13. Rescue Team- Day 1
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And we finally have a break from Kai's perspective to see what the rest of TOAL is up to! I plan to publish these a little more often as we continue forward and Kai's schedule becomes better known to both him and you, the readers. Eventually, I plan to have him pulled into TOAL's more pressing business as they soon become relevant to him while still keeping the same slice-of-life attitude (but with plenty of high-octane, high-fantasy adventure). But in the meantime, enjoy!

Also, thank you to whoever left a rating! If you don't want to type out the required text for the massive review, or want to wait around for a bit more content before you leave a rating, I'd most appreciate a comment on your thoughts, or what you want to see more of! Seriously, I will listen to you and probably incorporate it into the story some way or another. Either as a major (or minor) story arc, a chapter exploring the concept, or even an entire dialogue that addresses the issue! (I'm already doing so based on a a suggestion by PaulTB on royalroad). You know, I should probably start crediting my commenters for the good ideas, that might encourage more.

 

  World Gi-385. A land where tyranny and suffering held the populace in its wretched, iron grip. Greedy kings fought over scraps of land, letting their citizens suffer as the price they were all too willing to pay to stroke their own egos. Such a World would have been left very much alone, the strife its people created for themselves regarded as nothing but their sole responsibility.

  But one day, a pair of monarchs changed their fate when they found something new to exploit. Something that wasn’t theirs, something that was never theirs to begin with. When one plays with fire, they get burned. When one steals away children, the police come knocking.

  And knock, they did.

 

  Situated on a mountainside clearing, a two acre space of flat land was cleared of vegetation and cordoned off with a chain link fence and barbed wire, a series of imposing gray concrete towers erected along its perimeter. Binocular-wielding guards and dedicated snipers manned each elevated platform, keeping constant vigil of the surrounding lands. Under their watchful aegis were a series of tents that housed the bulk of TOAL’s agents who had come here to rescue some of their own.

  In the second largest of the tents, several men and women paced around the roughly paved floor, somehow managing to kick up dirt in their frantic movements that stained their black boots a dark shade of brown.

  “Alright, people!” shouted Abhi, dressed in a pair of military fatigues like the others around him despite his lack of any actual combat experience, albeit in a paler shade of camouflage green. He was just the resident runic researcher, after all. “Final checklist before we start the scanner!”

  “Base is clear of any possible magical interference,” replied a bespectacled woman with black hair tied in twin braids. She wore a similar set of fatigues and held both a clipboard and walkie-talkie in her hands. “And our snipers say the surrounding landscape is clear as well.”

  “Good. Arla, any local forms of magic we might’ve missed?”

  “No, sir!” replied the newcomer with a salute. Rather than the standardized set of camo, she wore flowing blue robes with a small placard on her left breast that clarified her identity as TOAL’s guest. “I’ve accounted for all known forms of magic used by the Valenloft Kingdom and the enemies’. None of them should interfere with rune magic! Elemental evocation, divination, and body morphing, to name a few.”

  “And Skills?” asked Abhi. “Do their magical signatures create any interference?”

  “Skills have magical signatures?” she asked in surprise.

  “Where do you think they come from?” asked the other woman with a disapproving look. “Thin air?”

  “…Yes?”

  The two scientists let out a sigh, causing their local arcane consultant to blush and try to hide the lower half of her face behind her hood.

  Abhi quickly recovered to console her, however. “Don’t worry about it, I’ve never seen a Skill that interfered with rune magic before. It just seems to transcend Systems like that.”

  Arla nodded in response, content that her mistake didn’t make her look too bad in front of her brand new employers. After defecting from King Reginald III and leaving his services as the Valenloft Kingdom’s court mage, Arla began assisting the scientists of the Terran Otherworldly Advocacy League in their quest to find the other set of children who had been summoned by King Reginald’s current enemy.

