quote:The small obsidian cube felt cool to the touch and heavier than its size would suggest.
"What's inside?"
"Sorry, Sylvia, but I have no idea," said Sneaky Pete. "Won it in a card game the other week, and the chump I took it off of didn't know either. But it's valuable as-is, right? I mean, it's a Pandora's box."
I nodded. Pandora's boxes are rare and completely impervious to scans by magic or science. The only way to find out what's inside of one is to open it. And I am not foolish enough to do that. People don't store nice things in Pandora's boxes. Open one and you might be in for a plague of boils, a nasty curse, or a hologram of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up."
"Do you want to sell or pawn it?" I asked.
"Pawn it," said Pete. He was a two-bit hustler, always finding minor magical items to sell to the shop. Every week he would haul in junk like second-hand wands, an alchemist's engine that turned gold into lead, or an early print of Pride and Prejudice, before the Victorians edited out the zombies. A Pandora's box was a big get for a guy like Pete. But he always took cash. I arched my eyebrow.
"I wanna hang on to this one. A long-term investment," said Pete. "I just need rent money."
I named a price and he accepted it without argument. This told me he likely would be back for the box. Lots of people abandon their property on pawn, but they haggle like hell to get the maximum value out of it first.
"All right then," I said. "You will have thirty days to repay the loan with interest. After that, the box becomes property of the shop."
He took the money and the pawn slip and booked it out the door faster than the Road Runner. I stored away the box, and went back to organizing the enchanted wedding rings for our annual buy-two-get-one-free sale.
The box didn't enter my thoughts for a time. Not until the Tooth Fairy showed up.
Alex Shvartsman is a writer and game designer from Brooklyn NY. In addition to IGMS, his short stories appeared in Nature, Daily Science Fiction, Galaxy's Edge and many other magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of Unidentified Funny Objects anthology series of humorous SF/F. His fiction is linked at www.alexshvartsman.com.Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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quote:I had so much fun playing in the magic pawn shop sandbox, that I knew I would have to come back to this setting and characters, again and again. In the first story, Cthulhu trapped in a snowglobe-like high-tech-faeriespocket dimension was brought into the pawn shop. So I got to thinking, what other interesting items might show up at its doorstep? Excalibur? Holy Grail? A mint Alf action figure, still in original packaging? The Pandora’s Box was definitely on the short list, and that’s what I went with.
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