The Star-Horn lines on the ground illuminated the dreamy tans of the prison-like block that covered the interior like a box of plain white. This was where the time-old Lord Calling Harborpad contained the greatest Summoners of the Great Victoria Era, now it's used for Low-Class summons to be used for military purposes.
There were five void-cloaked mercenaries that formed a circle, and Humpkin Barrenhold asked, his voice trembling but he tried to hide by perfecting his posture while in the awkward girly sit he'd been put on after he entered the portal: "I hope you're not exactly doing anything bad."
"#°¥{§¢$$$€°!" The other figure seemed to cuss at him for being so loud in a room so prone to echo.
Humpkin decided he would not disturb them. There was something going on that he did not know, and it would not be very wise prompting them into castrating him on the spot with a bloody ragged brown broom by his side. "That would be the most awkward death." He nodded to himself. Thought it would be very unwise as well.
A minute had elapsed.
"Do you understand us now?" the girl whose voice screeched of aluminum slang in her own language a while ago asked.
"Yes I do." Humpkin stuttered a bit, but he leaned forward a little to seem respectful.
The thicker figure of the five, the wide bookshelf of black that, Humpkin thought, encompassed even the modern tallest man on earth, said with his voice like he had just drank a full-gallon of cheap beer after a long hour forced exercise, "The boss would like to see you, so please follow us." He raised arms, still cloaked black like the rest of his body.
When he snapped, the interior changed from plain white to a green land where cattles thrive free and the old lords of centuries rule.
"Oops." The voice sounded comedian, reeked of an extremely hydrated man who never misses eight glasses a day. "You got it wrong again, Biggie."
"Stop calling me 'Biggie,' Star-Eye." That would explain his pathetically apart eye. "I know you don't remove cloaks because you feel offended of my joke, am I right?"
"Stop it now." The daughter of the rag-to-rich beggar from High Elvan Street would have to go to her kin's birthday party in order to meet Xin Yao Trouble, a son of probably-Chinese and American. So this should not stretch any longer.
Humpkin wide-eyed, the internal fluids trying to push out of his shaft, his next poop would be diarrhea and he doesn't like the idea of that in this place. Not exactly. Still, he could not move a little for even a bit, but he knew there was at least one person whose voice he hadn't yet heard.
The place change from the greens to the red carpet, leading to the flamboyant and rigid block of gold bearing the fat High Man—he renamed himself High Man after an argument with his religious mother who wanted nothing else but for her son to turn back to The One and surrender material wealth; the next day, he got her thrown to the High Elvan river, which he named after him as well.
The five mercenaries had disappeared by a dark smoke for this was a private matter they should not listen in on; that was the High Man's orders.
The interior smelled like newly-bought flowers like the Great Washington's Whitehouse where the President's Perfect Death, an unsolvable crime, occured, but at the same time it looked like the mass of an abandoned church somewhere in Philadelphia where he used to investigate a missing child but failed after three years because the last evidence couldn't be traced back to anything else that would make progress.
High Man touched his bird. "So I heard you're good at investigating." He pointed with his mouth. "The chair is prepared, please sit down properly."
Humpkin slowly carried his weight—one wrong movement and his anus would be vomiting brown through the black formal trousers. He sat and looked up with an honest face, the type you'd see in a pleaded-not-guilty but guilty criminal.
"I'd like to get straight to the point," High Man crossed legs, leaned forward. "You go inside the enemy barriers. I don't know how you will, but I figured you'd be intelligent enough to figure out how?"
He's the last Barrenhold, but that doesn't mean he'd be better off dead. He has a son who's drawing dinasours at home, waiting for the Great Knight who mastered fifty-five swords in just ten days—his son belived this story—so that they could swordfight before going to sleep and reading him the Lost Child book, his favorite.
"Sir, I have a son, so please just let me go back. Please!"
There was a second of silence.
"Look at the broom."
Humpkin looked. It was resting on the floor as if it hadn't slept for a week.
"We long transfered your family branch's consciousness to the broom," High Man said, "but unfortunately, there was only one. He was your son, right?"
Humpkin looked back and forth. He felt his stomach tightening in his seat. As if he could plunge any moment now. Just one more trigger. But he asked calmly, "What did you do to my son?"
"Well, I thought you wouldn't do as I would say, so I took measures. Was planning to turn him back when you say yes. But I guess he'll have to stay."
After years of working under pressure, under intense expectation from the victims of the deceased, and under the unwavering feeling of being shot dead tomorrow for trying to do justice to people, he found himself trying his best to stay in a marine's long posture. "What can I do?"
High Man pointed. "You find out all about the magics of them militaries down there on Jag Shore while you're pure from Caster's Resistance. Oh well, a great and free mind is open to learning. So the broom ought to help you upstart rudimentary magic." High Man laughed. "So it seems I wouldn't have sent your son back anyway!"