“You changed clothes, but you’re still bleeding.”
“It’s just a flesh wound.” I’ve always wanted to say that. Usually, my flesh wounds in The Loop are much more than flesh wounds. The NPCs don’t usually miss when they pull a trigger.
“You’re pretty tough, you know that?”
“I just don’t like cowards and bullies.”
She kisses me, and boy is it nice.
“Heya, Doll, what do you say we blow this popsicle stand and head back to my place?”
I’m well aware that there will be an assassin waiting for me when I return, but the nighttime button man doesn’t hold a candle to Morning Assassin, who gets lucky more than I’d like to admit.
So that’s what we do, straight to the honeymoon suite at the flophouse I call home. The thunder rumbles and the lightning cracks as I tear through the rain in my stolen hot rod, laughing while Dolly does an impression of one of the dames in the flick we just bailed on. A real sweetheart, this one, her hand is always available to hold when I’m not switching gears.
I get the ‘someone is about to snuff me’ twitch outside my hotel room door. Her eyes fill with worry and I assure her that I’ll just be a moment.
The title of the next scene should be The Assassin Lurking in the Shadows Meets an Early Retirement.
He tries to pounce as soon as I enter, but one well-timed throat kick from my boot with the blade in the toe, item 489, leaves him choking out his life as I hurl him out the window. Sure, I could have equipped my piping hot curling iron, item 203, and given him The Flaming Prostate Exam of Extreme Discomfort, but the night is young and I’d rather be done with triggermen. So out the window he goes, and I don’t even stop and listen for his inevitable crash below. My Billy Mays Ultra Super Heavy Duty Extra Strength Absorbent Power Rag, item 367, materializes. I mop up the blood and toss the rag out the window too.
“All clear, Doll. You can come in now.”
I swear Dolly floats in, that’s how light she is on her feet. She collapses onto my bed and her red dress disappears, replaced by a silk robe. She gives me that smoky, seductive, Bettie Page smile and beckons me with a crook of her finger.
“Now where were we?” I ask as I tastefully send my garments back to the big closet in the sky.
~*~
“Quantum?”
“I ain’t ready, Doll,” I mumble.
“Quantum, wake up.”
I blink my peepers open. Frances Euphoria’s ceiling fan is a blur overhead. It’s morning, or morning enough. My schnozzle flares at the scent of coffee.
“You were talking in your sleep.” She’s already dressed. The clip in her short hair isn’t necessary, but it’s cute, so maybe it is necessary.
“Did I reveal any prophecies?”
She laughs. “Yeah, Edgar Cayce, you talked about the three days of darkness, the end times and the forthcoming Robopocalypse. Kidding. I didn’t really notice what you were saying; you mostly just mumbled.”
“Just the way I prophesize.”
“We need to get to the office for today’s briefing. Grab a cup of coffee and get your clothes on.”
I lift my arms to indicate I want a hug. She hesitates, but eventually gives in. We cuddle for a moment and I’m just about to nod off when she stands and lightly hits me with a pillow.
“Come on, we need to go. Rocket killed graboids until about … ” She blinks her eyes shut to double-check the login data. “Crap! Until about four. That’s a lot of worms! Oh, and ick, super ick, glad we didn’t have to do that.”
“All right, just maintain positive control of your equus ferus caballus and let me get cleaned up.”
She stops at the door and turns to me. “You’re getting cleaned up?”
“Would you prefer that I did not?”
“No, no, no – have at it,” she hastily replies, “I just didn’t expect that to be one of your major concerns.”
“Welcome to the new, improved, kinder, gentler, more sensitive Quantum 2.0. What can I say? I’m turning over a new leaf.”
She expresses her amusement with a most unlady-like snort.
~*~
About an hour later, we join Rocket and Sophia in the conference room. The Dream Team’s Doctor Poindexter is all mad scientist-y in her white lab coat, and radiates a general and non-specific aura of disgruntled ill-humor. Rocket looks like he has been rode hard and put up wet, which really makes no sense. His eyes are bloodshot; his hair sticks up in all directions, and he sports an XXXL T-shirt with Cartoon Rocket bailing water with a bucket as he stands waist-deep in alligators and wails ‘Are We Having Fun Yet?’ The latest of his Bull Bean energy drinks is gripped tightly in one paw, and a 727’s worth of dead soldiers are visible in the trash can near the door. He’s a trooper, that’s for damn sure, especially for taking care of a small issue for me.
