Press Gnome

by Skyler Wood

  "Are my people going to be okay? If the Assembly moves on the press?" Vex asked.

  "They're doing it officially. As long as your people don't try to interfere, they'll be fine," Moira said.

  "Yet they tried to murder us," Cosmo said.

  "They'll claim that isn't their doing, but everyone would know it was a slap in the queen's face," Moira said with a contented expression. "I love politics."

  Cosmo wasn't nearly as fond of them—they kept almost getting him killed.

  "So you struck a deal of some kind with the Assembly because neither of you like the queen," Vex said.

  "Ah," Moira said, leaning back on her hands. "Now there is an interesting thing. Andreus could be keeping secrets from me, but if so I think I'd have found them out. No, our plotting against the queen, and the Assembly's own designs, aren't connected."

  "I never realized just how much I don't understand about my home town. I'm confused. You have to be completely lost," Vex said to Cosmo.

  "Not as much as you'd think," Cosmo said. "Everything is a cog spinning. Moving one way against another and pushing on the next cog. This whole city is like some vast machine where the cogs are people and guilds."

  "What a terrible way to look at the world," Moira said.

  Cosmo couldn't disagree more. People were confusing, nonsensical. But if they decided to conveniently sort themselves into groups that consistently worked against each other, well, that could perhaps make sense to him.

  "I think things are starting to come into focus, but there is one thing I don't understand—you. Why do you keep saving us? We're not just there, convenient. You've gone out of your way." Cosmo said.

  "If you research me you'll find going out of my way to save people is a thing I do," Moira said. "But I've been keeping a particularly close eye on you. I want to understand what the queen is thinking."

  "Why?" Vex asked. "It sounds like you and the bards oppose her on principle. Evil is right there in the title."

  "Do you really want to get into this?" Moira asked and shrugged, for once in a way not designed to show off her cleavage. "Do you ever think about it? Really? Good and evil?"

  "I'm a demonblood. I don't really have a choice but to think about it, I can never be good, even if I wanted to be. Neutral is as high as my alignment goes," Vex said.

  "But do you really think about what that means? Most people don't—on either side of the divide. Some people who are evil think it means an unlimited license to stomp kittens and be a jerk. Some people who are good think the exact same thing," Moira said.

  Vex was silent for awhile. "I don't really know how to describe it, but I know something is missing inside of me."

  "I've had people watching you. You've acted to defend Cosmo's life when you didn't have to. You wouldn't call that good?" Moira asked.

  "He's my boss, and a friend, and he's my partner even if not the fun kind. I'd do whatever it takes to protect him," Vex said, and her tail flicked against the bench.

  "You are loyal. It isn't at all uncommon even amongst the most evil. Neither is honor, nor self-control. I know, I know, get your bard jokes out now," Moira said.

  "This conversation is making me really uncomfortable," Vex said.

  "And I don't mean to. I ask because I have made a study of good and evil. You are missing some things. Your ability to feel empathy for a complete stranger is almost nonexistent. Still, even if you have fully given in to your evil nature, you could remain a loyal and steadfast friend, or a faithful bard."

  "Or an effective queen," Cosmo said.

  "The king was a kindhearted man. He hated to raise a fuss and was always thinking of what might make the lives of his subjects easier. And yet, I think it fair to say that in many ways Pipopolis experienced a decline under his rule," Moira said.

  "You're just a rebel in all kinds of ways. I'm so into that," Vex said.

  "Everyone with good taste is," Moira said with a toss of her hair.

  "So what are your thoughts?" Cosmo asked.

  "I think she is playing a familiar game, and that means I don't know her at all. But you two, I figure, do, and despite an attempt on your lives you're still here and still working at the task you are set. I think that means something," Moira said.

  If she couldn't get a read on the queen, she'd try to get a read on the two agents of the queen. It was smart. Cosmo vowed that, just as with the queen, he'd make it a point to look beneath Moira's act.

