Mortal's Choice

Dangerous Career

 "You should see this rock. The carvings on it are amazing. Like nothing I've seen before. I'm telling you we've hit pay dirt with this one." The male voice was excited, and Tamara Limer took a drink of tea as she looked out the window into the woods. It was raining, but everything was a vibrant green today. She liked the rain and the soft patter of the drops on the deck outside. Behind her the glass kitchen table was covered with papers, journals and odd items.

"You think so? You better not be bringing me back something with a curse on it. Just managed to break the last one, you know the destruction that happened in the museum?" She commented flipping her straight blonde hair with a flick of her head. It was annoying on the side of her face. She held the cellphone to her ear with her right shoulder and tea in her right hand before using the left to push the rest of the hair back.

"What do you want from Egyptian tombs? Just be glad that nothing's burning down."

"No, only two people died from touching it. I thought you left explicit instructions to not touch it." She accused and moved back over to the table and sat down before a laptop that was there. The screen was black and she still looked out toward the window. Her dark blue eyes not quite seeing what was there however as she spoke with a colleague on the phone.

"I did, they didn't listen. You know that most don't believe in the cursed objects, or the magic that some of these items come back with. I mean that antique doll you found in India, who'd have thought demon am I right?" She pursed her lips a bit, she felt that doll was dark from the start. She didn't think it should be sold to some little girl, and her intuition was always spot on. So she bought it, and checked the doll out only to find it was possessed with the energy of a demon.

"Yeah, well better us deal with it than some family." She commented and her colleague Max clearly agreed with the sound he made. The two of them were archeologists, though she did more of the lab and research. He liked to go to the places and bring things back. The reason they teamed up was because both of them knew that there was more at work in the world than just human hands. They had seen to much, had plenty happen to them and so they were normally requested first to look at objects that were old and questionable.

Of course no one admitted that they called Tamara or Max for such a thing. Too afraid that they'd be made a laughing stock for believing in ghosts or magic. But people that worked with old things, took items from places that they never should always found out the hard way. Then they needed to find people like Tamara and Max, and they were hard to come by. People that knew how to deal with the problems of curses or possession. How to neutralize the objects so they could safely be on display. Even if they couldn't do it themselves they knew people that could and that was what mattered. There wasn't exactly a degree you could take for what they were. What they had been taught by others. Tamara just kind of fell into it, and now constantly had someone calling with some problem or another.

"You know all I wanted to do was research the past, teach people about those that came before us and their cultures. Now here I am playing witchdoctor to long forgotten items that people don't know how to deal with." She gestured to an old pottery set on her table. Though he couldn't see it, but the set was harmless it would seem. Nothing evil. However she was trying to figure out the reason it kept moving about the house on its own. The entire set would just suddenly appear somewhere else in the house. No matter where it was taken, the three bowls moved around, though one never saw it with the naked eye of course.

"Well you had a different calling, plus that intuition of yours. ESP for sure, radar for the odd." He commented with a laugh and she shook her head but smiled.

"Woo, why couldn't I get a talent that was more useful. Like purging negative energy from things rather than just knowing when something is off or needs help."