling smile. “I wasn’t sure anyone would be here.”
Jack and I exchanged glances, equally puzzled by this comment. “And why wouldn’t anyone be here?” Jack asked. I suddenly realized that it was ten-thirty in the evening, and none of the regulars but me had found their way in. This was so rare an event as to be unprecedented.
She leveled her gaze at the both of us and blinked. “You mean you don’t know?”
“Know what?” Jack asked, his voice ratcheting up a notch as the fact of the empty bar and the late hour seemed to occur to him as well. I recognized concern in his face and he leaned against the bar toward her as if to speed her response by being nearer when she delivered it.
“A child has gone missing in the park,” she said. “Many of the neighborhood folks are out there looking for him. I was, but I needed to make use of your facilities and everyone else has locked their doors to help with the search.”
Well, that explained where the other regulars were. There wasn’t a one of us who wouldn’t drop everything to search for a missing child.
Jack pointed toward the restrooms, frowning. “The facilities are down that hall,” he said, then paused. “I’m not sure they’ll accommodate your wings though,” he added fretfully.
She grinned at him and I felt my heart skip a beat. God, she was beautiful. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll manage.”
“Should we go help?” I asked Jack, when she disappeared into the ladies’ room.
He shrugged. “Do either of us have a particular talent that would come in handy at a time like this?”
“Not me,” I replied. I could see what he was getting at, but I wasn’t sure I bought the argument.
“You can bet there are vamps and ‘thropes all over the park right now. I doubt we could add anything to the effort and, in fact, might impede it somewhat just by adding more scents to the trails.”
That’s when I realized that even the staff was missing, an oddity I should have realized right after my arrival. Had I not been so concerned with my own problems, I would have noticed something as obvious as that.
In fact, it was weird that Jack hadn’t mentioned it either. He met my questioning gaze and sighed. “Okay, you got me. I knew about the missing kid and I stayed here to keep your attention focused on something else.”
“What? Damn, Jack, couldn’t you tell I needed the distraction if nothing else?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, but a troll wandering around in the park when panicked normals are looking for a missing kid is a recipe for disaster.”
This drew me up short. He had a point, loathe as I was to admit it. Many normals will perceive me as a monster no matter what I do.
The Abyssian woman exited the restroom and strode up to the bar. I noticed something odd about her gait and realized that her wings seemed to be missing. This was a talent I did not know they possessed—though in all fairness, I had to admit that I’d never personally met one of their unique race before now.
Nor had many people at all. Abyssians tended to stay away from ordinary citizens, and that included most freaks. Abyssians aren’t human—they’re Sidhe with a manipulated gene code…more or less. Or so I’m given to understand.
Jack is far less reticent to ask questions than I am. “Hey—where’d your wings go?”
She turned to him with a little rumbling laugh. “I can summon or dismiss them as I choose,” she said. “It’s a sign of power among my kind.”
“I wish I could do that with my nose,” I muttered darkly.
Another chuckle and her gaze came to me. “It is a unique appendage,” she said. “Are you not happy with it?”
“Hardly,” I said. “It’s bad enough being big and gray with elephant feet”—I lifted one by way of illustration—“but to have this on my face is a little too much.” I yanked at the source of my aggravation and peered down at it irritably.
My trunk is roughly the circumference of my wrist and extends to about ten inches. In all respects it resembles a short, stubby elephant’s trunk. It’s truly a gruesome thing to be stuck in the middle of an otherwise normal human face. Well, normal other than the color and size, of course.
She frowned. I found it, oddly enough, to be as attractive as her smile. “Then why don’t you just rid yourself of it?”
“Rid myself of it?”
“Of course. Have it removed surgically or transformed by magical means.”
I blinked at her. She couldn’t actually be that ignorant of my situation, could she? Then I realized, she could. Abyssians weren’t connected to the net, they didn’t participate in the normal or even the freak community much at all. They were more or less completely out of the loop, as insular in general as the Amish were before they were happily transported to a colony world where they no longer needed to turn their back on technology. The Abyssians reportedly lived deep underground, in heretofore undiscovered caverns they called the Abyss—hence their name.
“He’s a troll,” Jack cut in. “He regenerates. Trying to fix it through surgical means would make a serious mess and, in the end, wouldn’t help at all. Prohibitively expensive too, assuming he could find someone willing to do it in the first place. And magic doesn’t work all that well on trolls either.”
“That’s too bad,” she said, leaning over and peering at me curiously. “It seems as though there should be something that can be done for you. Tell me, would your resistance to magic persist if it were you casting the spells?”
I didn’t know the answer to this. I’d honestly never thought about it. “But I can’t,” I said, which as far as I was concerned made the whole question rhetorical.
