by Jae Vogel
But I no longer cared. It was too long and I’d spent too much time doing the same job, as I said. After a while, you get sick and tired of the palace and all the elementals that wait on you. You just want to move into a different direction and find some place to retire. They don’t like to talk about retirement because there is no lifespan for us. They talk about better opportunities once the market expands, but really, there is only one Earth and our skill sets just don’t transfer well to other planets. I had a young girl I loved and she loved me so it was time to move on.
After ten years of pleading, I was able to get the paperwork approved. I took a special trip all the way back to Mt. Olympus and Zeus was waiting for me in his office. He tried to get me to change my mind, but Salacia was already waiting for me down at the bottom of the mountain where the cable car elevator begins. I took a cable car up because I felt it was time to get used to them. Couldn’t see any reason to make the air elementals fly me up to the central headquarters.
He reluctantly signed off the paperwork and I rode the cable car back down. I know he was angry after personally recommending me for the position, but I had enough. Too many long nights trying to find a place to put the manatees when their feeding grounds were interrupted. Too many years spent finding a place in Scotland for that big lake monster to hide. That one wasn’t even supposed to be under my jurisdiction, but the board decided since it was originally an ocean dweller, I had to take responsibility.
Anyway, by the time I was down at the bottom of the hill, we had everything resolved and I was fully mortal. I pricked my finger when I left the cable car just to prove it. I bled for the first time in over ten thousand years and was thrilled. I even showed my wound to Salacia. We went that night and found a little chapel where we said our vows. I had the license already, just needed to fill in the names part.
I thought everything would be fine. I had enough money saved where I didn’t have to work if I didn’t want to and we could enjoy our years in some nice dry land where the weather was good all year around. No more typhoons or hurricanes, I was sick of tending those.
But I noticed after the first twenty years that I was getting older and she wasn’t. I had given up my immortality because I didn’t want to see her age and now she was the one who didn’t get old. It didn’t make any sense. After another thirty passed, I was convinced it wasn’t because of her good genes, she really wasn’t aging. I confronted her about it one day and showed her the pictures through the years.
That was when Salacia confessed that she was an elemental worker. I was shocked because I can normally pick them out in a crowd from the funny sensations they give off. It was how I knew you had to be one when I walked past the bench. I can only surmise it had to do with her Atlantian origins. She was tuned differently and I never figured it out. Worse, she was a water elemental worker and we lived inland, far from the ocean. I never had the opportunity to see her do any elemental manipulation. We went to the nearest body of water and I saw some of the most amazing things from her. Water elementals walking on land but still made from liquid. Figures out of water, which rose from the lake. I’m sure she never had to worry about the ‘grandmaster’ status once the other elemental workers met her. She easily qualified.
But I had to go. I couldn’t take the knowledge that she would age so slow it would barely register. I know not all of you do this and I think it had to be because of her Atlantis origins. Still, it was too much for me and I made up a reason why I needed to go to sea. So I bought the charter boat and have been running tours ever since. It’s not hard to do if you’re mortal when you’ve been managing the seas for countless millennia. I’m back here because I know she needs checking up on and I have to make sure she’ll be fine even though this mall is over the entrance to the abyss. I learned about the reason for it being here from the guy who got the management job after me.
I was out on the boat one afternoon and a sea lion appeared out of nowhere. Sea lions don’t come up to the Jersey shore; they are native to the Antarctic regions. So once I saw the sea lion in the water, I knew there was something I had to deal with right away. I returned to the pier with the people who chartered the boat and told them there was engine trouble. They seemed to believe me, or at least they did after I refunded their money and apologized.
Once they were gone, I took the boat out and made excuses that I had to fix something again, had to test a motor, anything to get back to where I noticed the sea lion. I waited long enough and the sea lion surfaced right near the boat. As I expected, he’d been sent to see to me by Herk, the kid who took the job after me. It seemed Herk was at a regional meeting and heard a rumor about someone placing a building over the abyss. They didn’t know too much about the person who built it, other than he was an elemental worker with a very bad reputation. The word was out he had found a way to lure the local elemental grandmasters into his building somehow because he wanted control of them. The sea lion told me Herk knew I needed to be informed because one of them was my ex-wife. He knew I would want to look in on her and see if she needed anything.
And so here I am. It looks like we both have reasons for being here which are very similar.
“All we need is Ms. Delphi and it can be resolved, "Dion told him. He looked at his wristwatch. “She was supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago. I hope nothing has happened to her.”
“Probably not,” the captain replied. “She never was one for keeping her appointments. It amazes me she put together this little business empire with her bad sense of time.”
Dion turned to face the corridor and saw James returning with the elemental who’d left with him. He needed to think for a few seconds and remembered her name was Cynae. She was another blond who caused hearts to stop as she walked through the mall hand in hand with James. But James had a small bag in the other hand and was headed for the bench where Dion sat.
