Chapter 2

On the flight out from Dunwich, I was too busy planning to talk with any of my excited former classmates, laying in multiple plans. While Fax may have had a point about my basic abilities with women, he'd missed the a more important point. Pimps don't need to be charming, polite, or attractive. He was also right in that the idea of coercing women to have sex for money just wouldn't work for me. Oh, not necessarily because I was a soft touch. It was simply that I didn't have the same attention to detail in my dealings with people as I did with things that interested me, so blackmail, threats and whatnot probably wouldn't work. Besides, I just didn't work that way. Pure loserville. If people didn't want to work for you, you sure shouldn't want them anywhere near your stuff. Self interest trumps intimidation as a work motivator, if you considered the whole week. On any particular day, not necessarily.

That simplified things for me. I would have two different operations. The first for the Hollywood rejects, which shouldn't be too difficult in LA, what with the number of gorgeous girls with big dreams and few prospects, who really wanted fame and fortune, but would settle for the second. It would be a big massage, spa and fitness center, aimed at men, with a sideline of prostitution. We'd even make house calls. With a bit of magic, sniffing out law enforcement would be simple and easy. The second would be for the more desperate, runaways and others who would be prey for ordinary pimps and druggies. I'd 'rescue' enough to provide for a moderately sized stable, stamp out rivals to create demand, and that should do it. Perhaps pick out a few more experienced girls and put them in charge. If nothing else, I'd have an adventure.

Most of the planning was finalized by the time the connecting flight landed, lawyers issued with instructions to purchase two suitable buildings, very far apart and for two different companies, with foreign parent corporations that eventually led to Karedonia. A good place to hide investments from US authorities.

The process of finding the buildings had my seatmate staring at me as though I'd lost my mind. Okay, waving a mithril-inscribed blackwood wand at a computer screen and scrolling the LA map, then zooming in until the wand tip pointed at the one building ... I'll admit that would be more than a bit weird. It's at times like these that I truly appreciate the tide of progress and technology. Having to do the same in the actual city, then physically go to realtors ... time consuming, costly, and a major headache. Assuming some H1 fuckers didn't start a street fight.

On my MID, I'm classified as a WIZ3. It's the four and above ranked wizards that frighten people, mutant mages who can form and cast spells on the instant, without the preparation time and effort I needed. Still, having received tutoring from Circe herself, I wasn't exactly a slouch. The vast majority of mages I knew, not counting the instructors at Whateley, were specialized in one way or another, and I was no exception. My magic worked best through runes. It just made sense to me that way. Without the proper tools, be it etching or drawing, I was severely restricted in gathering and manipulating essence, which is what magic is all about. Well, Western magic. The oriental mystic tradition is something completely different, rather alien. The one class I'd taken about it had left me scratching my head in incomprehension. I'd have felt really foolish about it, if the same hadn't been true of everyone else in class except for a couple of chinks and japs. At least I'd learned a lot about the capabilities and limitations of Eastern mages.

Landing at Atlanta, I found that my flight to LA was schedule to leave only twenty minutes late. The airport was certainly busy, and I had to navigate through a sea of humanity to make sure that my luggage was rerouted properly. Just a pair of large suitcases that weighed less and held more than they should, gotta love spacial-gravitational synthetic warping. Now if only I could get my teleporter to work reliably over more than ten miles. Even with the best technomantic devise I'd managed to come up with, teleporter functions were too erratic to rely on beyond a few miles, and my single attempt to open warp-gates had not gone well. One day, I swore to myself. Forget the Excursion Cube or the Techno Trike - just open a gateway wherever you wanted to go. Talk about amazing!