  27

  Bards did indeed have the best beds, if foolishly large, especially for a gnome. Still, at least they made it through the night unmurdered, although Cosmo had to shoo away seven offers of company.

  There was a sumptuous breakfast in the morning, and they had to wait for Moira to wake before they were allowed to leave. They set off at once for the offices of the paper.

  There were two guards out front, dressed in heavy armor and blocking the door.

  Cosmo thought it was best not to approach them and they headed for the back.

  "Can you get us past the guards with your illusions?" Cosmo asked.

  "Maybe," Vex said, uncertain.

  There was just one guard in the rear. None of their employees were here, but nothing scared off the citizens of Pipopolis quite like the guard.

  Vex grabbed Cosmo and tucked him under one arm, and waggled her fingers.

  To Cosmo's sight they both seemed to completely vanish from sight, and then she was sprinting.

  On the other side of the loading dock they flickered back into being. The building seemed devoid of staff or any guards, and they were able to explore. What they found wasn't good.

  The paper and ink supplies they'd purchased the day before had been seized, but that wasn't the worst of things.

  Where the press had been there was only melted and twisted shards of metal.

  Cosmo ran over to study the fragments. Not just smashed—smashed and then melted.

  "They really took a hammer to it," Vex said, stepping up behind him. "Sorry boss, I know how much you love machines."

  "Not just a hammer. Fire. This was magic, maybe the same elementalist who keeps trying to kill us. Something strange though, some of these compounds…,” Cosmo said.

  “Problem?” Vex asked.

  “They weren’t in the press but if magic was involved it might have transmuted them,” Cosmo said.

  "What are we going to do?"

  Cosmo didn't have a clue. There was always the queen, but Cosmo's instincts were telling him that was the last thing they should do. Everything was force and counterforce, the Assembly wasn't trying to press back against the paper so much as the queen. If they made it her problem, the Assembly succeeded.

  "I don't know yet. Let's head somewhere safer and figure it out," Cosmo said.

  They snuck out the same way they came in and went to Grom's. Vex looked particularly unhappy and made it clear with the number of pies she ordered.

  "She's going to kill us. Moira didn't save our lives, she just slowed down our deaths," Vex said.

  "It isn't that bad. We could run, if we had to," Cosmo said.

  Vex shook her head. "Not a lot of options there, is there? Not for me. Don't let Moira tell you otherwise, evil can be real annoying. Do you want to meet the demon aristocracy? I don't want to meet the demon aristocracy."

  "So we don't go there. We travel. I'm a good salesman, a decent fixer of things. You can be my apprentice. Good to have a trade," Cosmo said.

  Vex stared at him for a long moment and pulled another plate of pie towards her. "That assumes our employer wouldn't send someone to follow us. Evil queens don't like their failures walking around."

  Cosmo feared there was too much truth to that.

  "Then we don't fail. We can't fail. We have to figure out a way to put something together."

  "With what? The press is destroyed. We have no money. What help we had is still out there but, again, we have no money."

  "Did somebody say no money?" Grom asked as he passed by, the or
c looking alarmed.

  "I'm running a tab," Vex said with a challenging look back, and then stared down at her pie once more. "Okay, let's start with what we have. You're a mechanical genius. Can you put the press back together if we get the parts?"

  "I don't think so. At best, it would take me months and I'd have to manufacture many of the pieces," Cosmo said.

  "What about the gnomes working for that corporation in the mining district? What if they helped?"

  "Even if they were willing to help, they're from a completely different discipline. They focus on magicity. It will have to be the free press. I don't like it, but we know it works. And if we couldn't catch it I doubt the Assembly did—it's still out there," Cosmo said.

  Vex sat up a little straighter. "Okay, we only have to do something we totally haven't been able to do so far. Still, it is something. I mean, maybe. We just capture it and haul it back to the building we no longer have access to. Obviously that can't happen, so assuming we catch it, we have to run the newspaper from somewhere else."