“I wouldn’t necessarily bet on that,” she answered. “Current figures indicate that roughly fifty to sixty percent of the human population now have the genes to use magic. Those are pretty good odds.”
I glanced at Jack, who seemed as surprised by this revelation as I was. “How do you know this?” I asked her.
“Not all of my kind stays underground,” she says. “This world may not easily tolerate me, but I am not looked upon too oddly should I travel to Starhaven.”
Starhaven again. It looked as though that was my ultimate destination in my search for a new form. “How do you get to Starhaven?”
“Through a worldgate,” she told me. “Why—did you want to go there yourself?”
“It might be the perfect place to seek out a solution to my problem.”
She nodded slowly. “Yes, it might. Do you have a way to get there?”
“Uh…no.”
“I thought not. So let me offer you some help in that department. I was planning on going there this evening anyway, but ended up being side-tracked by the search for the missing kid.”
“You were helping with that? S
houldn’t you be getting back to it?”
She shook her head. “Nah. I did a few aerial sweeps and came up with nothing. I don’t think the kid’s in the park anymore. They’ve got a few vampires and lycanthropes on the ground following by scent, so I figure they’re a lot better equipped to handle it from here than I am.”
Jack gave me a nod. “I just got off the line with Boneyard. They’re following a trail leading out of the park even as we speak.”
Jack has one of those PCD implants. When he looks like he’s talking to himself, he’s more likely talking to someone else over his invisible communication device. It’s still damn unsettling, since he’s gotten so good at sub-vocalizing we often don’t notice he’s doing it at all. Most of the time he just uses it to communicate with Boneyard and Kevin, the Lounge’s security staff, but nevertheless I had to ask—where would it all end?
Did I mention that communication implants give me the willies? At least they’re not as bad as those new wetware mods—the kind that allow people to communicate and even transfer images as if they were telepathic? Better living through invasive brain surgery. The whole idea creeps me out.
I guess I’m just old-fashioned in that respect. I like being able to hold a PCD in my hand. The most advanced interface I wanted to utilize was voice recognition software. I’m a bit of a technological throwback, I realize.
A troll afraid of advanced technology—imagine that.
“I’d love to accompany you,” I told the lovely Abyssian woman, realizing at that exact moment that I had failed to ask her name. “I must apologize, but I don’t know your name.”
“Spite.”
“Your name is Spite?” I goggled at this.
She sighed. “For now. We change our names as circumstances change. My parents believe I do the things I do out of spite, so it seems a fitting name for the time being.”
I tried to wrap my mind around the concept. “If you can change your name on a whim, how does anyone know how to refer to you?”
“By familial connections, typically. Changing our names often is a young Abyssian’s habit. Once we become parents it becomes a rarity to do so. So, if someone wants to refer to me, I’m called ‘Spite, Ensil’s daughter.’”
“Oh.” It still seemed weird to me, but who was I to argue about another culture’s traditions? “Well, Spite, is there anything I should take with me?”
“Credit chits, if you have any. Starhaven and Earth have an open trade policy for the most part, though most Earth folks are unaware of that fact, so any chits you have on hand will be honored there.”
An open trade policy? I had a feeling I was in for a serious education here, and even if I didn’t find a way to cure my malady, I’d at least learn many things worth knowing. “I have five hundred on me right now. Will that be enough?”
“It should be. So you’re ready?”
I nodded.
If you’ve never had occasion to travel through a worldgate, let me give you two pieces of advice should you ever consider doing so. First—take some anti-motion-sickness medication beforehand. It does things to your equilibrium that’ll make your last meal jump for the nearest exit point. Second—don’t start moving as soon as you arrive at your destination.
I don’t vomit. Ever. So I was pretty much safe from the first one, though my stomach was spinning like water down a flush toilet. But I threw myself forward almost immediately and rebounded rather painfully off the duraplaz wall that separated the worldgate chamber from the rest of its environs.
I sat down on the platform, hard. Once my head cleared, I spotted Spite standing over me, an unmistakably amused look in her eyes. “I’d recommend you curb your impulsive tendencies while you’re here,” she said, offering a hand. I took it and between us we managed to get me back on my feet. Since I weigh about as much as a small motor vehicle, this is a pretty impressive feat.
I stood there a moment and looked around. We were in what looked like a large plastic box, in which was a raised platform about fifteen feet squared. On the other side of the transparent wall separating us from the outside of the box I saw a feline hybrid—a lion, I think. At least he looked like he had a large golden mane falling around his shoulders. He stood beside what might have been a control panel mounted on a small pedestal. His tawny eyes gave us the once-over and he pressed a button or flicked a switch or something like that because, when he did, a section of the duraplaz wall fell away, giving us an egress.
