13) Hired gun.

I had Imogene help me pack up Mom’s stuff.

Some of it would be going to Mom’s cousin and some to her friends, after little Imo, a name I was waiting to spring on my sister, has taken what she wanted, and what I was setting aside for her since I felt that Mom would have wanted her to have it.

I set aside a few things for me. For the memories more than a practical need. A scarf, a fancy bookmark. The rest will be going to a sale at a shelter for battered women. They helped us once upon a time.

For right now I’m going to be taking a break from doing interviews, instead I’m going to share someone else’s story.

Confessions of an Otherworld Mercenary.

I'm not going to tell you my name since I don't want my Ex trying to get a cut of pay, or trying to take my land, but you can call me Sarge.

( Sarge goes on a bit of tangent here questioning why his ex-wife, a person capable of working and supporting herself is allowed to get to live entirely off of the alimony he has to pay her two years after their marriage ended rather than earning a living on her own efforts.)

I don’t blame her for kicking me to the curb. After I lost my leg in Afghanistan, I got mean.

She got the kids, the house, and the car, and I got to keep my disability money, and half my pension.

So, when I read your post about White Forrest, well, getting my leg back sounded good. Getting to put a hurt on some people while getting paid sounded even better. Therapeutic even.

The hundred thousand… Well, that would let me get some sort of life back.

I called the number on White Forrest’s website, and an actual living breathing person picked up. No machine, no push button maze, just a real live human being, or a reasonable stand in.

She took my information, and less than an hour later another woman called me back to arrange for me to fly out to South Dakota that very same day.

I was surprised. “Moving kind of quick here aren't we?”

“Yes Sarge, here in this place we are. Days here are weeks there.”

I packed a bag. Plenty of socks and undies. My grandfather’s trench knife. Photos of my kids.

A short flight later I was at an airport where I joined a mixed group of dozens of old soldiers, young kids just out of high school, some guys that looked like ex-cons, and some refugees who wanted to get their families out of people’s community centers.

Mostly men, or boys, but a good solid ten percent women, some of them with kids.

A rather nice looking bus took up to a brand new looking steel warehouse in the middle of a cornfield. Inside was something that looked like a psychedelic Stonehenge. Big blocks of aged stone with spirals painted on them the size of storage containers half buried in the dirt.

We got shuffled off to one side and handed some big ruck bags. A dark skinned woman with yellow eyes, a little bitty thing but she handled the sixty plus bag with ease, told me, "Check the sizes, and try on the boots, we got a replacement for them on this side if they don’t fit.”

I'm not sure where they got my sizes from, but while the shoes fit, everything else had an awkward fit, either too tight or too loose. I mentioned it to the dark girl, who flicked out a ribbon like forked blue tongue at me. "They will fit after you get invigorated. Just wear your old pants for now."

About a half hour later, the stones began to make a sound I can only call singing, and the space inside, about eighty feet across, filled up with a bunch of people in a mix of civilian looking clothes and worn out looking uniforms.

Most of them looked either drunk, or hungover, but each and every one of them looked healthy.

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Not necessarily young, not happy, but healthy and fit.

Then a few of the tall pale women who seemed to be in charge began to herd them out of the stone ring and off to the other side of the warehouse.

One guy turned around and yelled at my group, "Cut open the chest of the beasts, get the stones out, and make sure you get top dollar for them, the Blankos will try to cheat you on them!"

By Blankos, I guessed they meant the tall pale women rolling their eyes at him. I didn’t think having a name for our employers like Blanko was a good sign. But it wasn’t like I was ever that trusting of officers or REMFs anyways.

At least most of the batch from last week's hired guns seemed to have come back.

With about a dozen finely carved coffins being carried off to the side as well. And that was just for the ones they recovered and brought back.

Well, I didn’t think I was signing up to be a mall cop.

The few parents said their goodbyes to their often weeping kids who the Elfs here would be taking care of for six days, then we all go herded into the circle.

The singing of the stones from inside the circle turned out to sound more like an ear piercing scream before the world outside the ring of stones blurred and became somewhere else.

I'm sure you can find pictures of the city, the immense white trees higher than skyscrapers with buildings going up the trunks. The colors and the little butterfly people. But I didn’t get much of a chance to see the big city.

We were getting magic stone circled right out to our training base. Ft Mordor.

