I nodded. ”Looking at her picture, I think she’s probably a lycan.”

“Kids these days.” Trevor shook his head as he raised the finished disc charm up and gazed critically at the fine pen strokes. ”Back in my day, we’d never have been seen dead with an Outworlder woman.” He slapped the charm down on the table and began putting his work materials away as he talked on. “Sure, we got drunk and sometimes ended up with one at the end of a night—it was a bit of fun now and then—but what you young’uns are getting up to now. . . it’s pretty damn gross if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you.” I grinned at my boss. He was a paunchy older dude, his brown hair going gray and his belly starting to show the side effects of his taste for the Outworlder beers he so enjoyed. Like most of the old-timers, he didn’t see the appeal in cross-species pollination. Myself? I found the Outworlder women a hundred times more attractive than humans like me. And the beastkin variety, in particular, floated my boat.

Whatever Trevor said, I knew what I liked. I couldn’t wait to get out of the magic shop, into the car, and on my way to meet the gorgeous Astrid.

Thankfully, Trevor’s opinions were going out of fashion. After a hundred years of social reforms, the non-human refugees who’d come through the otherworld portal had been fully integrated with the rest of society.

It was now 120 years since Gateway Day, when the portal had opened from Eosor leading to our world. The Outworlders had come through to earth, and it had changed everything. During the two world wars, Outworlders and their magical abilities had been implemented with devastating consequences.

The Nazis had enslaved millions of Outworlders and attempted to create magical doomsday devices, but the Allied Forces had utilized corps of elite Outworlder volunteers alongside the regular forces. By the end of the war, they managed to free many of the prisoners and defeat the Nazi regime once and for all. The Cold War sent research into arcane weapons systems underground, but after the Wall fell, the two superpowers shared their experimental data.

The mid-90s were an explosion of magical, arcane ingenuity and inventiveness. Free market capitalism met magical paraphernalia, and the world entered a revolution to rival Copernicus. Anti-magic Boomers had called it the “System Apocalypse,” but it was the fulfillment of the dreams of young people all over the world. Internal chi was detected using magically enhanced scientific instruments, and the claims of thousands of years of mystical practitioners were proved beyond doubt to be true.