From the Agency Files

It’s a human idiom that makes a lot of sense. It does take all kinds. Thank the Fates.

I stood at something that resembled military attention, pressed like all my brethren to present the most professional demeanor we possibly could. This was the day. The day it ended. The day it began.

The door at the far end of the large chamber opened. It was remarkably hard not to shift my eyes that way, to catch a glimpse of those who were entering, those who would inspect us this final time before we became something more than mere students.

I drew myself to my full height and stilled my twitching tail as the footfalls approached from my left. Six of them, I thought. Not the whole of the Immortal High Court, then.

From the right appeared Commander Doneff, her cold dark eyes like chips of black glass in her cocoa colored face as she came to attention facing us, leaving just enough room between her and the rest of us to provide the visitors a corridor through which to walk.

Then, in the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the person in the lead. If person was quite the right word. He was somewhere between six and a half and seven feet tall, with light gray, almost silver, skin and almost colorless hair swept back from a high forehead. His eyes, currently like shining argent pools, drifted toward me as he took in my fellows to the left. Those featureless orbs seemed to rest on me for a short moment, then drift off too my right.

I could not mistake who he was. The Lord Immortal. ArchAngel. Justice Breed. The big boss of Starhaven and the interworld agencies. An android, yes, but so much more.

Behind him came a pale, broad-shouldered man with long dark hair flowing in a near black wave breaking over his shoulders. His eyes, full of a cold violet fire, fell on me with naked interest and I felt a involuntary shiver begin at the soles of my feet and travel upward.

His lip twitched into something that just failed to become a smile. He moved on, passing before me and to my right as he took in the students waiting patiently at attention next to me.

His feet made no sound as he walked. My sensitive hearing could pick up no sign of a heartbeat, no pulse of blood traveling through his body. He gave off no scent I could detect. He was as human, over all, as the first creature that had entered my field of vision.

Next came a slim, pretty blonde woman considerably shorter than either of these two men, but tall for a human woman. Blue eyes like the reflection of the sky on a glacier swept over me. I felt a calm interest radiating from her and in their depths I sensed something like careful regard. This was Valerie Winn. Raven’s wife. Healer. Psi. Head of Helix.

Then the left corner of my eye was filled with something massive and black as night itself. Without moving, I shifted my gaze and, with great effort, was able to take in its immensity. Her immensity.

She stood as tall as ArchAngel or taller, but probably massed three or four times what he did, even given the fact that he was a construct himself, made of durable alloys and composites. I had the impression of immense physical power, but the warm brown eyes that stared out of that face, a face that might have been sculpted entirely out of onyx, gave me chills. Her torso was hyper-extenuated, far longer than her proportions might have suggested, but this was to make room for the extra pair of arms that extended out a foot or so below her shoulders.

Her body looked alien, of course. The way the structure of her skeletal and muscular design had to have been modified to make room for the extra arms changed everything. Her breasts, like black basketballs grafted onto her chest in line with that second set of arms, captivated me for a moment. Not out of anything like lust, but in sheer astonishment. The nipples of those breasts looked like tiny chips of obsidian, hard and dark and sharp.

In respect for some level of modesty on the part of some of us, she wore a plan black kilt over her loins, much as I myself wore.

I lifted my gaze to meet hers and the dour look I received in response dropped what felt like a pound of ice into the center of my chest.

She was Kali. Goblin Queen. The ‘Many-Armed Attack Bitch.’ Head of the Triwar Guild. Mage and warrior. Once human, once male, but now neither of those.

Next came my own employer. He also filled the corner of my eye as he stepped into view. Nearly as tall as Kali, but more human in shape. His robes draped over a form that, while not quite as massive as hers, still conveyed the impression of great size weight. He wasn’t precisely fat, but he was definitely well-padded, very unlikely to have missed any meals in the past few decades. He wore a long white beard, and the hair flowing from his scalp conjured thoughts of a frozen waterfall or icicles hanging off the eaves of a house, catching and reflecting the image of snow on the surrounding ground.

His blue eyes twinkled with something like approval as his gaze swept across mine.

This was Fenris Wolf. Scion of the immortal Loki. Warrior-Wizard and legendary lawman. Head of the Crimson Sash. My boss.

As the almost Santa-like figure of Fenris Wolf drifted to the right, another hove into view. This one was the least remarkable of the bunch so far. A slender, nearly bald human male wearing a jumpsuit literally covered with little pockets and a wide tool-belt festooned with arcane gadgets, this figure strode past me without even a glance. In fact, he didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the gathering whatsoever. His gaze seemed to focus on something far beyond our vision and he wore a distracted air like a cloak.

I knew this one as well as any, as unremarkable as he might have looked. He was the being whose interests most closely match my own. Artificer. The Mage-Engineer of Starhaven. Head of Magitech.

After him came another woman, this one perhaps slightly shorter than human average, but more than making up for it in sheer muscular bulk. Dark brown hair had been tied back in a pony-tail that did absolutely nothing to hide the thick, corded muscles of her neck.

Her sleeveless shirt revealed arms more massive and muscular than any merely human bodybuilder. The effect was generally creepy, I decided. She looked as alien as did Kali, and yet was among the most human in aspect of them all. That which set her most apart was deliberately cultivated rather than an expression of anything that had changed her without her express intent.

This was Athena. Head of TAU. I didn’t know that much about her, but was pretty sure I didn’t want to. Athena was the one for whom this martial display, this presentation of militant discipline, had been originally designed. She liked order and structure and precision. And because of this, we were expected to behave accordingly.

I heaved a very small but heartfelt sigh of relief as she passed out of view. Not in the least because the next immortal to proceed into view was perhaps the most intriguing of them all, at least to a prospective mage-engineer like myself.

He wore the shape of a huge metallic scorpion, traveling on six articulate cybernetic legs supporting a tapering barrel of a body, the front end made up of a rather ghastly mock-up of a human face and two pincer-like arms, the rear a long, whip-like tail tipped with a two-tined metal fork across which sizzled an arc of directed energy every few seconds.

His gaze fell upon me and I could feel the weight of his regard like a physical thing, could feel the power of his psionic mastery pushing against my feeble shields, knowing that he was making no effort against them, just that the force of his will was enough on its own to threaten to overwhelm me. Undirected it was vaguely threatening, but directed it could be devastating.

