Chapter 124 – Meanwhile

  “Still weird to me that some things work on other worlds and others don’t while we are all interconnected and cultures tend to bleed over. Like how I might see someone wearing a North Face jacket on a world that uses oil lamps for lighting homes.” – Kurt.

  “Thank you all for coming.” Jay said as Kurt and the girls filed into the conference room under the security company office he owned. He was already sitting at the head of the table and had his laptop open and a slide showing on the wall mounted TV.

  Kurt flopped into a seat, Kristi and Val taking the ones next to him. “You say that like we had a choice.”

  “To be clear, you did have a choice. But that particular choice would also have consequences.” Penny said as she strolled in carrying a bag and several coffee cups showing the logo of the Caffeinated Captain. “But at least we are catering this event for you since it’s so early.” She then set the coffee and bag of breakfast sandwiches on the table for everyone to dig in.

  Val took a sip of her latte and made a little satisfied grunting noise. “Well, it also helps when you are sleeping with one of the owners of the coffee shop. I bet you extort little favors out of him all the time.”

  “The way I hear it, it’s Jamie who has her wrapped around his finger.” Kristi added while unwrapping her breakfast sandwich.

  “I don’t think it’s his finger she is wrapped around.” Val sang while smiling mischievously, her tails thrashing behind her in excitement.

  Penny, who had long come to expect Val’s behavior, was not prepared for the comment and seamless setup that Kristi provided. Her face turned a bright red, the flush reaching all the way to her ears as she spluttered, trying to formulate a response. Fortunately for the naga, Jay came to the rescue… kinda.

  “What or who Penny chooses to wrap her coils around is none of our business.” The manager began, arranging his coffee and chocolate croissant near his laptop. “We need to talk about what happened last week.”

  “You mean the rift situation?” Kurt asked.

  “Well, yes but there is more.” Jay said then clicked his mouse, showing a new slide. The slide showed a color drawing of a small townhouse style building amidst several others that were nearly identical. They all looked similar other than the colors and signs hanging from the street level store fronts. “Sorry but we don’t have a photograph of this since it’s on one of the worlds that work a little differently than Earth.”

  “This is the public Order Stabilitas building on Talth, in the city of Haliguard. On Thursday of last week, two days after your rift closure, it was attacked by the enchanter’s guild.” Jay began to explain as he clicked to the next slide to show an overhead map that was very finely drawn, but still hand drawn.

  “The attack was sudden and with no forewarning. They initiated with a spell ritual aimed at the front of the building. While the structure held, the wards were broken and the building sustained cosmetic damage.” Jay was reading from his laptop as he clicked the slide and a red arrow appeared on the map. “Our initial suspicion is that the ritual was meant to break any barriers or enchantments that were on the building. From there, an overwhelming force pressed the attack and pushed into the building.”

  Kurt raised his hand and Jay pointed to him. “Why? If they had a ritual that could cause enough localized damage to break the wards and shielding enchantments, couldn’t they have a second one to just destroy the building?”

  “Good question.” Jay said, having taken the opportunity to have a bite of his pastry. “We think they wanted to capture the people inside. Our observers and the survivors reported that they used a slew of non-lethal spells and devices meant to incapacitate. That is what leads us to think capture was the goal, but we don’t know any more than that.”

  Seeing as there weren’t any more questions, he continued. “Our personnel within the building were mostly able to escape, using the standard escape tunnel beneath the building to get back to the Order safehouses. We suffered two deaths, one of whom was defending the hallway to the stairs and another who armed the failsafe ritual. Neither got out before the failsafe went off.”

  Jay opened a video file that showed a house sitting in one of the multi-purpose training areas of the Order. It looked like a rather cozy cottage, probably three or four rooms and made of stone and wood with a tile roof. The only odd thing was the complete lack of one wall. It looked like a child’s doll house just scaled up to full size. “Before you pester me about it, this is the failsafe in question.”

  Then the video played. From within the house, near the center of the building, there was a small pop of light, like a camera flash. From that same spot there was a bubble of monochrome that swept out, stealing all the color from everything it touched. Then, everything within that bubble suddenly went black. Not just any black, but completely devoid of light or color, like everything was suddenly painted in radar absorbent paint. When the blackness dissolved like TV static suddenly resolving into a clear picture, leaving only a shell of a house missing a thirty-foot diameter sphere from the center.

