Reminiscences

James

I told you earlier that my family used me as a weapon. They wouldn’t hesitate to deploy me against their enemies, knowing that I because of my Astral Attachment I could easily overpower almost anyone I encountered.

I am from the Lando family, commonly known as one of the infamous Thirteen Families involved in the Hidden War that has been raging on Earth, away from the eyes of the public for all of recorded history.

Their magical duels, typically epic in scale and calling on some flashy displays of considerable magical ability, frequently lead to large-scale disaster. The mass casualties often caused by these encounters are covered up by governments as fictitious accidents, terrorist attacks, natural disasters and even entire wars.

The causes for the Hidden War are too many to delve into here, but it suffices to say that the powerful families have been pitted against one another in a contest over the valuable resource of Astral Light.

My role in this war, for the first part of my life, was to enforce the rule of order in the territory of my family. I would be placed in a sort of hypnosis after being injected with some magical chemical by Dr. Von.

This put me in trance where I could see, hear, smell and feel everything that was happening around me, but I had no control over my movements and actions. Essentially, I was helpless and being used as a puppet by whichever magical Client had been given control over the strings of my mind.

On one such occasion I was to leave with Madame Rend, a senior member of the Lando family Supreme Counsel, and assist her in the ambush and abduction of another family who had been deemed dangerous. On a purely shallow and physical level, Rend was an amazing beauty. Her blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes highlight the youthful glow she had managed to maintain for more decades than anyone really knew.

But as nice as the packaging was on the outside, on the inside Madame Rend was a simply cruel. She enjoyed hurting people. I’ll never forget the great joy that shone through her piercing red eyes whenever she saw another person in pin.

There were many chances for her to indulge in this during my upbringing. But on this day, she needed me in good health because our enemy was notorious.

There was one such occasion when we were supposed to pick up the son of one of the rival families for an interrogation. We were only supposed to ask some questions, with enhanced techniques if he was totally uncooperative. But the kid starting acting sarcastic and Rend just went off on him. She ended up pining his arm down with a vice grip and stabbing through his hand with a letter opener, essentially nailing his hand to the table. The kid was screaming so hysterically that we couldn’t get any thing out of him anyway.

There was another time, we were chasing after a witness who had escaped. We needed keep him under wraps for a few more days. The poor fool ran from Rend up a metal stair well on the outside of a building. It lead about 3 flights up to the roof of the building. He must’ve thought that he was still needed. I watched as she gleefully tossed him from the roof of the building, only after holding him over the edge and making him beg for his life.

That’s the kind of person I came to know her as, growing up with her in the employ of my family.

Our target, Stanley Benson, was a mid-level member of the Benson Clan. The Bensons were another infamous member of the Thirteen Families fighting a Hidden War on Earth.

The Bensons were old rivals of the Landos and both vied for position in the Hidden War. Stanley’s level was estimated by the Lando clan’s scouting team to only be around that of an Enforcer, the second lowest of four rankings in the Benson Clan’s system that placed every family member in a strictly enforced hierarchy. His scouts gave Stanley an overall combat evaluation of C, with an estimated Astral Consciousness (an accurate measurement of the magnitude of a person’s mastery of magic) level of 2000.

The official scouts of the Lando family did not assess Stanley as being much of a match for neither me nor Rend. However, we had been warned by the high-ranking Lando named Brandon Lando that he was a particularly crafty enemy. One that was able to use clever strategy to make up for his lack in raw Astral power.

We didn’t find much trouble in tracking Stanley down. Despite knowing that his antics at one of the local night clubs owned by the Landos had placed him in the crosshairs of prominent members of the Lando Clan, Stanley made seemingly little effort so conceal his whereabouts.

He was still frequenting many of the same places: late night diners, night clubs where he hadn’t been explicitly banned and the classic movie theater downtown he was known to hangout at on Friday nights.

As we approached that movie theater on a Friday evening in leather-clad backseat of a chauffeured black Lincoln Town car, Madame Rend took the opportunity to prep me on how to execute our plan.

“Larry!” She said strongly to the chauffeur in the front. “Will you raise up the separator? I don’t need the likes of you eavesdropping on the two of us.” She told him. The man cringed, shrugged, shook his head in affirmation and fumble briefly with the control panel on the front of the car before raising the divider.

After that Madame Rend mouthed a quick incantation under her breath and cast what was apparently a soundproofing spell on the backseat of the Towncar. “There, now we have some privacy.” She said to me.

I wasn’t much company back in those days. The drug regimen they were forcing me on kept my personality fragmented. It was clear they used different drugs to put me into different states, then used those versions of myself to execute whatever they wanted. Somedays I wasn’t sure who I was. But on this occasion I had been programmed as a trained killer. Quiet but alert. Moreover, talking placed an even greater strain on my stores of Astral Light, which would rapidly deplete whenever I was away from the family’s vast stores of Astral Light-emitting crystals in their estate.

“I’ve been informed that The Patriarch wants us to give him a chance to surrender. We are to take him alive, if at all possible”. Madame Rend looked at me firmly as she said this. “But I don’t care quite frankly. If something happens, you know.” She looked away, out the window at what could’ve been anything, and then right back with a little more intensity.

“Like if you crushed him. Like you did to that Lee boy.” She said this with a kind of sadistic glee. She was referring to what happened when a child of one of the rival groups tried to interfere on behalf of his siblings.

As we got out of the vehicle Rend said one more thing to me, “We only have 3 crystals. You know that means we don’t have a lot of time.” I nodded at her affirmatively. “So we still can’t let him drag this on too long. Don’t give him a chance to escape.”