Scorpio Cybersting. Mercenary commander. Head of Havoc. Once as human as any mortal, but damaged beyond repair during the vampire invasion of Starhaven several years earlier. Damaged to the point that not even the mage-physicians and all the technical expertise and equipment here could put him together again.

Why he’d chose this form in particular no one knew. He’d abandoned any pretense of humanity when he’d requested this body be built to house his naked brain. They’d kept him alive through extraordinary measures, actually talked about growing him a clone body using the technology available on one of the variant Earths out there, but Scorpio had insisted on this instead. He could have been human, but chose not to be.

He was perhaps the third or fourth most powerful psi on Starhaven. He was certainly the most inhuman, if only because he chose that path specifically.

I watched him trundle out of view with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I did not know how the other immortals felt about him, but there was no way I could ever trust him. And what might have been worst of all was the knowledge that he looked at me and knew how I felt beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Last in line came two women together. I was no judge of human attractiveness, but the beauty of these two women was literally the stuff of legends. Tall and dark, lithely muscled and sharp of gaze, cat-suited Jasmine Tashae, the Lady of Blades, walked past me arm in arm with her partner and apparent soulmate, the smaller but no less lethal Nyx Deathweb.

The tales of these two had already spread throughout Starhaven, and onto many of the variant Earths. Even the other immortals tread carefully around them. Jasmine Tashae, known as Jaz to her friends, was acknowledged as one of the most powerful mages in existence. The use of magecraft was considered a combination of knowledge and imagination and where Jaz lacked in knowledge, she more than made up for in imagination.

The group withdrew to a distance in front of us where we could see all of them without moving our heads. They stood, regarding us in silence for several moments before a single one of them spoke. When he did, ArchAngel’s voice boomed through the chamber like thunder.

He paused, waiting for the applause, then waiting for it to die down again before continuing.

“You came to us as barely more than blobs, unformed, unshaped, and undirected. You said to us ‘make of me something truly wondrous, something strong and adaptable and capable of accomplishing amazing things.’ We told you we could do this, but that it would be a joint effort. We would show you the way, but it would be you who did the forging, turning clay into steel, mere flesh into something infinitely stronger.

“And here you are. But this is merely the beginning of your becoming. You have been shaped and honed, but now you are to learn how you play in the hand, how the craftsmanship that went into your creation will fare in the wider world.”

ArchAngel’s mouth curved into a gentle smile as his argent gaze swept over us. “Congratulations. You have all now attained the status of a member of one of the most elite forces in the known metaverse. You are an operative of the interworld agencies.”

There came cheering, and boot-stomping, and some whistling too. I groaned out loud, hearing the sentiment echoed throughout the gathered ranks of this new ‘elite.’ Humans whistles hurt our ears and as often as we told them so, they chose to either forget or ignore the fact.

Tail lashing, I stalked around the room toward the nearest exit. I needed a drink and a large rare proto-steak. In that order.

The sound of my name pulled me up short and I turned, scanning for the source. To my surprise I saw Fenris himself walking toward me. I put on my best game face, which pretty much meant I chose not to bare my teeth and kept my ears pointing toward the ceiling. I didn’t want the man to think I felt any hostility toward him or anything.

Which I didn’t. Not hostility, per se. My issue with the immortals was far more complex than such a simple emotion might entail. I didn’t hate them so much as I distrusted them. They’d taken my older brother and he’d never returned. Upon reaching Starhaven myself, I discovered that he’d died in their service.

That happened a lot, from what I’d gathered. The retirement plan for the agencies was a great one. Unfortunately, it was a rare operative who managed to make use of it.

He shook his head. “Don’t call me that.” He took my arm and led me back the other direction, away from the food and drink awaiting my intentions. “Deacon, it has come to my attention that you have the makings of a stupendous mage-engineer. This isn’t really a surprise, since your people excel at such things, but it is remarkable that you chose to join the Crimson Sash instead of petitioning for an apprenticeship in one of the trade guilds.

I was no expert at reading human expression, especially when it was hidden behind a veritable forest of facial hair, but I thought he looked a little discomfited. “Well, that’s one way to look at it. Anyway, the fact is I have a mission that might be right up your alley. Not a lot of danger, which works for your first time out, but…well…we’re going to have to make it a solo mission because of some scheduling conflicts. The only higher level agent who might have been a good fit was called away on an emergency.”

“Let me get this right. You want to send me on my very first mission all by myself?”

“Oh, no. Not all by yourself. Just not with a superior agent along to hold your hand.”

I stared at him. “Is this usual?” I asked. “To send a neophyte agent out on a mission without supervision?”

His return stare was hard. “No. But we don’t anticipate any problems here. It’s not like this is a combat mission of any kind, just a request to do a little magical upgrade on a municipal project for a city on one of the variant Earths.”

“So why not send someone from the engineering guild?” It seemed simple enough to me. If it wasn’t a matter for the interworld agencies, there was no reason for any of them to send an operative.

“Because it’s a personal request,” Fenris growled. “They want a Sash agent to do it.”

From what I could tell, this stank to high heaven. Had they figured out who I was, set this all up to divert me? That made no sense either. None of this did.

“As soon as we get you equipped, if that’s all right with you. Oh, and set you up with a partner. You have any preferences?”

“Preferences?” I repeated. It was a strange question. I got along with most of my classmates. If he proposed sending me off on this mission with one of them, any one of them might do as well as any other. “Not really.” Then I reconsidered. “Wait. Actually, I think Vicky would work out the best.”

She probably wouldn’t thank me for the honor, but Vic was someone I knew I could work with. We’d partnered during several exercises and I’d found her to be quick-witted, tough, and competent. All excellent qualities to have in a partner. When added to the fact that she had the makings of a fine mage-physician someday, I didn’t see where I could go wrong.

Fenris glanced across the room, spotted the woman in question threading her way through the crowd toward the exit, and ordered me to stay put while he went off to get her.

Vic was a human. I was a procyon. There was no chance of anything approaching a more… intimate… partnership between us and as far as I was concerned, that was a good thing. Mixing business and pleasure tended to be a very bad idea. I’d seen it ruin all sorts of relationships in the past and it was a road I had no intention of going down.

Which was why I’d be trying to dodge Kirree for the past several months. Had she been some other agency’s trainee, I might have considered it. She was a beautiful lady procyon by any standard, but I was not going to get physically or emotionally involved with a co-worker. Physically was bad enough, but emotionally? Wasn’t going to happen.

