Corrupt, An IPMA Troll Brother Extra #3, Halloween 2015 by P. Edward Auman

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  Nearly four hours later, in the very earliest hours of the morning on October 31st, the group of four shadows had made their way across route 59, past Spring Lake and route 24, always keeping the occasional noise of large trucks passing on the I-75 to their left. There were many fields, streams and rivers they were able to use to stay out of sight or hearing from any nosey neighbors as they went. The Queen knew if they got to close to the yards about every third one had a dog that would raise an alarm, so she refused to let her minions speak during their travels.

  Finally, the lights in the lots around the Academy of the Sacred Heart across a busy road shone through trees. They were near. They just needed to find street number 1145 on the curving, almost back-woods road with heavily wooded areas around each house.

  So far the plan had worked perfectly. The fool in the little internet café and coffee shoppe in the valley below Maple Mountain had bought her story about returning from a high school Halloween party a few days earlier hook, line and sinker. When he asked what she was supposed to be she merely rattled off something about an old Japanese anime she used to watch as a kid. If he didn’t recognize the character he didn’t refute it and just nodded in agreement.

  “Cool,” he said and rang her up for fifteen minutes, for which she paid with the cash obtained from some of the fool humans she had stolen rifles from earlier in the year.

  She had kept a careful enough watch on the progress of technology among humans over the past three decades since Aragonamat first took her away, and knew a bit about using something called the Internet, an apparent linking of various computers to share information. It wasn’t until even the human hunters making ingress on her territory in the last few years were using this very technology on little bricks held in their hands that she became truly interested. She had seen how they could use them to locate their position and, on occasion, work their way back out of one of her darkening spells she’d put on the trees to get them lost.

  Therefore, it took her very little time to locate Jackson Davidson with only a touch of magic needed to inspire her searches and finding an appropriate map application, despite Jackson’s status as a secretive IPMA agent. The internet wasn’t such a mystery to her after all and she had momentarily wondered what her life would be like had she stayed with her human friends the night Morduk approached her decades earlier. Of course, she was told to always address him as Aragonamat around the Goblins as he disguised himself as the female dragon in human form. She thought on the possibilities. But she didn’t dwell. Regardless of what she might have made of herself as a human, she liked being queen. And she liked the magic she was learning, albeit achingly slowly.

  After an address was found, planning a route by trains was relatively easy too, though she needed to buy another fifteen minutes. A few days later, and here they were, all the way in Michigan, about 1700 miles away. They looked at a simple home built many decades earlier and obviously restored, with a cute front porch.

  It was time to visit a friend.