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  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

  512 Forest Lake Drive

  Warner Robins, Georgia 31093

  Tales from the Magitech Lounge

  Copyright © 2007 by Saje Williams

  Cover art by Dawn Seewer

  ISBN: 1-59998-467-9

  www.samhainpublishing.com

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Samhain Publishing, Ltd. electronic publication: May 2007

  Tales from the

  Magitech Lounge

  Saje Williams

  Dedication

  To those who have meant the most to me, and given me the most support through all my adventures. Shay, Charlie, Kevin, the Best Dave, The Glennertainment Center, and to so many others who’ve made an impression on who I am and the words I craft.

  This one is for everyone.

  Act I

  The Future

  Episode I: A Woman Walks into a Bar…

  Call me Jack. Most people do.

  I started out as a time traveler, but I had to give it up. Not only is it illegal, but it’s dangerous to the continuum. One cannot go around creating new universes willy-nilly, and that’s the most probable result of time travel.

  I became a time traveler completely by accident, stumbling across what I assumed to be a unique device while exploring some ancient ruins in South America. The device had apparently been left there by another time traveler, whom, I’m sure, wasn’t thrilled when I accidentally hijacked it.

  Unlike many such devices, this particular gadget, which looked a lot like a small pyramid crafted out of blue glass, could cross both time and space with equal efficiency. It dumped me in the American West in the year 1884.

  That was the first of many stops and it’s possible I’ll share them with you at a later date. But this particular story is not so much about my travels as it is about how my travels ended, and how I ended up where I am today.

  The year is 2260. The place, San Francisco, California, in the former United States. The exact locale is on Haight Street, less than three blocks from the legendary Golden Gate Park.

  I’m probably lucky to be alive, considering that no one told me that time travel was illegal until I ran into a group who took it upon themselves to police the activity. I’d skipped back to a time just around the second year BC in an attempt to meet Jesus Christ.

  Apparently that’s not an uncommon thing for time travelers to do, so this aforementioned agency keeps a monitor in place to watch for our arrival. I was snatched off the dusty road within minutes of setting out to find the guy.

  Two people seemed to pop out of nowhere, each grasping one of my arms, and frog-marched me into an alley between two mud huts. One, a remarkably tall fellow (he must’ve been seven feet if he was an inch), shoved me against a wall as the other, a short, elfin-faced woman, went through my pockets and frisked me in a so professional a manner that I didn’t even consider making a lewd comment about it. That should tell you how freaked out I was.

  “He’s clean,” she said finally, glancing up at her companion. “Where’s your time machine?” she asked me.

  Shocked to my core, I saw no option but to answer honestly. I’d been running around in the thing for nearly a year by this time and hadn’t ever run across anyone like these two. I had the feeling that if I jerked them around, I’d live to regret it.

  “You take care of him, I’ll go get the machine,” the woman told her partner.

  The big guy nodded.

  “What’s all this about?” I asked him as the woman dashed away.

  “It’s about you being in big trouble,” he told me soberly. “Time travel is illegal, dangerous, and really, really stupid.”

  “Okay,” I said. “When was it made illegal?”

  This took him by surprise and he gave me an odd look. I noticed then that the whites of his eyes were literally silver in color, the iris an extremely pale green. I couldn’t quite tell, but there was something weird about the pupil as well.

  He never did answer me, but I found out on my own later. Time travel was made illegal in 2236, years before I ever found my time machine. I’d been breaking the law the whole time and had no idea.

  Yeah, I know. Ignorance is no excuse. I have discovered, however, that stupidity makes a great excuse. Sometimes.

  As it turned out, he was a lycanthrope. A were-tiger, to be exact. He and the elfin woman, who was indeed an elf, were agents of an agency called Hex which had taken over monitoring time travel from another agency known as TAU.

  None of this was known to me at the time, nor would it have mattered. I’d rarely been as scared as I was at this precise moment. Not even when I’d been hunted by a posse in the old west for a train robbery I hadn’t had anything to do with. All I needed to do then was make it back to my machine and escape—which was apparently no longer an option.

  I wasn’t sure what the punishment would be for unauthorized time travel, or who’d decide my fate.

  As it turned out, I had very little to worry about. Hex’s first mission was to eliminate the time machine and return me to my own time. Rather than facing punishment, I discovered that my adventures had impressed someone important, namely the legendary Jasmine Tashae.

  Now keep in mind that the people of my time know about other universes, and are at least aware of rumors surrounding the interworld agencies. Not much, I’ll admit. And most of us don’t spend time thinking about it. The “monsters” that appeared just before the Cen War back in the early part of the twenty-first had pretty much been acclimated into our society. Vampires, lycanthropes, mages, and the various kinds of “supers” had become part of the landscape. Jasmine Tashae—known by most only as “Jaz”, or, alternately, “The Lady of Blades”,—had been a major player in that war. Her name was in the history books along with such luminaries as Deryk Shea, Nemesis Breed, and the vampire Raven.

