by Macronomicon
It wasn’t like the aliens were the only ones who had invented working outside the law.
But we mastered it, Jeb thought, chuckling to himself as he hopped down the street on one foot, slipping his pegleg back on in a remarkable display of agility before he went back to clomping on both feet.
He needed to get to his stash and get on the road east ASAP, which meant he had no time to play cops and robbers.
Jeb broke into an awkward run.
***Zlesk, Sheriff of Kalfath***
“Whew.” Zlesk let out a long, slow breath, fingers shaking as the last dregs of his reserves left his system. Almost dying was not a pleasant experience. He kept pressure on his arm to slow the bleeding. There wasn’t much, but keegan didn’t have a lot of blood to begin with.
This was NOT how I wanted my night to go. Now I’ve gotta process this fool. On the other hand, apprehending a dangerous criminal would be a boon for his career, so there was a silver lining to the night.
“Jeb, I’m going to need to take you down to the station and get your witness statement.
“Jeb?” Zlesk glanced up and realized the one-legged beggar was nowhere to be found. He’d fucked right off as soon as Boney Pete had slumped to the ground.
“Godsdamnit.” Zlesk glanced back at the riot of sharpened bones in the corner of the bar, some of them sticking through the floor, ceiling and tables. He was going to have to clean all this up, too.
At least the Ferravore bones in Boney Pete’s collection were worth nearly a bulb apiece. That would help with cleaning up the mess. Already, scavengers were trying to make off with the smaller ones, regardless of the sheriff standing right there.
“You there,” Zlesk said, turning to a younger man who’d watched the whole fight go down. He fished out a silver coin from his pocket and tossed it to him. “Fetch Clisk and Bon from the station, would you?”
I’m not dealing with this shit by myself.
***Jebediah Trapper***
Jeb was outside the city, panting from exertion as he’d kept up a light jog with one leg for at least half an hour. Climbing a hill one-legged was not as easy as it sounded.
Finally, he found the specific scraggly piece of brush on the side of the hill. He knelt down beside it and tore it away to reveal the top of the cooler he’d buried his contraband in.
Whistling, Jeb grabbed the Dirty Harry revolver he’d found in the glovebox of an abandoned car, and strapped it on his hip with the belt that came with it.
Jeb had buried all his gear in an oversized cooler, except for a few things to pawn when he’d first entered Kalfath. He hadn’t wanted to wind up on the wrong side of the law or get mugged in the first five minutes. A few of the item descriptions he’d gotten from The System had convinced him that getting caught carrying the wrong thing could lead to summary execution.
Case in point, Jeb thought, grabbing his self-powered fireball wand and tucking it inside his jacket, away from prying eyes. The aliens would come down on him a lot harder for that than a handgun.
Next he grabbed the Beautiful Revenge. The old-timey four-walled glass lantern was filled with half a dozen black butterflies, their wings accented with fluorescent blue and purple.
Each one of those babies could carve a hole in something about the size of a golf ball. They weren’t very fast, but they didn’t have a limit to the number that could be summoned, and they were able to be controlled until they delivered their payload of Annihilation Myst.
The best part was that the lantern had been designed to be used by weak Myst users…
Like me, Jeb thought with a scowl, tying the lantern to his right hip.
He grabbed a handful of bullets for the gun and put them in his pocket, along with several of his emergency Snickers looted from a vending machine and some bottled water.
Sweat beading on his brow, Jeb turned toward the east, where the messenger was no doubt leaving the city to inform Svek and his crew of kidnappers.
Jeb was half a mile west of the city. If he wanted to catch up with word of Boney Pete’s fate, he had to run.
“Goddamn it,” Jeb said, wiping the sweat from his brow and taking a swig of water before he resumed jogging again. This time weighed down by about ten extra pounds of gear.
“Smartass, I need a distraction,” Jeb gasped as he ran, tugging out the blackmail letter. “What’s it say?”
