Mastermind

by Steven Kelliher

  Scale sneered at my silence, showing me the tip of a yellowed fang. “Thought you knew everything.”

  I shrugged, not willing to bite. “Maybe you’re just dumber than you look, Doc,” I said. “Which is already pretty dumb.”

  “Maybe.” Scale said it distractedly.

  “How many villains does Blackstrike have working for him?” I asked.

  Now it was Scale’s turn to shrug. He’d relaxed momentarily, which meant whoever he’d been watching must have moved on. “Not sure they see it as working for him. From what I’ve heard, there may even be higher-tiered villains in league with that one. He’s clever.” Scale looked down at me, wearing a curious expression I couldn’t quite suss out. “Clever and ambitious, not unlike yourself. He’s been making connections in War Town. Or trying to.”

  “Well, I’m making connections too,” I said, injecting a boldness into my voice that wasn’t strictly earned. This was a desperate move to win Post over, and if I failed this time, I might be done for good. I pressed on, maintaining that boldness. “One day, Blackstrike and I will cross paths, and we’ll see who comes out on top.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you will,” Scale said, clearly unable to keep the thought of said meeting – or the prospect that it would go poorly for me – from brightening his dour mood. “I’d say sooner or later, but with how brazen you seem to be, I’d hedge on the former.”

  “Nothing wrong with getting to know the neighbors,” I said, looking across the street once more. Sebastian was standing beside the locked gate, doing his best to look innocent. He failed miserably, but then, knowing what I knew of Luther Smith, I didn’t think my bodyguard would be a deterrent for the crafting expert. If anything, he’d likely see it as an opportunity to test out some of his latest tech.

  “You’d do better to keep your head down,” Scale argued. “Build your… Influence.” The word seemed to make him want to choke every time he used it, as if he’d been infected by it. As if I had him Influenced just the same as the dock workers and crowbar-wielders that shadowed us now – those that remained after the bank job, which was a sight fewer than I’d have liked. In a manner of speaking, he was right. “You could have tiered up, challenged Madam Post proper, taken the docks for yourself and expanded that way.”

  “And what was your trajectory, Scale? To tier up in, what, nine months? Can have a real-world baby in that time. Nah, I’m thinking I’d like to climb the ladder a bit faster.”

  Scale muttered something about me being insane under his breath. I let it go. At a certain point, players would only take so much in-game before deciding they’d be better off risking a bloody fight and getting perm’d if it meant not having to deal with a shitty build and a shittier situation any longer. Reminding Scale he was my thrall was one thing. Reminding him he didn’t have a whole lot invested in his current build was another, and one I’d do well to keep closer to the vest.

  “Don’t worry, pal,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder like I would with Sebastian, “I’ll let you ride my leather coattails as long as you’d like. Plenty of room where I’m going.” Scale grabbed my gloved hand in his clawed one and removed it from his burly shoulder. The strength in the grip made me work to suppress a shudder. He really was a strong one, even if his IQ left something to be desired, and that Rage was a potent superpower. As long as I could aim it, I might not have to kill the bloke.

  “So, what’s the play?” Scale asked, his attempt at a whisper coming out like some weird hybrid between an alligator’s hiss and a cougar’s scream.

  “Play?” I said distractedly, still scanning every inch of the yard. The single garage door was an aluminum monster that looked better suited to housing a war plane than an eccentric’s habits.

  “You told the robot you had a plan,” Scale said, his ire growing alongside his worry. “Said you knew how to crack him. So, what’s the play?”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, coming to stand before the garage door. “The plan. Well, I’m going to try to Influence him, of course.”

  “If you were confident you could do that, you wouldn’t bring me,” Scale said, more wisely than I’d normally give him credit for.

  “True enough,” I admitted. Luther’s mind stat was on par with Madam Post’s, which meant an outright Influence attempt would likely fail. I couldn’t brute force this one. No. Until I tiered up, I’d need to play things smart. Luckily, the supercomputer also provided traits of NPCs, and Luther’s trait was ‘Unfulfilled’. That had given me enough to work with.