I glanced over and saw Vic coming through the throng toward me and bared my teeth at her in an approximation of a human smile. “Hey, Vic. The boss has something in the works and he wants me to take care of it. He asked me if I had any preferences as far as someone to work with and you were the first person that came to mind.”

I’m no expert on human concepts of physical attractiveness, but I’d imagine based on the reactions of most of the humans and some of the hybrids in our classes that she’s something of a looker. She’s strong and athletic with straight black hair and deep blue eyes, and all her facial features seemed to be more or less in proportion, so it was a fairly good bet that she’d be described at least as ‘pretty.’

Now me, on the other hand, am a totally different story. I’m a bull male, with all that entails. I’d nearly reached adulthood before I found an agency recruiter, and bore a host of battle scars from my years of living on the streets of my home world. The only procyons who tend to enter adulthood without earning their share of permanent disfigurements are the scions of the Families.

A tour of my furless patches, puckered stab wounds, long jagged scars, and bite marks could take several minutes. I knew because I’d timed it once. We’re generally proud of our scars, but I’ve found that humans tend to find the whole thing distasteful.

What’s really funny is meeting up with suburban or urban humans who think that are wild cousins, the raccoons, creatures similar to those from which we procyons ascended, are cute and cuddly. They’re smart, and maybe cute, but they are anything but cuddly. And we’re not all that different from them.

I could only shrug. Fenris hadn’t found his way back yet and until he did I had no answers for her. I told her what he’d told me, but that hadn’t been much. I didn’t dare ask her if it seemed as off as it had to me lest I rouse her suspicions, but I certainly wanted to.

Vic hailed from a locale on Earth Prime called Great Britain, and she spoke quite differently than many of the other humans I’d met. It was almost as though it were a different language, though I knew it wasn’t. They actually used different words for the same things, which really threw me off.

Most of the immortal types had come from North America, so it had been their idioms that had been adopted by most of the folks on Starhaven. The hybrids had been brought in by the vampire Raven and his wife Val, so they’d also picked up on the language common to North America.

Agents were recruited from all over, but most people tended to play follow the leader, so Vic tended to stand out in regards to the way she used the language. I found it endearing and interesting, actually. I liked listening to her.

Somehow I missed Fenris’s approach. He threw his arms around the both of us and marched us out of the room, past the buffet tables, and down the corridor to the nearest teleport disk without a word. I stared over my shoulders at the dwindling food as it vanished around the corner behind us, but he didn’t seem to notice or, if he did, he didn’t care.

Bastard, I thought. I’d been waiting all day for the meal. I’d even skipped my lunch in anticipation of diving into the feast. I promised to pay him back for that, one way or another.

He led us off the disk at our destination and to a nearby door, which slid open as we approached. “Ye Olde and New Weapon Shoppe,” he said, ushering us inside.

A short, fat, balding human male stood behind the counter, rubbing his hands together in a way I didn’t like at all. Sweat beaded on his broad forehead and his face looked flushed. Was the man sick? Unlikely. So what was wrong with him? “Lord Fenris. It’s so good to see you. What can I do for you today? We’ve got a new shipment of—”

“I need basic equipment, Ralph. Armor, boots, weapons harnesses, etc. You know the drill. And don’t give me your lower grade stuff either. I want immortal bodyarmor and good solid moly-edge alloy weapons.”

“Certainly, sir. What kind of weapons? I’ve got everything and anything you might desire. Everything from dirks to falchions to pikes.”

Escrima is an Earth martial art developed by the residents of several islands that was forced to defend itself from would-be invaders several different times in its long history. It was extremely versatile and taught the use of many different weapons, as well as unarmed combat. Escrima was only one of the combat arts offered by agency schools, but it had sure seemed like the best one for me to take. As I was informed early on, the more weapons I knew how to use, the better off I was all the way around. Sometimes one stumbled into caches of magical blades and such and it was terribly disappointing when o e found one couldn’t actually use that magnificent weapon one happened to pick up.

The agencies didn’t generally approve of students fraternizing with working agents, for whatever reason, but this was just another example of a bad rule no sane person would ever actually obey. I’d picked up several tips from field operatives I encountered at the Magitech Lounge or running around the Bazaar early on in my training.

The fat man, Ralph, vanished through a door into the back as we waited. Vic entertained herself by walking around the room, inspecting the various implements of destruction displayed on the walls. Fenris, by contrast, simply folded his hands inside his robes and seemed to zone out.

Ralph returned shortly, carrying two heavy looking cases which he threw up onto the counter and opened each in turn with a dramatic flourish. He reached into one case and pulled out what the uninitiated might have mistaken for a silk jumpsuit. It appeared to weigh next to nothing as he walked around the counter and handed it to Vic.

She took it, eyed it skeptically, and then looked around. “These are designed to be worn under one’s clothes, aren’t they?”

Ralph nodded vigorously. “Yes, of course. The dressing rooms are through that door there.”

He pointed to the far right of the counter, to a door I could have sworn wasn’t there a moment earlier. As she vanished through it, assumedly to try on her armor, Ralph brought me the second set.

I hefted it, shocked at its near weightlessness. “This is armor? Are you kidding me?”

“No, sir. It’s the best non-magical armor we carry. Immortal bodyarmor. Nano-forged adamant silk. Form-fitting, supple as anything you’ve ever worn, but able to spread impact across a wide area and stop anything short of a stab with a crystal sword. Guaranteed for life.”

“It’s for real, Deacon,” Fenris told me. “The stuff is amazing. You don’t have to take my word for it—go try it on.”

I went through the door and found the dressing room and quickly put it on, amazed anew at how it didn’t feel anything at all like armor. It unsealed from the front, the seam running from the collar all the way to the knees, which made it remarkably easy to slide on. I first stripped out of my utilikilt, then stepped into the armor that seemed to embrace me like a second skin.

It even had a hole for my tail, I noticed, before even stopping to consider what that meant. My tail would be vulnerable to damage in a way the rest of me wasn’t. I didn’t particularly like that idea, but I could hardly expect to encase my tail in this—stuff. The notion seemed incredibly repugnant.

I moved around, did a few experimental kicks and punches, and couldn’t believe how easily it adapted to my musculature and motion. Shrugging at my image in the mirror which, admittedly, looked extremely odd, if not ridiculous, I picked up the kilt and walked back out into the shop.

“Tell me,” said Vic, doing a pirouette in the center of the floor. On me, it only managed not to look ridiculous. On her, it looked absolutely flattering. “It’s bloody brilliant.”

