Would it not work with her so far from the Gray One’s office? This place must be empty of magic, or the Gray One would have rescued her by now — perhaps the return spell would not work here.

This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Travel Agency universe.

Travel Agency: Scouts

Part 6 of 6

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in the same setting as his story “The Travel Agency” and its three sequels. Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the first draft.

The original stories and this one need not be read in any particular order.

A commenter on a previous chapter remarked that it was hard to keep the scouts' names straight. I'll try to fix that in a future edition. For now, here's a list:

• Keisha / Tariq -- former spymaster, retired after his legs were amputated.
• Stephanie / ul-Kalsim -- Tariq' successor as spymaster, the head of this expedition.
• Lauren / the Subtle One / Sumalm -- a wizard in the sultan's service, less powerful than the Grey One / Ms. G. but still formidable
• Rae Nan / Tvalenn -- a camel-centaur and spy
• Natalie / ul-Balimmu -- an ifrit, friendlier to humans than most ifrits; a friend of the Subtle One

The next day, instead of asking her questions, they poked and prodded her body. One of the female guards brought her a tray of food when she woke her, and a flimsy blue-white gown, telling her to change into it. After she had eaten and changed clothes — the gown wasn’t long enough to cover her legs, and it was difficult to get it to cover her back and butt — the guard came back and took her down several hallways, around several corners, to a room where an older woman in a white coat was sitting.

“Lie down on the table there,” the older woman said. Keisha did as she was told. Her guard stood by the door while the woman fixed her legs into restraints — she braced herself; now would come the torture...

The woman put on gloves, then meddled none too gently with Keisha’s female parts, finally poking metal instruments deep into her insides. It was quite uncomfortable, and extremely humiliating, but she thought that if they were trying to cause her pain, they could do it a lot more efficiently. And the torturer didn’t even ask her any questions — or none to the point, none like the men had been asking her. Only “When was your last period?” and a few others like it. Keisha said she couldn’t remember. After that, the woman prodded her in various other places, looking into her mouth, nose and ears, and shone bright light into her eyes, but only briefly.

The guard then escorted her a short way down the hall to another room, and told her to stand between two large humming machines and hold very still. In another nearby room a man and woman strapped her to a table (now the real torture, she thought); but it was nothing to the tortures Tariq had more than once endured at the hands of the sultan’s enemies, or even the cold metal instruments poking into her vagina. They only slid the table she was strapped to into a huge ring-shaped machine and it made whirring noises while red lights flashed. She grew uncomfortable from being forced to lie in the same position for a long time, and little twinges of pain followed, but just when she was starting to panic and try to think of something to tell them to make them stop, the whirring noises ceased, the table slid out, and they unstrapped her. The guards led her back to the cell, where another meal awaited her; she changed back into the orange one-piece garment before she ate.

With no windows, she was uncertain how much time had passed; but she thought that her sleep after that meal was a long one, and it was the next morning. She woke to find that another tray had been left in her cell. Some while after she ate, the guards escorted her to the interrogation room again, but didn’t manacle her to the chair. The older man who’d questioned her before came in soon after.

“Mr. Wilson tells me that you claim Mr. G. induced a kind of recreational amnesia,” he said. “And all the tests we’ve done suggest that you’re human. The blood tests even show you have human DNA, though we’re still trying to track down a confirmed sample of the real Keisha’s DNA to compare it with.”

“I am human,” she said. That bit of the truth wouldn’t hurt.

“How much have you remembered?”

“Not much. I think I’d have to be out there, seeing my apartment and my home city every day, for the memories to come back.”

“How much do you know about how Mr. G.'s process works?”

“Nothing. I remember that he explained what he was going to do — but not how — and then the next thing I remember is looking around at my friends and the room we were in, being surprised at everything... Even my body, for a few minutes.”

“What did you expect your body to look like?”

“I’m not sure.”

The man was silent for a time.

“If there’s a chance you’re telling the truth, you present us with a dilemma. We don’t want to hurt an American citizen who’s guilty of nothing worse than falling prey to a quack psychologist, using non-FDA-approved methods to induce a dangerous amnesia. But if you’re the foreign agent we still suspect you to be, we can’t safely let you go — not now that you know we know about you. The other agents — if that’s what they are — are no great danger to us as long as we know what they are and they don’t know we know. So we’ll be keeping you here for a while longer. We can’t let you go out, but we can show you photos and films of your apartment and various places around the university and the city. Perhaps they will trigger the return of your memories, and you can convince us you are truly Keisha Grant, and we can let you go.”

