Alcingeria Volume Three

Chapter Seventeen: Employment Opportunities

Chapter Seventeen: Employment Opportunities

???

We found our way back to Despondency on the Sixty Fifth Plane. We didn't run into any Reapers, courtesy of our lack of souls, and Anariel opened the secret door into Cordell's shop for us. Mercifully, when she knocked on the door, he answered and welcomed us in with the same uncanny joviality he displayed the first time.

"Welcome back, valued customer and friends!"

His oversized smile was still unnerving even though I'd prepared myself for it on the way over. It was still so striking to me how human he looked. If it weren't for his yellow eyes and horns, he'd pass for another man on the street.

"Hello again Cordell," Anariel greeted warmly. "How's business been?"

"Booming as ever, if you'll believe it." He laughed. "I just sold a submachine gun to a minor god, so I have a sneaking suspicion the archangels are going to pay me a visit again very soon. What can I help you with? Can I help you find something?"

Anariel shifted nervously.

"We're not actually here to buy anything. Yet. That's actually kind of the problem. We, er, have no money."

He pressed his fingers to his temples for a moment, looking to the ceiling and seeming displeased and for the first time, his smile momentarily vanished. After a second it returned as he snapped to look back at her.

"If you were anyone else, I'd have thrown you out before you finished that sentence."

"I appreciate that, my friend."

"What is it that you're looking for, then? A loan? There's a bank down the street for that."

"On the contrary," she replied with a persuasive, sweet smile. "We're looking for work. I know you've got something you want done around here."

"I might be able to scrounge something up for you lost souls. I'll draw up a contract for you, but no unions."

"What's a union?"

"Never mind. Excuse me a moment, please. Let me see what I can get you."

He disappeared into a back room, where we could hear him flipping through papers. He came out with a ledger and a few pieces of paper. He looked through the ledger, his smile never wavering, as though each new item pleased him more than the last.

"Is that a to-do list of some kind?" Anariel asked after a few seconds of watching his manic grinning.

"Of some kind," he mused. "Let's see here. I'd love to throw you at the archangels who want to shut down my business, that is to say, all of them, but I'm afraid you'd be shredded alive. Or dead. Whatever."

"Do you have anything that wouldn't get us re-killed?" I asked him.

He was quiet for another minute before placing his finger on a particular entry.

"Yes, this one should do. How would you like to go after some smugglers?"

"Smugglers?" I laughed. "There are border inspections in the Astral Planes?"

"On some of them, yes, the ones with centralized governments. Out here in the boonies, it's sort of lawless."

"Where would we be doing this?"

"Prosperity, the Merchant City of the Twenty First Plane."

"Sounds like a happening place," Giovanni commented happily.