Smartass cleared her throat and sat on Jeb’s shoulder to read, to his irritation.
“Grenore. I do not care about your mewling protestations. The situation favors us. The Stitch has dropped a veritable fortress in the form of the Split Mountains between you and your beloved mines. A fortress I own.
“I know how far you’ve overreached with your new mine. I heard it straight from your foreman’s mouth before I broke his jaw. I have you by the balls, and you can do nothing to change it short of paying us our due. If you want your shiny new mine back, you will give us no less than two thousand bulbs in imperial marks…
“However, I’m nothing if not understanding and generous. If you can convince me to accept collateral of equal value, we will allow your workers to return to the mines, such that you can gather the money needed to appease us.”
Jeb blinked.
“Read that last paragraph again?” he asked as he ran.
Smartass did so without complaint.
“Collateral of equal value? Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Jeb asked.
“His daughter,” Smartass said with a shrug.
“His—” Jeb glanced at the fairy resting on his shoulder. “I forgot how you got your name.”
“We fairies have a knack for this sort of thing,” Smartass said, posing.
“Okay, so I think you’ve given me the kernel of what I need to enact part five of the plan, thanks a bunch.”
“It wasn’t hard,” she said with a shrug before her face brightened. “So how are you going to use the letter to take his Impact?”
Jeb glanced at Smartass. “I feel like if I tell you, you’ll do it yourself and take the whole share. I don’t recall a clause where you have to share with me if you take payment.”
“That wasn’t…the only reason I asked,” Smartass said, avoiding his gaze.
“Hah. Gimmie the letter back.” Smartass reluctantly handed it over. “Now we just have to do the part where we kill a dozen superhuman sand-pirates and rescue Ms. Grenore.”
“Simple,” Smartass said.
“Yeah, but not easy,” Jeb muttered, directing the next batch of butterflies to fly above him, keeping pace with him as they gradually disappeared into the sky, too small to be seen against the curtain of night.
They were passing the city in the dark of night, angling for the eastern road when Jeb had an epiphany that caused him to slow his stride for a moment.
“Smartass, I just realized something.”
“Yeah?”
“We didn’t actually make a Deal with Garland Grenore yet.”
“Oohh… That could be a problem. You should go do that. Like, right now.”
Jeb looked back at the city glittering in the dark, a few miles distant now.
“Nope, it’s too late to go back. I’ll miss the messenger, and this will get way harder. I’ll work something out when we get back.”
“Jeb, five percent of nothing is nothing.”
“Relax,” Jeb said. “I’ll figure something out. Rescuing that girl is more important to me, anyway.”
“Ugh! This deal sucks!”
***Mark Jacobs***
Svek is gonna wanna hear about this, Mark thought as he power-walked through the dark of night. He could already feel the heavy weight of the gold coin in his hand, taste the beer it would buy.
Among other things, Mark thought, mind wandering to the friendly ladies on the edge of town.
He’d been tapped to provide information to the pirates a couple months ago, and to be honest, they scared the hell out of him. But he’d made the trek up to the mountains three times now, and t
wice they’d paid him damn good money for it. The third time, they’d said the information was useless to them.
It had rankled, but Mark wasn’t going to argue with men who could casually tear his head off.
The fact that Boney Pete had been caught was way juicier than any news he’d ever brought before. He was definitely getting paid this time.
Mark chuckled to himself, but stopped when he heard a strange noise from behind him.
Clomp, shh, clomp, shh, clomp.
What the? Mark glanced behind him, his hair rising on his neck, heart jumping into overdrive. Monsters were real now, and Mark was level twelve. He didn’t even have a Class.
He’d taken the Easy Tutorial, wholly uninterested in risking his own life.
And yet, here I am, walking through monster- and outlaw-infested wilderness. What the hell am I doing out here? Mark’s typically strong sense of self-preservation returned in force, no longer blinded by gold.
Behind him, he made out the faint outline of a man limping towards him. The silhouette was human, but something was wrong. One of the feet was a slender pole.
