As tended to be his habit, Crick had remained largely silent as he went about his prep work on Thursday afternoon, using one of his Mercer knives to hand-dice pickles for use in mixing together the Loon Café’s signature balsamic tartar sauce. He scraped the tiny cutlets into the little food processor, then spun open the lid on the industrial sized jar of mayo, scooping out what he assumed was the appropriate measure, though he wasn’t, truth be told, paying the closest attention. His Tuesday and Wednesday had not done much to put his mind at ease, and to say that he was distracted would have been an understatement.
Mid-morning Tuesday, he had been awakened to the sound of sirens approaching his building. Having one of the lot-facing units, he had donned his bathrobe and headed out onto his deck, attached to his living room, and watched as an ambulance and two Savage Police cruisers came swooping to the front walkway. A few minutes later, they were wheeling old Bodrak out of the building on a gurney, the aged minotaur shaman covered in blood, his left horn broken in half. A minute after he was placed in the back of the oversized ambulance, the three officers who had come to the building came out, struggling to control a second man, a middle-aged hume who Crick recognized from the building only barely, having never exchanged even two words with the man.
“These freaks have it coming,” the likely assailant was raving, trying to shrug off the officers despite being cuffed and looking, from a distance, like he’d taken a couple of hits himself. “They don’t belong here!” It had been a hell of a way to start his second day off, and the following day, on his way to work, he heard a news story on the car radio talking about a pair of hobgoblins who had been attacked in broad daylight in downtown Minneapolis, targets of a suspected hate crime.
This shit’s getting more frequent, and more direct, he mused as he put the cap on the food processor and hit the ‘blend’ button, holding the cap in place. I think maybe I should bring it up at group. Crick continued his prep work, going through the motions without his usual level of attentiveness. By the end of his shift later that evening, he’d even had to remake four orders, because he just wasn’t paying the closest attention to what he was doing.
On Friday morning, after checking that his check had been direct deposited into his account, the goblin cook swung over to Kwik Trip to grab a few breakfast sandwiches, then made his way down the road to Sam’s garage. As he pulled up out front, he found the lizardman mechanic propping up the hood of an old Chevy Suburban, a dark blue beast that, from the looks of the rear passenger side, had been broadsided in some sort of collision accident. Crick got out of his car, whistling to himself as he sauntered up the slightly inclined driveway fronting the main garage door of Sam’s shop. Sam leaned into view from the front of the vehicle, grinning at the sight of Crick as the goblin waggled his bag of goods. “You bring me breakfast, bud?”
“Long as you don’t mind it coming from Kwik Trip.”
“Not at all, they make pretty decent breakfast sandwiches,” Sam said, snagging a rag and wiping his hands on it. “Follow me,” he added, turning and leading Crick inside the shop. Crick’s nose wrinkled a little at the heavy odor of gasoline and other motor fluids that hung redolent in the modest garage. Sam guided him over to an old metal desk in the far corner from the panel door entry, taking the primary seat tucked under the leg cubby and indicating that Crick should join him on the rickety-looking metal folding chair set up for customers beside the desk. Crick did so, divvying out the food and a couple of cans of coffee-flavored energy drinks. “So, what brings you by, bud? Finally need an oil change on that little beater of yours?”
“Soon enough, but not today,” Crick replied, sipping his drink. “I was wondering if you heard about what happened downtown, with those hobgoblins.”
“Yeah, I heard about it,” Sam said with a sigh, shaking his head. He took a bite of his food, sipped his drink, and swallowed hard. “Also heard from some customers that something similar happened just up the street, right here in town.”
“In my building,” Crick said, relating to the lizardman mechanic the incident of his door being defaced, and the old minotaur shaman being blitzed by another resident in the building. When he was finished, he noticed that Sam was tapping one scaled finger on his desk, seeming to be quietly seething. “I’m gonna bring it up at group next week.”