  She didn’t feel any particular remorse for her decision. She didn’t even feel any remorse for doing such a sub-par job for her newfound employers, either! Her act of childlike embarrassment was simply for Abhi’s benefit; he was much softer on her and willing to share his arcane secrets when she played the part of a cowed native, in complete contrast to the Kingdom’s soldiers. She was quite surprised when she got to see this characteristic for herself on someone so high-ranking, but chose not to look her gift horse in the mouth. Not until she’d heard everything it had to teach her.

  All her life had been devoted to learning as much as she could about magic, to become the most powerful mage Valenloft- no, the world had ever seen! She had plenty of time to scour the Kingdom’s arcane archives and achieve the greatest heights they would allow her to, but it appeared that they had finally plateaued.

  And through the divine providence of Allivaine herself, she was granted a new opportunity to expand her knowledge even further! What new heights could she achieve with such an unassuming teacher who didn’t even realize he was inadvertently grooming the woman who would become the greatest mage to ever live?!

 

  “So, Abhi,” said Arla with a curious smile, shuffling up to the Indian man who was now busy fiddling with a series of dials on a large machine. “What is this thing? And how will it help find your lost soldiers?”

  “Magical scanner,” tersely replied Abhi. “And we’re looking for kids, not soldiers.”

  “Right, sorry,” said Arla with another apologetic nod. “How does it work? Divination magic? And how did you take into account the interference from pre-existing divinations?”

  “That’s right,” replied the researcher, not bothering to look up from his work. “Because of existing divinations, we’ve reduced the complexity of the actual spell drastically. So we’ll be limiting the base range and complexity of the query to a few square yards and 20 milli-tingles.”

  “Milli-what?” she asked, honestly perplexed. “And how are you going to search the entire continent with a spell like that?!” Was she being taken for a fool? “Just what are you playing at?” she asked angrily.

  Abhi mostly ignored the outburst and completed a final set of dial tuning before pressing a big, red button and finally turning around to regard his guest. “You know the basics of divination magic, right?”

  “Of course!” she huffed. “You pose a question, offer multiple choices, and you get an answer for each choice from the Ether based on how well you cast the spell and how much magic you poured into it. A better spell means you can ask more choices and get easier to read answers!”

  “Pretty simple way of putting it,” he replied nonchalantly. “And the ‘answer’ you get is a kind of tingling sensation, right?”

  “That sensation has a name, the Reginalds. Since King Reginald is always correct, the correctness of a choice dictated by the spell is named after him.”

  “Pfft,” laughed Abhi. “That sounds stupid! We just call them the tinglies. Well, I call them that. Our official name is just tingles. And a single tingle is essentially a light full body sensation. So 20 milli-tingles is about 2% of that, a bare pulse on a couple of nerves.”

  “2%?!” Arla exclaimed. “No human being can feel that! How will you get anything from such a spell?!”

  “That’s why a human being isn’t going to be feeling it,” corrected Abhi, waving his right index finger in the air. “You are aware of automatic spellcasting, correct? Especially with divination magic?”

  “Of course,” she huffed again. “I designed my very own automatic divination spell to allow for the easy searching of scrolls and tomes based on the patron’s query in the Valenloft royal library! They don’t even have to be a magic user in their own right to make use of it! I made sure the outputted Reginalds… I mean tingles, where high enough for anyone to make sense of.”

  “Have you ever considered passing the output of the spell to something other than another person?”

  “What would be the point of that? An object can’t feel, and even then, it can't tell anyone how successful a choice is. That is, if it even could discern between choices at that.”

  “Well then,” smiled Abhi. “What if I told you that this device, this object, could do all of the above?”

  “H-how?” Arla stuttered, eyes wide. “And all of them?”

  “It’s simple! First, we cultured some nerve cells and stuck it to an electrode to measure electrical activity.”

  “Cells? Electrical? You mean like lightning…”

  “Pretty much, but at a microscopic scale. Maybe I’ll get you a biology textbook later for you to read up on cells, but they’re pretty much the smallest unit of life that make up plants and animals and such.”

