Chapter 55: Dark Chocolate

I AM PASSIONATE about a few things. I’m passionate about beautiful women. I’m passionate about good looking women. I’m passionate about pretty women. I’m passionate about pretty good looking women. And other women, too. But there are other things.

I’m passionate about all my people in Areola, and would defend them against all odds. I’m passionate about flying. I still wish Pinaruti had thought to give me wings. That would be so awesome. And I am passionate about fighting sex trafficking and all forms of slavery.

I say all forms and that includes men, women, and children. For example, a few years ago, as I was munching on one of my favorite dark chocolate bars, I read an article about slavery in the cocoa industry. I was appalled and spat the chocolate I was eating into the garbage. We might as well be eating the bodies of the children who are trafficked into slavery in Ghana and West Africa to work on the plantations.

I considered several ways to combat this. The easiest, in my simple mind, would be to loose the ninja priestesses on the owners and slavers in the industry and let them nail a few bodies to the doors. It’s become more difficult to launch crusades like that when I have to travel in today’s world. The airport scanners can identify my satchel even if the look-away spell is fresh. Of course, they can’t see Areola. Unless I open a gateway, the satchel functions as a simple case in which I keep a few papers and innocuous traveler’s goods. That’s all they see when the bag goes through the x-ray and when the bag is opened to look inside. I am concerned, however, about the effect of various forms of radiation on the satchel seeping into the infinity room. I have no evidence of that so far, but it still concerns me.

Each time I adopt a new identity, I need to create all the paperwork for it. I need a driver’s license, birth certificate, passport, marriage certificate, deeds, stock certificates, and bank accounts. It’s very complicated to travel anonymously to another country and wreak havoc on the slave trade.

So, I did the next best thing. I bought a cocoa plantation, freed the slaves and tried to reunite the children with parents when possible, and employed workers to take care of the plantation. I have compared the cost of owning a slave to the cost of paying a fair wage and employing workers. I find it is a wash. I continued to sell my cocoa at the same prices the slave cocoa had commanded. But I soon found the doors closed on my efforts to buy other plantations.

After attacking a few traffickers, I gave up the process for two reasons. The first was that each trafficker I brought down accounted for such a minuscule portion of the children and adults stolen into slavery that it did not seem to make a difference. The second reason was that, as fast and silent and nearly invisible as my ninja priestesses are, they are no match for machine guns, grenades, and other ordnance that falls freely into the hands of traffickers. I’m still working on a solution to that problem. My priestesses are precious to me and I will not willingly risk them in a battle against such machinery.

I fear that the days of attacking traffickers and pirates with swords and knives and nailing their bodies to the wall are all but gone.

Next, I turned to an all-American solution, inspired by a teen whose research paper revealed the amount of slavery involved in the chocolate industry and outlined a means to combat it. I employed him to start putting his ideas in action. We created a small chocolate company and started importing only fair trade cocoa from independent farmers Josh negotiated with personally. I made sure he was supplied with adequate capital to get the ingredients we needed and to ensure it was not slave-based cocoa.

Of course, that only served to make a very small dent in the chocolate market. We weren’t even listed on the Exchange of American Chocolate Companies. We got distribution through a local chain of grocery stores and a few specialty shops. But it was our start.

I invested in a chocolatier back in 1855, when I was living in San Francisco. Through ups and downs and several generations of ownership, it had survived and prospered. It had a much better marketing position, and even though it wasn’t strictly enforced within the company, it was trying to do an ethical business in a market that was becoming less and less friendly. I increased my stake, and once I’d become the controlling board member, I finished the acquisition and made Josh the chief of the larger company. We began to gain brand recognition and Josh expanded our buying into the markets that were dominated by the slavers. When he discovered an independent farmer was actually owned by one of the big plantations, he cut them off, even if they personally weren’t using slave labor in their operation. We insisted on purity in our product and purchased the beans directly.