The first thing I did once was got there was to follow my orders to stuff myself silly with some odd tasting barbecued bird. Battlehawk I was told. I would see, and kill several of those later on, but right at that moment, all I knew was that I cutting some of the dark meat slathered with Open Pitt off of a drumstick bone the size of a baseball bat.

Then I was chugging down glass after glass of some kind of fortified milk with a texture of too much undissolved drink mix in it.

All of this was to prepare me for a three day nap on one of a few dozen stone tables sitting underneath a merely six hundred foot tall white tree planted inside the former “Orc” stronghold.

A mere eighty year old sapling I was told.

When I woke up, I was coated in a foul smelling dried crust of everything bad I had stuffed down my throat over the years. And I had my leg back.

It was pale and weak looking, but I was back to walking on my own two feet, at least after I got back to my feet after taking a nosedive after jumping to my feet for the first time.

I also had all my teeth back, along with a piece of me that got cut off shortly after I was born.

That took more getting used to than having my leg back, but I think I'm going to live with it rather than let someone go down there with a knife.

Basic training was basic. No marching, no saluting, just learning how to shoot, how to take cover, and who to shoot at.

They trusted the veterans like me to help the virgins figure out the rest of it in the field.

I had a pretty good crew. Having Mama Sita in our group made the kids behave and listen. She was a good woman and deserved better than a ride home in an enchanted coffin.

The Elfs didn’t make those for us out of kindness, they didn’t want our corpses polluting their lands.

Yeah, the Blankos didn’t like us, or respect us very much. They could make the gems they traded for cash to pay us with, so we were cheap migrant labor. Good enough to do the work they didn’t want to do, but not good enough to stay. But they did keep their promises.

The setup here was there were two sets of so called gods left who were the last ones standing from their proxy war using the Elfs and Orcs as their toy soldiers. The other races were the leftovers from Gods who had been knocked out of the game after their races got beat.

But while bringing in humans didn't break the rules, the goddess Lyra who was the chief referee ruled that there had to be a balance of power.

The Lizard boys the Orc got to bring in used Air guns which didn't pack too much of impact, but we couldn't hear them shooting. And their skins changed colors to match their surroundings, not Predator level, but just really good camouflage.

Fortunately, Riels, a member of the same dark skinned race, the Niebs, as the gal who hooked me up with a good set of boots, filled me in on how it worked to be a mercenary.

“You shoot at the other side, yes, but you don’t always try to hit them, just keep them over there where they belongs. We’re here to fight, both sides, not to die, and not to kill. We wins by putting the other guys in such a bad spot they have to run.”

"But always go for the kill shot on their leaders, the fanged ones, Orcs, once the leaders are dead, the Grunts as you call them are more than happy to run away."

Really, for a conflict with live ammunition, it was all quite civilized. Still, with bullets flying, some people died.

Mama Sita. Sita Gupta got torn apart by a war beast when we didn't run away fast enough. I got its rider and a grenade and took out the furry rhino looking beast. I stuck around long enough to cut the green gem out of its chest.

It kind of called to me.

During our downtime on leave, I paid a Nieb Seer and found out I had a talent for nature magic, which the heart stone I picked up was attuned to, like a lot of Orc Warbeast heart stones. I picked up several more of them to pay for some lessons, but the one from the beast that killed Mama Sita was the strongest.

Normally the Elfs don’t let you take such things home with you, claiming they need it for the war effort, but I hid it in Sita’s coffin.

They don’t like touching live human bodies, they weren't going anywhere near a dead one.

Sita came to America to get away from her two kid’s father, an abusive asshole, so I kept a promise I had made to her and took them in myself, a good chunk of my paycheck went to fixing their paperwork to make that happen.

But like I said, making gems was easy for the Elfs, and there was plenty of room in the coffin.

Sita’s remains went into the ground on my new homestead, and I named the spirit that rose from the stone inside it Gupta, which means governor or something like that.

I'm still learning Hindu so the kids don’t forget how to speak it, and magic. Chandra has the same nature affinity as me, while little Ravi doesn't have any affinity that I can figure out, but he hopes to go to war against the Orcs one day when he grows up.

The kid wants some payback. I can respect that. I can also respect him if he honors her memory by living a good life instead.

From what I saw, the war over there will still be going on, so I will prepare him in case he doesn't change his mind.

Who knows, by the time he’s old enough to go over there, I might be ready for another three day lie down and join him.