Me: You got the stuff?
Rocket winks.
Me: Way too obvious.
Rocket: It’s in the custodial closet.
Me: Good, ‘cause it will be a cold day in hell before I eat dried kale, seaweed and couscous for breakfast.
“You aren’t going to try it?” Sophia has already finished her first plate and is in the process scooping more onto her second. I appreciate the effort, I do, but again, previous statement about cold day in hell, and last I checked it was the ideal temperature for swamp ass outside.
“Did you at least bring some tortillas?”
She shakes her head. Next to her, Frances busies herself with her own plate of macrobiotic gerbil diet food.
“I see. Well, y’all go ahead and chow down on your silage there, and if you’ll excuse me I think I’ll go powder my nose.”
I’m up and at it before anyone can tell me otherwise. I hit the hallway and turn straight to the closet. The delicate aroma of a proper south of the border breakfast tickles my olfactory receptors as soon as I reach the closet. I quietly shut the door behind me and go for the bag of In-N-Out in the Box breakfast tacos like a famished chupacabra in a pen full of three-legged goats, snorting and grunting as I savor each cholesterol, sodium and nitrate-laden bite.
Doc: I’m about to dive. Where are you?
Me: I’m in the closet.
Doc: Ever heard of R Kelly?
Me: Can’t say that I have.
Doc: It’s a good thing, trust me. Brief the team on the little funding discovery your FDA Monitor found. They should know about this. The info on Zedic, not so much. Don’t forget to give them the four-one-one on the new hacks. Sophia will be familiar with inverse coupling, so that’s all you’ll need to say to her. The others: the improved hacks prevent Reapers from ever logging in again by force-logging them into the OMIB whenever they spawn.
Me: Has Veenure spawned yet?
Doc: Nope, which makes me think she may know about our little hack. You didn’t tell her anything about it, did you?
Me: Insert obligatory sarcastic reply to stupid question >>here<<.
Doc: Good one. Fair enough. Anyhoo, today we’ll have our pow-wow with the Sage of Gotha and tomorrow we can continue the Reaper hunt.
Me: Any idea of how easy it’ll be to get the info we need out of the Sage of Gotha?
Doc: No idea. Hopefully he doesn’t require an arm and a hoof.
Me: Or a firstborn child.
Doc: Or a Humandroid assistant. It will probably be some type of quest, so get ready for a long day. Nothing is easy in a quest-based Proxima world.
Me: What’s the Sage’s deal anyway?
Doc: He’s an NPC NVA seed, that’s his deal. Didn’t you read Sophia’s report?
Me: I got through about forty pages of it.
Doc: Wow, mine went right to the spam folder. Anything I should know?
Me: He’s the NVA Seed.
Doc: Got it.
I finish the last breakfast taco to the sound of someone knocking on the door.
“Just a minute!” I say with my mouth full.
“Open up,” comes Frances’ reply.
I swallow the last savory morsel of real food and do as instructed. “Just talking to Doc.”
“In the closet? How did you get salsa on your face?” she asks with a smirk.
I peer up at the ceiling and delicately stifle a burp. “There must be a drip in here somewhere. We’ll probably need to get that checked out.”
“Are you telling me that we have salsa leaking from the ceiling?”
“Well, yeah. If it was leaking from the floor I’d be standing in a puddle.”
Our Lady of the Guada-Loop reaches into her pocket and hands me a wet-wipe.
“Do you normally carry one of these around?” I ask as I clean up the scene of the crime.
“No, but I knew once Rocket started winking at you that you two were up to something. I assumed it was food related.”
I flash my most charming boyish grin. “He’s a great kid, the best member of the team.”
“The best member, huh?”
“After you, of course.”
“Of course. Glad to hear I’m still number one. You ready to dive?”
“Sure,” I tell her. “Just give me a moment to brief everyone.”
~*~
Feedback until the cows come home. Feedback the sun dipping into the valley yonder. Feedback wonder, feedback sunder. Feedback from the depths come forth and pull me under, come forth and pull me down. In through the ears out through the mouth.
Feedback drown.