  “Luther Smith is more than just a tinkerer,” I explained. “He is an artist. And what artists covet, aside from the pursuit of their own passions, is the appreciation – nay, the adoration – of others.”

  Scale regarded me as if I had lost my mind. The thought had occurred to me too, but I was trusting my gut on this one.

  I cleared my throat and shook my head. “Don’t worry yourself over it too much, friend. It’ll come clear soon enough, so long as it’s working.”

  Scale exposed the majority of his yellowed teeth, razor molars, as he prepared to lodge an official complaint with my methodologies, but then the door shook, uncorking the sound of drummer’s bass, and started to rise.

  “I assume you’re going to want me to do the heavy lifting if things go sour,” Scale said.

  “Quite so,” I quipped, stepping boldly up to the tinkerer’s domain.

  I looked right and left as I went, marking the locations of Hobb and Brooks, who stood on guard at the gaps between buildings, white icons emblazoned above their heads. Across the street, Sebastian was hunkered down in the angled alcove between the side of the concrete wall of the tinkerer’s mini complex and the dilapidated apartment building, in a position no real man of his stature would have been able to hold in the real world without incurring some serious chiropractic expenses.

  I waved at him. He smiled like the golden retriever he so clearly was at heart, and stood.

  “I assume you’ll want me to smash through that gate,” Scale said, moving up beside me. I was bathed in the deeper shadows as he blotted out the gray light from the clouds above. “Unless you want to give golden boy a try at it.”

  “Sebastian’s probably more than up to the task,” I said. “You should know, Croc. He gave you a solid accounting the last time you met.”

  “Him and a dozen of his friends.”

  “My friends.” Remember that, you overgrown gecko. “And no, Scale, I don’t need anyone to smash anything quite yet.”

  He looked down at me with an expression I would have called quizzical if it didn’t look so dumb. “You really going to walk right up there?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  And that’s what I did.

  A few moments later, the three of us – myself, Scale and good ol’ Sebastian – were standing in front of the chain-link gate, Scale and I staring up into an old security camera while Sebastian kept watch.

  I didn’t say anything, and the next few seconds spent wondering if B5 would be proven right yet again terrified me more than anything that could be waiting for me across the lot, or even across the bay in Titan City. Finally, a red dot flickered on below the lens, and the mechanical arm that formed the camera’s spine twisted to give the tinkerer a better view of us.

  “Hello, Mr. Smith,” I said. I looked back into the camera as if it was a very old friend, then indicated my companions. “This is Doc… er, Scale. He’s a friend of mine. Helps me separate friend from foe, and foe from consciousness. Sebastian here is going to watch the gate while the three of us talk. That is, of course, if you’d like to talk to us.”

  The lens adjusted. I thought I could hear the tiny cogs and gears shifting in the cream-colored box that housed the camera’s guts, but it was likely my imagination.

  “If I may dispense with all pretense—”

  “As if you haven’t done that already,” Scale grunted harshly through gritted fangs that made whispering all but impossible for him. “We’re sitting duck
s out here.”

  I allowed myself the luxury of a long blink that took the place of a sigh and continued my address. “If I may dispense with all pretense, I know who you are, Luther Smith, and I know I can’t afford you. At least, not in the traditional sense of the word. Nevertheless, I think you’ll find what I have to offer tantalizing to say the least.”

  I paused, swallowed and opened my mouth to speak again, but then the red light winked out and the lens went still, the tiny motor behind it quiet.

  “Nice one,” Scale jeered. He started to turn and walk away, and I had half a mind to sic Sebastian and the boys on him, if only to lose myself in the violence that followed, but then a buzzer went off, and the sound of a heavy latch releasing echoed in the concrete yard behind the gate.

  The chain-link fence shuddered, and when Scale and I simply stood there staring at it and then each other, loyal Sebastian took it upon himself to step forward and ease the gate open, smiling at us as if we were simpletons who had forgotten how to do it.