The lion was dressed in some sort of white armor—reminded me a little of the kind the bad guys wore on that old sci-fi movie…The one with those laser sword things? Except it had a stylized phoenix emblazoned across the chest plate and no helmet. Some sort of black, bulky firearm hung at his hip.
“How’s it going, Joge?” Spite asked him as we passed.
“Not too bad, Spite. Been quiet lately.”
“Which is just how you like it, isn’t it?”
“You bet. The attempted invasion a couple of months ago was enough excitement to last me a decade, at least.”
They both laughed. “Who’s your friend?”
“This is...”
“Hydra,” I supplied, realizing that she’d never asked my name. “I’m from Earth.”
“You’d almost have to be,” Joge said. “Ain’t no trolls anywhere else. Or, at least, not trolls that look like you.”
He recognized me as a troll right off. I found that impressive. There were humans on Earth who’s first reaction was “what the hell is that thing,” and here was a creature that didn’t even live on Earth figuring it out as fast as that. “There are other kinds of trolls?”
“Troll is just a nickname they saddled your kind with when you started popping up,” the lion hybrid said. “There are real trolls out there too. One thing they ain’t is mutated humans.”
“Good seeing you, Joge. My friend here is looking for a way to look more normal and we figured this was the best place to go.”
He nodded. “You might stop by the Magitech shop. Word has it Artificer has some new goodies that might fit the bill.”
I blinked at the Magitech reference but didn’t say anything. She thanked him and we continued down a long corridor bisected by a clear pond ringed by several dwarf fruit trees that looked quite well-tended.
The corridor itself was immense, as large as an earthly cathedral in some historical city I’d never visited. The walls were an off-white color, and though it was way above us, it looked as though the ceiling was of the same hue.
We passed a couple adjoining corridors, then turned to the left several hundred yards from the worldgate, entering a long unremarkable hallway of more conventional dimensions. “What’s this Magitech place?” I asked her.
“There is a connection, if that’s what you’re wondering. It’s actually one of the reasons I chose to stop by your friend’s bar. The Lady of Blades is connected to the real Magitech and wanted to reproduce the atmosphere of the Magitech Lounge here on Starhaven. Your Magitech Lounge is the result.”
That seemed like half an answer, at least. I decided to wait and see what I could determine on my own before asking any more questions on the subject. She didn’t strike me as particularly informative about certain things and I decided that there might be a reason for this. Maybe she expected me to figure things out for myself, or else she just didn’t particularly like answering questions.
We turned right at another intersecting corridor and traveled another fifty feet or so, to where a large silver disk stood embedded in the floor. She led me up onto it and spoke clearly. “C Sector,” she said.
We were instantly transported elsewhere. It wasn’t like a worldgate. It wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced. I didn’t even find it mildly discomfiting, though I think a part of me knew I was in a totally different place than I’d started out.
I followed her off the platform and we fairly quickly emerged into a section filled with what looked like normal storefronts. I spotted two intriguing signs right off
. One said “Magitech Lounge” and the other said “Magitech Outlet”.
“In here,” Spite told me, and led me into the “Outlet”. The fellow behind the counter was currently dealing with two other customers, a hybrid raccoon and what may well have been some sort of weasel or ferret. It can be hard to tell the mustalid hybrid types apart. Except for the skunks, badgers and wolverines, at least.
Hybrids aren’t all that common on Earth, but there are some. They probably outnumber us trolls by a two to one margin, but that’s only an estimate. Normals have issues with those who are obviously freakish. They don’t mind so much knowing that vamps and lycanthropes and mages are among them, as long as they look more or less like everyone else. For those of us who do not, they harbor little but suspicion and fear.
Once these two had purchased whatever it was they were after, the shopkeeper, a thin, balding human wearing a pair of spectacles low on his nose, peered over them at us and smiled. “Can I help you?”
“Not sure,” said Spite, leaning against the counter. Carefully, I noted. While it was obvious the ceilings and doors in this place were designed to accommodate someone of our size, the counter was similar in construction to the bar at the Lounge back home. It didn’t even come up to my waist. “My friend here doesn’t like his looks. He wants to be able to change his appearance.”
“Understandable,” the shopkeeper said. “I just got in another shipment of syms—it may be that one of them could solve his dilemma.”
“What are syms?” I asked him.
He smiled genially. “They’re a living suit of clothes that bond with the wearer and can emulate not only any sort of clothing, but also act as armor. This particular batch is said to be more advanced than our last offering of its kind.”
“How much?” I asked him.
He stroked his chin. “Well…I might be persuaded to make a deal. They’re new, and it’s unlikely people will be in a hurry to try them out without some kind of guarantee.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. “What about the last batch you had? I assume they were okay?”
Tales from the Magitech Lounge Page 10