“I would imagine you should, yeah,” Sam said, finishing his food quickly, crinkling the wrapper and tossing it with a flick of the wrist into a nearby trash can. “And I think we should consider taking our meeting header off the Community Center’s board.” Crick raised an eyebrow at him, and the lizardman narrowed his eyes at him, setting his jaw. “We shouldn’t be advertising that we meet up in large numbers, my friend; one of these whackos may decide it’s a target-rich environment.”
“Shit, I hadn’t even thought about that,” Crick replied, flummoxed. “Do you think that’s really a possibility?” Rather than offer a spoken response, Sam pulled out his phone, tapped a few times on it, and handed it over to Crick. What was on the screen before him was a story from some news site he’d never heard of (not unusual, in truth), reporting an incident in Chicago wherein a support group for Outlanders and the children of same said folks had been attacked by a group of H1st members; 16 total members of the support group died in the attack. According to the local law enforcement spokespeople, the H1st assailants had brought and used a variety of firearms, sweeping into a church basement that was hosting the support group, and opened fire. Though they didn’t kill everybody present with gunfire (two minotaur members of the gathering apparently had each taken several hits, but weren’t killed by the small-caliber rounds), the fact that they set fire with Molotov cocktails to the building on their retreat from the assault finished off those who didn’t die in the initial attack.
“We are not in a position to really protect ourselves in numbers, Crick,” Sam said, taking his phone back with a nod and tucking it in his pocket. “Not unless we’re smart about how we respond to stuff like this. Do you know how many lizardmen there are in the world? The entire world over?” Crick shrugged, not knowing. “127,000, Crick, across the entire world. How many goblins?”
“Half a million, roughly,” Crick replied quickly, having occasionally looked into this particular statistic a few times, since he counted among their number.
“Yup. Minotaurs? Two-hundred thousand, roughly. Hobgoblins? Fifty thousand, and those are almost all here in the U.S. And elves? Three-and-a-half million, but that includes half-elves, too, so I haven’t seen the breakdown numbers. Point is, Crick, I keep track of stuff like this, and while these H1st people weren’t much of a concern to me a couple of years ago, they’re building up a head of steam, even here in the ‘fly-over’ states,” he said, making the air quotes in front of himself. He let out another sigh, shook his head, and stood up. “But anyway, enough of the hanging our heads, eh? How’s things going for you otherwise?”
“Not bad, all in all. Had a pretty good date with that Velis woman on Monday,” Crick said, hopping down off his seat and tossing his empty can in the trash. “We’re going out again this upcoming Monday, too.”
“Hey, that is pretty good. You thinking you might, ah, give her a bit of the ol’ green, as it were,” Sam asked cheekily, smiling like an imp.
“Already did that, on Monday,” Crick replied flatly.
“Get out! Seriously?”
“Wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but that’s part of why we’re heading straight for the movie next time. We got through dinner, then she kind of, well, insisted on certain plans getting bumped forward.”
“How’d she insist?”
“Stripped down to her bra and led the way back to my bedroom. Fairly direct, she’s a very no-nonsense kind of gal.” Sam followed Crick all the way back out to the goblin’s car, and as Crick started the vehicle, rolling down the window, he looked up at Sam and held up a finger. “Eddie may also reach out to you before he can get hold of me, I asked him to look into Libras’s situation, his legal status.”
“You think I might be in some trouble? Putting him up at my place, having him help me out here some days?”
“I wouldn’t think so, no, but Eddie’s looking into it all. I’ll see you at group, Sam.”
**
“No, no, no, that looks like crap, Crick, do it again,” chef Taylor grumbled, taking the bowl right off the main station counter and tipping it over the nearby trashcan, wasting the food. “Get your head out of your ass, and focused on what you’re doing here,” the elf snarled, stomping away back toward his office. Crick shook it off, and set to preparing a proper ‘Cold Cut Salad #2’ from the menu, being careful to make all of his cuts even, and doing the promised circle of sprinkling in the other ingredients atop the bed of lettuce and powdered parmesan cheese.