  “That was the failsafe that we developed and installed into all Order property outside of the main pocket realm. It is essentially an extra-planar teleport in which everything within the bubble is forcibly transported to the deep void where its compacted, crushed and turned into pure mana before bleeding back through the barriers between realms.”

  “T-that’s ah… nice?” Kurt hedged.

  “Thanks! Made it myself with the help of one of our trap masters, Skalnia.” Jay said, completely ignoring the nervous looks Kurt and his team were sharing. “Anyway, they hit the public building but missed the secret ones.” He clicked to the next slide.

  It was another picture, much like the first, this time it showed a pile of rubble. It was a small pile of rubble, mostly of the roof and nothing more since the failsafe took the rest. Surprisingly the neighboring buildings were untouched except from where falling debris had bounced into them.

  “The remains of the assault force searched the building for a few moments before leaving a note.” Jay said.

  “They left a note?” Asked Val. She sounded equal parts surprised and amused.

  Jay waggled his hand. “In a way. They posted a sign with a note-slash-warning, saying it was in retaliation for what happened with their branch in the Order and that they are declaring war, etcetera-etcetera. Pretty much scare tactics to try and impress the locals.”

  Kristi had finished her third breakfast burrito and had just finished her coffee as Jay finished when she raised her hand. “Why Talth? It seems a little too coincidental that they attack the world I am from.” Kurt noted she didn’t say ‘home’ when referencing her home world.

  “We think it is because they know you are from there and that you played a major role in the raid.” Jay answered. “This is likely as close as they could get to retaliating against your team directly. They have little presence in the United States, or even Earth, and they wouldn’t dare attack At’valheim, where Val is from.”

  “Huh, probably didn’t dare try something closer to Libermount either.” Kristi said with a snort.

  “Eh, the Order doesn’t have anything easily attacked outside this one city and it’s not even the capital of the nation. It was an ‘easy’ target despite them losing nearly two dozen people in this attack.” Jay replied. “Remember that they are mad at us since we sanctioned the raid.”

  Val spoke up next, having waited long enough to ask her question. “Why are you telling us?”

  Jay smiled in that way that was beyond unsettling. “Because, dear Val, I wanted to show you that your actions have real consequences. Yes, I green lit the raid and got the Order to sanction it, but your team was the driving force. You guys killed dozens of people and uncovered their little plot.”

  “But…” Val began to interject yet was cut off.

  “And I am extremely proud of you. Honestly very well done and great work all around.” Jay interrupted her smoothly in a tone that said it was plainly obvious. “All that aside, we have another issue to deal with before we take this show on the road to Talth for the next part of my plans.”

  “Wait, we are going to Talth?” Kristi asked, suddenly looking a little nervous.

  “Yes, but not right now. We, and I mean you, have some more work to do here on Earth first.” Jay then pointed to Kurt. “And you will need to do some enchanting to get ready for that particular trip. If you haven’t figured it out by the time we are ready, I will tell you about it.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Oooookay.” Kurt was confused, he thought his job description was mostly doing things on Earth, more specifically from his home. “So, what is the other thing we need to deal with here?

  “This dickhead!” Jay declared then clicked to the next slide and a picture appeared.

  In the slide was a photo taken at extreme range. It was a little grainy, but it showed a man of middling height wearing a brown jacket and jeans. His face was on the plain side, and his hair was a dark brown with little bits of grey showing at his temples. The caption at the bottom of the picture read: Mr. ‘X’ Aka Shit-bag Supreme.

  “Shit-bag Supreme?” Kurt asked.

  “Oh, sorry. Let me fix that.” Jay said and quickly began typing. The caption changed in real time to Mr. ‘X’ Aka Lead Keeper (Keeper of the Black Feast). “Sorry, left my personal notes up there.”

  The way Penny snorted gave Kurt the impression that this was common for his boss and that many people had ‘charming’ nicknames.

  Still, Kurt asked an actual follow up question. “Why are we interested in mister X?”

  “Because his organization are the ones that have been messing with rifts, summoning monsters and funding local extremists.” Jay answered then clicked to his next slide.

  The new slide showed a series of images with little notes next to them. They seemed to be mostly lists of transactions and phone calls made by Mr. X to and from his associates. Each one included a tag linked to a particular type of action as well.

  There were tags for summoning, lobbying, payoffs, harassment, public attacks, abductions and more. Each one was linked to a series of bank accounts, phone numbers and companies that were all listed under a section of ‘known aliases’ according to the label on the box.

