Chapter 19: Scrambling
“You’re a bit scruffy-looking, Davie,” Kaitlyn told me as we were getting up, preparing to leave. “Do you want to go into town like that?”
Being nature mages in the desert, showers were no problem for us, since we could whip up a whirlwind of cleansing sand, substituting air for water in a pumice bath. Shaving, though…
I sat down and thought for a bit. I didn’t want to go back to the campground to get my razor just so I’d be presentable at breakfast in town, but hair is natural, so…
As Kaitlyn watched, waiting to see what I was going to do about her concern, my short stubble just fell away from my face and neck in a thin cascade, leaving me as clean-shaven as if a professional barber had done the job with a perfectly sharp new razor.
Kaitlyn looked duly impressed. “You… Magic, right?”
“Yup,” I grinned, a bit smug myself now. “I just sort of ejected all of the little hairs as if plucked, only without doing any damage to the follicles. I concentrated on one, learned how to do it, repeated it for a few nearby hairs, and then set it to repeat over a given area. How does it look?”
She ran her hand over my face and neck, then said, “It looks and feels great!”
“Come into rapport with me, and I’ll show you the trick of it,” I offered. When I felt her life presence there with me, I trimmed all the other little areas of hair that have to be taken care of from time to time: pubes, neck, nose and ears.
Then I felt Kaitlyn do the same, magically shaving her underarms, legs, and outer labia. «Super cool!» she exclaimed through the bond, clearly very happy at having such an annoying chore reduced to a few seconds’ work.
I observed, «The best thing is that it’s as smooth as laser or chemical hair removal without the side effects. If we want to grow it back in some area, we don’t have to heal the scarred follicles first.»
Then, after thinking a bit, I sent, «Hang on a sec.» Then I slipped into a deeper trance, focused my powers… And accelerated the hair growth on my face in a very specific pattern to produce a perfectly groomed beard and mustache.
I sent, «You like?»
Kaitlyn bobbled her head a bit, considering, then went back and forth with me on the styling. In time, she was satisfied with my new look.
«Now for the teeth,» I sent. I concentrated and was able to just gather up all of the nastiness that had grown in my mouth since the last time I’d brushed, then just spit it out. It was gross, but I’d gotten my mouth cleaner in a few seconds than I’d ever managed with a commercial toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, and floss combo.
Kaitlyn wrinkled up her nose, but she saw the sense in my method and repeated it on herself, a bit more delicately.
Then I kissed her, and she sent, «Yes, a definite improvement, Davie!»
Having groomed ourselves suitably, we got dressed, mounted our bikes, and made our way into the nearest town.
As we rode down the small town’s main street, we saw an open cafe, so lacking any info on the best places to eat here, we rolled up, locked up our bikes, and walked into the restaurant.
Kaitlyn and I got a fair bit of eyeballing, both of us for wearing cycling clothes in a small town cafe, me for being non-white, and Kaitlyn for being just so darn cute.
A waitress invited us to sit wherever we liked, then she came over and looked us up and down before offering menus. Kaitlyn explained, “We’ve been mountain biking and hiking over on Stansbury Island.”
That little tidbit of information let the waitress and any eavesdroppers slot us into the “tourist” bucket and move past our atypical attire. Kaitlyn’s much smarter about this sort of thing than I am.
The waitress brought us menus, and we ordered. Kaitlyn got a big Denver omelette and I got a farm-style pancake and sausage breakfast. We’d need the calories.
I also ordered a newspaper from the waitress, and Kaitlyn and I split it, hoping to find that JRE was involved in a scandal over their treatment of the farmers in Moab.
Kaitlyn was the first to find news of it, a short story buried several pages within the business section of the paper. “This is terrible! Why isn’t it front-page news?” she complained.
“It isn’t a local event,” I reminded her.
“It’s a Salt Lake paper,” she retorted. “The JRE end is local to them.”
“Point,” I conceded. I’d been talking about the Moab end of things, but I didn’t find a second story about JRE in my half of the paper. After giving up trying to find more on the issue, I said, “You’re right, this isn’t good enough. They’re going to skate if we don’t get some more leverage on them.”