“Who are you?” Mark asked, turning to face the silhouette and fingering his sword, widening his eyes to try and make out the figure better.
Should’ve put more points into Nerve, he thought, peering into the dark. The figure was about twenty feet back and approaching slowly, at a sedate, limping pace.
“Hi there.” The voice belonged to a man, and it sounded a bit on the older side. “Do you have a moment to talk about running information for pirates?”
He knows! Run!
Mark didn’t bother drawing his blade. If the guy knew what he was doing out here, this wasn’t a random meeting, and that meant there was no way he would win in a straight fight.
He turned and ran, putting every ounce of his fifteen Body to work, taking off like a bat out of hell. Professional athletes from before the Stitching would have drooled with envy.
Let’s see a one-legged man keep up with this.
Pain erupted in Mark’s legs as something took a bite out of him in the darkness.
“AAAIII!” He would’ve been embarrassed about the shrill scream if he hadn’t been busy tumbling into the dirt road. Once he slid to a stop, he reached down to his thighs and found chunks of flesh just gone from his legs, overwhelming his ability to think from the sheer pain blasting through his body as dirt and grit got into the open wounds.
“Oh god, oh god.” Mark didn’t think of himself as a Christian, but prayers to God just kinda…tumbled out of his mouth as he pressed down on the golf-ball-sized holes in his leg, instinctively trying to stop the bleeding.
“Evening,” the one-legged man said, grabbing Mark’s shirt and flipping him onto his back before straddling his chest.
Mark froze when he heard the click of a hammer being cocked back. He heard it real good, because the barrel was pressed against his skull, and the sound echoed through bone.
“Now, you might be thinking to yourself,” the man said, “‘My Body is high enough for my skull to stop bullets, isn’t it? Why should I give a shit?’
“Have you ever heard of a compression wave?”
“N-No?”
“Here’s a good example: the bubble that forms on the other side of something that stops a bullet. Say your skull stops this forty-four. Some of that kinetic force will penetrate, and that makes a compression wave, a little bubble on the other side of your skull. That bubble expands outward at high speed, liquefying brain cells, breaking membranes, popping blood vessels, that sort of thing.”
“Oh, god,” Mark whimpered, his life flashing in front of his eyes. I should’ve went into the Hard Tutorial with Sara.
“Now, it might kill you, it might put you in a coma, or it might just lobotomize you and make you a simpleton. I don’t know for sure. I’m not a doctor. What I do know, is that it will end life as you know it.
“So, you gotta ask yourself one question. Is my soft, squishy brain strong enough to shrug off a compression wave from a point-blank forty-four? Well? Is it...punk!?”
“No! It’s not, please, don’t shoot me!” Mark sobbed.
“Okay, back to my original question. Do you have some time to talk about pirates?”
“Yes!”
“Good, umm…” The gun nudged his forehead, making him flinch. “What’s your name?”
“Mark!”
“Mark, I want you to tell me everything you know about Svek Pederson’s crew.”
Mark did so, telling the whole story between sobs. He gave the brown-haired man everything, from the time he’d been hauled into a side alley by one of the bruisers, up until now. He gave him the password, the location of the meeting point, everything he could think of. Mark didn’t even think to lie to the guy, he was so terrified.
The man digested all of this with a contemplative scowl. “Hmm. And you’ve seen how many of them in person?”
“I only ever meet two. They put a bag over my head and bring me to Svek! It’s in some kind of tent made of leather or something, it smells like cheese sometimes and—”
“That’s plenty,” the man said, raising his other hand. He leaned close, and Mark could smell the beer on the man’s breath. “Mark, before I let you go, I’m going to ask you to do something, and it’s going to sound like a fetish thing, but it’s really not.”
“W-what?” Mark asked, swallowing hard as the man began rummaging around in Mark’s pockets.
“I want you to say some very specific things for me before I get off.”