“That, was awful,” Shawna said quietly beside him. Crick, unsure what she meant exactly, paused in his motions for a moment. “He shouldn’t talk to you like that, just because you’re a goblin. I’ve read a lot about this sort of thing, elves being racist against anybody with green skin. You should talk to Bobby,” she said, referring to the diner’s owner, Bobby Lascomb. Crick snorted, shaking his head. “I’m serious! That sort of thing shouldn’t just be ignored, Crick.” Crick said nothing at first, finishing the salad and putting it up in the servers’ window, then dinging the bell. He took the food service gloves off of his hands, planted them on his hips, and pursed his lips up at the blue-haired young hume woman, considering his choice of words for a moment.
“You know what, Shawna? No. Just, no.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’,” she said with a huff.
“I mean, chef Taylor wasn’t giving me shit there for being a goblin, and him being an elf, see? Truth of the matter is, I’ve had a lot on my plate just lately, and the last few days, I’ve been sort of phoning it in. My head’s not all here, on my job, and he can see that. It isn’t because he’s an elf that he’s giving me a hard time; it’s because I’m not doing my best work just lately, and he can tell. He’s a sous chef, Shawna, one of the best at what we do in this area. You think I should just assume that he grumbled at me there because he’s a bigot? Frankly, I got no reason to think he is one. And assuming that you or I can figure out why he says or does the things that he says or does, just because he’s an elf, well, doesn’t that make us the bigoted or prejudiced ones in this case? So, no, Shawna.”
“But I mean, historically,” she stammered, trying to hold her ground.
“History doesn’t mean right now, kid. There’s a reason why we study history as part of the past, you see? I can’t blame Taylor for how his parents or further back ancestors may or may not have treated with folks who look like me back then. I’m not a Catholic, so the whole idea of this ‘original sin’ concept you seem to want to saddle him with makes absolutely no sense to me. So again, I say you, no, Shawna. I’m off my mark, he sees it, has opted to call me out on it, and so what I’m gonna do, is I’m gonna get back on top of my game.”
Crick reached blindly to his left, where the ticket printer had burped out another order, and snagged the next incoming order, glancing it over before handing her the second copy that printed up. “And I advise you do the same,” he added, turning his attention to making the customers’ food.
**
From “How We Fit”, by Cedric Welker (excerpt from Chapter 3-‘The New State of War’)
How terrible it must be, for some, to consider that when they are engaged in military activity, some individuals will come across a hostile who does not seem to be prepared or armed for combat, but who then suddenly turns and hurls bolts of lightning from their splayed fingertips at the would-be soldier, turning them into so much smoking meat in charred combat boots. Or perhaps to have a sniper train their scope upon a potential target, only to realize that due to the sheer density of the skulls of minotaurs, a biological differentiation that makes them difficult to permanently disable in a combat situation, they need to get not only a single perfect shot lined up, but a follow-up shot, hopefully in the same general spot to try and penetrate the skull.
Thanks in no small part to the hawkishness of President Richard Nixon as pertained to the Vietnam Conflict, the early days of our various peoples’ presence in this world was largely divided among those who arrived from Caldea in America; we were either conscripted to fight in a war we knew nothing about, for a people we knew nothing about, or we were turned out into the streets and wilderness to fend for ourselves. Blissfully, there were numerous state governors and legislatures who didn’t want to treat us so carelessly, and they got the ball rolling on turning us into productive members of the grander American society; this was something the federal government should have been taking notes on and learning from.
But the native humans of Earth quickly learned about our various capacities for warfare, and how battles were conducted when Outlanders were embedded into some of their frontline units quickly came into question. When a single elf can, through the use of deep magics, turn a scrapped troop transport vehicle into a rumbling metal golem that can bludgeon entire platoons to death under its welded metal fists, do you really spend much time worrying about getting fire teams into position to take out their human companions? Of course not!
