Where Lies Adventure!

A MASTERS THIEF Part III: "This is the Real World"              “Nice job Masters,” Fife said when Alex woke up to see the captain looming over him. “Whatever,” came Alex’s surly reply. Captain Fife shot a cruel smile back in answer to Alex’s insolence.  He backed away from the teen empath, allowing the bright lights his body was blocking to hit Alex square in the face. Masters quickly raised a hand to block the light.  At least, what Alex had for a hand.  But to the outside world, Alex’s hand was actually a stump of fused fingers shaped more like a dolphin’s flipper.  He tried his best to sit up instead.  He managed to do it too, as hard and slow as it was. Alex threw his stubby legs over the side of the operating table.  He tried pulling out the cord in his ear with his other hand.  It, at least, had little pincer-like appendages sticking out of the end of it: remnants of fingers he never had....

A MASTERS THIEF Part II: "Best Friends, Bro!"              When Alex opened his eyes, he found himself lying face-first in a dim, white light.  It felt solid enough, but it was so dull that he thought it might go out at any second.  What that meant for Michael Fabian, the rich heir to the Fabian family fortune whose head this was, Alex didn’t know.  He was here to do a job: con Michael Fabian into giving him the access code to that treasure trove of wealth.  Alex stood up, and as he reached his full height he felt the gelled spikes of his red hair bend as his head pressed against a low ceiling of dim white. The walls behind and to either side of Alex were the same as the floor: fading, solid white.  But the fourth wall, the one Alex was facing, wasn’t there.  Instead, there was a floor to ceiling opening in the room that looked out into a billowing white haze: a thick fog that shielded the deeper parts of Michael...