Why do you want a loan?

I’m asking, because he’ll ask. It’s kind of his job. They need to keep track of these things, make sure that what they’re giving—sorry, lending—money to isn’t illegal; but more importantly, to try to make sure that this loan will stimulate the economy in some way.

You want to buy a home? Great. Homes bought stimulate the housing market. You want to start a business? Keep the money flowing! Employ others? Even better! Buy a car—buy a motorcycle—Here! Here’s a credit card! Go nuts!

But why do you need this loan?

I’m asking, because he won’t. I’m asking, because I want you to think.

How will you pay the loan back?

This is the question he doesn’t want you to worry about. If your trust fund, like the Nigerian Princess’s, is going to open up in another six weeks, he might not be interested. His interest won’t be high.

When you come to him the first time, he will smile and he will bow. He will tell you that you are in good hands and extoll his own beneficence and mercy.

When you come to him the second time, he will frown and he will tap his long, thin fingers on the hard, oak desk. You no longer hold his interest—or worse: you’ve been keeping up on the interest, but not the principal, and what good are interests if the principles are lost?

Maybe you’ll be lucky—maybe your business will take off. Maybe you’ll get a job worthy of all those years of study. You’ll buy your house cheap—but then again, probably not.

You probably had to sell your house cheap, and still owe his bank back interest. Your school wasn’t worth the money down and you’ve been found wanting and waiting tables for scraps of approval. Your business didn’t take off because no one can afford your services because everyone owes money to him.

And in the vault of the Twin Oaks bank, the Goblin climbs his golden mountain to the top, content to know your money’s safe with him.

Because, after all, who could ever spend that much money?

They both looked like spies, but from completely different eras.

The one at the end, the one who was already seated, looked out of place to begin with. He was wearing a tie, which stuck out like a gangrenous limb in this small-town diner, and behind him was an incongruous coatrack upon which hung his 1940s bowler or whatever the hell it was called.

The other one? He looked scary. He looked Eastern European, like a Russian mob enforcer from a nineties action movie when they didn’t know what was really happening behind what was left of the Iron Curtain. He was large and awkward, but more awkward about being in the South than about being in a diner.

Ironic, since both of them were natives.

Welcome to Trinity’s Field, NC.

Ceridwen Entwhistle, who was also a native (but didn’t like to admit it) knew her targets from before. They had been ageless fixtures even when she was a child, which made sense, since–she now knew–both of them happened to be Elves. She had never yet had the pleasure of speaking with them, but she knew them by sight. Everyone did. And everyone knew that they were connected. They just didn’t talk about it.

The one at the end saw her and looked like he was going to stand up, but the other one was in the way, so all he did was straighten himself up in his seat and smooth down his tie. The big one looked at him, acknowledging, but didn’t actually “give him a look”, as such.

Ceri slid into the seat across from them. “Is this seat taken?” she asked.

“So you are the one,” said the one with the tie.

“We were expecting someone…” the big one thought about it.

“Older,” the other supplied.

“Yes, older,” said the big one, in the same silky serial-killer voice that didn’t work with his Russian mob exterior.

“I’m plenty old enough,” said the twenty-six-year-old agent of the Order of the Oak, who had seen more in the last eight years than most people saw in ten lifetimes.

“We do not doubt it,” said the big one.

Not caring which game they were trying to play, Ceri cut to the chase. “Where’s the girl?” she demanded.

The twitch that betrayed their surprise at her candor was almost imperceptible, but she caught it. They didn’t like her game, but now there was no getting out of playing it. Unless, of course, they switched games again.

“The girl?” said the one with the tie.

“The girl…” The big one had a more pensive tone.

“Remind us a moment,” said the first, “Which girl is this that you’re looking for–”

“Carly Elgin,” said Ceri. “Carly Mae Elgin, of 456 East Pine Street. Last seen in the company of Rowan Galveston. An Elf.”

They looked pensive, now.

