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Stories posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Into the fields of Summer - 39. Signs of Trouble 1
“Patri, I don’t know how to hide this any longer, at practice the other day, I basically beat a vampire, I was too fast, I can’t tone it down” I said worryingly while talking to my grandfather. “I think I’m losing control” I was getting antsy with all of the things happening around me.
“Ah, I see, the preparations for your coming here are just beginning, it would take at least a few more weeks for everything to be arranged, I was hoping that we’ll tell everyone you trust about this just by then, but it seems your abilities are developing too fast for us to hide it anymore” King ZoHal explained, he wasn’t stressed about it, but he seemed to have a bit of reservation about me telling dad, Leo, and Victor so soon, it seems that he’s still holding unto the secrecy of the Elvenhasil.
“Don’t worry Patri, I trust them, they’ll never betray us, they love me and they have my best interest in mind” I tried to allay any concerns he might have.
“I see, I see, it’s just that it’s hard to let go you know, and we’ve all basically made this domain our refuge for the past 200 years, letting outsiders in, will be something new, and unheard of even” there was some apprehension in his tone but he surely knew this had to be done, I can’t keep this a secret for a few more weeks if not days, time was certainly running out.
“I understand Patri, Hmm, how do we go about this anyway?, I can’t just blurt it out in front of them can I?” I sighed. I can’t think of any ‘smooth’ method of revealing this to the people around me.
Yal joined in our conversation and stated, “How about I come with you then?, they have to see a real elf to believe you, and I can bring some paintings or pictures of your mom in her youth to maybe prove our point or something like that” Yal suggesting.
“Well... I’m not sure how dad will take all of this, you know, learning your wife was an elf and an elven princess at that and to add on it, having your son as a half elf and the only one ever, sigh” this is some complicated shit, ugh, what did I get myself into.
“We’ll make it work” Yal confidently said.
“I hope this works” I replied with a shrug.
“We all hope so” The King said. Then the King looked at Patri and said “we’ll have to make arrangements for you to travel to the human world, take Hashana with you”
Yal smiled and agreed “definitely, I need a skilled elf to open a portal with me, she’s learned to be very good at it”
“Hashana?” I asked.
Yal then answered now with a proud smile, “Hashana is my younger sister, she’s an up and coming Scholar, she’s just earned her bronze scholar badge” he smiled even further.
“Uh Huh, okay, what’s a scholar by the way?, some sort of professor?” I asked.
“Oh, haha, no no, well, almost but not really, you already know that we elves get to visit the human world every few years right?, well, there’s an exception to that, Scholars - Elves that specialize in gathering information about the progress and other matters developing within the human world, there are also Traders - Elves that specialize in the procurement of goods and materials from the human world to the Elven world, we’re not exactly stuck in the Middle Ages you know, we need some electronics too, and machinery, but not much” he grinned.
“Ah... I see, so a scholar is more of a spy then huh?” I replied.
“Haha, well, we’d rather call scholars as intelligence officers” he winked at me.
The King then added “Yal here actually is a Master Scholar, hehe, we had to assign finding you to a Master, Hehe”
“Oh, haha, okay” I replied, finding some of this a little bit funny, Yal looked to be a very capable guy but he never appeared to be a spy, well maybe that’s what spies should look like, unassuming, hehe.
The King then added “So, we’ll make arrangements for Yal and Hashana to visit you in a few days, I believe we’ll be still in contact here a few more times before then”
“Okay” I said.
“And these traders?” I asked, genuinely curious about these types of elves as well.
Patri then explained “well... to acquire electronics and other stuff from the human world, we obviously need money right?, but we can’t just steal from you people”
“So...?” I asked
“Chris, one thing about the Elven realm is that we have a lot of gems and gold and silver, the spell creating this realm inadvertently added precious stones into the land underneath, and we have not much use for such stones and gems, and we have very skilled craftsmen, so we sell jewelry in your world, in turn we earn human money, and with the money we’re able to buy via the traders all the gadgets or stuff we can’t produce in our realm” Patri explained further “as much as we’d like to be self sufficient with everything, we simply can’t, do you know how complicated the supply chain is for making a phone or tv?, it’s ridiculous, and don’t start with me about microchips and the like, I’d rather have the big tech companies you have in your world deal with all of that, we’d rather stick with our jewelry ,thank you very much” Patri chuckled at that “So realizing how complicated trying to manufacture everything within the realm was going to be, we decided that it was best and more efficient for us to ‘import’ whatever we can’t make” Patri then pulled out his IPhone 8. I had to giggle at that point. It seemed that the elves had a very good understanding of the concept of comparative advantage I thought, though knowing more about their political and economic system seriously intrigued me, the notion of elves being a medieval society was surely slowly being broken down every time I meet Patri and Yal.
“But what about the signal and transmission issues?” I said, thinking about how their imported TVs and phones could work.
