“Nathan, you can’t just pick up orcs like stray animals!”

“I know, mom, but she was getting harassed, and then got hurt when I stepped in!”

“So why did you step in? Just leave it alone!”

“He had a knife, mom! He was going to hurt her!”

“That’s an even better reason to not step in. Jesus, Nathan, what if he stabbed you?”

My mom and I are arguing in the kitchen, while the orc girl curiously peers around the corner. After our experience with the Lycanthrope, I brought her to my apartment to treat her. It wasn’t exactly the greatest arrangement, but I couldn’t very well just leave her alone. The fact that she got hurt is at least partially my fault.

Disinfecting her wound was a pain, and she was convinced that I was killing her, but her arm is now bandaged and treated about as well as one could hope with my rather limited first-aid knowledge. Luckily, she’s not human, so the risk of Lycanthropy for her is zero. After treating her, I was going to kick her out until she told me where she was staying. That conversation went a little something like this:

“Alright, your arm’s bandaged. I can walk you home if you want.”

She sheepishly says, “Right… home.”

Does she… not know what that is? “Y’know, where you sleep?”

“Someone kinda… stole my home.”

“Like… they took over it or something?”

“They just picked it up and walked off with it.”

I feel like I’m missing something, “how the hell did they pull that off?”

“It was a tent.”

“Oh.”

And so, I learned that she’s homeless and has nowhere to stay. She was more than happy at that point to go find a nice alley to sleep in, but I stopped her. Until my mom got home she was contentedly watching TV while I tried to think about how to resolve this. My mom got back before I had a reasonable answer, leading to the argument in which I’m currently embroiled.

“I’m not saying she needs to stay here for a long time, but we can’t kick her out into the snow!”

“We can, and we will. Who knows what she’d do when we’re asleep?”

I’m about to respond when a knock emanates from the door.

She gives me a hard look, “Not a word about our guest, capiche?”

“Okay.”

My mom schools her features, the frown being overwritten by a tight smile in a matter of moments. She’s a tall, skinny, pale woman, with a perpetual set of bags under her eyes, causing her to appear tired all the time, which matches her rather curmudgeonly personality. It seemingly doesn’t matter how much sleep she gets, as the bags never disappear.

She opens the door and is surprised by the person on the other side.

A tall, blonde man in a suit stands on the other side, flanked by a noticeably shorter brunette woman. Both of them are wearing sunglasses. As the door opens the blonde man tucks something into an inner suit pocket. I only catch a glimpse, but it looks like a tuning fork.

The blonde man is the first one to speak, “Hello ma’am.” he reaches into his breast pocket, pulling out some kind of ID. “Department of Interworld Relations. You can call me Lenkov, this is my partner, Chris. Have there been any unusual occurrences in the immediate vicinity?”

“Not… that I’m aware of. Is something going on?” My mom responds.

“Hm. Nothing odd at all?”

My mom casts a glance backward. “Nothing at all.”

“Would you mind if we come in and have a look around?”

“I very much would, actually. Do you have a warrant?”

Lenkov gives a smirk, “Warrants are for cops ma’am. Stand aside. This is a domestic safety issue.”

My mom looks like she wants to protest, but also doesn’t want to get arrested. She stands aside.

Lenkov steps inside, followed by his partner. He reaches back into his jacket pulling back out the tuning fork thing. He flicks a switch and the prongs start to buzz. He carefully begins to walk around the apartment. He takes a glance at the orc comfortably lounging on the sofa but doesn’t pay her any mind as he sweeps the apartment with the tuning fork gadget.

Eventually, he coincidentally points it at me, and the prongs start to vibrate harshly. He takes a step closer and they begin to vibrate even harder. Step by step the vibrations grow harder until the gadget is pressed against my chest, vibrating my whole body.

“Well, I found the problem,” Lenkov says.

“It’s… me?”

“Yessir, it would appear that you’re attracting magicules. That only happens for a few reasons, and I have a pretty good guess as to which it is this time. Has anything strange happened today?”

I don’t really know what to say. Should I just tell the truth? Am I gonna get tased? “Nothing… too weird.”

“Let me rephrase that. Tell me everything or we’ll detain you.”

Well, shit.

I regale the story of my heroism, minus the mid-life crisis beforehand. He also asks a few other things like my name, whether I’ve had contact with any fae, and other things of that nature.

“And this… Lycan, when he pounced you, he bounced off of thin air?”

“Yes.”

“Hm.” He takes off his sunglasses, revealing narrow blue eyes. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Chrissy, Looks like you’re up.”

The short brunette woman steps forward and says, “Do you have anywhere we can sit down? This might take a while.”

My mom brings everyone to the living room, where she and I sit together on a black two-seater couch. The two agents sit near to us on a perpendicular three-seater couch, with the orc taking the far seat, looking at us interestedly.

After a moment of silence, Chris speaks. “Nathan. It would appear that you have latent magical potential. Congratulations.”

I don’t know what the fuck that means, but it sounds cool.

She doesn’t wait for me to respond before continuing, “You’re not a danger to yourself or others, yet. But you will need education before your abilities fully manifest. You have a few options.”

She continues her spiel, and it’s honestly a little dry so I’ll just abbreviate it a bit.