Kaitlyn had been reading while I’d been searching, and she reported, “The story isn’t entirely bad. It quotes their reporter extracting a promise to deal above-board with future land purchases. And if nothing else, this gets the news out about what JRE’s doing.” I didn’t say anything to this, so she went on, “What did you have in mind to get that leverage?”
I leaned closer to Kaitlyn, not wanting to be overheard and said, “That ring you’re wearing,” pointing at her engagement ring, “I extracted the gems and metals for it not far from here, from a mothballed mine. Not one owned by JRE, though that might’ve been deliciously ironic. And I did pay for what I took,” I reassured her. Kaitlyn nodded, so I went on, “Part of the payment was doing a site survey and warning them of a potential EPA violation, so they could fix it before any serious environmental damage was done. Their end, of course, is that they avoided a fine from the EPA. And yes, I checked back and found that they’d done the repair and remediation work required.”
Kaitlyn knew I meant that I’d delved the earth to find this problem. Unnatural problems with the Earth are easy to spot when you’re in rapport with Gaia. They stand out like spray paint on a wall to a mage’s life senses.
“I get it,” she said, “you want to go snooping on JRE mines, to find the same sort of problems, but to hold them over JRE for better terms.”
“More or less, yes,” I agreed, “except that if a problem is acute, we’ll fix it there and then. We’ll only use problems that can safely sit for a while as leverage. And, I think we might hold back a few in case they decide to play hard-ball, dribbling them out over time to keep them on track.”
Kaitlyn nodded with decision. “That sounds like a plan. We passed a public library on our way in. We can go there to find the locations of the mine sites and hit several of them. We should be able to find something there to hold over JRE.”
“If I’m right,” I told her, “we won’t even have to look very hard. We know they’re dealing underhandedly on the business side. They’re probably being slipshod on the regulatory compliance as well.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Let’s do this.”
At the library, we found out that JRE’s reasons for being headquartered in Salt Lake City were quite practical: most of their mines were scattered around the big city, two of them sufficiently close by that we’d be able to visit them today without making this too much of a working vacation.
As we were finishing up at the library, I motioned Kaitlyn over to the public computer I was working at and said, “Hey, while I was going through the paper back at breakfast I came upon an interesting news item: they’re holding the first ever World Naked Bike Ride here in Salt Lake City on Saturday!”
“What is this?” she asked.
“Just what it sounds like: a bunch of people show up and ride their bikes naked through the city. It’s a kind of protest in favor of better ecological policy, bicycle awareness, reduced petroleum use, that sort of thing.”
“And we ride naked,” she said in a flat tone, clearly not yet sold on the idea.
“Right. It gets more media attention than if we’d just ridden in normal cycling clothes, and it fits with the natural environment push of the event. If you think about it, it’s precisely in line with what we do as nature mages. We can’t ride bikes naked while doing magic” — we’d tried, but modern bikes are fairly high tech, so they tend to drain our magical reserves too quickly to be of any use — “but this gives us a unique opportunity to ride as nature mages; in costume, so to speak.”
“Here,” I added, “they’ve got a web site.” I opened the browser and tried a search, but I got a web nanny popup telling me I couldn’t get any results for that. I poked around a bit and found the direct link, and that was blocked, too. Ah, public libraries. May Ritchie help anyone who actually wants information in a library…
So, I pulled out my mobile phone and used its cellular data plan to pull up the site, then passed it to Kaitlyn, who browsed around a bit, then eventually said, “Yeah. Yeah! I do like it. This event looks like it’ll also help forward the cause of public acceptance of nudism. We may need that tolerance for purely selfish reasons at some point.”
“Indeed,” said I.
“Let’s do it!” she said, now resolved. “Not just for your reasons, Davie, but because I want to take a second shot at using the media against JRE. If one newspaper doesn’t do it, maybe a dozen TV news camera crews will!”
The thought made me rather apprehensive, but I told her back in Moab that I’d back her in this battle, so I stayed quiet.
Kaitlyn pulled out her own mobile phone, calling her mother Mary to tell her about the new plan, which then fixed our pickup time for ending this part of our vacation. Mary said she’d love to spectate, but that there was no way we’d get her naked on a bike on a public street. Kaitlyn teased her a bit, but she knew she wasn’t going to shift her. Oh well.