  "The bards? No, however much Moira has helped us, we don't want to get more tangled up with them," Cosmo said.

  "Tangled in the sheets. Sorry, couldn't help myself," Vex said, and let out a low breath. "The Adventurers Guild? They have room they aren't using."

  It was still a city guild. But one that accepted members of any of the others, and so far as Cosmo knew they were both nearly dead and had no political enemies.

  "Right. We figure out how to make that work. We might not have money now, but we did do our first run of advertising yesterday," Cosmo said.

  "And missed today," Vex said.

  "We'll still have brought them some sales. If paying what they owe brings them more, I think they'll do it."

  "We lost our photographs. We'll have to do a reshoot. That shouldn't be a problem, convincing bards to take their clothes off again," Vex said.

  It would be harder to convince them to keep them on.

  "But even if we can get up and running again, couldn't they just shut us down again?" Vex asked.

  "Whatever else the Assembly might be, they came for us in the night. We get up and running again, we find a way to take the fight to them in broad daylight," Cosmo said.

  It was dangerous, but playing nice hadn't gotten them anywhere but out of business.

  28

  The next few hours were busy. The adventurers were happy to give them some rooms in the back of the guild. Unlike the last time they'd visited, there were a few new faces. The newspaper's first version of the adventurer's guide had an impact.

  Most of those who had gone to the armorers in response to the advertisement were more idly curious than shoppers. Still, enough coupons had been used and they soon had a decent-sized pouch of coins.

  That left them with one key, missing ingredient. The free press. According to Grom it had been seen last night just outside of town.

  Cosmo and Vex went searching for it.

  "You can't tell me people make sense of these signs," Cosmo said.

  The signpost had over one hundred signs on it, all pointing in different directions. "Aberranth's Labyrinth" "Milbro's Despair" "Chasm of the Undying" and "Tomb of Apathy" to name but a few.

  Once you left the main road a lot of the area around the city turned into this. The dumping grounds of centuries of magical artifacts, corpses, and things no sensible person wanted to leave inside of city limits.

  "Nobody but adventurers," Vex said. "Who else would want to? This is pretty much awful."

  In places, towers jutted from broken earth, and shimmering portals could be glimpsed, doorways to places better not even imagined.

  "What do you think it would be doing here?" Cosmo asked.

  "Hiding from elementals? Maybe they tried to take it out too," Vex said.

  It was clear she was joking, but it made Cosmo wonder.

  "Is that possible?"

  "You want to take me seriously? Uh, okay. We're surrounded by magical portals, tombs, and the refuse of a whole lot of crazy mages. I don't know what that does to a tracking spell, but it probably isn't great."

  "Maybe they sent an elemental after it too?"

  "I still don't understand why they'd go to all that trouble. I just don't see how we were that much of a threat," Vex said.

  "Take it as a compliment and prove them right," Cosmo said, searching the surroundings. He was hoping for tell-tale signs of ink or paper, but the landscape was so chaotic and if the signs were here, he wasn't finding them.

  "Boss, are you okay? You're seeming a little bit ... bloodthirsty. I mean, it is kind of hot and all—you know, demonblood, but it isn't like you," Vex said.

  "We gnomes aren't a warlike people, we just want to hide away and tinker with our machines. I thought that the queen was counting on that," Cosmo said.

  "If she wanted a war, she'd have sent an orc or a dwarf."

  "But she didn't, she sent me. I see the way this city turns, the forces pushes and pulling. We tried to it one way and we were wrong. I'm not bloodthirsty, but I don't like to repeat my mistakes."

  "It doesn't suit you," Vex said, kicking a stone. "Anyway, I'm not seeing anything here."

  "Maybe we're going about this all wrong? We're looking as if the press is hiding from us," Cosmo said.

  Vex shrugged before yelling at the top of her lungs, "Press? If you're around here we're looking for you. Stories to be written! Vile conspiracies to take down!"

