By Sand and Sea (IC, CLOSED)

[Allanea]

Ibrahim Kadem's house

He relaxed on his arm chair, the glass of wine cold in his hand. He had just returned from a date – her name was Jaasira, and he felt good about this one – but still it was work, playing a role of someone he was not. Sometimes he even felt a mild tinge of sadness that he could never be the young man he pretended to be – young, loving, honest – but then it passed. He was not sure if men like this ever existed, and if they did, they were fools anyway. Look at the world! Does it look like the place to be honest and trusting! Ha.

And so now he was taking a break from playing honest and trusting, watching a soccer match on his television. It was an enormous thing, dominating even Ibrahim's enormous guest room with its size. He had had to avoid bringing his victims to this house of course – a pretense of poverty was necessary if he were to lure them into making the final sacrifice for him. Sometimes, however, he did not bother with pretending to be in need financially – sometimes he just handed the girl over to the buyer and went on his way. If this was the plan, there was no need to conceal the fact that he, in fact was wealthier than he pretended. His victims would never meet each other until long after it no longer mattered.

The door rang. He ignored it. Probably an error. They would go away soon. He had a match to watch – it was the damned semi-finals, and he was not going to be –

The door rang again.

And again.

"I am coming, you dumb son of a shoe!" – he roared, getting to the door right as he was – grey pants, shirt, slippers, glass of wine in his hand. "What the hell do you want anyway?"

"I have a package for Mr. Ibrahim Kadem that you need to sign for."

It was a woman's voice – deep, slightly hoarse, but definitely a woman's. That was strange – women rarely went on this sort of work in Ibrahim's country, certainly not now when there was a war on. On the other hand, this meant that she was not likely to be a threat. Ibrahim opened the door –

The woman was tall. She was taller than Ibrahim, a lot taller – she would probably need to stoop low to get through the door. She was dressed in a delivery company's uniform, but he did not need any great insight to understand she was here to have him sign for a package.

She locked eyes with him. Her eyes were black, the pupils impossibly wide. She was not a delivery worker. She was not even human. She smiles, and he saw her teeth – so many teeth, so sharp. Not human teeth at all.

The woman lunged, and Ibrahim screamed.


She cannonballed into him, knocking him off his feet. Pain bit into his body as his clavicle snapped.

And the woman spoke. It was a language never meant for human lips to speak, a forbidden tongue. As she spoke it, it seemed to Ibrahim that the lights in his house went slightly dimmer for a moment. He did not understand her, but she knew she was speaking threats and insults.

And she made good on the threats, instantly. The woman's knees were already on his stomach, her hands on his throat as she yanked him towards her and pushed hard, the back of his head smashing against the floor. Pain and nausea flooded through his body as she smashed him against the floor again.

"Who… are …" -he did not speak her accursed language, and she did not seem to care for his – but for a moment, the beating stopped. She looked at him again, with these horrible eyes of hers.

"I am Yagda Gra-Gonhug. Free Kingdom Armed Forces."

What a stupid woman. She could have killed him. She got distracted, answering his question.

Ibrahim swung upwards. The glass had broken, but he had the stem in his hand. Who cared who she was? He would kill her and –

She grabbed his wrist.

"Idiot." – she said. "Ragur" – again with that language.

Then, before Ibrahim could manage to drop the glass stem, she got her free hand on his, and pressed, the glass cracking under Ibrahim's fingers. He screamed, and screamed. He flailed at her with his free hand, but Yagda Gra-Gonhug did not seem to notice. She was taller, and her knees were still on his stomach. He could not reach her face with his fist. He realized now that it was foolish to try and fight her. She would do whatever she wanted, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

He wet himself in that moment. It was easy to wet oneself when a murderous stranger had their entire body weight on your bladder and your bladder was full of drink.

"Enough games, slave trader." – she spoke in Common now, with an accent like those Allanean actors in action films. "I don't have all day."

She grabbed his face, her hangs resting against his cheekbones. With his good hand he tried to resist, but he could have just as well tried to push against the hood of an oncoming train. It was only now that he realized that her fingernails were as sharp as razors.

"I do have a few minutes, slave trader."

And then there was pain, darkness, and Yagda Gra-Gonhug's loud, harsh laughter.

[Allanea]

In a hotel, somewhere in Northern Lybia

Yagda Gra-Gonhug was a tall, strong woman. She had the training, the strength, and the ferocity to kill a man with her bare hands if she so needed. She had also the skills with makeup and disguise to pass for a human (if rather tall human) in the streets of Tripoli or Misrata – and the local style of clothing helped with that quite a bit. Still, it should be said that Yagda Gra-Gonhug was not, by her employment, a field operative. She was a Network Intelligence Officer. It was her job to analyze knowledge gathered by intelligence efforts, identify and suggest targets, and – if the targets were approved, which they usually were – use her knowledge to help other professionals plan their work. She was something like an improvisational theater director, except the actors played with real guns and daggers.

And so, as Yagda relaxed in the bathtub of her luxurious hotel room, glass of wine in hand, the actors in her play began to move.

Mustafa Al-Nur's Palm Taxi company was their next target. The taxis had been easy to observe from drones and satellite, their phones fairly simple to tap, and where the taxis passed through city streets, photographs of the drivers and their vehicles were collected.

And over the next few days, the play entered its next act.

One of the taxi-drivers-cum-human traffickers died a simple way. He was driving his taxi through the desert, scouting for more refugees to take on, when his taxi suddenly triggered an IED. This was entirely normal, after all, there were many terror groups in Lybia. Eight kilograms of high explosive smashed the white-and-yellow car, flipping it over as it was flung off the highway. The target died instantly.

Not everyone of Mustafa Al-Nur's henchmen was this lucky. One man got into his taxi in the morning, started the air conditioner, and got driving. Within a few minutes the vehicle crashed, the driver at the steering wheel contorted in agony. A very careful coroner might find that the poison had been introduced with a tiny needle in the driver's seat. But careful coroners were at a shortage in Lybia at that time, and those few that remained were overloaded with work.

As the Palm Taxi company was being disassembled around him, Mustafa Al-Nur may have believed himself still a victim of a series of unhappy coincidences until the very day of his disappearance. He vanished – alongside with his phone, his laptop, and his taxi. The man himself – and his taxi – were found, eventually. They were inseparable from each other – literally as someone had handcuffed the body to the vehicle's steering wheel.

Meanwhile, Yagda Gra-Gonhug rested in her hotel room, took calls over an encrypted satellite phone, ordered takeout, and watched sunset. Sometimes she called her family over the regular hotel line – why, thank you, I am fine, the Middle East is beautiful this time of year, shwarma is delicious, the Mediterranean is lovely.

The play continued.