~*~
I awake on the other side of mind to find Dolly near the window of our guild, as naked as the day she was … um … spawned, using her witchblade appendages to carve out a stairwell. Stinkerbell hops from stair to stair, laughing and pooting little clouds of pixie dust.
“Glad to see you two are having fun,” I tell the pixie.
Doc spawns in his orange tactical vest and is just about to say something that I can only assume will be witty, biting, pithy and erudite when he’s interrupted by both a hullabaloo and a brouhaha coming from outside. A loud, repetitive beeping noise is punctuated with colorful blasphemies; imaginative curses; jocular observations on relative anatomical short-comings, poofiness, and onanistic tendencies; in addition to derogatory remarks about combat ineptitude – all in the various crap Dick Van Dyke British accents.
“This should be good,” chortles the War Faun, and we move to the window.
The Quiet One is backing the JCB digger onto a series of narrow wooden planks that barely span the much deepened and expanded moat around Festung Britania while Bucket Hat ground-guides him. He makes rude and threatening gestures at Scotty, Irish Shorty, and Pip, who are mocking his heavy equipment operating skills and pelting him with Horse Piss flagons, Irn Bru bottles, and sheep poo. On the far side of the courtyard away from the mayhem is Chrono’s blacksmith shop, an exact replica of his place in Kayi. He’s stuck right in, and his vigorous, manly clanging and banging makes an interesting counterpoint to the Brits’ shenanigans.
Pip’s sheep takes no notice of any of this. She has a cozy sheep pen fenced in wattle, her own little sheep barn fashioned from an oversized Horse Piss barrel, a trough of rolled oats, a round bale of Coastal hay, and all the pasture forage she can graze.
A well flung Irn Bru bottle gets The Quiet One right between the eyes and knocks him out of the operator’s seat and into the moat.
The backhoe continues on its own and puts a wheel over the edge as the Brits scramble to get control of it and get the machine back on track. Scotty glissades on a patch of particularly moist sheep droppings and slams into the other three like an ill-aimed, steam-propelled caber, carrying everybody over the side and into the moat. Doc counts and gets as far as ‘three Mississippi’ before the digger impacts with thundering crash, followed by a beautiful Hollywood flaming explosion which propels the five blackened, smoke-trailing members of the King’s Own Sextuplet up out of the moat.
Pip is still alight as he lands in the sheep pen. Pippa ambles out of her barrel barn, knocks her water bucket over on him to mostly extinguish him, and goes back inside to resume her cud-chewing.
“Bloody ‘ell! It’s all fun ‘n’ games until some gormless twat blows up the rented digger, innit? Good thing we didn’t rehydrate the dehydrated water or uncrate the sharks with frickin’ lasers in their heads yet,” says Burly, who now stands next to me. He catches the skepticism in my eyes. “It’s a work in progress, mate, a bloody work in progress.”
Doc shakes his head and stomps his hooves. “Boys, you can’t buy entertainment like that.”
I put a hand on Burly’s shoulder. “How’s Chrono doing out there?”
“All right, I suppose. ‘E’s been beating away in ‘is little shop at all ‘ours of the night.”
Rocket is next to spawn. He’s oiled and muscled now, as if one night of worm killing has suddenly morphed him into Ronnie Coleman.
“You look like the second runner-up at the Rollins cosplay try-outs.” I observe.
He snorts in amusement and flexes his pecs. “Just been hitting the digital gym.”
Frances Euphoria: So that’s what you call that?
“You call that muscled?” Burly laughs as he walks towards the door. “You should ‘ave seen me old mum!” As soon as he’s out, he barks at his load o’ Girl Guides in the approved Regimental Sergeant Major manner. They’re gathered around a wicker basket half-full of Horse Piss flagons, and immediately take notice of him by continuing to hand ‘round the beer while presenting him with the two finger salute – except for Scotty, who bends over and flips up his kilt.
Sophia is the last to take shape. She’s in her Robe of Illusion, which still nauseates me just by looking at it. Her first step is into the air, a foot up at least, where she drops her hands to her sides to let her mutant hack claws form. They’re slice-y, dice-y and everything nice-y, something Vega would trade his mask for.
“Good weight, well balanced and nicely finished,” she admits to Doc as she practices a few slash-and-strikes with her new and improved weapons.
“You’ll note the Thulean script in engraved and gold-filled characters that spell out Doctor Sophia Wang, PhD on each blade,” he says.
