A merchant ship’s crew makes a timely delivery for a client in the post-Final War Magical Realm. Originally written for an NYC Midnight contest.
I was in the galley of my vessel, the Abuela, an abandoned shrimper that had done most of her service in the Gulf of Mexico before the Final War. She’d been re-outfitted for land use in the Magical Realm, the MR. It had been a simple transformation, consisting solely of the addition of a fermitic tetrablazer and a coating of calcentrozone. The tetrablazer was a bit of overkill for this old ship, but it got us from here to there quickly, and that’s important in the MR, especially when your work involves deadlines.
And this time we were on a firm one.
I’d just sat down to dinner, when the ship’s autonav chose to triple our speed. The jolt as the overdrive engaged sent my dinner plate with its bone-in ribeye, roasted potatoes, and sauteed green beans sliding toward the floor. Only my well-honed reflexes managed to prevent a culinary disaster. I snatched the plate in mid-air, interrupting its fall, and replaced it on the table.
“By the gads, Caruso, why can’t that thing give us a little warning?” said Eldragon, a Wizard of the 3rd Order and my long-time first mate, as he stooped to pick up his plate. “At least the steak was saved,” he said, staring at his ribeye’s former accompaniments strewn across the floor.
El casually tugged his left earlobe, instantly recreating the potatoes and beans on his plate, while simultaneously moving the ones that were currently decorating the floor to the nutrecycler. He glanced over at me, probably wondering whether I’d say anything about his breech of The Uniform Code of Magical Protocol, specifically Article 127.1(b), which prohibits the use of Magic for “correcting problems caused by the physical universe that could have been otherwise prevented.”
I’m a stickler for rules, but I held my tongue.
We’d taken the mission to North Moon for one purpose: cash flow. We had none, and this contract provided plenty. We’d have done it for half the price, but through sheer, dumb luck the client, Lacie, had mistaken my quotation as the cost for each of us, rather than the package deal I’d intended. I did nothing to dissuade his misconception, and was silently joyful that my poker face had carried me through that negotiation.
My gut told me, though, that before this mission was over we’d earn every newfarthing of our accidentally inflated fee.
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Fishing trips had long been our steady source of income, and we’d known all the best spots in the MR, but the last of those spots had finally gone dry, so we