Draining the last drops of peppermint whisky out of the buttercup and lowering it gently onto the nightstand, Inspector Twinkle Feathershine sighed, a wheezing rasp that stank of nicotine and regret. Somewhere, history laughed. The Elves, after their long travels, troubles, and travails, had carved something of a home out of the Yukon frost. The streets of Whitehorse, the provincial capital, rang with the bubbling songs of Elvish pipes. The smells of roasted ladybug and honeysuckle soup drifted through its snowy alleyways. Elves argued, cajoled, sang, wailed, and cast spells on its sidewalks and in its apartments.

This was where they’d been permitted to settle after the shocking collapse of Elfrealm in 1948, when the young nation was overrun by a coalition of militant pan-Arabs and unreconstructed Orc supremacists. Now, 60 years later, the Canadian government was preparing to take control of the Yukon Temporary Elf District. Once again, Feathershine’s people would be without a home, rootless, abandoned, as alone as they had been in the days when humans thought they were mythical. It was enough to make an elf turn to drink. Especially one who’d already made that turn every day for thirty years.

But Feathershine was still an RCMP inspector, for two more months, anyway. He was a Mountie from his pointy ears down to the curled leather toes of his Elvish police boots. And that was why he was getting ready to head over to the Pini Hotel. They’d found a dead elf in one of the flophouse’s rooms, evidently strung out on fairydew like so many others these days. Sure, he wouldn’t have had long. But a bullet got him first. And Feathershine, well, he didn’t want to care. But he couldn’t just look away.

Feathershine made it as far as the door before it occurred to him: better bring his Yukon 15003 Elf-1 Generation 1 Night Vision Monocular. Its IR emitter allowed Feathershine to see for up to 30 feet in total darkness. The Pini was a gloomy place, but he was thinking about the network of tunnels below it. They say the tunnels were built by the Commando E partisans back in the ‘60s, when it looked like the Elves and the Eskimos were going to war. They’d fallen into semi-disrepair and were rarely ventured into by sensible Elves – in other words, the perfect hiding place for a killer. Feathershine didn’t know what its infrared vision would reveal, what he’d see through its 22mm objective lens. But whatever it was, it wouldn’t be as frightening as the future.

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