Fine, she thought. I guess I’ll have to play by their rules, first.

Fucking Elves.

“Which one of you is Lester Charleston?” Ceri finally took the bait. “And which is Charles Leicester?” She said it like “Lester”, like the British.

“Lee-sester,” they corrected her.

She frowned. “Is that seriously how it’s pronounced?”

They shrugged, as though they were the same person. “Some people say it one way,” said the tie, and the big one, “Some people say it the other way.” And the tie again: “We argue either way.”

“So which is which?”

They both shrugged.

It was odd how, the more she looked at them, the less she could distinguish between the two. Each individually looked completely different from the other, but their movements were so attuned to one another that it became difficult to think of them as two different people. Two different Elves, she corrected herself.

“Where’s the girl?” If they weren’t even going to play by their own rules, why should she? “We know that you have her; why? Elves don’t take human children, it hasn’t been in their programming for thousands of years. Why now?”

“You are correct,” said the one; and the other, “We do not take human children.”

“We know that you have her!”

She said this loud enough that some few people in the diner turned their heads towards her, so she muttered a quick Telepathy-bolstered incantation of Lethe to bring bliss back to their ignorance.

“We know that you have her,” she repeated in softer tones.

“Carly Mae Elgin is with us,” one of them confirmed.

And there it was!

Just like that?

“I thought you said you didn’t take human children,” Ceri reminded them.

But their response was completely impassive. They didn’t say a word. They didn’t have to. They just sat there and let her figure it out.

“Carly Elgin is…” But no, that was absurd.

“Her birth records were falsified,” said the big one.

“Her birth mother, this Janice Seymour?” said the tie.

And the other, “She never existed.”

“But that’s not–” Well, but of course it was, and Ceri could see the way that it was possible, the way that it could happen, even before they interrupted.

They told the story so seemlessly, it was like they were one person. “An egg was stolen from the Willow Grove fourteen years ago. In it was a female gene-sequenced to be a mate for our Rowan. But there was a crash while the egg was en route. The rituals had not been completed. The egg was not fully programmed. This was why the child was able to be raised ignorant of her true heritage by the man who had found her.”

“Nigel Elgin,” Ceri supplied.

They let this sink in for a moment.

“We will not return the human child,” they said with a single voice.

“There is no human child to return,” said the big one.

“Carly Elgin has at last been returned to us,” said the one with the tie.

And there was nothing Ceri could do now to change that.

Darryl was one of the first people Rachel met when she got to UNC-Trinity. She liked him. He was cute. Kind of a dork, but in a way she could appreciate. She’d made some bad choices already by then when it came to men and she was hoping to change her ways, maybe get it right this time.

Darryl didn’t seem to take to her immediately, though. He was more interested in this petite virgin, Michelle, who seemed like the shoe-in for the ingénue-protagoniste of their college saga. But was she interested in him? Nah. Darryl was the kind of guy who found a girl out of his league to be friends with and pine over.

She needed to save him from himself.

It was charity, really.

Rachel told herself she wasn’t going to use it anymore, but she actually had a superpower and her high school fan-club (which had consisted of her gay best friend and her frenemy Susan) assured her that it was the scariest, most powerful and most dangerous superpower there was—even if it was the most subtle and hardest to detect. Rachel had the ability to psychically manipulate other people’s emotions. If you were having a bad day, she could turn on the sunshine and make you infectious with glee. If you were too happy with yourself, she could activate your sadness and drown you in self-doubt.

It was horrible, of course. There had been a learning curve, because she knew she was a horrible person for using it and she had to deal with that, but when she found out the guy Susan had been sleeping with was becoming abusive, she had to do something, right? So she took away her love and her lust and replaced them with anger and a very rational fear.

