Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Drug Runner

Timor shifted nervously where he stood waiting for the ITSA guards to pass buy. They weren't human, which was lucky for him since humans often had drug sniffing dogs with them. Leave it to humans to train predators to sniff out drugs for them. He shifted again nervously. He didn't like this job, and had never intended it to go like this. He remembered just a year ago at home working in the shop with his sister Paxi and his parents, but then one of their rival business owners managed to upsell them at every turn and they had lost the shop to debt collectors. His father had been struck ill and their mother was busy taking care of him.

It was left up to him and to Paxi to make money for the family. Paxi was older than him so she knew more about what she was doing, and she had a natural talent for sales. She was working in advertising in one of those companies that typically targeted human tourism. Timor was too young for anyone to take him seriously in the industry, so he had been forced to find other ways to make money fr his family. He had sold drinks street side, cleaned pipes, washed windows on high rise buildings, pretty much any unsavory poorly paying job that he could think of until this opportunity came along.

He had been cornered in a back alley on the Tesraki home world and assumed that he was going to be robbed or kidnapped from the slave trade like had almost happened to him when he was young, though this time there would be no friendly human around to save him.

Instead they had invited him back to their warehouse and offered him a job.

It was nothing bit they had told him, and the amount they would be paying him was almost five times the amount he was being paid polishing botos.

They admitted that it was probably a little dangerous, but that was alright. They were sure someone like him would be able to handle it just fine. He knew flattery when he saw it, but he was willing to try anything at this point. All he had to do was bring the packages from point A to point B. As young and innocent as he was, it wouldn't look like much, and since the items he was carrying wasn't so well known in the universe at that point, they shouldn't have any detection equipment up for it yet.

So he had been given the ability to travel all around the universe as a drug runner.

It wasn't entirely an unpleasant job. Most of the time he got to just relax and wait for his next shuttle, but there were other times that he spent very scared that someone was going to find him. He heard that people who were caught running drugs ended up in the Turma supermax prison, and everyone knew what could happen to you there.

He shivered and sat up as he waited in line.

He was waved forward after a moment and let the desk agent scan his card.

He was sure they were gong to be able to tell how nervous he was, with the twitching of his right ear, but the Rundi seemed to have no interest in paying attention to him and moved him on.

Timor rested a hand on his belly where the package was resting. They had shaved off one layer of his fur to put on a prosthetic over that. Inside the containment unit the containers were hidden inside strange leaf shaped pieces that, when looked at on a scanner would appear as nothing more than the contents of his lunch.

Still, he hated this part the most.

He raised his hands over his head as he was ushered through the scanning machine.

There was a sharp beep and he was allowed to pass. A very bored looking Iotan leaned forward and ran a wand over his body before eventually waving him through. The vials never had any metal on them, made primarily of an organic sort of plastic, and since they were made up of human hormones, the scanner didn't detect any unusual chemicals. If it had been programmed to do that, than no human would have managed to make it through the system without setting off alarm bells.