“You’ll find a tab at the back of the collar,” Ralph told us. “If you push on it for five seconds, it’ll pop out a strip of fabric that’ll turn into a hood if you need it. Most people don’t ever bother, but it’s there in case you need it. What’s more, there’s another tab just inside the cuff of the right sleeve. Press down on it for ten seconds… and the stuff turns transparent.”

Vic let out an odd ‘eep’ sound and let go of her cuff. “You coulda warned me,” she said to Ralph.

He did some measuring of our feet and came back out with boots a few minutes later. Now procyon feet are different than humans, but these boots felt as comfortable as I could have hoped. More so, in fact.

Ralph clapped his hands together. “Now for weapons. Would you folks prefer a weapons harness or a more traditional weapon belt?” he asked.

“Belt,” said Vic. She lifted her gaze and looked at me with an expansive shrug. “Harnesses don’t work so well for us women, ‘less we want to give our tits a twist.”

The statement came as such a surprise I barked a laugh. I couldn’t help but grin back.

Ralph bobbed in place. “A belt it is, then. And a harness for you. So what weapons would you like?

“Rapier and dirk for me,” Vic told him. “And a couple of boot knives. That’s a good fellow.”

He blinked at me, glanced at Fenris uncertainly, then nodded. “We have insta-forge capabilities and can reproduce any weapon in the history of several variant Earths in a matter of minutes.”

“I’m not sure what I want ever existed,” I told him. “But they will. I want two of them. The design is that of an oversized Bowie knife, seventeen inches of steel, eight inches of haft three inches in diameter—material doesn’t matter, though I want something that grips well and can take a beating—with a full tang including a reinforced blade trap. Got a piece of paper?”

He ducked back behind the counter and produced a sheet of plain paper and a mechanical pencil. I hurriedly sketched my design and handed it to him. He eyed it speculatively, then nodded. “I can do this quite easily sir. I assume you want it moly-edged adamant alloy?”

I nodded. Short of mystical materials like magewood or high crystal, a molecular-edged adamantine alloy blade was the best I was likely to get. It would best even the best steel on any of the primitive Earth variants and give me just one more advantage when I’d need all I could get.

We had one more stop to make, and that was at the Magitech Outlet to pick up our last few pieces of gear.

First came the Personal Communication Devices, cleverly disguised as leather and steel bracers. This multi-function communicator and tactical data emulator was the newest model designed and built by Artificer. It came with planetary wide private audio and video channels for use between Sash agents in the same dimension, a uni-band Starhaven access channel that dialed directly to HQ for two-way voice or data transmissions, a strategic cartography application that could track and identify all life forms within a five mile radius, with multiple-point zoom function for real time tactical mapping, zero-point wireless ear-bud transceiver, and emergency worldgate back to Starhaven on voice command.

Once we’d strapped that too our wrists, the woman behind the counter, a sharp-eyed albino woman, one of the Stewards of Starhaven, passed over our namesake emblems. The two black and red tiger-striped bands that fitted around our waists that bore three dimension pockets—each with an opening large enough to fit a one liter bottle of bioregen. Inside one of these sashes, an agent could carry a theoretically infinite number of items, provided that they could fit through the openings, and provided the wearer didn’t mind digging through piles and piles of things to locate the object he or she was looking for.

I tied the sash around my waist, simply to make it easy to carry until we had the chance to drop by the Bazaar to purchase clothing to wear over our armor.

One more item remained, the single item I would be required to wear that Vic would not. The Amulet of Shaping.

The fact was that most of the variant Earths in which the interworld agencies worked were human dominated, if not entirely inhabited by humans. There were some few so-called ‘open’ worlds, which knew of the existence of others, and accepted the appearance of non-humans such as myself, but the vast majority of them were places I could not tread without carefully disguising myself.

That’s what the amulet was for. Bound with a very powerful, multi-strand rune, it allowed the bearer to wear a visual and tactile illusion so clever it was nearly impossible to break. Thanks to an inverted thread that masked the whole spell, once it was activated only the wearer could remove it. Theoretically, anyway.

We made a quick stop at the Bazaar before being escorted directly to the main Starhaven worldgate.

The main Starhaven worldgate sat in a giant duraplaz cube on one end of a very long hall roughly the height and width of an Old Earth cathedral, though much, much longer. Much of the rest of the area was devoted to what seemed at first sight to be a park of some kind, with trees and various kinds of brush spread out between a dozen or so small fountains used to keep the fauna irrigated.

In truth, the reason for the greenery was to provide cover in case someone figured out a way to launch an invasion and attempted to establish a beachhead at the worldgate itself. It had happened once, and several different security protocols had been established in the aftermath.

“So,” said Fenris, looming over us and inspecting us with a critical eye. “Are you ready?”

“In a word—no.” My response was rather terse and it seemed to take him aback.

“No. You’ve dragged us through Starhaven, equipped us fully, and yet still haven’t bothered to brief us on the mission. It would be very foolish of us to step through that gate without first knowing what we’re supposed to be doing. You said that it was part of a contract with a municipal government, an engineering issue that is somehow the responsibility of the Crimson Sash, but you haven’t given us any details. And I have to wonder—how did they arrange a contract with the Crimson Sash if this is a world in which I’ll be required to wear an Amulet of Shaping?”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I was beginning to understand why my brother had never returned.

“It’s fairly simple, really. One of our mage-engineers had been on assignment on Kheas when the city engineers of Darleth had commissioned the construction of a great damn diverting water from the upper Femes River to irrigate the fields surrounding the city and provide the people precious water during the dry season.

“Unfortunately, building the damn encroached on the prerogatives and territories of a particularly secretive branch of the faerie folk who happened to live in the highlands near the source of the Femes. They’re not a warlike tribe, but they’re more than capable of dismantling the dam. So our mage-engineer helped weave magic into its creation that kept the Fey from doing so and was forced to agree to upgrade and renew the magic as necessary. It’s necessary now.”

“Forced? How forced? I still don’t see how this is any of the business of the Crimson Sash, or how the agency was even pulled into it in the first place. This isn’t an open world and thus any agreement between the original mage-engineer and the city can’t be carried over to his employers.”

“Maybe not his employers,” Fenris agreed, “but one can argue that his family is responsible for continuing it.”