“I hope so.”

If she hadn’t lost track of the days, tomorrow should be the day the scouts returned to their own world. Would she and the original Keisha swap back then? If so, she could probably convince her captors of her real identity and get them to let her go, and Tariq could go home from the foothills with a clear conscience. Or would it not work with her body so far from the Gray One’s office? This place must be empty of magic, or the Gray One would have rescued her by now — perhaps the return spell would not work here.

After returning her to her cell to eat, the guards brought her to another room, and another strange device produced images of light on the wall. A few she recognized as scenes from around the city, but most were unfamiliar.

The next day, they brought her back there and showed her more still images, followed by moving pictures like the simulated dinosaurs she had seen at the museum. Again, only a few of them looked slightly familiar.

The next day, more of the same. She was sure that she should have returned by now; the return spell hadn’t worked. Would her friends have gone home? Or would they insist on staying to help the Gray One search for and rescue her, or search for her on their own? The Gray One might have power to compel them to return in time, if they were in an area where magic worked, and not borrow their hosts' bodies longer than was agreed upon...

After a few hours of watching those images, as she was getting hungry, she was taken back to the interrogation room. Another man she hadn’t seen before came in a little later and questioned her. He repeated most of the questions the older man and Mr. Wilson had asked her, but in a more aggressive tone. She stuck to her story that Mr. G. had suppressed her memories to allow her to experience her home town as though it were a foreign city; but this man clearly didn’t believe her and kept interrupting her with more questions, some of which she didn’t understand. (“How many light-years away is your home planet?”, for instance, left her utterly baffled.) She was finally returned to her cell without anything to eat. That night they didn’t dim the lights; she slept fitfully.

The next morning one of the guards woke her up and dragged her down the hall to the interrogation room without a meal. She was kept waiting there for some time, then the same man as the day before questioned her for several hours. When he left, she was given a meal, but it was taken away before she had eaten her fill, and another man came in and questioned her further. She hadn’t slept enough, and was getting confused; sometimes she wasn’t sure if she had answered aloud or only thought something.

Some time after she was returned to her cell and managed to fall into an exhausted sleep in spite of the bright lights, one of the female guards woke her. She expected to be taken to the interrogation room again, but instead the guards simply led her on a long walk around the halls, then returned her to her cell. She slept again, and woke again to find a guard she hadn’t seen in several days shaking her shoulder.

“Shh,” the guard said. “It’s me, Melanie. We’re here to get you out of here. Just keep quiet and pretend you’re still a prisoner.” Keisha rose, uncomprehending. The guard looked nothing like Melanie, but perhaps it was a disguise spell?

“I have to put these on you to make it look plausible,” Melanie said apologetically, holding up a pair of manacles. “I’ll try not to make them too tight.” She fitted them to Keisha’s wrists, binding them in front of her body this time. “Mr. G.'s outside, in the body of the guy who chatted you up at the Vortex. Just be cool and we’ll be out of here in a little while.”

They emerged from the cell to find Mr. Wilson in the hall, or the Gray One in his body. He and Melanie led her down the hall without a word to an elevator like the ones they had ridden in the parking decks downtown. She felt heavy, like she had felt when the elevators were taking them up to the story where Melanie had left the minivan, and then the door opened. She followed them down a series of further halls, and then — into a room with windows! It was daylight outside, either early morning or late evening. The Gray one spoke to a couple of guards, and showed them a small card he took from his pocket; then he and Melanie led Keisha out into a parking lot. They put her in the back of a van, with darkened windows and a grille between the benches in back and the front area where the driver and his companion sat.

“We have to make it look plausible until we’re away from here, I’m afraid,” the Gray One said in a low voice. “We’ll stop and take off your manacles as soon as we’re out of danger.”

Keisha couldn’t see much from her vantage point. They moved slowly and stopped and started several times, and she heard the Gray One talking to people outside the van through his window. Finally they sped up to the usual road speed these cars traveled at. By now her lack of sleep was catching up to her; she fell asleep.

When she woke, the back of the van was open and Melanie in the guard’s body was gently touching her shoulder. The manacles were already off. The Gray One was standing outside the van, looking at them.

“Are you strong enough to walk?” Melanie asked.

“Yeah, I think so...” Keisha got up and climbed out of the van, followed by Melanie. She still felt sleepy, but a little better than she’d felt earlier.

