Workforce - 3

Chapter 3 in the ongoing saga of a magical crackhead and his continuing journey into long, distressingly delayed adulthood.





Back in the good old days - back before my father changed, back when he still had hands he could console or smack a child with....back in the days where my mother consumed something at dinner besides a triple dose of the current fashionable dieting potion and an ever-increasing number of glasses of fine elven Shiraz, I remember that conversations used to go a little differently than later on.

My father believes that magic is some kind of trust. That those of us who have it, like me, and him, and my elder sister, have a responsibility to safeguard those who don't. Like my mother. Like the entire Morati world.

That's why he did it, of course. Melted himself, I mean, or whatever it is he actually did. So he could help people without magic. People who didn't even live in our world, for the love of God.

That was when I realized, I think. Shortly after my ninth birthday when my father of the wild hair and distracted manner turned into something as comprehensible and personal as a lightning storm. That's when I realized that I had to look after myself, since my father was gone and my mother was a simpelton and my sister preffered to live in places where little brothers were a crime against nature and God. I would look after myself, and the damn mundanes and morati could just as well go hang.

So it was hard, you see, for me to make pleasant conversation with Carl. Pert and supple though she was, her manner reminded me entirely too much of my mother and her very hedged-in milquetoast existence was a sort of walking, breathing, endlessly chattering reminder to the fact that my father loved these creatures more collectively than he did me individually...

And sorry, but even fifteen years later that knowledge kind of stung.

All self-centered ruminations fled when we arrived at her domicile. It was a dreary rectangular building covered in doors and railings, only two stories. The grounds were mostly cement, and a hurge murkey kidney-shaped pool where four trees worth of autumn leaves had fallen to float and rot.

"Come on, my apartment is upstairs," she said. That's when I realized: this wasn't even her home. She lived in a compartment of it, like some kind of hive for the festering underclasses. And she shared it! My teacup cerebrus, Muffin, had more space than this in the Petatorium. Significantly more. And he only weighed nine pounds.

The whole edifice was painted an appallingly cruel shade of ecru. It was pigmentary torture, is what it was. If offered a choice between a garment in that shade and prolonged and painful torture, I'd go laughing to the rack without a backwards glance or inward shudder.

I thought desperately of the winking sapphires of my bedroom's multilayer chandelier. Spider-silk bedspreads; my bed stand, carved from a single block of translucent, blue-green jade. My hands were ringless and seamed with dirt, like some filthy sheepshagging peasant's.

Surely there was a way to reverse my father's transformation. At least long enough for me to drive a knife into the fleshy underside of his face and out the top of his smug little skull.

"Oh crap, I forgot my key," she said apologetically as she patted her pockets. The door we stood before had 606 written on it in dulling brass and the dark brown paint was peeling in mournful strips. She knocked on the door.

"Come on!" She called "let me in!"

The door was answered by some kind of immense scowling man-bear. You know, one of those fellows who looks as though he sweats testosterone, bleeds hate, and pisses pure liquid murder. He was a good foot taller than me, about four times as broad in the shoulder, and he wasn't wearing a shirt, just some sort of loose dark-grey pantaloons with a drawstring at the waist. Like some kind of goddamn pirate. Every inch of him that wasn't covered in hair was covered in scars, and where those two options failed, there was usually something inked on (I counted two serpents, a dragon, and something spiked and ominous around one bicep) or some random piece of metal jammed through it. In the normal course of events I'd have cast a spell on him just as a matter of caution; something that caused, for example, a meteor collision. I would not have considered it overkill.

But of course, I had no magic. Lucky me.

"Who the fuck is this, Carl?" his voice was about as you'd expect; low enough to shake masonry from the walls. His brows knitted together in an awe-inspiring display of facial tectonics; you could hear the gristle popping.

Why had I allowed myself to be dragged into this situation? And dragged I had been; that little hussy Carlotta had waylayed me. She was no better than a highwayman.

"I'm sorry, Buddy," she simpered, while pushing me forward, clearly to placate the man-bear. How nice! A life sacrifice. In her position I'd do the same thing, of course, but I was worth more "but I ran into him on the street and he seemed really hurt and he seems kind of nice and I accidentally punched him in the face and-"

The manbear put up a hand. He had trimmed his hair with a hacksaw, apparently, and had probably done it himself or enlisted the help of a blind paraplegic. All that remained was a whitish-blond fringe around his skull "fine, Carl. Bring him in and I'll take a look at him."

She seemed immensely and totally relieved. Though she was clearly not the sharpest cap amongst the witches, her absolute and total transparency had a kind of charm to it. It was helped, of course, by curly blond hair and some of the finest knockers seen outside the Realm of the Inconsiderate Succubi. The look in the man-bears deeply shadowed eyes could almost be considered affectionate. If, of course, he wasn't so clearly some kind of sadomassochistic albino gorilla swanning about in spiked jewelry and stolen pantaloons.

"Thank you, Buddy!" she said, and stood on her tiptoes and gave him a kiss on the cheek "take care of him, okay?"

He turned and walked into the apartment, clearly gesturing for me to follow. I turned to Carl, madness in my eyes and fear in my heart.

"Where's this nurse you promised me?" I hissed between gritted teeth, as loudly as I dared. Even assuming he could not simply smell my terror like a timber wolf, I didn't want him to hear me.

