//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: Amphorae 
// by Dave Bryant 
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Rose Brass frowned and sat back in her rickety old swivel chair. “So why is a cheap suit from the District coming to see a local social worker on the other side of the country?”
The “cheap suit” in question cleared his throat with a mix of annoyance and nerves—annoyance over the trace of disdain in his host’s tone and wording, nerves over her appearance and apparent mood. He shifted on the tired metal-and-plastic stacking chair facing the equally battered desk and lifted his briefcase. Looking down at it as he set it on his lap and opened it was preferable to continuing to stare at her. She, in turn, rocked back and forth slightly, good eye narrowed and mouth compressed to conceal a small smirk. She knew exactly the effect she was having; indeed, she cultivated it.
If it had been just the prosthetic right arm, she might have been certified fit for duty, but when the docs concluded her left eye couldn’t be saved, that was that. The army captain found herself down-checked and retired to the permanent disability list. Without any other direction, she moved back home, to the city where she’d grown up. The next few months were a bad dream, but eventually she’d washed up at the doors of an organization dedicated to assisting veterans just like her. They’d helped her rebuild her shattered self into something she could like and respect again, and along the way found her a new career.
Now she paid it forward. She got the hard cases, in both senses of the word. Unregenerate gang members. Druggies who got revived by paramedics, often the same ones, over and over. Mental cases, though one wasn’t supposed to call them that. Those who, one way or another, ended up even more completely crushed than she had been and couldn’t scrape themselves back up again. She didn’t always succeed. Too many of her young clients were struck from her rolls in myriad ways—missing, in cuffs, feet first, and every other fashion one could imagine. But enough of them came through to keep her returning to her tiny closet-like office day after day.
Right now there was an unusual lull in her case load. She wondered, not at all idly, if the man in front of her, or his superiors, had arranged that.
Her guest finally stopped rummaging in his pleather-covered briefcase and hefted a monumentally thick expanding wallet in one hand. “This is why,” he growled. After shutting the briefcase and lowering it to the floor again, he dropped the file, still held closed by its elastic cord, onto her desk.
She sat up straight and looked, but made no move to reach for it. “All right, that just changes my question. Why is a cheap suit from the District bringing a new case to a local social worker on the other side of the country?” She turned her gaze on him again. “At least, I assume it’s a new case.”
“It is. And I guarantee it isn’t like any case you’ve had before.” Now it was his turn to hide a smirk. He probably thought he was doing a better job of it than he actually was.
Rose reached up left-handed to rub her scarred cheek under the ostentatious black eye-patch. “That would take a lot of doing,” she replied with no particular emphasis. “And again, why me?”
The more businesslike tone drew him into replying in kind. “You have a security clearance.”
“I had a security clearance.”
“You’ve been re-investigated and re-cleared.”
Rose did her best not to look startled. After a moment she replied dryly, “That was fast work, especially considering what I went through after being drop-kicked from the army.”
The man shrugged. “Bad as it was, you never let it get to the point you couldn’t qualify. Money was tight, but you always paid your bills. You were depressed, but you never tried to drown it in drink—or anything else. I could go on.” But why bother? was the unspoken addendum.
“Huh.” There was an awkwardly long silence after that. “Okay. Next question: Why do I need a security clearance to handle a youth case? Foreign national?”
“You could say that.”
“I could say no, too.”
“Look, it’s all in the file.”
“Yeah, and there’s a lot of it—assuming the information is both good and useful, which I doubt. Can’t any of you people give straight answers?”
He sighed. “Fine. It’s a big file because there’s a lot of context you need to know before you can start, and there are three clients, not just one. The info is good, I can guarantee that much, but how useful it is I can’t say. That’s for you to decide.”
“Context? What context? I can study up on any cultural background I need, unless the clients are from another planet.”
He picked up his briefcase and stood to leave, clearly having exhausted his patience. “Exactly.”


By the end of the day, Rose’s world had been turned upside-down. She stared at the file, once again neatly closed, on her worn blotter. She was forced to concede, however grudgingly, her visitor had good reason for his evasiveness—and that he was right about the case being unlike any she’d seen before. 
The information had to be good; there was too much evidence and sound analysis for it to be completely spurious. Even her ingrained military distrust of all the ways intelligence can go wrong was overcome by the sheer volume and quality of the briefing material. Details might be blurry or downright wrong, but she was convinced the most important elements were correct.
So there was, of all things, a magical portal to a world of talking ponies—and other creatures—hidden in a plinth standing on the grounds of a high school out in the suburbs. Hijinks ensued, and now magic from that other world had leaked into this one. That was more than a little frightening, but despite herself she was favorably impressed by the efforts of the reformed runaway who’d started it all to make good and to turn her life around.
She was less impressed by the famous ancient wizard who’d built the portal—and who’d dumped some of his problems on her world. His logic, apparently, was to exile the three . . . sirens somewhere that lacked magic, thereby depriving them of their power. That had worked out real well, now hadn’t it?
With a sigh, she leaned back and stared at the water-stained ceiling tiles. Reluctantly she extended him the benefit of the doubt. Military officers lived and all too often died by the adages “if it can go wrong, it will” and “no plan survives contact with the enemy”. The file didn’t say much about how he’d managed to punt them from one world to the other. He might not have had time to come up with a better plan. He might not have known enough to come up with a better plan. He might have been forced to do it on the fly, with no time for any planning at all, good, bad, or indifferent. It might have seemed like a good idea at the time.
And to be fair, it worked, for a while. The trio had scraped by with trace amounts of magic, keeping themselves below the notice of the authorities and getting what they needed to live, but not much more. Only when a big gob of magic leaked into the world, thanks to that runaway, did things change. She supposed even a mighty wizard might not be able to predict such a bizarre chain of events—especially since it had been centuries in the other world, but only a few years here.
In a maniacal bid for power the three had challenged the group of students who had absorbed so much of the magic that had come through. Naturally, the latter had resisted, aided by a princess from the other world and the runaway. Not only had they won, they utterly destroyed their opponents’ ability to use magic at all, apparently permanently.
Rose shivered once and raised her prosthetic hand to her eyepatch. The sirens’ crimes had been punished, eye for an eye. Now, as far as anyone knew, they were three ordinary teenage girls, lost and alone on the street. Her job would be to help them glue themselves back together into something resembling whole people.