  “Thank you, Sebastian,” I said, and he turned his shoulder to accept the slap-pat that had quickly become our ritualistic bond.

  Scale and I entered the yard, and Sebastian closed the gate with a loud, metallic crash behind us before turning around to guard it from whatever the world might throw at it. There was nothing remarkable about the place – some odd stacks of tires, loose hubcaps, hydraulic arms and discarded pistons, along with several stacks of seeming junk – but Scale and I walked like soldiers tiptoeing across a minefield or wading through a snake-infested river.

  We knew we were dealing with a tinkerer, and, as was the case in the comics, traps were their forte. After all, nobody admitted a monster – well, a pair of monsters, I supposed – into their domain without a plan.

  Of course, calling the dusty warehouse a domain was a far cry from the truth. In fact, even calling it a warehouse stretched the definition to the point of pulling it apart at the seams.

  The tinkerer’s garage was just that: a garage, no different from your grandfather’s aside from the fact that it housed what looked to be turrets and hoverboards in the place of classic cars and wax kits, though I thought I saw the latter gathered on a wooden shelf to the right.

  There were cables and bungee cords hung from the exposed planks in the ceiling, and assorted doohickies and techno-thingies hanging in the shadows above, only just illuminated by a few skylights. Scale and I stepped up onto a wooden platform at the back of the garage, and found ourselves staring at the tinkerer over a work table that had accumulated an inch-thick coating of silver dust on the back of the inventor’s latest project, which looked to be some sort of… pogo stick.

  As for the man himself, he was even more mundane than his profile had suggested. He looked vaguely dwarven, standing a full head shorter than me, which made him several heads shorter than Scale. He had an orange mustache and beard that was about as well-kept as his workspace, and he wore brown leather overalls above a gray shirt that might have been white once, long ago. He had startling blue eyes and a large nose, and, of course, he had welder’s goggles pulled up on top of his head. The only thing missing was a forge and a hammer, perhaps a pipe. But I wasn’t entirely sure he didn’t have them lying around here somewhere.

  What struck me most about the NPC man apart from his utter normalcy was the fact that he wasn’t the least bit nervous, despite the fact that Scale could reach across the wooden table and throttle him in the time it took one of us to offer an opening word.

  Of course, maybe that silent confidence had to do with the weapon – pogo-stick qualities aside – he clutched by the handles on either side, with the base resting against the front buckle of his suspenders. He looked nonchalant enough, but I had no doubt he could put the thing to quick use if pressed.

  Scale wasn’t quite as perceptive as I was.

  “Well?” the lizard said. “You going to do it, or not?” He gestured at the tinkerer, utterly unimpressed by our surroundings, nor apparently threatened now that we were inside.

  “Do what?” I asked, incredulous. “I came here to have a conversation with Luther.” I turned back to the tinkerer, whose blue eyes shifted from Scale to me and back again. “My apologies, Luther. My friend here is rather bent on acquiring your services and—”

  “Services?” Scale was losing his patience even more quickly than I had hoped. I smiled behind my mask, and thought the tinkerer could see it in my eyes. He frowned ever so slightly. “Just do the thing you did to the others. Wave your hands. Cast your spell.”

  “Luther, sir. Do I look very much like a wizard to you?”

  Luther didn’t answer, and I regretted asking the question.

  I turned to Scale, motioning to Luther with my right hand. “Perhaps you would like to cast a spell, friend, if you really think that will convince Luther to join us in our noble quest.”

  “Quit talking like that,” Scale spat, his eyes shifting from me to Luther and back again. He was nervous about the NPC’s utter calm, and now it seemed he did notice the strange device the man clutched, and the various pieces of machinery seemingly placed at random throughout the shop.

  Scale smiled, and I didn’t know why at first. “So, this one’s beyond your Influence too, huh?” He chuckled, as if nothing could have given him more joy. “That’s twice in a row now, Despot. You sure you want to keep showing me just how weak you are?”

