Chapter 3: The Lobanhaki's Profile III

"Agent Langley" and "Agent Norfolk" closed the door behind them. Their armor seemed fancier but not fanciful. A custom job, unlike the mass produced equipment he saw the Huntsmen wear. The girl wore robes around it, like those the Elders did, but Agent Norfolk was obviously not an Elder. One word described her: beautiful. A look in her eyes did nothing to dispel that image of her. She might be blonde, but she was not blonde.

Langley seemed a little more distant, but as a former serviceman himself, Dominic Leonard had a hunch as to why. It was obvious in the way he carried himself, subtly there in the way he scanned the room. He kept that to himself.

"Did you bring him?" John asked them.

The question was answered quickly.
"Do you have to ask, Huntsman?" A disembodied voice replied.

The hairs on the back of Leonard's neck stood up. He turned around towards the source. At first he saw nothing, and crazy thoughts went through his head of somebody throwing their voice. Something caught his eye, though. That something ate away at the backround, bit by bit until he came to the insane conclusion that there was somebody standing right before him. Then, in a moment, it suddenly didn't seem so crazy.

That is, as long as he didn't think about it. He stood not much taller than John, and looked half his age. His first impulse was to wonder why they had brought a teenager into this, but as his eyes met those of the young man in front of him, he no longer wondered. The "boy" was dark-skinned, white-haired, and pointy eared, his irises a sparkling amethyst. The armor and robes he wore were like Agent Norfolk's: those of an Elder.

This time, though, a native wore them.
The Elder raised his hand and the two-way mirror behind them shimmered. A moving image of Agent's Norfolk and Langley interrogating John appeared.

"Joel, you look good considering how much blood that Kapajikal took out of you last time we met ." John marvelled.

"Kebethek tekaubpya. I couldn't have born it to be outlived by a youngster like you." Joel replied, smiling with dully pointed teeth. "So tell me, what did you drag me all the way from the Chekthauf Nughal for?"

"We'd been working a RICO case-" Agent Leonard started.
"A what?" Agent Norfolk asked.
"Organized crime-related: Racketeering, extortion, that sort of thing." John explained.
"Go on." Norfolk said to Agent Leonard, nodding.
"We started seeing some of your people get involved. I suppose they saw the crap that went down here, and told themselves they wanted some of your kind of help." Leonard explained.

He froze for a moment.
"Relax, it's nothing new. Only difference now is they're being more brazen about it. Go on." John said.
"Well, we talked with one of those old SACs out there, and he wanted us to keep all the investigation strictly to ourselves, and let you Huntsmen take care of doing the dirty work." Dominic said.
"Orders I take it you obeyed to the letter, right?" John cracked.
"Yeah. Just remember, you're not investigators..."
"We're consultants!"

They laughed. John thought for a moment. "What kind of consulting have you found necessary now?"

He laid the photos of the crime scene out in front of them. Messy, like most.
"Morning of February 8th, we show up to do a raid on a Russian Mafia warehouse. We have everthing staked out, the warrants wrapped up tight as drum. We weren't taking any chances, and neither were the folks who were consultiing with us. Long story short, we got our asses kicked. My people and yours." Dominic filled in.

"I heard about that. You lost some good men. Hmm. These weren't in the database they sent us. This is worse than I thought. What happened here? Both our teams should have been able to handle this." "That's what they said. It was this Zarrach character. You guys say the Talents usually only have one or two powers. This guy had more. You say that a person can't be a Crafter and a Talent at the same time. This guy was. Plus he had people like him fighting along with them." Agent Leonard said, glancing towards Joel.
"Borderlanders, you mean. Now I see why you want Jacob Riley on your case." John said, subdued.

Joel made a face.
"Was it just Aucethabi?"
"Aucethabi?" Leonard asked.
"Elders. Were we the only ones backing this guy up?" Joel asked.
"They had some of the Ritulmidocha, some Metalheads, and a few of those Neanderthal looking folks with the white hair" The agent recalled, fumbling at the words.
"Aucethabi, Ritulmidocha, Worethewa and Jhems'vahsh. This guy's getting around. That can't be cheap. HQ's about to hear about this. Did you get any names and descriptions for these guys?" John said..
"Not really. I was too busy ducking swords. Wait, there was one name. It was wierd. Like somebody lisping the word circus. Circuth, like that." Agent Leonard explained.
"Serketh." Joel said, accent on the first syllable.