For their part, the North Vietnamese turned a sizable clutch of hobgoblins who landed in this world into a ‘butcher battalion’, men and women of the already war-focused race who went full steam ahead into the waiting jaws of the American military machine. They ultimately ended up getting killed down to their last, but not before claiming the lives of nearly ten-thousand American humans, elves, goblins, minotaurs and lizardmen.
Most notably, however, came The Stavik Incident, in 1987. Though the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had rarely seen flashes of large-scale heated incidents, the events of March 2nd, 1987, in the Russian village of Stavik, proved once and for all that the humes of this world share very little in common with the humes of Caldea. In Stavik, a small collective of elven and lizardman magic-users gathered one afternoon, and attempted a grand ritual, one that was designed to try and open a new portal, one that would take them all back to their homelands of Caldea. For reasons that many have hypothesized about, the ritual failed, and the excess magical energies ended up being dispersed throughout the region, including some of that energy making its way to a coal power plant in the Ukranian territory of Luhansk. The plant was destroyed by an abrupt explosion, likely caused by the sudden excess of mana being converted into electrical energy, which the plant could not cope with.
In response to the incident, the Soviet Union’s reigning Communist Party outlawed all use of magic among its citizenry, even Outlanders and their offspring. In the United States, out of an abundance of caution, similar laws and regulations restricting the use of magic were put in place, and an entire law enforcement organization, the Office of Magical Intervention, was formed.
Back in Caldea, magical accidents and disasters happened all the time. Nobody ever thought, as a result, that magic should universally be condemned or shelved as a result. But here, in a world run entirely by humans, who have no native access to magical powers, it is seen as too great a risk to keep around. And mind you, this is among a race that had developed nuclear weapons.
Which is the greater threat, I ask you? Us, with our magic and our odd cultural mannerisms? Or the humes, who could destroy their own world a dozen times over?
**
The following morning, after one cup of coffee and one cigarette, Crick answered his phone and clicked for the speakerphone and number pad, recognizing the incoming number as coming from the front lobby’s call box. “Hello?”
“Crick, it’s Eddie,” the minotaur paralegal said clearly. “I know it’s early in your day to have a visitor, but that’s the advantage of having weekends off; I figured I’d come by for a little visit.” There was a brief pause. “I have donuts.” Crick snickered, and hit the ‘9’ button, which birthed an audible ‘click’ on the line, and Eddie thanking him for buzzing him in. A couple of minutes later, as Crick was stirring his second cup of coffee, there issued from his apartment’s front door a knock, which he answered at a measured pace. There in the hallway, Eddie Rygar towered over him, Hy-vee bag in hand. “I’m calling dibs on the fritter in here,” the big man said, offering the bag to the goblin. Crick took it, waved Eddie inside behind him, and started back toward the kitchen.
“Did you grab yourself coffee? I have three-quarters of a pot still.”
“I’ll take some, thanks,” Eddie said, following Crick into the kitchen. He looked around, noticing the little three-step step stool by one of the counters. “This, is a standard-sized unit,” Eddie observed, himself having to keep his head slightly ducked to avoid the tips of his horns scraping the ceiling.
“Yeah. They don’t have many custom places in this area,” Crick said, mounting the stool and grabbing a plain brown coffee mug from an upper cabinet and holding it out toward the minotaur paralegal. “Sugar and creamer are over there by the fridge,” he said, heading back to his seat once Eddie took the mug from him. When Eddie sat down across from him, he did so gently, not trusting the small chair to support his full weight; but to his pleasant surprise, it didn’t even creak. “Don’t worry, I bought the furniture from an outlet specializing in home goods for Outworlders.”
“Nice. Where’s that at?”
“Eden Prairie, actually. Lot of elves and lizardfolk out that way.” Eddie nodded, then brought his messenger bag up onto the table, popping it open and pulling out a notebook, pen, and some kind of thin booklet with a plain white cover wrap. “So, what brings you to my humble abode at this hour of the morning?”