“How did she like the mall?” Dion asked James.
“Why don’t you ask her directly?” James said. Dion turned to Cynae and repeated the question.
“It’s nice,” she told him. “I don’t see why you make such a big deal out of shopping and looking for things. I see so many items sold here that are just different variations of the same thing. But if it makes James happy, I’ll come here with him every day.”
“But let me get to the point,” James said. He held up the bag and made sure Dion could see it. “I went over to your friend Hobbs’ store and told him we expected some trouble in the blue section of the mall, so he gave me this.”
“What is it this time?” Dion asked.
Hobbs was a small man who ran a special shop in the mall for people who looked for interesting art objects and needed things they couldn’t get anywhere else. He’d supplied Dion with the Seer stone, which made his map of the mall readable.
“See for yourself,” James said as he handed Dion the bag.
Dion opened the bag and pulled out a silver chalice. It was only three inches tall and didn’t appear to be very valuable. The silver on the surface was in a bad need to be polished and the tarnish on it was thick. He turned it over and tried to figure out where it was made. By the appearance, he assumed it to be from the nineteenth century in England. There was no silversmith or other manufacturer’s stamp on it.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Dion told his friend. “What’s it supposed to do?”
“It controls nymph elementals.”
“Naiads!” both Dirce and Cynae corrected him at the same time.
“Naiads, then. According to Hobbs, it can neutralize any malignant water elemental for a short time. You sit the cup down in front of them and they pour into it in liquid form. It won’t bind them for more than one hour, but it allows you to buy some time. You have a bad water elemental attack you and the cup can contain them inside it.”
James handed Dion a piece of paper. “Memorize the words on this. It activates the cup. You can’t use it without the words of power.”
Dion looked at t
he words for a few minutes, then folded the paper up and put it into his pocket. “Sumerian,” was all he could say. “Guess that explains the origin of the chalice.”
Dion swiftly introduced them to the captain. “I guess we’re all waiting for this Salacia lady,” James said. “Is there anything we can do in the meantime?”
“Not really,” Dion told him. “You might as well show Cynae the rest of the mall while we wait. Try to bring her up to speed on the world we live in. She’ll need to know. If you see any of the other chess club members and the, uhm, Naiads with them, advise everyone we’re still waiting on the pool owner and can’t go anywhere until she makes an appearance.”
James and Cynae walked back into the main mall, as they attracted attention from the other shoppers. Dion could only speculate about the kind of attention the other guys and their girlfriends were attracting. He was certain they would change the entire social scene at the high school once they returned from spring vacation.
“So far no sign of Karanzen or any of his thugs,” Dion said to the group. “I’m hoping this will be the one day we don’t have to put up with him.”
“Someone I should know about?” Captain Gabriel asked him. The captain remained standing. He knew Salacia would be here soon enough and wanted to be the first one to see her. Inside his heart, he missed her deeply and wished there was some way he could reconcile with her. But he would be an old man soon and she didn’t look much older than thirty, although she was well over two hundred years old. He wished at times that he’d never decided to renounce his immortality. Why hadn’t she told him she was an elemental worker when they first met?
“Officer Karanzen,” Dion told him. “He’s in charge of mall security. He has tried every day to keep me from reaching an elemental grandmaster. He’s not quite human anymore and thinks he can scare us with his little tricks. But he has security guards who work for him and you never know when they will get in the way. He tried to keep us from entering the mall this morning, but we entered with the water elementals when they mobbed the door. I haven’t seen him around since then, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“I’ll keep a watch for him,” the captain replied. “He won’t be able to do anything to me, even if I’m mortal. One of the advantages of being from the mountain is that we’re immune from any elemental action.”
James was busy talking his favorite subject over with Cynae: chess. She was listening intently to every world he said. Her light blond hair was over one shoulder as she leaned forward in her tracksuit to listen to him. James took a good half hour to describe his winning move at the last tournament where he played to her and she sat there transfixed on every word he said. This was a new experience to him.
Most of the time, the girls in school would look at their watch and find an excuse to leave if he tried to tell one of them about a game. It wasn’t as exciting as football or any other of the team sports the school pushed so hard. In fact, next year the chess club would be known as the chess ‘team’ and anyone who was a member would be able to get a letter for their jacket. They were even thinking of a name for the new team. The favored name was the ‘Kings’. It seemed to fit.
They sat in a small ice cream parlor, which was one of several in the mall. This one was part of a nation franchise. James remembered when it was a small place near his parents’ house where they would go on hot evenings in the summer. The line would grow long as the small town had few other places to go in the warmer months. Before the mall opened, if you wanted some adventure, you went downtown to Scipio.
“So you had him in a gambit and he didn’t even know?” Cynae asked him. “I would have taken out his rook a lot quicker than what you did, but you won the game, so it doesn’t matter.”
