Monster Hunter Memoirs: Grunge - eARC

by Larry Correia

  “None,” Jesse said, shuddering. “And we’d need to go get more Betadine. Another one. Assuming we can get up there undetected. Assuming we can release her. How the hell do we get her out? You said she was prevented from casting a glamour, right? What do fey look like without their glamour?”

  “Fey are like a dozen species, and some of those can change shape. They are generally described as being fox like. Sometimes bat like. No real clue. Most of the pictures are pretty blurry wood-cuts done by an artist based on descriptions from survivors.”

  “I don’t like the word ‘survivors,’” Jesse said. “But speaking of which, how do we keep her from being detected by her mom?”

  “That’s easy. She won’t like it but the answer is iron. We’ll line a fifty-five gallon drum with something and put her in that. That way her mother won’t be able to find her.”

  “And keep her in it?” Jesse said. “You’re starting to sound uncomfortably like a serial killer, Chad. I’m not sure I’m liking how your mind works.”

  “Get one of those big, steel, containers like the lich was keeping the girls in,” I said. “Set up a little camp inside it. If we need to pull her out, back in the barrel. Trunk of the car? That’s surrounded by steel.”

  “Seriously like a serial killer,” Jesse said.

  “Speaking of which,” I said, looking at my watch. “I have an appointment to make. Keep looking it over. This will take a while.”

  “What appointment?” Jesse asked.

  “Need to see a man about a horse.”

  * * *

  “So you want an extremely detailed contract?” the lawyer said.

  He was supposed to be one of the top corporate attorneys in LA. He certainly had cost enough just to talk to.

  “A really big one,” I said, holding my hands up mimicking a pile of paper about a foot tall.

  “Binding a faerie queen?” he said, clearly thinking I was mad.

  “Yes,” I said. “And a faerie princess.”

  “Faerie queens don’t exist,” the lawyer said, his hand reaching under the table for what was clearly an alarm button.

  “It’s for a movie pitch.”

  “Oh,” he said, pulling his hand back. There is nothing too stupid it hasn’t been involved in a movie pitch and he knew it.

  “The executive producer is going to read the whole thing, though. And he’s a real anal asshole. So it’s got to be even more anal. They have to actually be binding contracts that are unbreakable. Not just iron clad. Depleted uranium clad.”

  “Oh, we can do depleted uranium,” he said, pulling out a notepad. “So, what are the terms…?”

  * * *

  “I thought you guys only came once a year,” the security guard asked.

  We’d found our objective and found the issues that we could determine. It wasn’t the right time of year for the mission, anyway, so we dropped back to plan and organize.

  One issue was the contract. After we had what looked like a “depleted uranium clad” contract I sent it to other lawyers in New York. They found wiggle room. We got rid of it. Then we sent it to lawyers familiar with PUFF. They cost even more than top end regular attorneys. They found codicils and rulings that gave it some more wiggle room. We got rid of the wiggle room.

  That took months. Most of the time, I was obsessively playing the violin. I was off-duty for that. I couldn’t afford to get an arm break.

  It was the first time my metal humerus had ever given me real issues. Turned out it slightly affected my play. But with enough practice that even got better. And so did I. I seriously doubted that my mother’s intent when she forced me to learn violin was to allow me to bind a Fey Court. But that might be the outcome.

  When I’d taken violin I’d driven my teachers insane. I sort of liked it but I was a rebel from before potty training. So I’d forced them to listen to noises few regular students could wrench from a poor instrument. I’d found out you could do some really amazing things with a violin. Some of them were actually cool. At least if you were into heavy metal, which my teachers were not.

  Occasionally, just to keep them guessing, I’d play something like Locatelli’s Caprice in D major Op. 3 No. 23, perfectly, just to keep them guessing.

  Think of it as achieving a perfect C.

  I had this one Russian defector teacher. Drove him nuts.

  “How?” he would shout. “How can you play Paganini perfectly and the rest of the time it is nothing but squeals?”

