Know Your Roll

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Know Your Roll Page 28

by Matthew Siege


  “Really. As luck would have it, just about every armorer, forgehound, weapon crafter, and blacksmith Hallow held is currently swimming around in a sea of food upstairs, waiting for us to tell them what to do. You and Bingo go and get your teams together, and bring back Illgott too. He’s emptied the arcade and dragged the consoles up here and I think I know why.”

  “Sure thing. What are you going to do in the meantime?”

  When I put my hands on the twin joysticks in front of me, I felt like I was coming home. “Making this work is going to take a lot of blood, sweat and tears, so I better get down to the business of bleeding, sweating and crying.”

  “Yes!” Patch shouted, pumping both fists into the air with so much enthusiasm that she forgot to hold on to the side of the Mech. She tumbled backwards, landing with a heavy thud. “I’m okay!”

  “There’s one condition, though,” I called after her, leaning over the side to find her rubbing her head from the fall. “And before you prattle on about it, it’s non-negotiable.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I mean it. If the answer’s ‘no’, I’m calling the whole thing off.”

  “You can have anything you want, Raze,” she said, batting her eye at me sexily. “Anything.”

  “Good. I get to name the Mech.”

  Chapter 30

  Sixty-six minutes and twenty-six additional points in Electronics later, Illgott finally wheeled a hoverhaul loaded down with the arcade consoles he’d smuggled out of Hallow through the rear hangar doors.

  I’d been repairing as much of the wiring as I could, but now that he was here I climbed down from the cockpit and joined him as he parked the cart to one side of the Mech. Patch and her team had been hard at work for a while, talking in low tones and taking hundreds of measurements as they drew up new blueprints and modified old ones.

  I didn’t know where Bingo was, but I trusted him to be diligent. The Mech was clearly his crowning glory, and both his pride and his survival depended on us getting it functional.

  The ogre started unpacking the cart, using a way more care than I ever had when I was in charge of the games’ maintenance. “I’ll help out in a sec,” I told him.

  “Once the heavy lifting’s done, you mean.”

  “Exactly. Now that I’m not chained to a desk, I’m going to enjoy being able to pee without waiting for permission.”

  “Too much information…”

  I went to the edge of the pillar and found a good spot before dropping trou and arcing a stream of urine over the side of the precipice with enough precision that I was pretty sure it wouldn’t hit anything until it made it all the way down to the magma far below.

  “Boys are gross,” Patch called out, looking up from her schematics and wiping perspiration from her forehead.

  “I’m a man.”

  “Men are gross, then.”

  I pointed at the lava. “You’re just jealous you can’t pee off the side.”

  “True. Also yuck.” She came over and handed me an oily rag when I was done. “Wipe your hands off, at least.”

  I did, even though they came away dirtier than they had been in the first place. “How’s the Mech’nic stuff going?”

  “Good. Illgott says he’s been busy with a surprise for us.”

  “Oh?” I glanced over at him. He was wearing the look he always did when he was trying to listen in on somebody without them knowing it. “It better not be a Lynyrd Skynyrd mix tape or something…”

  Patch shuddered. “I think it was some Mechronite, actually. We’ve already melted down the scrap Bingo found in the food, but if we don’t get a lot more we’re going to have to supplement the Mechanical with other metals. Hey, when I went in to bring Bingo some of the scrap, he showed me something cool. Did you know we can change our settings? It’s awesome, though I’m only just getting the hang of it.”

  “What does that even mean?” I asked.

  “It’s probably easier to show you than tell you. He kept telling me that alcohol was involved, but eventually I worked out that all you really need to do is go to your happy place. When I went to mine, everything was right there, plain as day.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m supposed to have a ‘happy place’, now?”

  “Yep!”

  “What if I don’t?”

  She shrugged. “Then I guess I feel even worse for you than I usually do. Not very helpful, but it is what it is.”

  “Thanks for nothing.”

  “Come on, I’m just kidding. Everybody has one, Raze. Even you. What sparks joy, when you think of it? Don’t be shy.”

  The way she was looking at me, her eyepatch flipped up and her eyes sparkling, convinced me to at least try. I cleared my head and concentrated on what would really, truly make me happier than ever and suddenly everything became clear.

  I turned and pointed at the Mech. “I want to get in that thing and burn the world down on the way to whatever lies at the end of it.”