“How could you have taken out his rook?” he asked her. “He had it defended by the queen.”
“Oh, it’s not too hard if you plan ahead.” Cynae took the salt, peppershakers from the next table, and began to assemble a layout where she showed him how, with spoons and forks added, how easy it would have been to do it earlier. Every time he voiced an objection, she showed him a way it could be done even if his opponent had made some uncommon moves. By the end of an hour, he sat there stunned at her strategy and planning.
“You’ve played this game a lot,” he said to her.
“We all have,” she said. “Next to ‘go’, it’s popular with us.”
“You play go?” James asked. His ice cream had melted while he listened to Cynae and her descriptions of chess moves. Go was a game he knew a little bit about, just never had much of a chance to play.”
“Yes, we play it all the time on the rocks. You only need different colored stones to have a game and those are easy enough to find. I wish we had a board and I could play now.”
“I’m sure there would be a way we could sketch one out,” he told her.
Just that instant, James noticed three women enter the ice cream parlor. There was something strange about them, but he tried not to pay much attention to the trio. Each wore some kind of uniform and appeared to be searching for something. Ten seconds later their eyes and Cynae’s locked together as they made contact. Nothing was said, but James saw the anger build in Cynae’s face as she watched the trio walk over to them.
Chapter 11
“What do we have here?” the first said to the one next to her. “I think their profile matches the shoplifters we’ve been after the past two months.”
“Yes it does,” the second answered. “Guess you two kids will need to come with us.”
James noticed the name of the security company on their uniforms, which the mall employed to guard the place. It was the same one Karanzen and his men officially worked for in the mall. Dion lacked the opportunity to tell James about the security chief and why he wanted him out of the mall. They all appeared to be in their thirties and wore silver badges over their uniforms. Each had their black hair tied back. They wore dresses with their uniforms and high heels. The heels were a giveaway something was wrong with them, but James had no way to know about it.
“You have a lot of guts coming in here and acting this way,” Cynae said to the women in front of her. “If we were back on my rock the twelve of us would take care of you quick.”
“But you’re not on the rock or in your cave,” the second of the uniformed women said to her. “You’re some place where your powers have less effect. Furthermore, you sisters are wondering around with humans they’ve glamoured. Just like you put one on this young man. Since it works both ways, you have attraction to him as well. So why don’t you just shut up and come with us?”
“Do you know these women?” James said to Cynae. He had no idea what she talked about, but ever since meeting her this afternoon, his world was disrupted.
“I know who they are,” she said. Cynae turned back to the women. “All I have to do is release him and I can concentrate fully on you three.”
“You might be able to do that,” the first woman said. “But then what happens to your young man? He can’t stand up to us and we still outnumber you three to one.”
“You wouldn’t dream of hurting him in this place.”
“Would we? We work for the man who built it. I think he’s willing to do a lot so that we can carry our mission. So if you really want to free this young man, go ahead and see what happens. But you might want to consider the possibility what we will do.
While James stood there confused, Cynae resigned herself to leaving with them. There wasn’t much else she could do at this point. They had her exactly where she was the most vulnerable.
“Let’s go,” she said to James. They left the ice cream parlor with the three new water elementals disguised as security guards.
Floating around the top of the ice cream parlor was a small air elemental sylph. She had accidently blown into the blue water part of the mall earlier that day when a door opened on the outside and a rush of people sent her in with them. She wanted to get out and back into the fresh air wh
ere she could spend the day playing in the air currents. She’d been unnoticed by the water elementals down on the ground. Just as she thought it was time to leave and not attract attention, since she wasn’t supposed to be in this part of the mall, the sylph spotted the confrontation between James, Cynae, and the three uniformed elementals. She recognized him as part of the elemental worker’s group who was over in the hall.
It occurred to her she might be able to trade some favors for this bit of information. As soon as the door opened again to the parlor, she shot out into the main concourse of the mall in search of Dion. No one noticed her leave, other than another chess club guy and his elemental girlfriends. The elemental looked up and wondered why an air sylph was in the water part of the mall and why was it in such a hurry to get out. But she said nothing as her boyfriend was babbling about comic books and she was eager to learn more from him.
“Have you seen any of the chess club guys?” Dion spoke a few minutes later. “I know they’re wandering around the mall with their new girlfriends, but I thought some of them would have returned by now.”
“Not a one,” Dennis spoke. He was still in heaven with his elemental girl as they cuddled on the bench. Dion began to feel like a chaperone at a dance when he noticed Sean and Emily in their own state of nirvana. He felt something from behind and turned to see Lilly starring at him with her big brown eyes. What was it that these elemental possessed which caused such bliss to break out among people? Even the shoppers walking down the corridor started to make contact as they passed them. Husbands and wives who’s entered the mall angry at each other where touching for the first time in years.