  "It doesn't actually have ears, but I do," Cosmo said with a wince.

  There was a clatter of stones from a nearby hilltop and Cosmo looked up to see the press bouncing from leg to leg. It didn't stay there for long, bounding towards them and moving to cower behind them.

  Before Cosmo and Vex had time to be surprised that Vex's calling had actually worked, a moment later it became apparent why the press was hiding.

  Following after it were shambling constructions of wood that looked like the frames of wagons.

  "Are those ... Undead carts? They weren't even alive to start with," Cosmo said.

  "I don't think they care about the semantics of their existence," Vex said, stepping between Cosmo and the press.

  "It is ridiculous. This is what happens with magic. You can't even throw it away properly. The next thing you know your garbage is trying to throw you out," Cosmo said.

  "Not the time, boss," Vex said.

  Cosmo was bumped from behind. The press was peeking out from behind him. It was ridiculous, really, given both the lack of eyes and the fact it was taller than Cosmo. Cosmo tried to pat it on what absolutely wasn't a head—and what absolutely wasn't a tail began to wag.

  Vex gestured and bursts of flame appeared in front of the carts. They stumbled backwards, but when they didn't catch on fire they quickly began to advance again.

  "Magical wood. Resisting my fire. I'm not very good at magic," Vex said.

  The carts were clearly afraid of the fire though—they had reared back.

  Cosmo looked to the press. "If you still have some paper we sure could use some when I say the word."

  The press seemed to understand him, or at least it jumped up and down, which it hadn't done before.

  "We're going to try and scare them off," Cosmo said.

  "Yeah, I figured that. I'm ready when you are," Vex said.

  The carts continued to wheel themselves nearer, and when they were close enough Cosmo told the press, "Now."

  The press began to madly spin its rollers and papers flew into the air, a cascade of them falling over the carts as Vex gestured again. The papers turned into a rain of fire.

  It still didn't seem to be enough to ignite the carts. Where fiery paper touched them it continued to burn, but the fire didn't spread. Still, being caught in the flames panicked them.

  The carts spun their wheels as they reversed, making a painfully slow-motion retreat back up the hillside.

  "You going to run?" Cosmo asked the press.

  It nuzzled Cosmo from behind.
<
br />   "I think you made a friend, boss," Vex said.

  Just what Cosmo always wanted. His own magical artifact.

  29

  They didn't want to give the Assembly any notice of what they were up to, and they had to transport the press through the city in secret. Lacking any better resources, they simply tossed a sheet over it and Cosmo rode it.

  They soon had it in the Adventurers Guild. This was a far smaller operation than their previous one, but it needed to be if they were going to keep a low profile.

  The adventurers had picked them up enough paper and ink for the day's run, in exchange for getting to add a few kegs of beer to shopping list.

  Bards had been in and out taking a new set of pictures. Sedwin wasn't a trained photographer, but at least he was free and had access to a magical camera.

  It was already getting late in the day. They might be back in operation with only a day off. Again, they were going to need a headline.

  "We need a story," Vex said.

  "We have one. Ours," Cosmo said, as the press thumped in a circle around him. It was surprisingly quiet given its size and weight.

  Vex stared for a moment and then laughed. "I guess we do, and I guess if people bought the previous day's issue they might care. But closing down the paper isn't a secret."

  "You talked to some of our people. What reason did the Assembly give?" Cosmo asked.

  "Illegal operation. They'd shuttered the paper and we'd reopened it without their approval."

  As reasons to shut them down went, it was true enough. Cosmo rather doubted the queen had asked for the Assembly's permission, so it really depended on what authority you thought was greater.

  "We need to keep that from happening again," Cosmo said.

  "Unless you want to call in the queen, I don't think that happens. I don't know if it happens with her."

  "We change the name of the paper. Instead of the Pipopolis Press we are now the Daily Scroll. They can say we're the same, but any person in the town can walk past and see we're not even in the same building anymore," Cosmo said.