  After the Cen War, most of the old national boundaries dissolved, or new unions were formed. This precluded the eventual formation of a single world government, but not before the most intractable were assisted off the planet. They went on to colonize other star systems. Some had wanted to escape through the worldgates into other universes, but the newly formed interworld agencies didn’t want malcontents from Earth Prime flooding the metaverse. They made it abundantly clear they were willing to back up that preference with force, if need be. So with the help of Deryk Shea, now the richest man on Earth, a fleet of colony ships was constructed and launched into space, aiming for potential homelands spread out amongst the stars.

  I’ll admit it. Earth is a strange place these days. But it’s still my home. I didn’t flee through time to escape this world, but to discover new ones. And discover them I did.

  My rather unique method of self-education caught the interest of the near-mythical Jaz, and she approached me with an astounding offer. In the place the interworld agencies call home, on Starhaven, there exists a watering hole called the Magitech Lounge, known as a refuge for all manner of sentient beings.

  As Jaz told me, Earth could use a place like that. Even with all the preternaturals, parahumans and metahumans here, it’s s
till a melting pot that hasn’t been stirred real well. Normal folk are fascinated by the strange and unusual, but they’re also still afraid of it and no amount of book learning will change that. They needed something a little more…immediate.

  I took her offer. It wasn’t as though I had anything better to do.

  Earth’s Magitech Lounge is in an old converted warehouse half a block off Haight Street in San Francisco, above which we set aside a few rooms for rent and my own living quarters and office.

  San Francisco, as you can imagine, has become quite the Mecca for the preternatural and paranormal. Not as much as Tacoma, which is where it all began, but San Fran always did have an open-door policy for society’s misfits.

  June 18th, 2267

  San Francisco

  Another Earth

  The doors opened at noon and even then there was a line forming. I stood just inside, staring out through the one-way glass that forms one side of the entry-way. That gives me the option of excluding anyone I think might end up being a bigger problem than my security staff can handle.

  On a positive note, most of those in line seemed pretty normal today. Ordinary humans mixed in with possible paras and metas. It’s hard to recognize some of them on sight.

  Mostly tourists, I figured, which definitely wasn’t a bad thing. The night before we’d had a rather rough customer—a visiting troll—try to start a fight with one of our vampire patrons. I was looking forward to an easier time of it tonight.

  I should have known better. Peace and quiet will never be my lot in life.

  It was the three-hundredth anniversary of the Summer of Love here in the Bay City, and that fact alone had drawn the tourists in droves from the far reaches of the galaxy. Not sure why anyone even cared, but there was something about the old counter-culture and its mystique that touched a chord deep within far too many people.

  I’d been there—the original Summer of Love, that is—and I knew full well it wasn’t quite all peace, love and cosmic hippy shit. The 1960s had been a turbulent time, and the historians never really did it justice. They liked to emphasize the good stuff and ignore the rough edges.

  Of course, that’s pretty much what historians have always done.

  This meant, of course, that there were an awful lot of tie-dyed shirts in the crowd, with a lot of long hair, flowers and John Lennon glasses. Everyone wanted to be a Beatle, it seemed. I made a mental note to make sure there were a lot of Beatles tunes on the rotation tonight.

  I spotted someone at the back of the line and found myself scowling. “Boneyard?” I murmured into the transceiver implanted in my jawbone.

  “Yeah, boss?” his deep bass voice rumbled back.

  Boneyard was my head of security, a six-foot-eight were-panther with skin as black as pitch and a huge, bullet-shaped head. Despite his fearsome appearance and name, Bone was the very soul of discretion and temperance. When you’re a six-foot-eight were-panther, you can afford to be. “See that blonde woman at the back of the line? The one with the mirrored sunglasses perched on top of her head? Don’t let her in.”

  “Okay, boss.” I caught a note of curiosity in his voice, but he was too much of a professional to ask.

  Bone is from New Orleans, originally, but left before the rising sea claimed that once proud city. Global warming was a reality and, while mages and scientists were working feverishly to reverse its effects, the long-term consequences of ignoring it had become sickeningly apparent, and far too many people paid the price for their folly. Half of Golden Gate Park was now underwater. Quick action on the part of San Francisco’s mage community had saved the rest.

  Thankfully the mages were also able to rescue most of those who would have died as a result of global flooding, but a lot of people lost everything they owned, and were displaced not only around the globe, but even out to some of Earth’s colonies. Whole islands ceased to exist as livable space. Suffice it to say the only way to get a Caribbean vacation these days is to do it the way I did.

  Good luck with that.

  I sighed. One of the problems with being a former time traveler is that it changes one’s whole image of the world. I had more of a personal connection to history than most folks. Sometimes I found it distracting as hell.

  I nodded welcomingly to the patrons as they filed through the door, greeting each with a smile. They seemed an ordinary mix of folks, probably tourists interested in checking out the newest hotspot in San Francisco with nothing else in mind, but my suspicion had gone into overdrive when I’d spotted Lilith at the back of the crowd.