I’ve got the ability to manipulate magicules— basically, I can do magic. Because my abilities are immature I’m not a threat to anyone yet, but I need training or else they could manifest dangerously out of control. Now that I’m a registered mage, I’m legally required to receive training.

It’s now that I’ll take a break to explain why there are magic and fantasy creatures roaming the earth.

It was about 60 years ago when the first gate opened. Smack dab in the middle of Washington D.C. a giant magical portal opened, and intelligent species other than homo sapiens set foot on the earth for the first time in tens of thousands of years. This portal was the joining of two worlds and the beginning of a new era for mankind. Magic and its utilization represented an incredibly lucrative opportunity for many, so relations with this new world were quickly established. It’s then that we began to understand more about the world on the other side of the portal, Terra.

20 years before the gate was created, Terra was at war. Every major nation vied for control, and the bitter fighting gradually escalated until finally, the nuclear option was taken. The elves, masters of magic, had a brilliant idea. They brought 100 of their greatest minds together to weave a spell that would end the fighting once and for all. They would annihilate every other race in one blow. Those 100 elves spent 10 years weaving the spell, and finally, it was ready. After 10 years of grueling labor, elves would reign supreme for eternity.

At least, they would have, if they hadn’t fucked the spell up completely.

Of the 100 elves chosen to prepare the spell, zero were men. When the spell wasn’t affecting any of the elves creating the spell and had a 100% lethality rate against their (100% male) testing population, they figured it was ready.

Over the next 10 years, every male of every species on Terra was wiped out by the errant spell, leaving only the women of every population alive and consequently unable to reproduce. The elves had sentenced every race on Terra to extinction in one grand act of hubris.

That is until those same elves made a final gambit to correct their mistake. Although they couldn’t fix what they’d done, they could prevent their world from dying out. They would trade all of their lives, all 100 of the best mages currently alive, to create a portal to another world; A world where males were still plentiful. It was a nearly impossible task, and if they failed their world would be doomed.

As I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, they succeeded, and the portal was opened. Over the next 60 years, several more gates were opened, and relations between Terra and Earth flourished.

The male situation, however, still wasn’t great. They’d opened a portal to Earth, and found a male population, but they were all human. Humans didn’t exist on Terra before the portal opened, and to the dismay of all races, couldn’t interbreed with the races of Terra.

At least, normally they couldn’t.

After the portal was opened, magicules (magic particles) flooded Earth, introducing magic into a formerly magicless society. Magicules changed society in many ways, but also altered the very beings of children who were born into this new world. Some gained magic powers, others came out of the womb completely insane. Some developed curses, and others… found that they were now able to interbreed with the races of Terra.

Only about one out of every fifty men has the ability to sire children with Terrans, and among those, only about half have good enough affinity for it to be feasible.

That’s right, only one in a hundred men can realistically mate with Terrans. Oftentimes, the ability to mate with Terrans coincides with other magicule mutations, but not always. However, if you have other magicule mutations, you can mate with Terrans 100% of the time. In addition, the resulting child is almost always a full-blooded member of the mother’s race, despite their human fathers.

Because of this, Terran races were saved from extinction but faced a new problem. Terrans need viable human mates to continue their races, and there simply aren’t that many. In addition to this, despite sixty years having passed, the Terran male population was still zero. The elves' spell was still working, so all zygotes that would result in a male are immediately terminated. The only race that was immune to this was humans, as they weren’t included in the spell. Now that the only mages that could feasibly undo the spell were dead, it was unlikely to be undone in the next several hundred years.

This left only one option. The humans that could mate with Terrans needed to mate like crazy to save the various Terran races from extinction. Suddenly, one in a hundred men found themselves as bargaining tools for the burgeoning magic trade, as not just their seed, but they themselves became a valuable commodity.

It certainly made the last few decades a bit more interesting, that’s for sure.

Chris interrupts my thinking, asking, “Did you get all that, Nathan?”

“Uh… yeah.” I totally spaced out.

She raises an eyebrow, then gives me a pamphlet. “That has most of the information that you need, as well as my phone number on the back. If you have any questions about your new responsibilities as a registered magic user, feel free to call. We’ve still got a few more things to talk about, however, so let’s not dwell on this.”

I give her a nod. I don’t really know what else there is to talk about. Compared to becoming a mage anything else can’t be that important.

“As you’re now a mage… there are… other important things that come associated with that… Those things are—”

Lenkov speaks up, “Christ Chrissy, stop pussyfooting around it. You can mate with Terrans. Do you have any plans to follow up with that?”

“Uh… what?”

“Are you gonna stick your willy in non-humans?”

“I… Uh… haven’t really considered it?” I take a glance at my mom, who is wearing a neutral expression. This isn’t a discussion I want to have with her around.

Lenkov follows my gaze, “I suppose you can consider that later. I only ask because we’re looking for graduating students to take part in a new initiative. You planning on going to college?”

“Yeah.”

“How would you like to have your university not only paid for but actually pay you?”

“That might be nice.” I have no idea where he’s going with this. He kinda sounds like a military recruiter.

“How do you feel about Terrans? Any strong feelings?”

“Not especially.”

“Good, good. Well then, how would you feel about attending university,” he pauses dramatically for a moment, “in another world?”