And then Peninnah came along. When she found what we were doing, she began negotiations with a very large chocolate company and I began acquiring shares in the publicly traded international company. That required a great deal of negotiation as the company was closely held. Ultimately, she was able to exchange the value of our little company for equivalent shares in the new parent and I began pressing the megalith to start sourcing their chocolate in the way we did.

At first, they simply left Josh alone to continue to make his elite type of chocolate. It has since been discovered that our little subsidiary is more profitable by percentage than the rest of the company combined. That might be because the big plantations have seen the guaranteed rates we pay independent farmers and have tried to price their cocoa in the same range. That went over poorly with many chocolatiers around the world.

We’ve a long way to go. We have begun to make a dent in the slave trade by making fair trade cocoa more profitable than slave cocoa. But even the major chocolatier we own a stake in accounts for only four percent of the world chocolate market. I’m thinking we might still need to invade Africa with a few ninjas and make an example of the worst of the plantations we have found.

Where was I going with this? Oh, yes. My continued passion for fighting the slave trade and human trafficking.

Liz frequently tells me that my prevailing opinions are chauvinistic and it should not take the sex trafficking of women and children to get my goat—so to speak. Yes, I am opposed to slavery of all kinds. I just have a special soft spot for helping the weakest.

Back when Pinaruti summoned me ... Remember Pinaruti? He was the hapless and slightly drunk sorcerer who attempted to summon Beelzebub back in Knossos, Crete about 2,000 years BC (Before Caesar) and slurred the name. Much to his surprise, he got me: Beetlebob. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent. Me.) Pinaruti conveniently died of shock when he saw me and unwittingly created a bridge for me to cross into the natural world, a free demon.

I read Pinaruti’s memories from his cooling body and discovered his intent was to imprison me in the walls of King Drakomaxos’s palace and force me to keep it cool in the summer. Yes, his intent was to make a slave of me. I was horrified! And frankly pleased the old fool had died when his summoning actually worked. But the very thought of slavery has gone against my grain ever since that day.

When I finally convinced Drakomaxos I could build a palace of stone that stayed cool, he immediately wanted to get a bunch of slaves to build it for him. I started my mantra that has been with me for four millennia: A house built by slaves will soon crumble around its owner. In Mania, I made sure that was the case when I was hired to build a palace for the king. Soon after the palace was built for Idiopheles by slaves (and I was safely away at sea), an earthquake brought his palace down around his ears.

Then I was commissioned to build a temple for the god Ninra in Bathra, a town in Mesopotamia. He and the goddess Namri agreed that no slave labor would be used in building their palace. Slavery became anathema in Bathra for centuries.

And so the story goes. I have always been opposed to slavery.

As to sex slavery, this started out as just another form of slavery that I was opposed to. You see, one of the things about having lived a long life is that I have changed. I have learned to adapt to changing mores and to learn from them.

There was a time in certain cultures when women were considered chattel, disposed of by their fathers into the possession of their husbands. In some cultures, women were not allowed to own property, to make friends or even to leave their house. I always felt this was silly but it did not truly sink in that the treatment of women was abhorrent and immoral and a form of slavery until I spent twenty years as a woman. I discovered my weaknesses, my frustration, and my fears. I thereafter made sure that each of my women had the opportunity to learn martial arts to the best of their ability so they would never need to walk in fear.

I further gave those who wished it an opportunity to live as a man for a day and to gain insight into a man’s appetites, fears, and power. Most discovered the physical power of a man was not worth exchanging their female bodies for. Some wanted the change made permanent and I happily gave them that wish. There was even an instance back in Bathra when the goddess Namri granted a man his wish to become a priestess in her temple. I got to fuck her once and verified that she was, indeed, changed wholly into a woman.

The thing is that I changed. I became more aware of women as societal equals of men. And when I witnessed women denied that equality, through slavery and abuse, my ire rose to heights unmatched. I once severed the head from the body of one of Odysseus’s crew who insisted the woman he captured in Troy was his to do with as he wished. I lost a few more crew members that day as they decided my rules were too hard for them to live by. And I gained a couple of women who chose to live in the infinity room.