  Hasn’t made you bold enough to challenge me yet.

  Instead of saying that, I merely shrugged. And tipped my head toward the tinkerer, letting my right hand linger in the air a moment longer. I stepped backward, Luther Smith’s icy blue eyes never leaving Scale’s.

  “Fine,” Scale said, puffing up his chest in an obvious attempt to push down the uncertainty flooding his veins. “I’ll do it myself.”

  With that, he squared up to the tinkerer, and the two eyed each other across the narrow work table for a long blink before the overgrown lizard lanced his clawed hand forward with deceptive speed. The tinkerer was ready. I saw the flash before I heard him click the hidden triggers beneath the handles of his weird pogo stick, and Scale’s eyes widened to expose the whites at the edges as he realized his folly.

  The hollow end of the stick flashed blue, and a glowing projectile slammed Scale in the chest hard enough to send him flying backward. He smashed through a wall of shelves and hanging chains, crashing into the back of the door, which rattled and rasped on impact. Before Scale hit the ground, the blue projectile sprouted tethers, which expanded around his muscled form like a spider’s web. They set bright blue anchors into the door with blinding speed and tightened as Scale recovered enough to start thrashing.

  After a few tense seconds, he hung there, bound tightly, caught like a fly in a radiant blue web. It was like a fisherman’s net, and from what I could tell, it wasn’t inflicting any damage onto my companion other than the initial impact.

  Scale: 98% HP

  “Not bad,” I said, switching my gaze from the bound Scale back to the tinkerer. I was startled to see his blue eyes already fixated on me with an intensity they hadn’t held before, along with the hollow and still-smoking end of the net gun.

  I held up my hands. “Not bad… but…”

  The tinker’s eyebrows drew together in consternation. He applied some pressure to the triggers, but I pointed back toward the door with my left hand, and he couldn’t help but look back at Scale.

  “But I certainly hope that’s not all you’ve got to deal with such a pest.”

  Scale was angry and struggling. His bonds glowed brightly every time he shifted and flexed, but they weren’t giving. I saw his eyes begin to change, going yellow like a cat’s.

  It wouldn’t do to have my most valuable player ally killed by an NPC, but then, I didn’t trust Scale as far as I could throw him, and I wanted to know what the tinkerer could do when pressed.

  Scale stilled for a full breath, hanging lifeless. But his yellow eyes were now fixed on Smith, who backed away from t
he edge of his table, knuckles blanching as he applied more pressure to the triggers.

  Scale roared, and when he flexed again, his muscles seemed fuller than they had been before, corded with veins and the Rage running through them.

  And… there it is.

  Scale brought his clawed hands together and slashed through the glowing net. When he hit the ground, he did so in an animal crouch, looked up, flared his nostrils and shot toward the tinkerer with all the killing speed he could muster.

  Smith wasted no time, launching another spinning blue net ball toward Scale, but the villain was now too fast. Scale leapt over the flying gadget, rotating in the air as the ball expanded, its seeking tendrils attempting to wrap up a passing green limb. He landed on the work table on all fours, and the tinkerer went stumbling back.

  I nearly intervened, though I imagined Scale was beyond being reasoned with at this stage, as he raised a taloned hand to rend the NPC apart.

  And then the tinkerer cast his net gun aside and pressed a button on the side of his watch. Scale paused, his webbed ears twitching as he heard a clanking sound from the side… from behind me.

  I dove to the left, hitting the wooden planks of the floor hard just before the turret roared to life, pouring its hail of bullets into the center of the work area.

  Scale took a few glancing shots – it seemed they could penetrate his thick hide, but not easily – and rolled off the table, bringing it down with him and propping it up as a shield.

  Scale: 92% HP

  Smith scrambled to his feet, taking care to avoid the flashing stream of bullets as he ducked out of the way, snatching a small gray metallic ball as he went. The turret roared from its hidden corner, the bullets quickly reducing the work table to splinters.