  I imagined myself in the cockpit, except instead of it being a broken shell all the screens were replaced, and the missing levers and switches were back where they should be. The equipment was faithfully measuring fuel and ammo and acid. The jump jets and missiles were ready to fire at the press of a button and a variety of triggers waited to be goosed into life on a half dozen joysticks in front of me.

  Settings

  VEHICLE ABILITY ROLLS: [DELIBERATE], INSTINCTIVE

  SKILL PROGRESSION NOTIFICATIONS: PERIODIC, [INSTANT]

  OUTLOOK: BLISSFUL (-10% Experience Gain), CUNNING, [GRIM] (+10% Experience Gain)

  VIOLENCE, LANGUAGE AND REALISM: CARE BEAR, ROSE-COLORED GLASSES, [PG-13], PARENTAL ADVISORY, HARSH REALITY, HARDCORE, ULTRAVIOLET

  DIFFICULTY: EASYMODE, [HARDMODE] (Locked due to Archetype)

  Okay…

  I swapped the Vehicle Ability Rolls to ‘INSTINCTIVE’. That sounded more like what I was used to with ‘Space Paranoids’, and I trusted my reflexes and intuition more than the part of my brain in charge of thinking things through. Besides, the last thing I needed in the back and forth of Mech combat was being sidetracked with extra information. After that, I changed my Skill Progression Notifications to ‘PERIODIC’.

  Once that was fixed, I focused on my Outlook. Grim gave me a bonus to experience, which the others would benefit from as well, so I kept it there. I was already used to the way I saw the world, so leaving the setting in place wouldn’t throw me off my game. Violence, Language and Realism was set to ‘PG-13’, which bothered me so much that I bumped it all the way up to ‘Ultraviolet’, mostly to see what I’d been missing.

  The last setting was Difficulty, which I wasn’t sure that I would’ve changed even if I could.

  “Holy fucking asslicking shitballs,” I said, marveling at my sudden knowledge and mastery of a wide variety of new words. “It goddamned worked!”

  “Told you so. Don’t go nuts with that, though. You might be able to hear your potty mouth, but it’s toned down for those of us who know that swearing loses its impact with baseless repetition.” She glanced to the side as Illgott approached.

  “Ready for your surprises?”

  “Fuck yes,” I told him, earning a wrinkled nose and a scowl from Patch.

  Illgott chuckled. “Found the settings, huh? Anyway, I’ve got a present for each of you. Patch, you first.” He put his fingers to his lips and let loose an ear-piercing whistle around his canines. “I heard you needed Mechronite. Lucky for you that Raze talked The Less is Mortar into donating a few tons of it.”

  There must have been an army of cranes set into the ceiling, because the huge metal counter counter from the alchemist shop I’d torched descended smoothly from above. Her team rushed over, guiding it to the forges in the back of the room where huge pumps and vents dragged the lava’s heat up from below to focus on the metal.

  “Thanks!” she said. “Both of you.”

  “Be careful with it,” Illgott cautioned her. “That Mechronite’s got quite a few hardco
re enchantments on it. If you’re smart, you should be able to transfer some of them over to the Mech components you make from it.”

  “On it,” she said, jogging off to direct their work at the forges.

  “Nicely done,” I told him once she was gone.

  Illgott blushed. “I saw an opportunity and I took it. Learned that sort of thing from you. Now, are you ready for your surprise?”

  I heard his words, but I was too busy watching Patch to respond with anything approaching coherence. “Have you ever been in love?” I asked.

  “No time for that shit,” he told me, snapping his fingers in front of my face. “Come back down from orbit and let’s do this, all right?” He put a hand on my shoulder and walked me over to the pile of gear from the arcade he’d unloaded from the cart.

  I had a stupid smile on my face, and I had to physically wipe it away to get back down to business. “Okay, I’m back.”

  “Good.” He pointed at the components. “You recognize all of this, I’m sure. ‘Space Paranoids’. ‘Killer Instinct’. ‘Starfighter’. The Claw Game, and even ‘Hero Within’. The Silvertongue you guys insist on calling ‘Bingo’ conned one of my hapless ancestors into looking after all of this stuff.”

  “He owned up to it an hour ago.” Now that I’d spent so much time in the cockpit, I could look at the electronics spread out in front of me with new eyes. “You were in charge of keeping the cockpit’s internals safe, huh?”

