Tales From the Sorcery Patrol: Case #9987: City Living
Officer Emily Fae
1423 hrs
03/06/03
Sometimes I really love the city. I mean, most pixies find living in urban areas very difficult, and I’ll admit that the general lack of flora and fauna is sometimes a little disturbing, but on the whole, you really get a more exciting and complex combination of auras in the city. Sure, the softness and security of a pine grove, or the melody of a babbling brook have their obvious pluses, but for sheer excitement, there’s nothing like a downtown rush hour. Most of the fairy folk don’t stay long enough to overcome the culture shock.
And it certainly can be a shock. Let me tell you, it took a lot of getting used to. As I said before, there’s virtually no plant or animal life to be found outside the zoo or the city park, and what is here, is weak and caged. Not only that, but everything is straight lines and right angles. Frankly, I don’t know what humans see in right angles. There is none of the organic beauty of Elven or Pixie cities. Everything is gray and hard and rigid.
Don’t even get me started on the size thing, yikes. I suppose I have it better than human would in one of our cities, but it could still be quite intimidating to someone less confident than I. Some of my friends came out from the Great Mother Tree to visit me last week, and they said they found the whole place to be just too large and harsh and oppressive. They didn’t know how I could stand it.
I guess I’m just wired differently. I mean, all those things bothered me a little for a while, but there’s so much fun to be had in the city. Human art and movies are fascinating, and the people! I’ll tell you, as wise as an old Beech tree can be, they are just no fun at a party, if you know what I mean. I guess I just like the excitement.
It was a fine spring afternoon, and Mark and I were on patrol. We’d had a rain storm that morning, so everything was still a little soggy, but the sun was out, the sky had cleared up, and the city had come out to stretch it’s legs.
A downtown storeowner had called in to complain that a drunken man was causing problems, and harassing his customers. We were the closest, so we got tapped. Usually drunks aren’t too bad, but occasionally they can get violent, so we always have to be careful. A lot of people don’t realize that we police officers are risking our lives just about every moment of every day. You never know when that shoplifting imp or witch speeding on her broom will decide that they would rather pull out a wand or put a hex on you than cooperate.
We pulled into the grocery store’s parking lot, and sure enough, we could see the guy, just where we were told to expect him. Unfortunately, we saw a lot of other things that we didn’t expect.
Like a giraffe. Wearing a cowboy hat and glasses.
There was also a man who seemed to have breasts the size of bean bag chairs, and was attempting to crawl away, but grimacing as his swollen nipples were dragging on the asphalt. A young couple found themselves attached at the hips, literally. An elderly woman seemed confused by her new elephant’s trunk. She apparently hadn’t noticed her ears yet. The trunk and the ears were both bright pink.
Unfortunately, our drunk appeared to be a sorcerer, or a wizard. He was wearing an electric blue wizard’s robe, apparently inside out, and a pointy hat with moons and stars on it. It was a wizard’s dress uniform, but frankly on first glance, I doubted he was a full wizard. Usually they had more sense than this, and besides, wizards almost always prefer to let their victims come to them, as opposed to venturing outside on their own. Most likely, this guy was an amateur sorcerer that had failed his wizardry license exam.
Mark parked the car, and we slowly approached the man. A woman who had had her arms turned into impressively sized male genitalia was screaming at the guy to change her back. Probably not a good idea.
"Ma’am!" I called out, "Please step away from this man, we’ve got the situation under control here."
"Yeah, shut up, bitch!" The man shouted, and with a wave of his wrist, the woman’s face stretched into a dog’s snout. She whimpered a moment, and then let out a forlorn howl. Fortunately, he appeared to be using rather pedestrian transformation spells, shouldn’t be any trouble to reverse all this once we got this guy under control. The woman glared furiously at the man, but backed away as instructed.
Mark gave me a sidelong glance, asking with his eyes if we really did have control. I did give it a second thought, after all, Mark, being so much bigger, and being a human, was a much easier target for this guy’s wrath than I was. On the other hand, if we waited for backup, the situation could escalate in the meantime.
Unfortunately, while I was thinking, our uniforms had finally soaked into the man’s booze-addled brain, and he ran inside the store cackling madly. The situation had just escalated.
"Mark, you call for backup, and put on your magic armor. I’ll fly in there and see if I can talk him out." He nodded quickly and ran back to the car. I flew to the automatic doors, which were now blocked by a confused looking baby girl the size of a gorilla. I pulled my miniature "jimmy" off of my belt. It’s a handy little wand with complex door and lock-opening spells already pre-cast on it. I pointed it at the exit door, which was not obstructed with giant toddler, and voila! It swung open. I flew in quickly, and found the store in chaos.
This guy had gone berserk, transforming anyone he came across apparently randomly. Fortunately the store had only a few dozen people on it, or else we might have had a panicked stampede, but even still, people were being quickly transformed as he staggered throughout the store.
A woman in the produce department found herself looking like Carmen Miranda, with fruit now literally growing out of her head. A man and a woman in the dairy aisle found themselves odd hybrids of cows, chickens, and people with feather-covered udders, black and white spotted wings and large human breasts. They looked up at me and "cloooocked" at me in terror as I flew by, still looking for the perp.
I finally found him in the seafood aisle, laughing over a helplessly thrashing mermaid, and a large sow with swollen teats and a man’s head. The guy’s energy had to be wearing down by now, and it showed by the way he reeled slightly.