“His family?” Then it hit me. My attempt to slip in under the radar to investigate the disappearance of my brother from the inside, my vow to find out exactly who was responsible and see justice down, had been an act of futility from the beginning. Fenris knew precisely who I was, and probably knew why I was here.

And yet he’d let me through the school anyway, allowed me to graduate. Why? Because he needed me to do this job? Why couldn’t someone else have done it? And what did this have to do with my brother’s disappearance?

As long as my attempt to go undercover had failed, there was no reason not to simply switch to a more direct route to the truth. “Where’s my brother, Fenris?”

“I don’t know, Deacon. It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you. For the record, I don’t think he’s deserted. Nor do I believe he’s dead.”

“Not so far as I can tell. Your brother had been assigned to this world as a waystation monitor. It’s a fairly prestigious posting, and in this case a particularly useful one for a mage-engineer. This civilization is just beginning a period of building and might end up putting together structures that rival or even surpass those of Egypt or Babylon on ancient Earth. It’s a fascinating period for a mage-engineer to have the chance to observe first-hand.”

Vic was looking back and forth between us, realizing that something besides the obvious was going on. I’d confronted the immortal directly, challenged him to tell me something he would, under normal circumstances, have had no obligation to tell me.

“You share your brother’s dedication and willpower, Deacon. I respect that immensely. And in case you were wondering, I did not share who you were with the other immortals. I figured it was between you and me. The others wouldn’t appreciate the notion of a family member trying to join an agency to investigate us.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. My commitment to discovering what had happened to my brother had helped carry me through the training, but now that I had achieved the rank of full agent, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Other than my job. Especially in the light of Fenris’s revelation. “So he didn’t disappear while assigned to this way station?”

Vacation. It was an innocuous enough word, conjuring images of lazy days on a beach, a whirlwind tour of New Las Vegas, or a hiking expedition to explore a primeval forest. Down-time. But we’d all heard the rumors that vacations were often even more dangerous and challenging than assigned missions. Trouble seemed to find interworld agents wherever they were and, from the tales whispered around the training facilities, the trouble that usually found them while off on what Vic might refer to as a ‘holiday’ usually made their most recent missions seem like mere classroom assignments.

Fenris shrugged. “Don’t know. The agents have the option of having their vacations monitored in case there’s trouble, but Astrol didn’t bother. Never had. The last time any of our people saw him was when he stepped through that worldgate.” He pointed at the shimmering silver doorway in the cube not thirty feet from where we stood.

“Fine, Fenris. I’ll do this job. But when I get back, I want your permission to go looking for him. I would like that to be my primary mission.”

Fenris seemed to consider this for a long moment. “He’s not the only agent who’s gone missing over the past few years while on vacation. We could use someone dedicated to tracking them down. If you’ll agree to look for all of them, we might be able to work something out.”

He glanced down at it in some surprise, then reached out to take it. “Deal.”

I wasn’t happy about what had been done to this faerie tribe. It seemed terribly disrespectful to have simply ignored the fact that they had rights in the matter. Not only that, but most Fey possessed a sort of mystical link to their lands, which typically meant trouble for anyone daring to encroach on them. The spells bound into the dam might not have been to ward off deliberate action on the part of the tribe, but simply to deal with a more or less natural corollary of this phenomenon.

I couldn’t understand why my brother would have agreed to this in the first place. Long, bloody wars had been fought on my world to establish a code for dealing with natural rights, like the right to retain one’s ancestral lands. Why would he have gone along with a plan to simply ignore the rights of this tribe of fey when he knew very well that there’d be long-term consequences and that he’d be obligating the Crimson Sash to maintain what he’d helped build?

We were escorted to meet the city managers, who subsequently arranged for us to be taken to the dam itself, a three day journey in the company of a platoon of smelly local soldiers who were honor-bound to make sure we made it there and back in one piece.

This tribe wasn’t warlike, but that didn’t preclude them from taking potshots at travelers from time to time as they traveled through their territory. Their use of a particularly potent poison made them somewhat more than just a nuisance.

Both Vic and I took a universal detoxifier as a precaution, but we actually managed to make it to the dam unmolested. The platoon’s commander actually seemed surprised by this, though he did his best to hide it.

Just from conversations overheard during our journey, I knew the soldiers held these fey in near superstitious awe, even at the same time they considered them to be a pesky bunch. No one I talked to could be enticed to actually describing them, believing that discussing them could draw their attention and make an attack that much more likely.

I really didn’t want be drawn into a lifelong commitment to preserve the physical integrity of a construct that I believe had been built in direct defiance of what I considered to be good judgment, not to mention basic decency.

Not that I wasn’t sympathetic to the people of the town. When the city had first been settled, the area had been much more luxurious in terms of available moisture. The climate had changed, however, and it had been steadily creeping toward a more desert climate over the past few centuries. For the town to survive, much less thrive, they had to come up with some way to irrigate their crops and bring potable water to the people.

They’d come up with a way to do so, but at the expense of the fey, and I couldn’t help but believe that it would cost them dearly in the long run. These fey were elusive, which meant they couldn’t be easily eradicated, even if the city decided that was their best course of action. And even the most peaceful peoples could be turned into a serious threat if given enough cause, as history had proved back on Old Earth time and again.

What we needed was a real solution to the quandary, some way to seek and find a mutually beneficial way to get beyond this conflict. To keep the dam from being slowly destroyed by whatever force was trying to dismantle it, and to keep the tribe from preying on those travelers forced to come this way in order to see to the dam’s less esoteric maintenance needs.

I could try to get myself out of the cycle by training some of the local mages to bolster the spells holding the dam together, but just giving myself an avenue of escape wasn’t enough. I needed something more. Something better.

Female warriors weren’t common on this world, I quickly determined, and this posed something of a difficulty for Vic. While somewhat respectful of me, and aware that we represented some powerful interest from somewhere beyond their city, their natural inclination was to treat Vic as if she were some sort of oddity, or, worse yet, an exotic diversion they might somehow tame.

Late one night she and I stood on top of the dam, staring up at the stars and enjoying a momentary respite from the demands of the mission. “How are you doing?” I asked her, aware that things had grown tense of late between her and the soldiers escorting us.

“I haven’t killed anyone yet,” she replied. “I suppose that’s something.”

“Sorry about that,” I told her, knowing full well she wouldn’t even have been here if not for my request.

“These people are backwater idiots. It comes with the territory. I knew I’d have to learn to deal with this sort eventually—I suppose it’s probably a good thing I’m getting over it on my first mission out.”