  Arla nodded along. “So you took part of a person and found a way to measure how it feels? What happens to the person it’s made out of? Do they survive the procedure so you can get more?”

  “What? Nah, we just take a skin sample, they’re perfectly fine afterwards,” replied Ahbi, not really catching what Arla was implying. “But everything else you said pretty much sums it up.”

  “Alright, so how do you deal with the other issues?”

  “So the electrode can pick up on incredibly small tingles, so 20 milli isn’t that hard to detect. After that, we just pass in a single choice at a time, so there’s no need to have the nerves go ‘looking’. We tell it what to look at!”

  “Interesting…” she replied, nodding her head. “And the range? You’ll be limited to only a few yards around this device to query if you use such a weak spell. How will you search an entire continent?”

  “Right,” Abhi nodded back. “Rune magic has more uses than ripping a hole across Worlds. They can also rip holes across space in a single World, and if the hole is small and temporary enough, it doesn’t even cost that many resources!”

  “The archives mentioned something about that, but most of my focus was on understanding the summoning spell first and foremost, so I didn’t have time to look into alternative uses.”

  “No problem, luckily we have a pretty good grasp on the subject, so we don’t need you for that.”

  Arla raised her eyebrows at his reply. Perhaps they were even more intelligent and powerful than she had originally thought? She’d have to get her hands on that information for herself!

  “Anyway, we just open a large number of those tiny holes all over the continent and cast the weakest divination spell we can manage for that duration, getting a relatively accurate answer for each check! So anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours, we should have an answer as to where the kids are.”

  “Wow. Then what kind of question are you asking? Do you have enough details about these children to narrow it down enough to make the spell more easily castable?”

  “Regrettably, no,” frowned Abhi. “So instead, we’ll look for traces of the rune magic that summoned them in the first place. It won’t linger on any of the ritual’s casters, but it has a tendency to stick onto anyone who was summoned. And that’ll be our ticket.” He turned back to the rest of the tent and addressed them in a half-shout. “Alright, everyone! The machine’s running, and once it’s done, let’s save some lives!”

  The rest of the tent cheered along with him. Arla raised an uneasy fist into the air along with several of the more confident others.

  The twin-braided scientist gave her a look at the halfhearted response. “Something wrong?” she asked, eyeing their guest. “I bet our motivations are a stretch from Reggie’s.”

  “They are,” she replied hesitantly. “But that’s not what has me worried. King Reginald is not one to take an insult sitting down, and everything you’ve done since you arrived has been nothing but an insult to him.”

  “We have enough soldiers and resources of our own to rout an army even if he does try to visit,” replied the woman with a confident smile. “And someone as hot headed as Reggie would’ve launched an attack by now.”

  “That’s what I’m scared of,” sighed Arla. “When he’s really upset, he doesn’t rush into things. His fury turns cold and focused. If he isn’t attacking us now, then he’s planning something terrible. I can’t dare to even imagine what he has in store for us…”

  “Whatever it is, we have contingencies in place,” replied the woman with a reassuring smile. “And besides, we have our ways to keep him distracted.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Arla with fearful eyes. “By Allivaine’s grace, I hope you’re right.”

 


 

  Rain poured from the skies in a torrent of bullet-sized drops over the city of Lluthcaster. The roar of falling water over the cobblestone streets was more than enough to scare even the most hardened traveller away to the safe comforts of an overhead roof, roaring fire, and a bowl of hot barley soup.

  Somehow, the one cloaked figure making their way through the streets was unaware of what they supposedly should’ve been doing, too focused on the road ahead of them. Water pelted the simple oil-treated fabric they wore for protection, squeezing through the many gaps where the cloak overlapped with itself, soaking its owner cold all the way down to the bone.