She wasn’t sure how this power she had worked, or where it had come from or anything, but she conceptualized it as a color wheel of six basic emotions. The primary colors were Love (blue), Hate (red) and Fear (for the yellow-bellies). The secondary colors were trickier, but she figured that Grief (Green) was founded on Love and the Fear of losing it; Lust or Passion (purple) turned Love into a kind of Rage; which left Joy as a combination of Hate and Fear, which only makes sense if you really stretch things (but orange is the color of stupid people, so that makes it okay).

With these six basic emotions, she was able to get people to do pretty much anything she wanted them to do, as long as she activated them at the right times. So making this Darryl kid fall in love with her? Easy..

Not that easy, of course, though. It was a process. She couldn’t get him to fall out of love with Michelle (not that “love” necessarily had anything to do with it) but what she could do was push the Purple more to the Red end of the spectrum when he was around her, maybe sprinkle some Green in any time she went Orange.

It was weird, though, because Darryl still kept hanging out with Michelle, no matter how angry she made him. It was like there was something else compelling him towards her.

So she put herself in play, perhaps a bit sooner than she should have or otherwise would. She put herself in play as an antidote to Darryl’s unrequited feelings for Michelle, and she encouraged him to take her advances seriously.

But she underestimated Darryl. She underestimated what we are forced by the limitations of language to refer to as Darryl’s rational mind. The part of him that longed for Michelle wasn’t just physical or even emotional. She challenged him intellectually on a level few other people ever had, and shared his interests in ways few others could.

When he started to feel an attraction to Rachel, he knew it was irrational. He knew it was his body telling him to want sex, his heart (as it were) longing for amorous attentions, but Rachel couldn’t fulfill the roles that Michelle was taking up. She couldn’t, wasn’t even equipped for it.

So the more Rachel changed Darryl’s heart, the more conflict Darryl felt. He wanted to like Michelle, but he felt some strange irrational anger towards her at the strangest times. Was he really that shallow? He knew she didn’t want him—it didn’t stop him from wanting her, but it allowed him to cope with it. Was he really turning into that crazed, psychotic asshole misogynist taking out his own insecurities on the girl who wants to be his friend?

And then there was Rachel. He could tell she wanted him—he couldn’t imagine why, but he wasn’t blind. He just had to ask himself, How would that work? OK, she wanted to sleep with him, but then what? Did she want to be his girlfriend? Having someone willing to warm his bed did appeal to the baser facets of Darryl’s sensibilities, but no matter how many simulations he ran, he couldn’t make any of these numbers add up to a long-term sustainable connection. So he resisted. No matter what parts of him pumped his gas, he forced himself to stay in neutral around her.

He was sad (green) when she wasn’t around, passionate (purple, never completely blue) when she was, jealous (bright, blinding red) when she was with someone else, happy when she spoke (the orange of the stupid people) and all the while he was desperately frightened (yellow) of himself, of his yellow-bellied cowardice in dealing with the whole situation.

Finally, Rachel asked him “Why don’t you want me?” She was drunk at the time, they were at a thing, and he was drunk, too; when Darryl is drunk, he waxes poetic: “Because I don’t understand you. You’re this huge, terrifying force and there is absolutely no reason why I should want you.”

“So you think I’m fat?” she slurred.

This confused him.

“You do, you think I’m fat! I’m a fat whore manipulizing other people and their—“

“I don’t think I’m fat!”

“Well fuck you, then, because I am fucking fat! I’m fat and I’m horrible person!”

This made him feel worse. She knew because she was upping the Green in his aura. He made a move towards her and for a brief moment, she thought maybe she’d won, maybe this would be it.

But instead of taking her into his arms and smothering her insecurities with kisses and then guiding her to the bed, he just wrapped his arms around her and held her.

“It’s okay,” he told her. “You’ll find someone. There are plenty of reasons to like you, your fire, your personality. Those reasons just aren’t mine.”

It isn’t fair, she thought. Why does he have to be so nice?

But he was right, so she dismantled what she’d done to his aura.

By then, she had more important things to use her powers for anyway.