***Jeb Trapper***
“That stuff about compression waves was all true!?” Smartass demanded.
“All true.”
“Wow.”
Jeb directed the next three butterflies to emerge from the lantern to join the growing swarm high above him. They were so high and so numerous that they looked like a wisp of cloud floating through the night sky.
And that suited Jeb just fine.
Jeb was at the meeting point, sitting next to the signal fire, just waiting to get himself kidnapped. He’d hidden his lantern and wand.
“I hope that kid doesn’t get gangrene and die. I tried to avoid the knees and femoral artery, but those butterflies aren’t exactly precise.”
Jeb hadn’t been expecting the informant to be human, but it made sense. The authorities wouldn’t think a human was working with alien pirates at first glance. Add that to the fact that humans were fairly expendable, and probably would be for another decade or two, until they managed to scrape together some political clout.
“I’ve never heard of a creature with The System dying from any illness other than age,” Smartass said.
“Yeah, high Body would mean the end of disease, wouldn’t it?”
Jeb kicked his foot off the side of the rock as he thought. I wonder if the doctoring profession is crippled from the vast majority of people being totally immune to disease. Add to that people who can heal injuries with magic, and you’re looking at the end of physicians in general.
Then Jeb imagined what would happen if a modern doctor got a Myst Core.
It’d probably be something easily underestimated like a Salt Core that he can use to change the ionic bonds of atoms in the enemy’s body and give them an untraceable heart attack…or dissolve them, or something. I dunno.
There were bound to be a few of them out there.
Jeb’s musings were cut short by the crunch of dirt underfoot. He stood up on the boulder and scanned the darkness. Despite the rather large signal fire, Jeb was unable to pierce the darkness with his regular human eyes. Whoever might be out there was invisible to him.
Jeb, on the other hand, was lit up like a Christmas tree, standing so close to the pyre.
“E’Nak Chuman!” Jeb shouted the password into the wilderness.
Silence reigned for a good minute, and Jeb was starting to think he’d simply heard some wildlife rummaging around, when the crunch of dirt sounded again, much closer this time. Two rat
her large melas men morphed out of the darkness, like the firelight had scoured away some dark shroud wrapped around them.
“Evening,” Jeb said, hand near his gun in case these weren’t the fellows he was looking for. “Mark told me—MMPH!” Jeb’s well-crafted excuse was cut short when the two thugs lunged forward, moving in between Jeb’s thoughts like a pair of jumping spiders, practically teleporting to either side of him.
One shoved a gag in Jeb’s mouth, the other wrenched his arms behind his back. A moment later, a hood snuffed out Jeb’s sight, and he felt the men going through his pockets.
Jeb had buried anything a messenger wasn’t supposed to have a little ways away, including the wand, the lantern, and the letter from Svek.
Those were no-nos that would probably get him summarily executed.
They fished out Jeb’s last silver coin, a bit of his change from the bar, and took his revolver, pegleg and shoe. Aww come on, why the shoes, man!? Jeb tried to protest through the gag, but it came out as a surly groan.
Jeb tensed up when the inquisitive fingers seized on his ring.
Oh, shit, I forgot about that. Goddamnit!
Plan, meet First Contact.
A moment later, they pried it off his finger before muttering to each other in hushed tones. Jeb could picture them using their fancy-schmancy System to identify his magical ring and wonder why an informant was wearing bling that could likely be traded for a mansion.
“Enough. Svek will decide what to do with him.” A rumbling voice cut the other off, and Jeb felt himself being slung over someone’s shoulder before they began moving across the mountainside at roller-coaster speeds, making his stomach distinctly uneasy.
They must have been going somewhere around forty miles an hour, judging by the feel in his gut when they made a turn, and generally the movement was more upward than downward.
Ten minutes later, Jeb heard other voices, and they set him down on some kind of rug made of coarse fur.
Ten minutes at forty miles an hour, so somewhere between five and seven miles away from the meeting point, generally uphill.