They were near a two-story brick house, surrounded on all sides by trees. A narrow dirt road, unlike the black-surfaced roads she’d seen elsewhere in this world, ran from the front of the house away into the trees, turning as it went out of sight; at the end of the road near the house was not only the large boxy van they’d rescued her in, but the smaller gray minivan that Melanie had driven the scouts around in. If it weren’t for the large glass windows in the house, and the vans, she might have thought she was somewhere in the northern kingdoms of her own world.

“Let’s get you inside,” the Gray One said, leading the way to the house and unlocking the door. “Do you still need to sleep? Or would you rather eat first?”

“I’ll eat a little,” Keisha said, “but I need to sleep some more too. Are you going to send me back to my own body and world, or is it too late now that I missed the right time?”

“I can still do it, but I need to ask you some questions first, about the people who captured you and what they did to you. And I want your body to be rested and fed before I put the original Keisha back into it.”

“Thank you for getting me out of there,” Keisha said.

They fed her two “sandwiches,” slices of meat, vegetables and cheese enclosed between slices of bread; she ate voraciously, and then asked if she could sleep for a while before she answered the Gray One’s questions. Melanie showed her to a bedroom, where she removed the hateful orange suit, crawled under the sheets and blankets, and fell almost instantly asleep.

When she woke, she found that some clothes and underwear that fit her had replaced the discarded orange suit. She got dressed and went out into the living room, and was pleasantly surprised to see Melanie back to her usual appearance, or back in her own body. The Gray One was again the gray-haired older woman she’d been when Keisha and the other scouts first arrived.

“Did you sleep well?” the Gray One asked.

“Yes, thank you. I could eat something more, though, if you don’t mind.”

They had been cooking, and they served her a plate of roast chicken and baked vegetables. While she was eating, they told her what had happened after she was captured.

“I saw you heading toward the restroom, and I didn’t worry about you at first,” Melanie said. “But when you didn’t come back after a while, I got nervous, and Natalie and I went to look for you. We didn’t find you in the restroom, or anywhere in the club, or in the alley or the parking lot. So I called Ms. G.'s emergency number, and — she didn’t answer.”

“I was in your world at the time,” the Gray One said. “I’m terribly sorry. I spend most of my time in this world, these days, and if I’d been here when Melanie called, perhaps I could have found you before your captors got very far with you. But by the time I returned to this world and saw the telephone message Melanie had left, they had removed you to the place we found you — or at least, they had already removed you from the low-magic area around the club.”

“She couldn’t find you directly with her magic — all she could tell was that you were somewhere in a no-magic area. But we had a lead — Natalie had seen that guy who was following you around, and when she described him, Ms. G. was able to use a spell to try to find him.”

“Mr. Wilson,” Keisha said, her mouth full of chicken.

“That’s one of the names he uses,” the Gray One said. “The finding spell didn’t work at first; he was probably in the same no-magic area as you. But I kept it running, and eventually he entered an area with a little magic. I found him then, and followed him around until he went back to the place they were holding you. We weren’t sure then that you were there, but it seemed likely. We — not just Melanie and I, but your friends as well — watched the people coming and going from that place; Natalie and Rae Nan recognized a couple of people they had seen at the museum or one of the clubs, including the woman whose body Melanie was wearing when we rescued you.

“The next time any of the people we’d been watching entered a high-magic area, I captured them and picked through their memories to learn what had become of you. I couldn’t have done that a year ago, but as our worlds get closer together, magic gets stronger in this world, and more and more magic areas appear. Then I altered their memories to make them forget they had seen me, and... did some other tinkering. And I let them go — all except for two, whose bodies Melanie and I borrowed for our rescue mission.”

“But by then your friends had gone home,” Melanie said. “They didn’t want to, but Ms. G. promised she’d get you back, and said it was safer and easier for them to go back at the scheduled time. The real Lauren and the others were horrified when they found out what happened to you, but we told them we’d rescue you, and then get their friend Keisha back into her own body and you into yours, in another few days.”

Keisha told them how she had woken up in the cell, and been questioned, and remained silent at first, but then came up with the cover story.

“What a wonderful idea!” the Gray One said, delighted. “I got some of that from Mr. Wilson’s memories, when I was learning how to impersonate him convincingly, but it wasn’t entirely clear. Perhaps I will find that a useful cover story from time to time. — Go on.”