  Hey, Vladimir, try paying attention to modern music. Those “squeals” were the guitar solo from “Satch Boogie,” man.

  Which I could also play on guitar.

  Took months to get back to that point. But I had months.

  Finally, we had the contracts as iron clad as they could get and I was doing Liszt’s B Minor Sonata for solo violin perfectly enough that the conductor for the Seattle symphony asked me why I wasn’t a professional violinist and had I attended Julliard?

  And we were ready. All we had to do was find this fey princess and rescue her from her tower. How hard could it be?

  “Turns out the primary lubricant we’d installed last time was the wrong type,” I said, trying not to touch my fake moustache. “So we’re having to go around to all our clients and replace it. Big screw-up. We’ve been to about sixty towns so far. All the same thing.”

  “As long as we don’t have to pay for it,” the guard grumped, looking at my fake ID.

  More money had changed hands. For a considerable sum the yakuza had come up with all the information and IDs we needed. In retrospect that was the best head removal I’d ever done. The gift that kept on giving. As long as we had available cash.

  We were both pulling dollies with fifty-five gallon drums on them. Most of those had gone to the new blue plastic type. Finding actual steel oil drums had been the hardest part of the whole endeavor.

  Two because one was filled with oil. The other was empty. They were functionally identical. We’d simply put the princess in the empty one. It was lined with foam rubber and had discreet air-holes the better to keep our rescuee alive.

  The one question I really had was if there was some sort of mystical tracker on the fey. If there was, mom might notice right away when she dropped off the grid. That would be bad. I wasn’t prepared to face momma fey, yet.

  Yes, we were winging some of this.

  “It’s on the company.”

  “Okay,” the guard said. “Go on through.”

  First hurdle crossed.

  CHAPTER 19

  We knew where the elevators were from the schematics and how to find our way to the small entrance to the bell tower.

  Fortunately, there was a maintenance room under the tower. ’Cause this was one place where we had a hitch. There was no way to actually get the drum up into the tower.

  The door under the tower was locked. The guard hadn’t asked us if we needed the key. Presumably there was a maintenance supervisor somewhere with the key. In fact, we even had his name. No way we were going to bluff our way through that.

  The empty drum also contained bolt cutters.

  I climbed up the stairs, cut the bolt off and lifted the lid.

  The interior of the bell tower was cramped. Most of it was taken up by a large set of bells. They were in a ring with a small space in the middle for the hatch. The actual mechanism was above the bells themselves. If we’d actually been here to change the oil we’d have needed a very long line and a pump.

  What I didn’t see was a Faerie princess.

  “Cooee?” I said. “Anybody home?”

  “See her?” Jesse asked.

  “Does it sound like it?”

  I climbed up and made my way between a couple of the smaller bells, looking around. No faerie princess.

  “Gimme the sprayer,” I said.

  When we’d discussed the question of the missing princess with the Nelsons they’d suggested invisibility as a possible reason. It was possible the princess was bound to invisibilit
y as long as anyone was up there. Throw in silence and immobility and she would be ignored by any workmen as well as unable to escape when the occasional maintenance crew went up there.

  For which we had a solution. The Akkoran solution was supposed to reveal some kinds of invisible objects. It had required making a trip to China Town to get it prepared. And we were assuming that it was the actual Akkoran solution. It was just a bunch of herbs as far as I could tell.

  I took the hand sprayer and started spritzing the area around the outside of the bells.

  Sure enough, half way around the circle I hit pay-dirt.

  “Oh, crap,” I said, blanching at the sight of the fey princess.

  Take a four foot tall bat. Take off the wings. Mottled, wrinkly, green-gray skin like a ghoul. Make the face uglier. Stretch out the snout till it was more of a proboscis. Give it really weird, tilted, insectile purple eyes. Long, skinny, arms with ugly, taloned hands.

