Oracle

Part 2

The job looked like a normal job, nothing different to his regular order. Find an oracle who is not protected by any of the factions within the city and deliver their source of power to the auction. How much money he received depended on the source of the oracle's power. If it was detachable from the oracle, he was paid more. If it was part of something necessary for the oracle to live, his boss paid less.

It was a simple job to hunt down unattached oracles in a city such as Asmelle. The port city was large and had more people and creatures living in it than any other on the continent. The city was the gateway between several lands and, while the law did exist in Asmelle, it was not quite the law of the country it technically belonged to. The law of the city belonged to a man known as Calder. A powerful man who controlled almost every trade within the city, both legal and illegal.

Calder had strict rules about the welfare of the everyday citizens of Asmelle. Notably that none suffered unduly or were affected by the goings on of the things outside their normal lives. It was one thing for a civilian to go looking for the darker parts of the city, another for them to fall into it. Luckily for the organ trade, there were plenty of people in Asmelle who did not count as citizens. Tourists from other countries who strayed into bad neighbourhoods, illegals who hid in the city from immigration control, unregistered folk who lived in the slums.

The boy Elison had 'scouted' was one such boy. The boy was a young man, 21 and fresh out of university and heading abroad to see the world. He had been dancing at a nightclub when Elison had made his move, a pretty little thing with skinny hips and pouty lips which had almost distracted Elison from his job. His screams as Elison had bundled him up and away had echoed for hours afterwards in Elison's head.

He felt no regret for delivering the boy to the butcher to have his pretty blue eyes removed. The upper classes considered outsiders like him meat. For Elison, the boy was a paycheck that needed cashing in. The fact he was still considering the boy when he got the phone call hours later was a bad sign. Perhaps it was time to move on from being an organ finder. You couldn't deliver people to have various things removed with a conscience, despite Calder's weird mandates about how locators could treat the poor souls caught in the web. Mandates which were getting stricter, not that Elison minded. If they were going to rip the eyes out of a man, the least they could do was ensure he was comfortable for the rest of his miserable life.

He moved from the delivery point to one of John's bars through the shadow highway, a route which only a few people could access and even fewer could walk. Like many true denizens of the city, Elison had a quirk to his bloodline. An added layer of something which let him do things that most humans couldn't. Moving through shadows was his quirk, not a unique one by any means. It was useful for agencies who served businesses of a darker nature.

"Regular?" One of John's fancy bartenders asked as he moved from the shadows toward the bar where there was a row of men hunched over their drinks, smoking cigarettes in one hand and their drink of choice in the other.

Elison grunted at the man, pulling out a cigarette and adding to the row of smoking men. The room smelt of old wood, stale beer and smoke. It was not a place for the faint-hearted, with a death occurring most weeks, if not nightly on a particularly bad run. The bartender dumped a pint of beer in front of him before looking at him sideways.

"Oracle night?" the man asked, cleaning a glass, "What was their source?"