“There’s still a lot about this whole deal I don’t really understand. Even if my brother was involved, I don’t know how or why he got the Crimson Sash tied into the mess. It’s making me crazy trying to figure it out. The locals don’t know anything about the Sash—they just think we’re mages from a long way off, part of some organization or guild contracted to keep the dam from coming apart at the seams.”

She sat up suddenly. “What if the obligation isn’t with the city at all?” she asked me.

She stared at me as if my head was currently imitating a block of wood. I blinked. “Oh. The fey.”

“Sure. Why not? They could well know about other worlds, and might even be aware of the interworld agencies. The fey travel between universes all the time.”

But that didn’t make a lot of sense either. How could we be obligated to the local tribe of fey to maintain the dam when they didn’t want it here in the first place?

Unless… I stood up and looked down at the area under the dam, a once wide canyon that had since begun to take on the look of a lush grassland dotted her and there with small copses of trees. It wasn’t easy to make out a lot of details in the dark, but I could see where the river lay and something of what stood around it. If the fey village had been built somewhere near but above the river as it lay before the dam’s construction, the destruction of it now might well destroy it. And if it was some inherent magical force that was nibbling away at the construct and its spell protections rather than the deliberate actions of the tribe, we might well be the only thing that stood between them and the utter decimation of their home.

If this was the case, why hadn’t Fenris told me that in the first place? Unless he didn’t know it either. But shouldn’t have Astrol’s report reflected this arrangement? All this maybe and maybe-not stuff was making me crazy. I needed answers and perhaps the best way to get them was to track down the fey themselves and get it directly from the horse’s mouth—so to speak.

Of course, tracking them down wasn’t going to be easy. “We need to ask the fey.”

“Oh. That sounds simple enough,” I said sardonically. “Any suggestions?”

“Sure. Start dismantling the protections on the dam. If we’re right, they’ll come running to see why you’re doing it.”

Concrete had been around for thousands of years. The ancient Romans of Old Earth used a mixture of lime and volcanic ash to pave their roads and their work in this regard was something that went a long way toward bolstering their claim to be the greatest civilization in the history of the world. At the time, and on the variant Earths where it even applied.

The locals in this particular variant, a world that had never even heard of Rome, nor most of the cultures from the history of Earth Prime or its closest variants, had used a similar mixture to create their dam, reinforcing it not with wood, as might have been more common in cultures with this level of technology, but with large iron bars.

In engineering terms, it was a remarkable achievement all the way around. The dam itself would be classified as a major arch dam, generally considered to be far beyond the capabilities of an iron age culture such as this one. And for good reason.

After accessing the agency database through my PCD, I was able to determine that neither my brother nor any other outworlder had been in any way responsible for the dam’s design. This was all local, as far as that went. Local design, local craftsmanship, and local labor.

The magic that had been built into the dam’s structure, on the other hand, was definitely outworld in origin. The locals had their own mages, but everything I’d been able to determine indicated that they weren’t particularly advanced by any measure. They were more or less limited to a basic level of pest control, limited combat magic, and potent defensive stuff intended to secure the persons and property of those sufficiently wealthy to pay for it.

The spell sigils that marked the surface of the dam, etched in great detail across its massive stony face, were elaborate and multi-faceted. I counted at least eight arms on the least intricate among them, which put it well and truly above my own skill level. But the good thing was that I didn’t have to built these spells from scratch as much as make certain they were renewing themselves as efficiently as they were designed to do.

The thing about spells was that they were usually one-time deals. You pulled in mana threads, wove and knotted them together into a sigil utilizing as many threads as necessary, or as many threads as you were capable of handling, and then ‘hung’ them in a spell web around yourself or bound them into a specific object. Either way, once that energy was drawn upon and the spell activated, it vanished. All used up.

Runes gave the mage a way to produce spells that could continually recreate themselves. If one drew a rune in the shape of a spell sigil and then bound that spell directly into the rune, the spell could reconstruct itself even after the initial energy expenditure had been discharged. It was a little like a spell battery that had the power to recharge itself over time.

These runes were subject to erosion, and therefore whole sections of the magic, one or more arms of the sigil, might not be reproduced at all. When that happened, the very integrity of the spell itself could be compromised.

My job was to dig out any sections of the runes that had faded or collapsed and make sure to renew that part of the underlying sigil if it had been damaged or rendered inoperable. The fact was that just about any mage could have done as much, but whoever held the contract preferred it to be a mage-engineer working for the Crimson Sash. That was part of the deal.

By my estimation it might take me seven hours to put the runes right again and another two to reset the energy signatures of the spells themselves. Upon initial inspection, I’d already determined that the repairs weren’t urgent, though it seemed as though the erosion might be occurring far more swiftly than one would expect, but it was easy to see how that might have been caused by whatever environmental magic bound this territory to the fey tribe in question.

That dam didn’t belong here as far as that magic was concerned and it meant to get rid of it, even if its destruction might accidentally lead to the demise of the very group of fey the magic was attempting to defend.

Magic could be astonishingly stupid. It occasionally seemed to have a will of its own, some sort of consciousness, but all too often it didn’t seem to grasp the big picture.

I studied the runes, estimating which ones I could deliberately damage to attract the attention of the fey, yet still be able to restore to full functionality once I’d gained the information I needed. I couldn’t risk erasing one of the contingency arms that held the spell together, but maybe I could wipe one of the trailing appendages…

Water flowed down the wide sluiceway constructed to carry the correct amount of water in the direction desired by the civil engineers who’d set all this up. The sluiceway emptied out a few miles farther down into what remained of the old river bed, then split again to carry the water to the southwest along the New Femes to irrigate the crops outside the city and to the southeast along what was now known as the Old Femes to eventually empty into the sea.

I switched to magesight and caught a passing mana thread, then after a long moment of hesitation, used it to erase what I considered the least indispensable portion of one of the runes.

Then we waited. After about twenty minutes, I did it again to another rune and then waited some more.

Just as I prepared to repeat the process with a third rune, something changed. At first I thought I was simply getting drowsy—not really all that surprising, considering how much concentration and mental energy this sort of thing took.

Then I thought I heard tiny bells, and colored lights swirled in my vision. I stumbled and Vic caught me. “Are you all right?”

“Drunk.” I sat down heavily, abruptly sure she was right. It was as if I were suddenly drunk. Not easy to explain, since I hadn’t had a drink of anything but water or tea for several days at this point. “How could I be drunk?”