A faraway smilecracked his lips, and for the second time that day, Leonard hoped the Elder was a vegetarian. "So will you carry my request to your friend?" Dominic asked.

John seemed to stare off into space, then glanced at the agents before looking back to the young agent.

"I tell you what. Let's carry it together. If I know him well, I know he'll want to judge the source personally, size you up." John suggested.
The agent shook his head. "I don't think my higher-ups would approve of me accompanying you there. I can at least make sure that you're given the preparations you need for your journey to find your friend, though."

John sat there, looking at him. Slowly, a smile crept to his face.
"And if those preparations happen to require you to follow me somewhere?" John suggested. "I suppose I could swing it. Could remind my SAC of the need to keep our consultants on a short leash. Avoid negative publicity and everything. What is it?" Agent Leonard asked.

"When our people shut down that rogue gate, I had thought for a moment that my days of dancing my way around these sorts of things were over." John shrugged.
"No. You just get to be more brazen about it. Where to, then?"

John decided he liked Agent Leonard. "Lousiana. Then Padzhir, by way of the Baton Rouge Gate." He detailed.

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Convincing his superior was a real bitch, but he told them what he really thought. Too many more raids like the one in the Bronx, and all the progress on organized crime and the drug-runners would be kissed goodbye overnight. He didn't tell them everything. Later he would claim that he was caught up in events- the truth, minus the fact that he decided to be involved- but for now he was just trying to do his own dance around them. It helped when he told them that Zarrach was part of Morningstar's outfit. Nobody wanted a repeat of Hamilton City.

He drove his way out of Shreveport the next day, and past Baton Rouge a few hours later. The gate he was heading to was one of the more sophisticated ones. It was part of a sequence called a gate road. Each gate was an entrance to one world, and an exit from another. You would dive into one world, surface on Earth at the next gate, and then use that gate to enter the next world in the sequence.

What made it more complicated was that each direction had a different sequence. If you went west on the Baton Rouge Gate, you would get a Ocean realm called Sechichalu instead of Padzhir. John explained that it was like a highway that took you to different places depending on which side you exited from. On one side, you'd get the mall, the dealership, and the electronics store, and on the other side, you'd get the neighborhood, the grocery store and the office building, going in the other direction. So its a gate highway then.

He asked. John was not amused. John told him not to think too hard about it, but it occured to him that these were entire planets, parallel earths, connected like this. The massive implications of that were difficult to put aside.

He walked past the burnt machinery, the cracked crystals and melted alloys. The shockwave of energy the rogue gate had fed into the system had destroyed much of the technology that these literally gated communities had used to conceal themselves. Since the secret was out, the only likely fate for much of these things was the trashheap. Something occured to him, though, as he approached the gate with his bags on his shoulders. He had seen the high tension powerlines being hoisted onto the towers nearby. His suspicion was confirmed when he saw workers from the local utilities milling around the town around the gate.

Energy. Pure energy. The gates were marked by columns of them, or rather the disturbance in space and time around them. As he walked closer, past the guards and the fortifications, he saw it closer and closer.

The surface of it was like rippling water, a light deep within it. It flowed upwards, defiant of gravity. It was massive, a hundred yards from side to side. He didn't notice when John walked up behind him, carrying a long bundle on his shoulders. Langley and Norfolk arrived, both carrying walking sticks. Runes seemed to be written on the surface of Langley's staff. He dressed normally, as if he were going on a hike in the appalachians, not a trip to another world. Joel arrived there the latest, and he spoke with a man in Huntsmen armor. That should be Tony Mendelson, the Huntsman Lancer (something like a lieutenant) that John brought along on his order's behalf. Agent Leonard had tried to get another agent on this team, but his superiors had deemed it unnecessary, if he was only there to help prepare the Huntsmen to pursue the suspect.

The others filed through the shimmering surface of the gate and disappeared into the liquid stillness. the agent was nervous about crossing over, so he hung back. A hand came down on his shoulder. It was Langley, a serious look on his face.

"No more doing things the easy way." he said.
They walked through together.

Tales from the Borderlands Omnibus