I believe that is a fundamental problem with the world as I look around it today. People refuse to change. I include both men and women in that category. They see the problems and are taught the lessons, but they refuse to change. The thought that greater physical power carries the right of greater social power is so deeply ingrained that men attempt to exercise their superiority by suppressing, abusing, and enslaving women and children.

I am sad to say that this myth is propagated through many of the world’s religions, designed, it seems, to maintain a society in which men are inherently superior to women and children. This fundamental belief is what feeds the slave trade—especially sex trafficking of women and children.

As a result, I become irrationally incensed when I find captive women and children.

Since the time I discovered the first young girls imprisoned on a pirate ship for the pleasure of the pirates, I have taken as my mission dispatching the offenders as quickly and efficiently—and sometimes as painfully—as I can. My demon morality is not offended by the deaths of slavers.

Those priestesses—the fifty-two very young women I found on various pirate ships over my few dozen years as a trans-Pacific trader—experienced the worst of serial rape and abuse. They were healed and cleansed by me in the pool and became my priestesses. And then they trained harder than any other people in Areola to become an avenging force wherever I pointed them at sex traffickers. They’d once saved Peninnah from kidnapping and rape by completely destroying the personal army of a Japanese corporate president. We now own his company.

All of that is to explain some of my actions in this Current Era (CE).

The United States experienced a surge in refugees coming across the southern border. Rather than taking them in and giving them shelter, they were considered ‘illegal aliens’ and were arrested. Many parents and children were separated, most never to be reunited. That pissed me off. But when I found out what was happening under the radar, I went full goat ballistic.

The liberals of the world decried the pictures of children in cages and parents separated and kept in detention camps. Many were announced as deported. But the true story never made the news. I found out only by accident when I was searching for a place in the Arizona desert where I could hide the satchel and crawl in for a few years. I’d also decided to hide out and see what happens when refugees illegally crossed the border out in the desert.

Truckloads of hopefuls were being taken across the border and were stopped and incarcerated on the spot by border agents. Dozens, or perhaps hundreds never made it to detention camps. The desert hides hundreds of bodies of unknown people who came across the border for refuge and were killed on the spot.

Oh, don’t let me get the issue confused. I would never accuse the border patrol of murdering innocents. I don’t think. It seemed that just before the agents showed up, however, the men who ran the transport lined up the men in their load and shot them. They made the women and children dig in the sand to bury their fathers and husbands. Then they spotted border agents coming to chase down the illegal immigrants. The men running the transports always seemed to be able to disappear while the agents focused on rounding up the women and children and putting them in yet another unmarked truck to take them away to detention. The women tried to tell the agents about the murders but were simply pushed into the truck and taken away.

When I witnessed this happening, I took off across the desert in my demon form after the men who transported these unwitting refugees across the border. They were already in Mexico, but that didn’t make a difference to me. We don’t need no steenking badges. Six men were counting out and dividing the money they’d taken from the refugees. I fell upon them and twisted heads on necks until there were none still alive. I discovered the transporters were called ‘coyotes.’

That was how I found out about rescue operations and bullets. This scar I bear on my side is where the one shot that was fired in time hit me. I hadn’t been swift enough to avoid it. I was lucky. It hit me in the side and I was in a remote part of the desert where I could hide and enter Areola for a few days to recover. But like Issa still bore the scars of his execution after he’d been resurrected, so I still bear the scar from my brief battle.

When I left the infinity room to have a look around, I discovered the bodies, truck, and money I’d left behind were all removed. I assumed someone had come looking for them. That meant there would be others in this racket that needed to be taken care of eventually. I didn’t know when or where to start looking for them, so I prowled around the desert for several weeks before I spotted another delivery being made.

“Where did they take the women and children,” Zhi asked me as I was healing.

“I don’t know, love,” I said.