Warlock

Hancock Hunters

The timer by one of the large ovens began to scream its message to the kitchen. Loch slipped on some oven mitts and quickly replaced the finished pastries with a new batch. He passed the finished batch to the older woman beside him and rushed back to one of the many stoves to scoop the mashed potatoes from their pot into a large bowl. One of the younger volunteers, not much younger than he looked, picked up the filled bowl and headed to the front room with it. The oven timer screamed again, but this time someone else got it. Loch glanced at the clock. This was his fourteenth time volunteering for the lunch shift at the soup kitchen now, and every time he ended up dashing around the kitchen for four hours. The traffic flow of volunteers was even more dangerous to navigate than the city streets, but he was getting fairly good at it. The volunteer coordinators were especially grateful for another chef to help prepare food for their massive daily turnout.

"Hey Pholos, want to help dish up the food today?" One of the old woman volunteers – their breed made up the majority of those who worked in the soup kitchen – smiled at him from the doorway to the main room.

He quickly shook his head. The poor members of the city always tried to start conversations with the volunteers. He was lucky that, as one of the only capable chefs, he was always too busy in the kitchen during the preparation hours to talk with the other volunteers or the poor. "It's fine. I'll help clean up. Thanks anyway, Darcy." Loch pasted a smile on his face, once again thanking himself for his short acting career.

The old woman smiled and shook her head. He heard her speaking to one of her friends as she walked away. "That boy is so selfless and kind. I heard he volunteers at the hospital on the corner, too. I wish my grandson was like that." Loch tried not to laugh aloud at their description of him. Putting on a nice face had gained him a lot of information in just the past two weeks, but the face was far from genuine. He had garnered his fair share of fear back before he gave up on life.

As he began to wash dishes from a stack the size of Mt. Everest, Loch focused his hearing on the main room. A former bum spoke to a gathering of current bums in a hushed voice. He had joined some organization called Hancock to hunt the creatures that they suspected were the perpetrators of the mysterious killings. The man had been preaching to his small group of followers about the supposedly secret organization for days. The "Hancocks" believed that vampires and werewolves were real, but what tipped Loch off that they were not just another superstitious group was their mention of the 'lizard people', or the little-known draconem. Draconem were not necessarily rare; they simply did not pop up in many human fairytales. That meant when a human described one, they usually knew about the reality of the Others.

From the former bum's latest rant, Loch found that the Hancock organization was growing in number, and they were now capable of creating machines that allowed the human eye to see past the illusions guarding the Others. He even demonstrating by putting on a pair of sunglasses, or what appeared to be sunglasses, and pointing at various people around the room, describing their real appearances to his followers. Loch mentally scanned the room himself, and found that the Others with higher level shadows guarding them had not been noticed. He was safe from the Hancocks, for now. His actual appearance still appeared almost human, however, so he could even be safe from scrutiny if they created a device that could see past the most powerful shadows.

If he were actually part of the Other world, Loch would have reported this information straight to them. Fortunately, he was not, so he simply listened. Deciding that the ranting human had given him enough information for the day, Loch focused on a conversation between two Others that had volunteered at the soup kitchen. Others were never homeless, for they always banded together in groups, often living in the same place. Extended families saved a lot of money on rent.