“So at first they seemed to believe me, and they did a bunch of things to me to figure out if I was really human. I wasn’t sure what else they thought I might be; Melanie said there aren’t any other speaking peoples in this world. But then another man started questioning me, and I didn’t see Mr. Wilson or the older man any more — I guess that might have been when you captured Mr. Wilson. And this other man didn’t believe my story, and kept asking the same questions over and over, and others I didn’t understand. And they stopped feeding me regularly, or very much when they did feed me, and they didn’t let me sleep much... by the last session when they questioned me, yesterday or maybe the day before, I was really confused from lack of sleep, and I think I might have told them something about where I was really from, but I’m not sure. If I did, I probably didn’t say it very orderly or coherently.”

“Hmm,” the Gray One said thoughtfully. “That is unfortunate, but I think I can limit the damage.” She asked Keisha many questions about the appearance of the men who had questioned her and the guards who had been present during the questioning, as well as the woman who had poked and prodded her.

“That will do, I think,” she said finally. “I can refine my finding spell, so it will find each of them the next time they enter a high-magic area. And then I can erase or, more likely, modify their memories of what you said when they questioned you, and the circumstances under which you left their prison. As magic grows stronger, perhaps I will eventually be able to do something permanent about this threat to my customers... but that will do for now, I hope.”

When Keisha was finished eating, the Gray One went to another room and came back with her mage’s staff, a seashell, and a bag of blue powder. “Are you ready to return to your own world?”

“Yes,” Keisha said. “I’ll miss having legs, but — they aren’t really mine. It would be wrong to keep them, and deprive the other Keisha of them.”

The Gray One spoke into the seashell: “Barsiq, is Keisha in Tariq’s body ready for the return?” She held the shell to her ear and listened, then nodded. “Let’s set up the circle,” she said, and led the way outside. She sprinkled the blue powder in a circle in the dirt road near the vans, and had Keisha stand inside. Then, making mystic gestures and speaking in a low voice, she lowered her staff to touch the edge of the circle.

There was a blue flash of light, and Tariq found himself in his own body once again. He was sitting in the middle of a blue chalk circle; Barsiq, ul-Kalsim, Tvalenn, and the Subtle One stood outside it, looking anxiously at him. They weren’t in the hollow of the hills they’d been in when Barsiq put the first spell on them, nor in the village, but somewhere higher up in the mountains; even from his low vantage point, Tariq could see for miles to the foothills below and the brightly colored rock formations of the desert beyond.

“Well,” he said, “I’m back.”

“It worked!” ul-Kalsim said. “So the Gray One rescued you, then?”

“Yes — I’ll tell you all about it. But where is ul-Balimmu?”

“He left, soon after we returned to our own bodies. Barsiq and the girls borrowing our bodies had brought them into the mountains; we’ve been making our way back to the foothills and the caravan road ever since we returned, until Barsiq suddenly told us a few hours ago that the Gray One had found you, and we needed to prepare to send Keisha back to her body.”

Tariq nodded. For more than a year after he lost his legs, it had felt strange not to have them, especially when he woke up in the morning. Now he felt that strangeness and loss again, but also something else: the strange absence of his breasts, the strange obtrusiveness of his male parts.

ul-Kalsim helped him onto the back of an ass — he hated the dependency, but an ass wouldn’t kneel on command like a camel, so he needed the help. The girls and Barsiq had apparently left their camels at the inn in the village, and hired asses before setting off into the mountains.

They continued down the mountain on the last leg of their journey back to where they had last seen their own bodies, and Tariq told the story of his imprisonment and interrogation. Ul-Kalsim said they had found no paper or ink here in the mountains, with which to write down what they remembered of the exhibits in the museum, but they had been talking over what they could remember, to remind one another and keep their memories alive until they could find writing materials, whether in a village of the foothills or in the city.

“We will build a printing press or a steam engine before I die, I swear it,” ul-Kalsim said, “though my grandsons may be old men by the time we can build internal combustion engines.” He used the English words for those things, there being none in their language.

“Oh,” Tariq said, “did you find a recipe for Coke? In the museum, or elsewhere?”

“No,” the Subtle One said with a sigh, “we were too busy helping the Gray One search for you.”

“Ah, well. There is always the pixie-wine.”

“Alas,” Tvalenn said, “the girls in our bodies seem to have drunk it all.”

Tariq hoped that Keisha in his body had enjoyed it enough to compensate her for the temporary loss of her legs. He thought it was a good trade.

That's all. Let me know if you see anything that can be improved; I'm going to do another revision for the short story collection ebook I'm working on, to improve the clarity re: the names of the characters, at least.

When Wasps Make Honey, the sequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, is now available from Smashwords in EPUB format and from Amazon in Kindle format. See here for more information.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. An earlier version of this story was serialized on the morpheuscabinet and tg_fiction mailing lists in January 2013.