  “Dammit Khethiwe, sending me out in the rain like this,” grumbled the lone traveller as they held their cloak with an iron grip that might as well have been rusted. “I swear, I’m going to spend half of our operational budget on booze after this is all over, just out of spite!”

  Eventually the lone wanderer arrived at their destination and relaxed their eroding grip as they finally made their way inside. A large tavern situated in the middle of the seedier part of the city stood tall surrounded by smaller shacks and tenements, its rotting wood panels covered in faded paint hinting at days of glory long gone.

  Its doors opened and slammed against the back wall, the sound of the impact audible through the roll of far off thunder, and in walked the drenched traveller who earned several careful glances from the more cautious clientele. They didn’t mind. Their goal was to get noticed, after all.

  The wanderer made their way to a very specific table at the back that already housed a single occupant. Dressed in a cloak of his own and covered in tattoos across his arms, a very angry looking man barked at the stranger who dared take a seat beside him.

 

  “Beat it!” he said with a scowl. “I’m expecting someone important, and my friends don’t like interruptions.”

  Several large men and women seated in nearby tables glared at the traveller. They could only be described as a collection of brutes and thugs, one of them perhaps even a hench! Either way, they all sat with angry expressions and a thirst for blood.

  The traveller sighed and pulled down their cloak. Behind the black fabric was a young man with tanned skin who showcased a 5 o’clock shadow and a very tired face. “Easy now,” he said with his hands up in the air in a display of supplication. “I come with interesting tidings. Interesting tidings.”

  As he repeated the phrase, everyone around him relaxed, with the belligerent man opposite of him properly settling down into his seat.

  “Yup, that’s the code phrase. So we finally meet face to face,” he said with a cocksure smile. One that would’ve looked at home on a murderer. “You have a name, or should I still refer to you as my ‘mysterious merchant of secrets’?”

  “You can call me Ash,” he replied, shaking off the rest of the loose droplets stuck to his clothes and open skin.

  “That stand for something?”

  “Asher,” he grunted. “Now are you going to continue playing 20 questions for my name, or are you ready to do business?”

  “Pfft, looks like some of your secrets aren’t for sale,” the man chuckled in a raspy voice. “But don’t we all have ones like that? Sure, let’s do business. What do you have for me?”

  “Payment first.”

  “Like hell!” he shouted, rousing his compatriots out of their complacency and onto their feet. “Secret first, then if it’s any good, I’ll pay you what I think it’s worth.”

  “Hmm… how about a compromise then? A secret without proof is just a rumor. So how about if I tell you what’s going on, and you’ll pay the agreed upon amount if you like it in exchange for the proof.”

  The thug regarded the traveller with careful eyes. “Fine,” he finally said, slapping his hand down onto the table. “What do you have for us to hear?”

  “That the head general is planning a coup on King Reginald.”

  All eyes were upon the wanderer, who simply sat still with an austere smile on his face.

  “You’d better not be playing me, that information’s worth a fortune!” rasped the thug excitedly. “Where’s the proof?”

  “Right here,” the tanned man fished out a white envelope from his pocket, somehow entirely untouched by the rain, unlike the rest of his clothes. “Everything is in this letter written by the general himself.”

  “That’s his seal on it, alright,” he said with a quick observation, before their secret merchant placed it on the table face-down. “So how about if you go and slide that over here and we’ll get back to you on your payment later.”

  “Payment now, or I walk,” he deadpanned.

  “No, no, no, that’s not how things work around here,” said the tattooed man with a shake of his head. “You hand over that letter now or we’ll gut you like a fish.”

  “Gut me like a fish, and you have no letter.”

  “Ha! Hear that lads? Looks like the poor sod’s never been mugged before! The letter we want happens to be right over here, so with you dead, there’s nothing stopping us from taking it for ourselves. What do they teach you children nowadays?”

  The wanderer took a slow breath as they picked up the sealed document. “You mean this letter?” he asked, raising a flame-covered right hand towards the dry parchment.