"Freeze!" The guy turned around with a drunken grin on his face.
"You mean, like this?" With that, he lashed out with an ice spell that I almost took full in the face, only a quick evasive maneuver saved me from being frozen solid. Even still, the tips of my wings caught it, and suddenly I had difficulty staying aloft. If he had hit me, I might have been killed. This guy was serious.
The guy rounded the corner of a cookie display as I landed and attempted to clear the ice from my wings. Now my wings aren’t particularly sensitive, I don’t really feel a lot of pain in them, but a little bit of damage can go a long way towards wrecking my flying control. Thank Goddess Mark was calling for backup.
"Emily! Where are you?"
I looked up suddenly; Mark was in the store! I had to warn him. Once again, I went to my belt and pulled out my little megaphone. If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s loud.
"Mark! Be careful, this guy’s dangerous!"
By now, most of the ice was off my wings and I took off perpendicular to the aisles, looking down each one as I passed it. I saw several more victims, a life-sized Mrs. Butterworth, a giant pitcher with arms and legs filled with some sort of fruit drink, and a large anthropomorphic rabbit, which was stuffing itself with some sort of multi-colored cereal. I reached the last aisle, and still didn’t see our guy, so I ran back to the front of the store, looking for Mark. Behind the cigarette counter, I think I saw Joe Camel.
At the front of the store, I arrived to find Mark, wand drawn, with the guy in a standoff. He had a hostage. A terrified looking teenage girl wearing an oversized business suit was trembling in his grip. His shoulders were shaking; I think he was crying. I was behind them, so I signaled to Mark, and began to sneak up on them. Mark worked a nod to me into a natural looking gesture as he talked to the guy.
"Come on, Sir, you don’t want it to be this way. Let the man go, put your hands on your head and cooperate. You’re in enough trouble as it is."
The guy laughed bitterly. "Yeah right, like you know what I want. You’re just like those bastards at the licensing bureau. Wrong aptitude, my butt! Can you believe they said I was too unstable?"
Admirably, Mark was able to refrain from rolling his eyes. By now I was only a few feet away. One of the great advantages we pixies have over humans is the lack of footsteps to give us away. Close up, you can hear a soft buzzing from our wings, but that’s about it.
"I can see you aren’t ready to give up yet. NOT YET." I caught his emphasis, and backed off slightly. I flew up a little to check another angle, and saw that he had a wand against the girl’s head. That had to mean something more powerful than the mostly reversible transform spells he had been using.
"But I know that you are a reasonable person," Mark continued. "So let’s not do anything stupid and just keep talking about this."
"I wasn’t doing anything wrong!" The guy yelled, his voice breaking with emotion. "Why don’t you just leave me alone?"
"We can’t have you just going around transforming people, sir. But you haven’t done anything permanent; don’t go making things worse for yourself."
The guy didn’t say anything. I couldn’t see his face, but clearly he was wavering. All the tension had gone out of his shoulders, and he looked down at the girl he was holding.
"Ok sir, listen to me, we can keep our voices LOW, and work this---NOW." I got Mark’s signal and rushed forward quickly, and got him with a stun wand, set on low, to the back of his neck. He slumped to the ground, and the girl ran over to Mark and hid behind him. I checked the guy, and the stun worked just as I had hoped. Instant paralysis without muscle spasms.
Mark walked up and watched as I put a binding spell on the guy’s wrists. "Great work, Em. He had just taken the wand off of his hostage and put it to his own head."
I understood completely, if my stun wand had been set to full-stun, his muscles would have seized and his spell, whatever it was might have gone off. We heard the back-up arriving outside, and Mark went out to explain what had happened, while I began rounding up the transformation victims from throughout the store.
After another call to the station, we had a transformation specialist on his way to turn the victims back to normal. Mark and I carried the guy’s limp body (well, Mark carried the body, I carried his wand,) out to our patrol car. After a few minutes he came around and we explained to him that he was under arrest for multiple counts of non-consensual transformation, public display of sorcery without appropriate license, resisting arrest, and use of an unregistered magic device. (The wand.)
The man he had transformed into a young girl and taken as a hostage refused to press charges. Probably embarrassed by it, I imagine, and I decided not to push the freeze spell charge, it really kind of fit in with the resisting arrest, and I’ve always kind of lived by no-harm, no-foul. Mark thought I should have gone after it anyway, but accepted my decision. Besides, the stun had sobered him up somewhat, and he seemed genuinely apologetic for everything.
He said he didn’t have any prior record, so probably he’d get off with some community service and a suspended jail sentence. That was ok with me, this guy had definitely gotten out of control, but he didn’t strike me as a genuinely bad person. Just had some emotional problems. I’ll be sure to keep tabs on him for a while. I think he’ll be ok.
The expert from the TF department was able to return all of the victims to normal in a relatively efficient manner, and in the end, no permanent damage or injury to be found. It all turned out a lot better than it might have, but it just goes to show you how we can’t treat any call as if it’s no big deal. It’s all a part of the job, and a part of living in the city.
I’ll admit that sometimes I miss my friends back home, and the Great Mother Tree too, but just the same, I find that I’m pretty happy here. I like my job, I’ve made new friends, and I find the variety of the produce and sugary treats here light years beyond the clover and wild honey back home. Besides, how often does the Great Mother Tree get to see a giraffe in a cowboy hat and glasses?
The End
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