She crouched down beside me, tilted my head back, and peered into my eyes. “Not drunk, drugged.”

“But we’re on the detoxazine, aren’t we? How could anybody drug me? And who would do that?”

“’Who’ isn’t hard to figure out, Deac. Our faerie friends would probably do just about anything to stop you from making that dam come down around their pointy little ears.”

She sighed. “I’d guess that our little tactic worked, but not well enough. The little squeaks haven’t shown themselves, they’ve just made it impossible for you to keep doing what you were doing.”

She stood back up, looming over me. “Of course, there’s nothing stopping me from continuing to rub out the runes in your place.”

“Please don’t.” The voice was female; soft, lilting, and musical. “We did not expect you to do the opposite of what we asked you to.”

“We can be contrary like that,” Vic said, spinning slowly in place as if trying to find the source of the voice.

Something darted past me at about eye level, something roughly the length of my index finger. I caught a glimpse of rainbow wings and… were those tiny pink legs? I blinked. What had they drugged me with?

Abruptly the wooziness vanished and I found myself staring at an eight inch tall human figure with butterfly wings standing on the toe of my boot gazing back at me with her hands placed firmly on her hips.

I growled under my breath. Of course! That explained why none of the other fey had tried to intercede on their behalf, why they’d more or less been left to their fate, and why the magic had seemed to have its own agenda. Pixies were the absolute lowest rung of the faerie pecking order and no self-respecting fey of any other tribe would lift a finger to help them.

I’d taken an elective class on the fey at the Sash academy. It wasn’t something most people found useful, but I’d always found faerie tales intriguing. So here I was meeting my first real fey in person and the pretty little thing was standing on the toe of my boot looking as if she wanted to poke my eye out with the tiny little sword she wore on her hip.

“We? Lady, I didn’t enter into an agreement with anyone except the folks who built the dam in the first place. I agreed to check out and fix the runes if they needed it. Which I will do. But we’ve been trying to figure out for days how anyone knew to make any kind of arrangement with our real employers and we were drawing a blank. Until it hit us that you would have to have been the ones who’d done so. And yet that didn’t make sense, since you hadn’t wanted the dam built in the first place. Unless now that it exists, to have it fail would endanger you somehow.”

If anything, her glare grew even more hostile. She put her hand on the pommel of her sword and jumped down to my shin, walking with exquisite balance over my knee, up my thigh, and stopping some few inches from my groin.

Vic squatted back down beside me. “We’re not trying to cause you any trouble,” she said. “In fact, we’d like to help if we can. If you need to find someplace out of danger to move your home, we’d like to offer our assistance.”

The pixie stuck two fingers in her mouth and let out a shrill whistle that had me clawing the gravel beneath me. What was it with human types and their damn whistling? It hurts our ears.

Suddenly the air was swarming with pixies, from tiny ones no bigger than my thumb to one nearly as tall as my forearm was long, with a truly astounding wingspan.

This mutant pixie landed lightly on the ground a few feet away and marched up to stand beside me. “So, you want to help?” he asked, each word dripping with bitter venom. “Then fix the thrice-damned runes! That’s all we be asking of you. Your predecessor helped them build the flogging thing, so the least you can do is make sure it doesn’t come falling down and drown us all unawares in our beds.”

This one was male, hair as straight and dark as Vic’s, eyes like tiny glittering emeralds as he glared up at me. I spied the gleam of a silver tiara parked rakishly atop his head and guessed him to be some sort of pixie lord.

“Don’t be blaming him for your troubles,” Vic snapped at him. “He didn’t build that dam. It wasn’t his bloody idea. He’s not even human.”

“Not human?” The pixie lord cocked his head and regarded me shrewdly. “By all the ghosts, he’s not. That’s truly amazing. He looks a bit like a polecat, though, if a polecat could be taught to walk and talk like a man.”

I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been called a polecat. If I remembered correctly, it had distinctly negative connotations. This fit everything I’d learned about pixies as a species—they were all too often unintentionally offensive. At least, most folks believed it was unintentional. Some said their rudeness was the other reason, other than their lack of power, that the rest of the Fey preferred to act as though they didn’t exist.

“The dam exists,” he said, “and moving our village is no solution. No one will allow us to move into their territory. This land is ours and these…humans—” He spat the word as if it were the worst insult imaginable— “have left us with no options. The dam must stand.”

“The only reason you don’t see any options is because you refuse to look,” I growled as I climbed to my feet. “There are always choices you can make, if you dare to look beyond your own damned preconceptions.”

He stared back at me in what looked a lot like shock and horror. How dare some walking and talking animal speak to him, the king of the pixies, in such a manner? It was almost as though I could read his mind, though what he was thinking was plastered all over his doll-sized face.

“Just because all the territories on this world are claimed by humans or other fey races, doesn’t mean you can’t pack up and go somewhere else,” Vic pointed out, giving me a sharp glare to suggest I might have gone a little too far.

I returned her gaze blandly. So far I wasn’t too thrilled by the behavior of these creatures, and saw no reason to be polite when they themselves wouldn’t bother. Now that I knew what they were, and had some notion of their abilities, I certainly wasn’t afraid of them. “That’s actually not a bad idea,” I said. “Where did you have in mind?”

She shrugged. “I can think of one place that doesn’t have any native fey population—except for one, and only one, large, protected natural habitats, and a stated policy of not interfering with indigenous creatures.”

I thought it over. She was right. There was no place more suitable. All of Earth Prime’s native fey races had been wiped out by the immortal Hades, leaving only Carth Dragonfriend, the last living Sidhe lord in that universe. The Confederation of Human Worlds Charter would automatically grant the pixies the rights of citizenship—once they’d been there a few years, anyway—and their rights would be defended by Deryk Shea and his Adjuster’s Office without hesitation, even if Shea realized they weren’t natives.

“I do.” I turned back to the pixie king. “What if we could promise to take you somewhere you’ll never have to worry about being harassed, where you can live in peace and have your rights defended by the most powerful people in the land?”

His eyes narrowed in suspicion as he returned my gaze. “Another world? And what proof do you have of any of these claims?”

I jabbed a finger at Vic. “She grew up there. There are thousands of places you could relocate to. Did you have anywhere in particular in mind, Vic?”

“Actually, I was thinking of Ireland. The natives there still put out milk for the little people, though the little people have been gone for centuries.”