  She hadn’t changed all that much from high school, and I couldn’t help but wonder what she was doing here. Had she heard I ran this place, or was it just a coincidence? I don’t trust coincidence. Particularly wise of me, I think.

  Sure, she was the woman who’d yanked out my heart and danced on it back then, but why was I expecting trouble from her now? We were both twelve years older and, presumably, much, much wiser. Well, at least I was.

  She’d made it to the front of the line, I noticed, and she was arguing with Bone. She didn’t look happy, and the big were-panther took her venom with his usual stoic indifference. Insults bounce off him as easily as bullets, which is why he makes a great security chief.

  She’d always had a particularly sharp tongue, and less of a tendency to curb it than most folks. She had been accustomed to getting her way. She’d been the captain of the soccer team and the Queen of the May at our prom, as well as student body president our senior year. Lack of ambition had never been one of her faults.

  I had to admit that she still looked as good as ever. I’d long harbored suspicions that she was a parahuman, but, if she was, she didn’t broadcast it. She hadn’t pulled anything obvious on the field, and hadn’t beaten up the local bullies with anything approaching regularity, but somehow I knew there was much more to her than met the eye.

  Now, of course, was my opportunity to discover more. Or so I told myself. In all actuality, the sight of her standing there, her long, wavy strawberry blonde hair stirring in the breeze, her jaw tensed and her pale blue eyes flashing, hit me below the belt. I felt the stirrings of feelings I hadn’t allowed myself since the day she’d thrown my promise ring in the dirt at my feet and damn near broke my jaw with a wicked left hook that came out of nowhere.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the painted portrait hanging in the foyer, a unique little piece I’d happened to stumble on while touring New York not long after I got out of high school. The long, lanky fellow stared back at me, a wry grin across his face, and I reminded myself of what I’d had in mind when I took the job here. WWSD. What-Would-Spider-Do?

  I knew the answer without asking. He’d be a bigger man and invite her inside. It didn’t do any good to offer every other weird denizen of San Francisco and beyond a safe haven if one kept someone else out because of petty personal differences that should have been swallowed by the intervening years.

  I sighed again. “It’s okay, Bone. Let her in.”

  “All right, boss. Whatever you say.”

  Lilith entered and almost missed me, standing as I was under the Spider Robinson portrait in the dark hole next to the ramp leading onto the main floor. She’s always been pretty sharp-eyed, so, as soon as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she swiveled around and pinned me with her gaze.

  She drew up short. “Jack?”

  I nodded, lips twisting into a half smile. “Yeah. How are you doing, Lilith?”

  “Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about it,” she said, returning my half-hearted smile with a giga-watt grin. “I was hoping I’d run into you here. You the one who told the bruiser outside to keep me out?”

  I nodded sheepishly. “I’m afraid I wasn’t feeling particularly welcoming when I saw you standing out there.”

  “What changed?” she asked, as I led her up the ramp and out onto the upper level. I took a sharp right, cut past the dance floor, and pressed my hand to the reader plate next to the VIP lounge. The door slid
open and I ushered her inside. “Lights, fifty percent.”

  The lights came on obligingly, revealing a couple of low-slung chairs against one wall, separated by a small table just the right size for a couple of drinks. A long couch filled another wall, and a self-serve bar took up the one remaining. “Have a seat,” I told her, walking over to the bar. “What’s your poison?”

  “Mai-Tai,” she said, slipping into the chair and crossing her legs. She was wearing a pair of beige Capri pants and a loose-fitting white peasant top that bared the very tops of her creamy white breasts. I resolved not to spend any more time staring at them than I absolutely had to.

  I yanked my eyes away and concentrated on mixing the drinks. A Mai-Tai for her, a Kung Fu Monkey for me. I carried them over to the table and set them down gently before sliding into the chair beside her. “It’s good to see you,” I said and, to my surprise, I actually meant it.

  To her surprise too, it seemed. She gave me an odd look and a smile just short of a smirk. “I’m glad to hear that, Jack. You have no idea how glad.”

  I really didn’t like the sound of that. I returned her look through suddenly narrowed eyes. “What does that mean?”

  “I’m in trouble.”

  “No, really?” I grunted irritably. “What kind of trouble?”

  “I’ve pissed off some dangerous people and needed somewhere safe to hide.”

  “So you came here?”

  “The Magitech Lounge has a reputation for being a sanctuary. I thought I’d test that out.”

  “So this has nothing to do with me, does it?” I felt like a complete idiot for hoping, even at the deepest level, that something would be different this time around. Apparently with all my hopping through time, I didn’t gain any damned sense when it came to women.

  “The fact that I heard you were running the place had something to do with it, sure.”

  “Lilith, if you don’t tell me the whole story, I’m going have you thrown out so fast you’ll bounce half a block down the street.”