She flashes him a rare and genuine smile, “Yes – that was very thoughtful of you. Thank you, Doc.”
“Looks like everyone is here, Aiden?” I turn around and catch him just as he steps out of thin digital air.
“You got me,” he says with his hands up.
“And don’t you forget it, pal.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Rocket did a brilliant job of cleaning up our garden!” Red says as soon as we’ve materialized in his living room. He’s rocking the whole Hugh Hefner look in a satin robe and socks with slippers. His wife, Blue, is in a flowing summer dress that is a few shades darker than her skin, which could be described as ‘olive’ or ‘almost philosoraptor’ depending on how accomplished a writer one is.
“You’ve done us quite a service,” Red continues, “and the graboid hides alone are enough to fund our next two vacations to Valhalla.”
Two vacations? I try to catch Doc’s eye, but he’s too busy munching down on a dingleberry treat.
“We promised you entry visas, which we will give all of you,” says Blue, “but we wanted to give something to you, Rocket, as a token of our appreciation.”
“You don’t have to give me anything,” he says.
“We insist.” Red turns to the kitchen. “Tom! Please bring the gift for Rocket.”
Frances Euphoria: I love getting gifts!
Sophia: Rocket! IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU TAKE THE GIFT WITH YOUR RIGHT HAND AND YOUR LEFT HAND ON YOUR ELBOW.
Rocket: THANK YOU SOPHIA, FOR YELLING THIS AT ME.
Tom Myspace emerges from the kitchen with a big ol’ box wrapped with a thick golden ribbon. The Ivy’s manservant is in a penguin tuxedo, his bluish hair gelled and parted on the right. Our boy wonder takes the package from him just as Sophia instructed.
“Open it!” Blue says with excitement in her
eyes. “You’re going to love this!”
Rocket pries the box open and lifts his prize into the air. “Thanks for the … the … ”
Aiden buries his head in his hands.
Me: Holy phallic object, Batman, an adult novelty toy!
Sophia: It totally is ...
Doc: I can confirm that this is indeed what it is. Smile and nod, Rocket, smile and nod.
Rocket: Why would they give me this!?!?
Frances Euphoria: Screenshots? #rocketsline
Blue claps her hands together. “It’s a graboid statue! Notice the veins on its body, the way it is shaped almost like a banana and the way its head is bell-shaped and a bit wider than the rest of its body. This one, of course, has its mouth closed, but you can still see the indention of the lips here. We were going to have it mounted, but some people prefer to keep them unmounted, as they make great paperweights. We have the same one on our desk in the study. They are carved by Chordee, the famous Thulean sculptor.”
“That’s a Chordee?” Sophia asks, suddenly and unctuously impressed. “I thought he retired.”
“He did, but he’s a personal friend and he owed us a favor.” Red grins. “It is a priceless work of art, and I hope you display it prominently in your guild.”
“Will do.” The graboid statue disappears to Rocket’s inventory list.
Me: Regift it to the Brits as a fortress-warming present.
Sophia: He’ll do no such thing! That’s a Chordee!
Rocket: Q-Bud, I’ll trade you the Chordee dildo statue for anything, and I mean anything in your inventory list, even your box of simian flinging poo.
Me: Ah yes, item 415, although I am a bit partial to that particular box of poo. Still, an interesting proposal. Let me get back to you on that.
“And Tom,” says Red, “have you prepared the entry visas to Athos?”
Tom snaps his fingers and five scrolls appear. They float over to us and I read mine over:
By Royal Decree of the Eugene Botkin Lineage, a single entry and single exit to Athos is hereby granted to Steamboy_889 and each of his guildmates, to be used at any time at any port of entry into the city. Disclaimer: Logging out counts as an exit from the city, as does embarking upon any journeys or quests outside the city limits. An additional entry and exit stamp may be required at the Athos Registration Office located in the city center. The additional entry stamp fee, US $995, can be paid in either Proxima Rupees or US Dollars. Exchange rates change daily, and the current exchange rate will be posted in the Athos Registration Office and can also be found on your Tritania dashboard here. Enjoy your time in Athos and be sure to present this entry stamp at any Drorikh retailer for a 5% discount*!
The Feedback Loop (Books 4-6): Sci-fi LitRPG Series (The Feedback Loop Box Set Book 2) Page 41