“Some parts we can make, some we have to import as well, those fiber optic cables and transmitters are pretty expensive, sigh, though we’ve recently gotten the hang of producing more and more of the parts” Patri replied then paused, and that’s thanks to our scholars he winked at Yal.
Wait... did he just mean corporate espionage? Damn, this goes deeper than I thought.
Yal then added “and we have our own networks too! Hehe, we don’t have satellite tv though, the elven realm is quite different..., you’ll understand how or why when you get there, but going back, we have several networks for tv and our version of the internet, is pretty decent too, we don’t have that many websites but we do try to cater to everything of interest out there” Yal just had to wink at the last part. Oh my... did he just mean Elven gay porn? I had to blush.
I then tried to redirect the conversation back to a more civil topic, “Well... all that importing, that must cost a lot” I looked at Patri.
“It does, well into the hundreds of millions of ... dollars? If not billions in a year, but let’s just say that humans love our jewelry” Patri winked back at me. “And don’t worry about us, we’re actually running a trade surplus with the humans and they don’t even know about it, haha”
“Oh I see” I shrugged.
Then looked at Yal “So... you guys aren’t stuck in the 18th century then?”
”Far from it, you’ll be surprised at how we’ve adopted several human innovations and how we’ve developed on our own, you might be surprised as to how a nearly closed off society can developed its own applications of tech”
I thought all this talk about the elven realm has saturated my brain too much. Who knew that maybe buying some jewelry from whatever store or whatever the elves used as a front actually financed this elven-human trade, I had to hold my head to stop a headache, first vampires then werewolves, then now elves, sigh.
“Now, time for some meditation” Yal enthusiastically said.
Hopefully some meditation would help me calm my thoughts.
“Ohh... right” I replied, this might be what I just needed.
After my meditation, Yal taught me some water tricks, not much actually, it was mainly just manipulating droplets of water in the air, we also glossed over Water Magic Theory, which was complicated as shit, though I kindda got the hang of it, seemed like I’ve read on it from a weeks back, not sure if that’s really the case, but it seems that the books I’ve been ‘reading’ before contained some knowledge.
—
Victor’s POV
The snow was very heavy yesterday, I wasn’t able to visit Chris but he had Leo and his dad to keep him company, Chris and I also texted every now and then which included some flirty ones, hehe.
During breakfast, Henry and I were eating at the main dining table when I received a call from a long time friend of mine.
“Dianne, to what do I owe this pleasure?” I said, greeting my friend, Dianne Walker, Governor of District 6 which was just west of District 4, under her were W. Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. District 6 was a little bit harder to control as the government there is highly understaffed and the various syndicates even more entrenched but Dianne’s done a good job reducing the hold of several syndicates in her area, her district is actually one of the few inland districts to have shown a marked improvement in the past few years. Vampire and Werewolf syndicates tended to gather away from the coasts, therefore inland districts had a harder time enforcing the Accords and Treaties, the situation continues to improve every year but there is substantial criminal activity going on
in the inland districts, this has been a problem for both Vampire and Werewolf governments.
Dianne had a highly concerned if not exasperated tone “Victor, we have a problem” she stated.
“What’s this about?” I asked concerned, she’s never been like this before, she’s not a big worrier. Something has certainly bothered her. This could be serious, I thought to myself.
“3 out of the 5 NuBlood warehouses in my District were attacked and severely damaged last night in the middle of heavy snowfall, several feeding centers have been attacked as well, good thing no human donor or vampire were at the feeding centers due to the weather, though some vampire guards and human guards were injured at the NuBlood warehouses, we were totally caught by surprise, it’s been mainly quiet the last few years, this just came out of nowhere, this is clearly an intelligence failure on my part” she sighed, not sure if she felt more disappointed with herself or simply frustrated at this point.
“Shit, this is bad, how much stock do you have left?, you should last several more days if not weeks right?, we can’t have vampires going hungry, that’s gonna be a mess” The thought of having tens of thousands of not hundreds of thousands of hungry vampires out on the streets is a mortifying thought.
“I know it will be a big mess, that’s why I called you, District 4 is the nearest producer of NuBlood, can you ship several truckloads as soon as possible?, we can’t afford to run out of stock even for a single day” of course we cant afford such a thing, such a thing would lead to total chaos amongst the vampire population.
“I’m on it, don’t worry” I replied, “I’ll have my people work on it, rest assured Dianne, you’ll be stocked again in no time”
“We’re, already repairing the Feeding centers but it will take a few more days, sigh, I just hope our donors haven’t been scared away but this incident” she clearly had a lot of things to do to keep her citizens in line the next few days, the only thing worse than hungry citizens is a group of panicked citizens.
“Any indication on who was behind this?, this couldn’t be random, it’s too well coordinated” I said, a few possibilities crossed my mind, but one clearly stood out.
“Well... that’s the other thing, in the walls of the burnt NuBlood warehouses, a symbol was left behind... It’s of the Blood Army, Victor, they’re on the move Victor, this is bad”
“Shit” I was right.
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Stories posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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