  On top of being imprisoned she was nude. You don’t want to know what the body looked like. I seriously wanted to scratch my eyeballs out. I was open-minded but, God’s left tooth, no! I started to understand the legend of the Gorgon which I’m pretty sure, now, must have just been a fey.

  There was no question in my mind that fey were something alien to earth. The description above does not cover it. It was simply alien. I had the same reaction as most people’s reactions to a spider. “That is just wrong!”

  “You okay?” Jesse said.

  “Found her. Trying not to retch. Fey are serious ugly.”

  “She might be able to hear you.”

  “Fine. If she doesn’t appreciate my opinion of her appearance perhaps she’ll appreciate getting out of here.”

  I tentatively touched one of the skinny arms. I really didn’t want to, again it was like touching a spider, but we were here for a job. Pulling on her wrist showed that she could move. Pushing down on her head caused her to bend over. It was like a mannequin.

  “We can do this,” I said, picking up the feynequin and trying not to scream. This job really is a bit tough on the sanity. “Get ready to catch her. And try not to scream.”

  * * *

  Turned out there were containers that were already made up as living spaces. The one we had obtained had steel doors, the better to keep Momma’s magic from finding the princess, and a nice interior. We’d added steel screens over all the air intakes and outlets. I wasn’t sure if fey magic could detect anything through there. Based on gnolls we’d discussed waste issues. The waste receptacles could be hooked up to either a sewer system or a chemical waste system. We were planning on dumping those far from where we eventually put the trailer.

  We’d gotten the drum into the trailer, gotten the feynikin out and set her up. But she was still a feynikin. I was worried about how long she could remain that way. She didn’t seem to be breathing.

  Finally, we just left the trailer. We’d set up a double door system, steel mesh, as a magic lock to keep big momma from noticing human entries and exits.

  “What do we do now?” Jesse asked.

  “Stay on plan. We take her back to Seattle. We’ll figure out the feynikin…”

  There was a banging on the wall of the container as I said that and we both started.

  “Like, how did I get here?” a female voice shrieked from inside the trailer. At least I thought that was what she said. It was muffled. “This is like totally like bogus! What’s your damage? If you think you can like kidnap a princess of the fey you’re, like, a total retard! Like, let me out of here! Like, now!”

  “I think our feynikin is awake.” The banging was coming through the walls of the trailer so she wasn’t at the door. We could open up and finally speak to our rescued princess.

  The moment I opened the door and stepped through, though, the banging stopped. And the solution had worn off so I couldn’t even see her. Which was fine by me. There’s ugly then there’s fey ugly.

  “Well,” Jesse said. “That’s a bit of a difficulty. Whenever someone comes into her presence, she must be enspelled to freeze and disappear. When we leave, she’s mobile.”

  “Noticed,” I said, frowning. “That’s going to make negotiating difficult.”

  “You could say that. There is one good point.”

  “What?” I asked, frustrated. I knew there would be hitches but this one was unexpected. It’s not the things you don’t know in this business that get you. It’s the things you don’t know you don’t know. I was having to wonder how many of those there were in this operation.

  “She’s not going to remember how you described her.”

  * * *

  The answer was as simple as an intercom. It took a bit to install. Then we left. There was a mike on the exterior and it started squawking immediately.

  “I, like, demand you let me go like right now!” Princess Shallala shouted. “When like my mother finds out about this you are going to totally like be in trouble! I know you’re like listening!”

  “Calm down, Princess,” I said, soothingly. “You’re not being kidnapped. You’re being rescued.”

  “Like, this totally doesn’t look like being rescued!” She seemed to be calming down.

  “Gimme a break. You’ve got a couch, a kitchen, a bathroom and a bed. That’s got to be better than being stuck in a tower.”

  “Like, there’s nothing to eat or drink in here!”

  “There’s a case of MREs.”

  “Like, what are those?” she said, disdainfully.

  “Meals Ready to Eat,” Jesse said.

  “Like, in cans?” she asked, haughtily. “You expect me to like eat out of cans?”