 

  The air was tense. Nobody dared make a move lest they lose a possible goldmine of information… or their lives. Eventually, frayed nerves reached their breaking point and someone broke the silence.

  “To hell with it, kill him!” shouted the thug.

  The tanned man simply smiled, and let loose a small gout of flame right onto the seal of the envelope, turning the red wax to a runny dribble and singing the outer layer of the cover before dropping the paper and making a break for it. He dodged all manner of thrown knives and glass as he made his way towards the exit.

  As the rest of the medieval gangsters made their way to the exit in pursuit, they were called back by their boss.

  “Wait!” he shouted, pouring his glass of cheap ale over the flames to extinguish them. “We’ve got the letter, there’s no need going after him. Besides, he’s likely to collect even more information and try selling it to one of our subsidiaries. All the more money to be made for us, and all the more favor we gain from our Splendid King.”

 


 

  Several hours later in a small shack, far away from any prying eyes, sat a young man with tanned skin and the beginnings of a beard. He balanced himself on an old, wooden chair as he spoke into a walkie talkie with a smile.

  “Mission complete, Khethiwe.”

  “The letter’s been delivered?” replied a feminine voice with a Zimbabwean accent with a clear British tinge. She sounded both calm and forceful in her words.

  “Yep,” said Asher in a single long, drawn out syllable. “Even melted off the seal and gave it a bit of burn damage, so there’s no way for them to tell that we forged it.”

  “We can thank Ashley for making that move necessary,” the voice deadpanned.

  “Hey, it’s not my fault the seal wasn’t in the general’s room! Besides, I left Reggie’s royal amulet in one of the drawers before I left, the one Artyom gave us.”

  “Which allowed us to complete phase 2 of the plan while we were still preparing for phase 1. Good work.”

  “Thank you,” he replied with a big smile. “But I don’t see why we don’t just kill Reggie? Can’t exactly track down our researchers and send an army after them if their dear leader is out of the picture.”

  “The people of this World are vain, not stupid. Well, at least not that stupid. If the king drops dead, their successor will do whatever it takes to keep it from happening to them, and that means immediately scrambling the army on a direct path towards our men.”

  “So instead, we make the king think the general is trying to kill him, and make the general think that the king is having an affair with his wife, so they start fighting each other instead of us? You said they weren’t that stupid, how long will this little misdirection last?”

  “Long enough for us to find those Earthers and bring them to safety. Abhi’s done this before, I trust him to finish things quickly.”

  “Fair enough. Do I get to take a break yet?”

  “One more mission, and then you can take a nice, long vacation. We’re going to be doing the same thing to the enemy kingdom. They’re farther away, so we have some time before they can launch a counterattack against us, but I don’t want to depend on that luxury alone. We’re going to need Ashley for this, and we’re going to need her now.”

  “Ugh,” Asher groaned. “Today really isn’t an Ashley day.” He let out a sigh and pulled out a small vial. “But whatever, let’s just get this over with.”

  He uncorked the glass container and downed its contents in a single gulp. Immediately, his body began to contort. His face began to lose its edge as his facial hair began to fall off and onto the ground. His muscles began to shrink, and torso began to take on a curvier shape rather than the blocky build he previously hosted.

  “Well, at least it beats shaving,” said Ash, their voice higher pitched than before. Gone was Asher, the cloaked seller of secrets and shadow skulker, and in his place was Ashley, femme fatale and… also shadow skulker. But for now, she would play the role of the other head general’s new maid.

  “Alright Khethiwe,” said Ashley into her walkie-talkie. “I’m ready, just get me some transport and a maid outfit that isn’t as… revealing as the last one.”

  “I don’t dictate the tastes of our targets, Ash. But you’re in luck, all of the skimpy outfits are reserved for the butlers.”

  The woman let out a sigh. “On second thought, maybe today is an Ashley day.”

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