"Buddy's a nurse," she explained. I gaped at her. Nevermind the sheer ludicrousness of a male nurse -I mean, clearly "Buddy", not unlike a woman, hadn't the brains for medical school- I wouldn't trust someone who looked like that to do anything more delicate than slaying Visigoths or pushing over trees

"Come on,"  she said, with exaggerated patience. I reluctantly entered their dank little hovel, where Buddy pointed at a threadbare, odiferous sofa, and told me to take off my shirt. I was not generally accustomed to taking off my clothes in front of strangers unless dictated by circumstance or fantastically drugged, and certainly not in the presence of (a) a lady I had no intention of laying and (b)  a man who looked like, if peckish, he might snap off my arms and legs like dandelion stems and gnaw them in the private darkness of his reeking den.

I did it with the utmost reluctance; more because I really disliked the shirt and suspected I might look better without it.

Buddy just raised his eyebrows and whistled, slightly. Like my injured dermis was some kind of floor show. He came back with a plastiform box (also made from dead lizards - could that really be sanitary?) that he called his "kit" and told Carl to get him something to drink.

She returned with a silver can for him and a glass of yellow liquid for me - the glass had an animate sandwich dancing with lewd and whorish abandon on the side, but I wasn't picky- and the absolutely vile saccharine taste of the "lemonade" served as a welcome distraction as Buddy grabbed one arm in an unbreakable grip and started tweezing bits of gravel out of my flesh.

I took it stoically; weeping but a little while Carl sat on the couch next to me, patting my hair, and my bare shoulders. She seemed almost as upset as I did. She was as upset with a particlarly painful bit caused me to whimper like a beaten child and grip her offered hand hard enough to cause the tiny bones to grind together.

Her carrying on was a damn joy compared to Buddy, though, who seemed against all evidence to have a brain tucked up in that thick skull of his, and he'd clearly marked me as "Suspicious."

Some of his questions were easy enough to fence off. Some of them weren't. Where was I from? Err, that one drew a blank, until Carl said that she thought I sounded British, so I said yes, with emphatic nods, I was most certainly a British. Whatever the bloody flipping hell that meant. When did I get into town? Just today, I answered truthfully, thinking lies would only complicate things. I was wrong, since his next question was how did you get to Morganfield, brigand, since the nearest international airport is close to six hours drive away?

I am an accomplished liar; of course. Ask any number of young ladies who never doubted for a moment the veracity of my assurances of respect come morning light. However, I had no magic, Buddy had my wrist in one gargantuan paw and it felt like he could snap the bones by a desire to see me sweat a little.

"I, uh," I stammered "I took. Um. What is the word-"

"A taxi?" Carl chimed in brightly, and I almost kissed her. Would have, too, if Buddy hadn't taken that as an opportunity to drive his tweezers bone-deep into the flesh of my arm.

"Yes, a taxi, a taxi cab," I said.

"That must have cost several hundred dollars," Buddy observed neutrally.

Oh bloody balls.

"Yes, well, easy come, easy go," I said with a nervous chuckle "I'm uh, staying with friends in town," I said, suddenly inspired "I have their address written down..."

"Here?" Carl asked, instantly producing my father's note. I winced as she looked at it, deeply confused.

"I can't read this."

Since it was written in High Atlantean, I'd have been pretty surprised if she could; nonethless I made a grab for the note. Buddy, of course, got it first, by expedient of having arms as long as my entire body.

"Well he IS from England," Carl said reasonably "It's probably written in British."

That comment seemed to pain Buddy somewhat; so I held off on affirming that the note was written, of course, in British, native tongue of my proud homeland of Englandia or wherever the hell.


"Crap, what are these, hieroglyphics?" he waved the paper in my face. I was instantly outraged; to be compared, nay, even linked in his mind to those double-crossing, murderous, mummy-worshipping sand beetles was an offense of the greatest calibur, for which my father would gladly incinerate him and all his issue without a pause for reflection. I am an aristocrat of Atlantis-in-Exile, it was perched on the tip of my tongue to say.

My righteous tirade was interrupted by the door opening, and Carl calling cheerfully "hey Isabelle!"

Even Buddy's face softened somewhat; he gestured with his head towards the newcomer and said "My sister, Isabelle," in much the same tone one would say "and these are the Crown Jewels."

Good god, was this Buddy's sister? Were their parents cousins? Siblings perhaps?

She was without a doubt the most hopeless specimen of womanhood I had ever seen since the open-casket funeral of Great-Grandmother Ethelred when I was five; and great-grandma had the excuse of being close to two hundred and seventy. Her hair was lank and dark and hid most of her face; enormous spectacles distracted the viewer from the color or even the existence of her eyes, and she had, apparently, dressed that morning by drapping her body in as many formless layers of burlap as she could, in shades of moth-brown and coal-black. She was sort of narrower in the middle, an approximation of womanly curves that on her resembled an overstuffed bag of beans with a belt cinched tight around the middle.

She was also, much to my surprise, glowing. My magical senses had not been deadened, I realized belatedly, and to my inner sight she was surrounded by a searing-bright and luminous aurora of shifting colors and lights, beggining as a vague turqouise near her distressingly oily skin and turning into a brilliant mantle of wickering and incandescent flame that surrounded her like the corona of a star. She, of all people, was a wizard. Untaught, oblivious, and clearly something of a mess; but she was, by the size of her aura and the light I could see burning behind her muddy eyes, the most powerful untrained wizard I had ever seen. She had absolutely, absolutely no right to be here.

She looked at me for a long, long moment. What was going on in her head I couldn't possibly have said; she didn't seem at all distressed by the presence of a half-naked, bleeding man in her living room. Considering her brother, it might not be that unusual. And, I realized, there was absolutely no way she couldn't recognize me for what I was. I instantly broke into a cold sweat under the blurry bespectacled blowtorch of her gaze. The jig was almost certainly up. She knew me as I knew her. I saw her eyes go wide.

"Who the hell is this asshole?" she asked, more or less conversationally, as she turned abruptly and walked to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.