“Milk? As an offering?” The female pixie, the one who’d arrived first, chirped up. “Kalai! That sounds perfect!”

“We still have no reason to believe or trust these two, Naya. One of them is a human. The other is…” His voice trailed off as he stared up at me. “The other is something else.”

“What have you got to lose by checking it out?” I asked him. “Seriously? We can take you and your friend there over and you can decide for yourselves.”

Distrustful bastard, isn’t he? I thought. Not that he doesn’t have a reason to be. “A very bad man happened to them,” I replied. “Someone who’s…gone now.” Not precisely true, but Hades had apparently reformed enough that even Carth, the one he’d betrayed so badly, had accepted him.

Not that this had anything to do with that. For all intents and purposes, the one who’d destroyed the fey on Earth Prime no longer existed.

The diminutive King considered for a long moment, then gave us a curt nod. “All right. You may take us there. If it looks promising, we’ll think about your offer.”

It took us a total of fourteen hours to complete the relocation of the pixie colony from their original world to Ireland on Earth Prime. By the end of it, even King Kalai had grown almost civil where we were concerned.

Once they’d been transplanted, from the young warrior pixies we’d first met to the very young and very old, those who hadn’t yet learned to fly, and those whose flying days were long behind them, I returned to the dam to finish the job with the runes. Then I tracked down the commander of the force that had escorted us up here in the first place.

He looked less than pleased to see me, but brightened when I explained that we’d eliminated the threat to the dam for the foreseeable future, and that subsequent ventures up here would no longer have to contend with hostile natives.

“We negotiated,” I told him. “It’s amazing how well that can work. You shouldn’t have to worry about the runes being destroyed from here on out. You’ll need to bring your own mage-engineers up here to do whatever maintenance is necessary every five to ten years or so, but that should be all.”

“Does that mean you won’t be coming back to do the work?” he asked, looking puzzled.

“It does. My work here is done. From now on your own people should be able to manage it. Thanks for the escort and good luck.”

I strode out of the building, collected Vic, who’d elected to remain outside, and we gated back to Starhaven.

“Good job, mate,” she said, clapping me on the shoulder as we exited the gate cube under the watchful eyes of the Phoenix Guard contingent on duty there.

I gave them a jaunty wave and bared my teeth at her in an approximation of a grin. “All in a day’s work.”

“Egads,” she replied, “I certainly hope not. As interesting as it was, it’s not an experience I want to repeat in the near future.”

I snorted. “Tell me about it. C’mon, we need to go find Fenris Wolf. I think he has a special assignment for me.”

I laughed aloud at that. “Well, we’ll see what Fenris has to say. If he agrees, I don’t have any problem with it.”

I shook my head. “Not on Starhaven it isn’t. But I get your point. Mission completion means we get paid, and getting paid sounds awfully good to me. Then I’m all for a good meal and someplace soft to sleep for about sixteen hours.”

I shuddered. Humans and their hot showers and baths. Some of them seemed to risk being boiled alive. Give me a cold shower any day. “Suit yourself.”

We set off to find Fenris. It didn’t take long. He was in his office at Sash HQ. His secretary buzzed him on the ‘com and, when he heard we’d returned, he quickly invited us in.

As we entered, I had the sudden impression that he’d been doing something somehow inappropriate. I wasn’t even sure why. He might have been sleeping, except immortals didn’t sleep. He just didn’t have the air of someone who’d been hard at work. More like hardly working.

He sat behind one of the largest desks I’d ever seen, and even with my considerable height—six and a half feet—I felt literally dwarfed by the massive slab of what I took to be marble and the huge human figure sitting behind it.

He motioned us to the two chairs and we climbed carefully up to sit in them, more or less at eye level with him.

“Is this how all our assignments are going to be?” Vic asked, a trifle waspishly.

“You send us in without giving us all the dat and we end up having to play catch-up the whole time?”

“The eternal lament of the agency operative,” Fenris responded coolly. “Often times, yes. I take it you figured out who’d requested Sash intervention.” It wasn’t a question.

I nodded. “We did. Then we had to figure out what to do with them. We took them to Ireland. On Earth Prime.”

He looked at both of us in turn, gauging our reactions to see if we were ‘having him on,’ as Vic might have said. After a moment, he threw back his head and roared with laughter, the sound echoing off the walls and filling the relatively large office with a veritable avalanche of sound. “Oh, what a great solution. That was probably the only place you could have taken them where trouble wouldn’t have come out of it. The Irish will appreciate having a native fey population again, and maybe the pixies might even learn to make themselves useful for a change. Good job!”

“Now,” he continued, leaning forward. “We had an agreement, did we not? You exceeded my expectations, Deacon. I thought you two might be able to do something about it, even if you couldn’t do anything to end the obligation, but I hardly expected you to solve the whole problem in a matter of days. You’re not only a mage-engineer, you’re a natural diplomat. Keep that up and you’ll rise in the ranks quite quickly.”

I shrugged. It was a purely human gesture, but it felt natural for me by then. I’d grown rather accustomed to playing the human. Entirely too accustomed to it, once I found myself thinking about it. But that was a concern for another day. “I couldn’t have done it without Vic. If possible, I’d like to talk to you about assigning us a permanent partnership. At least until one of the two of us decides we want to pursue something different.”

“Done,” he said, negligently waving a hand. “Easy enough. Now go see Artificer. I had him working on a device that should help you track your brother.” He opened and reached into a desk drawer, pulling out two rectangular objects about the size of my forefinger, tossing one to each of us.

“Credit chits,” I said, reading the digital readout on the side of the gadget. “Five thousand credits? Wow. Thanks, boss.”

“Don’t mention it. Now run along. I’ve got work to do. And so do you. Pop back in if you find anything useful out there.”

“Don’t mention it. It was my pleasure. Seriously, though…don’t mention it. Oh, and no using your mage-engineer tricks to up the credit on those chits.” He grinned and winked, nodding toward the door. “Stay out of trouble.”

Name: Mykus Meep	Specialty: Smuggler-Thief
Race: Boro	Status: Class 2
Agency: Triwar Guild	Supervisor: Unassigned
Mission Log Classification: Open	Current Assignment: Classified

Name: Deacon	Specialty: Mage-Engineer
Race: Procyon	Status: Class 3
Agency: Crimson Sash	Supervisor: Fenris Wolf
Mission Log Classification: Open	Current Assignment: Classified