Falvio sat back in his stellar lounge and browsed through a rotating torus of faces that looked uncannily similar to his own. Each small bust floating by had a scene surrounding it. Tiny dioramas showing the habitat and level of technology that the owner of the bust inhabited. He skipped through several whose societies looked too far advanced. He preferred more primitive targets. They didn’t pay out as much, but they didn’t have any concept of cross-verse regulation and enforcement, significantly reducing the risks of his operation.

Also, he could skimp on the mark’s background research costs and increase his profit margins.

Hmmm… this looks interesting, a certain Damien Garth. His verse wallowed in a stunted technological state, but he had managed to acquire a good sum of material wealth. That should be worth the effort. He set about creating a message and deploying it through the verse membrane.

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For Garst, the collector threats — hard labor, miitary conscription, severed limbs — really didn’t motivate him much any more. He’d made a career out of staying ahead of those situations. Lack of psycho-grease, now that’s a worthwhile problem to solve. He went back to his strongbox and disarmed the spore mine before triggering the lock and opening the heavy door.

He sifted through bundles of documents and identifications looking for the right match. A low rising and falling chime sounded off in the main room. Some sort of correspondence had arrived. He stopped. No one should know how to send to him. He put down credentials for a mercantile investor persona and walked to the message booth.

A velum envelope sat in the message basket. He picked it up and observed that it only had his name on the front. No address. Before he could decide if that was a good sign or a bad sign, his door singer emitted three sharp soprano notes. The warning signal. He hurried into his stock room and snatched up a hand-spitter. The singer let four piercing notes fly. He froze. That meant the visitor was a collector or at least worked for one. He had to answer the door. Who knows what they’d do to his place if they thought he was not home.

“Yes?” He asked into the mouthpiece.

“Is this Mr. Damien Garst?” The voice that came through the sound panel made his spine squirm. It sounded like screaming radio static.

“I’m sorry but I’m under strict orders not to disclose my employer’s identity,” he pulled back the priming lever of his hand-spitter slowly, quietly.

“I can imagine. Please inform Mr. Garst that the offiice of Rave and Wild requests him to pay a visit in person at his soonest convenience.” The rasping voice had added a bit of emphasis to the word pay, “Here’s a memento from the proprietor to underscore the gravity of this simple request.”

He heard a soft thud from something hitting the bottom of his security pass-through. The scanners illuminated green. No obvious threats anyway. He ratcheted his hand-spitter’s priming lever back into standby and took a deep breath. He opened the pass-through. A small black velvet pouch sat inside.

He took it into his study, put it on the desk and then poured himself a healthy cocktail from the carved dark-wood bar. He sat down and looked at the pouch. He took another slug from his drink and the lifted the pouch, sensing its weight in his palm. He loosened the drawstring, feeling tension in his jaw, and upended the pouch.

A sneak ring fell out and rolled in a tightening spiral on the desktop. He knew that ring. It used to be the property of Jinny the Spike and they only way it would not be on his finger was if that finger was no longer attached to his hand. The situation was clear. He needed to settle with Lexor Rave and Punch Wild post-haste. He did not have what they wanted. He needed a plan fast.

——————————-

Dirty rain dripped down the back of Falvio’s neck, easily dodging the protection his decorative short collar offered. He hated this outfit, but it served well to impress his marks in these ponderous backwater verses. He looked every bit the exiled royal he had depicted in his letter to Garst. He trudged down the back alley to the drop point, expecting his target to be watching from some clandestine nook. This was the trickiest part of any cross-verse job. He had to slip through the verse split, go to the drop point, grab the satchel and return back before the split sealed back up.

He concentrated on staying in character, even this far from his goal. No more incidents like his jump to that verse with the excessively violent primitives, barely evolved from their Stone Age and yet on the verge of a nuclear Armageddon. He had approached his drop point a little too flippantly, thinking his attire and attitude did not matter. The local verse dwellers taught him otherwise. They ambushed him, their mundane weapons had not alerted any of his sensors. He had managed to escape them, but it cost him the last of his stunballs.

Head held high, he peered down his nose at a junction in the walkway ahead. A fountain gurgled at its center. He let an imperial sneer settle on his face. He had arrived.

———————————-

Garst crouched behind a barrel that splashed him with generous abandon while the rain pounded down. He shivered and ignored the final twitches of the psycho-grease leaving his system. He had to pass the time somehow, might as well do it immersed in the there that is also here.

He watched the window of the inn across the way. He could see the collector’s strong man looking out, scanning for anyone who approached the stairwell by the fountain. Garst shrunk back when the thug’s augmented eyes drifted his way. Jinny’s sneak ring should have kept him undetected, but who knows what types of radiation those purple sheened eyes could detect.

Two young men entered the fountain square trading boisterous jokes, giving Garst a scare when one of them almost descended the stairwell to prove some half-drunk point. Then his partner relented and they continued on their way.

The ornate stonework around the entrance to the stairs had almost stopped squirming from the tail ends of the psycho-grease when he saw a parody of himself stroll into the square. “My god, what an arrogant fop,” he thought to himself as the allegedly displaced royal looked around and spotted the stairwell. He pulled an expensive tin of sparkling snuff from his sleeve and had a snort in each nostril, sneezing into a dainty kerchief before approaching the stairs and heading down with a furtive glance around the square.

Garst felt the twinges of disbelief vanishing. The strange letter presented the perfect opportunity, if it were actually true. Seeing someone that looked like him arriving at the pick-up location, made it look like his little trap would work out after all.

Soon after, the door of the inn opened and the bulky figure of the collector thug exited and went down the stairs. He emerged moments later with Garst’s dandy likeness, manacled and looking disheveled.

“My good fellow, you are making a fatal error! I am a member of the aristocracy, you will pay dearly when justice is delivered.”

“You’re not fooling anyone, Garst, we all know you like to pretend you’re someone else.” The captor’s rasping voice carried across the square, giving Garst chills. He dragged his charge along, oblivious to his struggles, while his real target, Garst, hid behind a rain water spewing barrel.

Garst slowly made his way out of hiding, making sure there wasn’t any back up lingering around before removing the sneak ring and leaving the square down a different walkway. He whistled a cheery tune. What strange and well timed luck to receive a letter from a different version of himself! Sure the sender had been asking for help, but Garst was interested in saving himself, not mysterious other iterations.

He may not have made any money from that last little scam, but at least the local collectors were off his back.