  “They’re actually in plastic and foil packages. We can get you something to cook.”

  “Cook? You expect me to cook? Are you, like, totally out of your mind? A princess of the fey does not like cook! That’s like, like totally saying I have to scrub like my own back!”

  The pain in the ass bitch comment from Queen Cougar was starting to make sense.

  “And there’s like totally nothing to drink in here at all!” she continued to complain. “Like, what kind of a rescue like do you call this? What do you expect me to like do? Drink like tap water? I only drink Evian and like Dom Pérignon! Maybe like a totally awesome Napa vintage! And you’d totally better not be planning on feeding me like McDonalds! Grody! Like, cook? Like, food in plastic? Like, what’s your damage? Are you like totally mental?”

  “Oh, my God,” Jesse said, turning off the speaker. “I like totally can’t listen to it anymore.”

  “Like totally,” I said then blanched. “Gag me with a spoon. Oh, my God!”

  “What?” Jesse said.

  “My contact said she’d been imprisoned for twenty years for a severe infraction against her mother and ‘all mothers everywhere,’” I said. I turned the speaker back on.

  “…and like I totally like need some new clothes! Like, what’s with all these like cheap T-shirts?”

  “Princess,” I said. “Princess? Shallala? You there?”

  “Like, this is totally bogus…”

  “Did the offense against your mother have anything to do with Valley Speak?”

  “Oh my, God! I like totally invented Valley speak!” Shallala squealed, for the first time sounding happy. “It’s like totally awesome isn’t it? It’s so me!” The last was a squeal of pure delight.

  Jesse quickly shut off the intercom again.

  “Chad,” he said, seriously. “There are deals with the devil and there are deals you don’t make!”

  “I know,” I said, growling in frustration. “I know. But this is the only chance we’ve got to stabilize Seattle, Jesse. We have to do it.”

  “You want to, like, make a deal with the inventor of Valley Speak?” Jesse said. “Like, bring that thing to Seattle? Have you, like, lost your, like, ever-loving mind? Valley speak is like pernicious like infective and totally like practically on the PUFF list!”

  “Jesse,” I said, putting my hand
on my best friend’s shoulder and looking him in the eye. “Like, in this job, sometimes like sacrifices totally gotta be made, dude.”

  * * *

  “Princess Shallala,” I said as she continued to babble and complain. “Princess? Shallala? Like totally shut up for a second!”

  “Are you like speaking to me, mortal?” she snapped.

  “Do you want to know the plan or not? Because if you do you’re going to have to like shut up for a second!”

  “Fine!” she snapped. “What-ever!”

  I could picture her with those long bat arms folded and her head to the side. The long and limber neck of the beast and its weird insect eyes made the whole Valley Girl head tilt make like so much more sense. She was like totally grody.

  Oh, God. Pernicious. Infective…

  I explained. I had to keep getting her back on track. I won’t force you to read that. Anyone who has ever dealt with an ADHD Valley Girl off her meds knows what it’s like. Jesse had to leave. I just figured I’d explain it to my father confessor and try to get it to count as a corporal work of mercy.

  “So, like, you want me to go to, like, Seattle?” she said. “Oh, my God! Totally puke me dork face! Seattle has like no malls! And it rains all the time! And there are like no hot clubs! Totally gag me!”

  Gladly, I thought.

  “Twenty years in a tower watching everyone else go to the mall,” I said. “Or twenty years as the princess of Seattle. Your call. All I’ve got to do is take you out of this container and run like hell. Your mom’s people will be on you like a flash.”

  “And then she will totally rip out your soul and flay it for eternity, dork face,” Shallala pointed out.

  “I’ll take that chance.”

  “She’s like going to anyway, dumb butt. I can’t, like, just be Princess of Seattle. The instant I like go out in public the Hunt will be on me in like a second. And then they’ll like have your smell and no mortal survives the Huuunt.”

  “Got that covered,” I said.

  “I’d like to hear how,” she said.

  So I told her.