  Jay went to the next slide and showed several images, some mug shots and some security camera stills. Each one of the images had the crime that was committed along with a series of dates, transactions or meetings that lead up to the event. All of those were compiled into a few organizations that were then linked to each other on the next slide.

  Slide after slide went by, each one showing the summarized ‘proof’ that much of the anti-para crime and unrest was organized and orchestrated by one entity. There were even slides showing that various para organizations similar to the Order were being directly targeted. All this went into one question, the very important one that was the ingrained into people to ask.

  “Why?” Val asked as Jay flipped through the slides.

  “That is a great question, and it ties into the rift that went tits up last week.” Jay said then frowned. “No offense to the ladies, naturally.”

  Kristi snorted in amusement as she leaned back in her chair. “None taken. But still, why is this X guy doing it or organizing it?”

  Jay pulled up another presentation on his laptop. This one looked to be made by him, judging by the lack of Order Stabilitas watermarks on it. “It’s his cult. They are one of the actually bad cults, the kind that give other, perfectly nice and reasonable, cults a bad name. To be clear on the type of bad, this isn’t Kool-Aid time bad, it’s ‘let’s end the world’ bad.”

  Penny suddenly stood and walked to the door, opening it and leaning out. Kurt heard a faint. “Thanks hon.” Before she reentered and shut the door behind her while holding a tray of fresh coffee. She passed them out as Jay continued with his presentation.

  “These ‘keepers’, as they refer to each other, have been having some success with summoning. It started several years ago, before the veil broke. Random beings from other planes of existence started popping up randomly, summoned by cultists and being forced to fight or flee.

  “Naturally when you have angels, demons, monsters, devils and fey popping into Earth randomly, it gets some attention. That’s where I first came along, investigating these happenings in the States, among other things, for the Order. Then one of their side projects ended up bearing fruit and this world was exposed to our side of things in a very dramatic way.”

  “Dramatic is a nice way to sum up literal witch hunts and innocent people being killed because they looked different.” Kurt said, still bitter about how shitty things had been for a lot of good people.

  Jay stared at him for a moment. “Yes, indeed it is.”

  There was a tension that began to fill the room until Val came to the rescue, placing a hand on Kurts’. “Wording aside, there is nothing we can do for those people now.” She then looked at Jay. “So, these keepers are confirmed as responsible for breaking the veil?”

  Taking the out, the demon continued with his briefing. “Yes, completely confirmed. Those records you seized in the raids on those covens helped us immensely in finding not only evidence that there was another organization pulling strings but also proof.” He then smirked a bit, clearly amused. “We also discovered they are not the only group causing trouble.”

  Kurt raised his hand, catching Jays attention so he could ask a question when he paused. “Other groups that want the world to end?”

  “Not quite, but I promise they are equally delusional. It’s the group that tried to get you in the early days when your wards weren’t up yet.” He clicked through several slides until he found the one he was after. “There is a religious organization loosely based on some universal religious ideology that is always taken to the extreme. They refer to themselves as ‘templars’. Now I assure you, we have reached out to the actual Templars and they had no idea you existed.”

  “You asked religious fanatics about me?” Kurt was stunned by the stupidity if that were the case.

  Rolling his eyes, Jay shook his head. “No, the Templars are not religious fanatics, just financial fanatics.”

  “I thought they were a super devout order or knights or something?” Asked Kurt.

  “Ah, yeah they had that, but it was mostly a side gig to their banking system.” Jay answered. “That’s why we were confused as to why they would send people after you.”

  “Then who was it?” This time it was Val pressing for details. She had been there for both attacks and felt personally involved despite their target being Kurt.

  “Modern offshoots of several religions.” Jay answered in a very bored tone. Apparently, this wasn’t a new concept to him. “The first is an extremist group based out of eastern Europe with ties to several extremist organizations in the middle east. The second set was actually domestic, being the byproduct of several small extremist congregations. Either way, they were given the information by X and his associates stemming from a leak in the Order. One that I personally fixed.”

  Groaning, Kurt rubbed at his temples. “Ugh, why does it have to be them?” He muttered. “Bunch of fucking smooth brained idiots that can’t think past ‘non-human bad’. Bunch of fucking cunts that make the normal Christians look bad.”

