Exposition! I kind of want to write a little more about elven river-city depravity, but I fear that it would go down… tangents. I mean, this is a story about the last Raygun in the world, not… ahem.
Portsmouth was great, though. In small doses. Even Wilkinson lightened up after we got there.
Elves are funny. Like, funny-ha-ha and funny-weird and funny-up-to-something, all at the same time. When they started fleeing from the Magicians’ Alliance a century or so ago, babbling about breeding pits and mutation magic, the Free State ended up encouraging them to keep going southeast into the Big Swampy, but we were nice about it. We gave ‘em gear and travel rations and weapons and maps of where all the really big nomad gangs hung out, and wouldn’t you know it? Pretty soon all of those pains in the ass on our borders were too busy being dead to raid us anymore. The way I heard it, the Governor who set that all up stole the idea from the Ancient Romans, or some other country from the Before Times. Whoever it was, those gals weren’t dummies, because their trick worked like a charm.
But some of the elves stuck around, and they do their sticking in Portsmouth. In the finest tradition of the Free State, they get along by smuggling, playing the angles, and being somewhere convenient to somewhere else, and Portsmouth’s a great place for that. South, the road leads to the Elf-lands; north, it’s the Ghost Road.
You can imagine which way gets more traffic.