Occupational Elf: A Short Story
Andrew Hickey
Copyright © Andrew Hickey 2012, all rights reserved.
Cover art "Caged Troll" © Francesa | Dreamstime.com
The author has asserted his moral rights.
Published by Andrew Hickey on Smashwords
It’s always the way, just when you’re in the middle of a collar, that’s when your radio goes off.
Charlie and me were in hot pursuit of an elf who we’d caught selling pixie dust to the local pre-teens, when I get a buzzing from my radio.
“Bill, you there? Over”
“Can it wait, Liz? We’re a bit busy here. Over.”
“We need you to come in as soon as. Tony just made an arrest, and we think it has to do with the Densmore case. Over.”
“Copy that. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Over.”
While I was talking with Liz, Charlie had grabbed the little bastard, and was holding him off the ground by his ears.
“You are under arrest. As a non-human sapient lifeform, you have no rights except the right to choose your deportation destination. Do you wish to be deported to Fairyland, the Misty Worlds, or Faraway And Longago? ”
“Fuck off, copper.”
“Fairyland it is. Do the honours, Bill.”
I pulled out my magic truncheon, waved it a couple of times, and opened up a portal to the Queen of Fae’s dungeons, and Charlie threw the elf through.
“Did you get the name of his dealer? ” I asked.
“Course not. He said the dealer wouldn’t tell him his True Name. Just knew that he was a goblin.”
“What a surprise. Oh well. Back to the station.”
As you can probably tell from the foregoing, I’m a copper. But as you can probably also tell (I can tell you’re bright by the way your lips aren’t moving while you’re reading this), I’m not your typical plod. I don’t get called out when your telly gets nicked, then go round to whichever local scrote was most likely to have done it and tell them I know it was them and can’t arrest them, but have my eye on them. That’s not my job, and I’m very glad it isn’t.
No, I work for Peculiar Branch. Officially, we’re the Anomalous Occurences Department, but everyone calls us Peculiar Branch. We enforce the laws of nature, rather than the laws of the land.
More often than you might think, this universe is breached by ghosts, goblins, fairies, elves, wizards and so on. When they come over, they bring their magic with them. And magic is no good for anyone.
Society lives by rules, and magic is all about breaking rules. If you spin straw into gold, you do end up with real gold – but you’re still destabilising the economy just as much as if you were a forger. Offer someone three wishes and within ten minutes you’ve got someone with a sausage for a nose. Flying carpets are great until you get sucked into a jet engine and cause a crash.
In worst-case scenarios, magic actually becomes a weapon of mass destruction. We in Peculiar Branch are just thankful that al-Qaeda won’t work with genies because of their religion – a genie with a bad instruction could wipe out the whole world, or even the universe, before we had time to blink.
But thankfully, most of what we have to deal with is petty stuff – unicorns on the rampage (fortunately for us, unicorns seem to have very medieval ideas of virginity, so many of our more sapphic WPCs end up on unicorn duty), political refugees from the Goblin Wars (we feel sorry for these, but we can’t take them in. Our neutrality is too important), shops selling mysterious items (the reason they have always gone two days later is that we raid them and close them down the second we get wind of them), that sort of thing.
So we keep the world running smoothly, and according to the laws of physics. But occasionally, there’s a big problem. We’d had one that year.
A bloke called Tim Densmore, a nerdy little accountant type, had got hold of some grimoires from god knows where. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem - while your actual magical artifacts can sometimes cause trouble, a grimoire is only of any use to anyone if it’s used by someone from the magical realms. A normal human from this universe can put on all the mystic robes they want and chant ’izzy wizzy let’s get busy’ as much as they like, but they won’t actually do any magic. We’re not made of the right stuff.
Except for Densmore. No-one has any idea how he did it, but he managed in a very short time to raise himself to the level of a Class Eight Mage. Now, admittedly, that’s not much – you can do the odd rain of frogs, or mystic whirlwind, but Class Eights are hardly Gandalf. But the highest level anyone from this universe had ever previously attained was Class Thirty-Nine (ability to inflict a sneezing fit with a curse, if the victim already had a weakened immune system). A Class Eight was a real problem.
All the laws regarding magic users had been crafted under the assumption that we’d be dealing with illegal immigrants. You just get them and chuck ’em back where they came from, and let them be someone else’s problem. They very rarely came through a second time – the Misty Worlds and Faraway And Longago operated on a different time scale to ours, so one second here was a decade there, while the Queen Of Fairyland is not keen on people who’ve tried to escape her realm, and tends to make her displeasure known in a variety of nasty ways – so chuck ’em though, job’s a good’un, onto the next one.
But Densmore was from this universe, and even from this country. He wasn’t technically breaking any laws, because no-one had planned for anything like him.
Then all of a sudden, just as he was calling down the winds and rains to destroy the town of Basingstoke for an imagined slight some twenty years earlier, his powers disappeared. We had him quietly locked up in a loony bin, and hoped that’d be the end of it.
But now the case was apparently getting re-opened, and it was muggins here who had to deal with it.
I got into the station and asked Jill, on the front desk, what the trouble was.
“Troll in cell five,says he’s got information on Densmore, won’t talk without a lawyer.”
“What for? Does he think we’re going to breach his inhuman rights? ”
“Don’t ask me, I just work here.”
I went into the cell, and was confronted with a fifteen-foot tall troll, bent nearly double even in our oversized cells, with a small bloke sat next to him who I assumed must be his brief.
“Mind telling me why I shouldn’t just open up a portal and send you back right now? ”