“Well, I’ve been talking to a few folks at the firm, about your questions regarding Libras. The golem from group,” Eddie said, unzipping his plain black windbreaker to reveal a sizable University of Minnesota Golden Gophers shirt in maroon and yellow. “Most of them had never even heard of a golem, turns out, until I asked Mitchell Hornberg about it. His father was a rabbi, and Mitchell heard and read about them while studying the Talmud. There seems to be some differences between the Earth version of golems and Caldean ones, but the one that stood out biggest to Mitchell was that ours can, you know, talk.”
“Theirs don’t?”
“Apparently not,” said Eddie, snagging the apple fritter out of the Hyvee box of pastries on the table between them. “Also, from what Mitchell could remember, if the person who made the golem dies, the golem is supposed to then belong to their next of kin. If no next of kin is available, then the golem is supposed to just keel over and fall apart, or at least, cease to function. With Libras, obviously, that isn’t the case. We might have a unique situation on our hands here.”
Crick mulled this over for a moment, lighting a cigarette and leaning back in his seat, poking at one of his teeth with his tongue, a crumb finding its way into a small but worsening cavity. He hadn’t known what sort of information Eddie would eventually bring his way with regard to Libras, and one way or the other, he had assumed that he wouldn’t need to involve himself any further with it. But something nagged at him in all of this, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on the ‘what’ of it. “Is Sam in any trouble here, do you think? Housing Libras, using his efforts as sort of unpaid labor at his shop?”
“I’m not sure,” Eddie said with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “Best guess? No, he’s not in any trouble, because by the strictest interpretation of what I’ve learned so far, Libras isn’t a person; he’s property. He isn’t a living, breathing person, so technically, he has no rights to pay, or housing, or decent treatment of any sort. If Sam wanted to, he could rip off Libras’s arm and put it up on eBay for sale as a used tool.”
“Jesus, that’s grim.”
“I could have this all wrong, though,” Eddie said, pointing to the cigarette case with a raised eyebrow. Crick flapped a hand at him to go ahead, and the minotaur took one out and lit it with his own lighter. He hacked loudly for a minute, shaking his head. “Cripes, this is why I don’t indulge very often. Hurts the throat.”
“You get used to it.”
“Not sure that’s a good thing, bud. Anyway, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed on these things, Crick. I’m just a paralegal.”
“Yeah, maybe, but you’re a curious sort, Eddie. You read. A lot.” The minotaur nodded with a grin, taking another drag. “So, what can be done for him, do you think? To sort of get him started on legally becoming a person in his own right.”
“For starters? Well, I honestly think he should apply for citizenship. He’s originally from Caldea, so he’d probably have to use the same sort of procedures that the federal government set out for the gotrin when they sort of declared themselves as present in this world. Maybe those brothers from group will have an idea of how to help him out with that.” Crick nodded, taking out his phone and opening up his Notes app, typing a few things down via shorthand. “Crick, I hate to ask this, because I think your heart’s in the right place, and poking or prodding might make you second-guess yourself, but, why are you getting involved? This isn’t your problem, strictly speaking.” Crick said nothing, hopping down off his chair and walking over toward his fridge, hopping up and down in front of it, trying to swipe something just out of reach on top. Eddie got up, walked over, and pointed to the pair of bananas that Crick still had perched up there.
“Yeah, grab one for me?” Eddie did, handing it down to the goblin, who just smirked up at him. “Now, why’d you do that?”
“Because you asked me to.”
“No I didn’t, not at first,” Crick replied. “You didn’t have to get up out of your chair at all. You saw me struggling with something, and you chose to get up and come over here to the fridge. Then, you asked me if I wanted your help. You saw a situation that required assistance, and you moved to intervene and maybe help fix the situation. You could have just as easily brought me over my step stool, and I could’ve climbed up and grabbed this myself,” Crick added, tossing the banana back up atop the fridge with a practiced flick of the wrist. “I’m grabbing Libras a step stool. The rest’ll be up to him.”