  Seeing how everyone was looking at him, Kurt elaborated. “Worked with a bunch of them at one point. They were nice guys, your best friends even, until the veil broke and my ex outed me to everyone. Then I was nearly lynched in the parking lot of my job before I was fired.”

  “What in the hells is wrong with people?” Penny gasped.

  “Heh, jokes on them.” Kurt laughed off the concerned looks. “I easily won a lawsuit against them a couple years later. Didn’t even go to trial and they settled out of court for enough to buy my property and house. Wrongful termination and discrimination case was irrefutable with the emails and letters they sent me. That and a bunch of other laws they broke. I wonder what happened to that company though.”

  “They went out of business after having to pay you and three other employees with similar circumstances.” Jay informed him. That information was news to Kurt since he had cut ties with nearly everyone when he moved north and his disdain for social media made it even harder for him to keep up on things.

  The rest of the meeting was essentially Jay making a wish list for his near future goals and telling them some of his plans. For the most part, it would be business as usual until they caught a lead on X and his associates but there would be a few more group events with the rest of Jays’ teams.

  He told them a little about his latest team leader and the people he had picked up. Apparently, he was a elf and halfling mix with an affinity for wind magic and rituals. Jay said he was a bit rough around the edges which was code for ‘kind of a dick’. He came with an additional agent, some dryad and sylph hybrid who had been friends with him for a while.

  Unfortunately for them, they didn’t have any combat experience beyond some very basic firearms knowledge and magic. Unfortunately for Kurt, that meant they needed a trainer.

  “Listen, I am not saying they need to know how to set up a MG nest and make a sector sketch. I just want you to get them some training in firearms that extends past the four fundamental rules.” Jay sighed. He pinched the bridge of his nose as he explained it. “Actually, they might need those too. Hillbilly’s wouldn’t be too far from an apt description.”

  “Kurt, just do it.” Kristi said while twirling her empty coffee cup around on the table. “You can even help Anna get squared away too.”

  “Oh! While you are there, maybe help show the Order what weapons and accessories they should be using?” Penny chimed in. “I know you said we were… what was it you said again?”

  “He said that the cold war called and wants its equipment back.” Val provided in a rather chipper voice.

  “Yeah, whatever that means.” Penny said, ignoring the chuckle from Jay.

  Looking between his boss and his girlfriends, Kurt finally relented. “Fine, but Renee gets the contract if she wants it.” He figured he could help out a friend as long as he was being peer pressured into being an instructor again.

  “Deal.” Jay agreed, far too quickly for his taste. “I will get something set up soon.”

  Penny began tapping on her tablet. “That means that Kevin will reach out to me.” She muttered under her breath.

  Jay rolled his eyes and shut his laptop. “Anything else? No?” He asked looking around. “Alright I’m done then. What did you have next on your list?”

  “Maintenance.” Kurt grunted. “Fixing some plumbing for the coffee shop.”

  “Then doing some plumbing in my apartment bathroom for your Christmas gift.” Penny quickly added while showing her tablet screen and the calendar on it. She had the next few days bracketed as ‘new bathroom’ among other things listed out.

  “Then you are going to be laying some my favorite pipe after dinner.” Val piled on with a licentious grin.

  “VAL!” Kristi said, swatting her on the back of the head. To her amazement, her hand passed right through, dispelling the illusion and showing the Kitsune leaning to the side, easily avoiding the smack.

  “HA! Missed meEE! Oof. Ooooowww.” Val began to say before she was knocked flat by Kristi’s tail suddenly sweeping the chair out from under her and leaving her groaning on the floor.

  It was naturally just Val being dramatic, but Kurt was beginning to wonder if she was doing it on purpose or if it was more of her nature coming to the surface. She was getting more and more bold with talking about their sex life around others.

  “Anyway.” Kurt said, standing and summoning his tool bag. “I better get started before Jamie needs the sink in the kitchen again.”

  With that, the group split up, everyone going separate directions. Penny followed Jay through the portal back to the Order while Kristi and Val went to chat with Hannah up in the store front office. Kurt took the back way to the coffee shop, going through the back hall and up the stairs to emerge near the bathrooms of the neighboring unit.

  He was actually looking forward to just doing some manual labor. He had missed having projects since finishing his house and missed the semi trance like state he would enter when focusing on his work. Kurt was also hoping to catch up with the kids, seeing as he hadn’t seen much of them recently and had promised Don and Leslie to check in on them.