  Illgott gave me a weary look. “One of my ancestors made a bad deal. The Silvertongue weren’t exactly Kingmakers, but they could make Heroes. There was a lot of wheeling and dealing going down in the last days of Rule of Cool, and my forefather agreed to look after this stuff in exchange for a family of Heroes. Others made similar arrangements in return for favors.”

  “So this thing,” I slapped the Claw Game, “belongs in that thing.” I hooked a thumb over my shoulder toward the Mech. “In theory.”

  “Every screw and wire, same as all the rest of the consoles. Supposedly reassembly will feel automatic, once you start fitting it together.”

  There were so many disparate pieces on the ground in front of me that I had to laugh. “That’s easy enough for you to say.”

  Illgott snorted. “Before you get a nosebleed up on that high horse, spare a thought for the long line of Ogres who had to run a ramshackle arcade with five old machines and no spare parts.”

  “Four,” I corrected. “Since ‘Hero Within’ never worked worth a damn.”

  “Well, it’ll be five as soon as you put its panel pride of place smack in the middle of the Mech’s instrument cluster. The core joysticks are hardwired straight into the heart of the beast, which is why the game was always missing them.”

  “Interesting…”

  “They didn’t dare dislodge them when they dismantled the rest of the cockpit, so they left them behind.”

  “Thanks for looking after it all, I guess.”

  “Didn’t have a choice. I’ve got one now though, and I’m using it to help you. My fingers are too fat for the intricate stuff and I don’t have the know-how even if they weren’t, but I can haul the pieces up to you and hold them in place while you work your magic.”

  “Sounds good to me. Let’s put Humpty Dumpty back together as fast as we can.”

  We got to work.

  The Mech had been designed to be customizable, with countless ways to incorporate new modules, improvements and upgrades. I didn’t know if we were going to be able to make use of most of them right now, but if we did manage to eke out a victory there were certainly big leaps forward to be made in the future.

  “Bingo told me this Mech was a one-off,” I said, a while later.

  The ogre had filled a shopping cart with parts from the games’ guts and was holding it over his head so that I could reach out and pick what I wanted. “This was just a prototype, supposedly. Did he tell you that the real version was supposed to be a couple of hundred feet tall?”

  “Something like that. I think he was bullshitting, though.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me. The bones of the last batch of most of us who put our faith in him are collecting dust in various parts of the mountain.”

  I was soldering as quickly as I could, occasionally taking purposeful whiffs of the smoke curling from the electronics to keep me going. “I don’t know… Nothing about the circuits I’m looking at says ‘beta test’ or ‘unstable zero build’. Patch will know more than me about the bread and butter stuff, but the cockpit controls are lean and mean. If all Rule of Cool wanted to do was get a proof of concept out, they didn’t need to put anywhere near this much work into it.”

  “What are you getting at, Raze?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess I’m thinking that instead of running out of time to deliver a big version, they chose to spend their resources perfecting this one.”

  “It always comes down to Mechronite. The stuff’s rare. If they couldn’t build the chassis bigger, they’d have refined the internals instead.”

  “I guess so.” I set the soldering iron down and stood up. Just about all the arcade games had been dismantled except for the Claw Game. The big glass rectangle of questionable prizes was still intact. “Where is that thing going to go?”

  Illgott shrugged, grabbing it in both hands and hoisting it up. “Since I could talk, my Papa made me remember the order. ‘Killer Instinct’, ‘Space Paranoids’, ‘Starfighter’, Claw Game, ‘Hero Within’. Over and over, and if I got it wrong I had to skip dinner.”

  I eyed his gut as it overflowed the top of his pants. “You must have been a real quick study.”

  “Very funny… My point is that the Claw Game’s next in line, so shut up and make it work.”

  “Okay, okay…” The only spot it could possibly fit up here was behind my seat, so I unlocked the base of it and swiveled it forward. Once I had, there was just enough room back there to squeeze it in. Between Illgott’s muscle and my willingness to hit the edges of the prize container as hard as I could with a wrench, we eventually maneuvered it into position.

  When it was in place, I could see how a dozen hoses, cables and wires would connect to the sides of it. That was a relief, because up until then I had no idea how to attach them to anything remotely useful.

  “I think…” I chewed my lip and traced the new connections with my finger. “Yep. This thing’s in charge of reloading the weapons. That’s gonna be fun…”

  “The Rule of Cool, right?” Illgott told me. “The more ridiculous it is, the better chance it has of working. Isn’t that the way it always was with you Gearblin?”

  “Supposedly.”

  He smiled and slapped his palm against the Mechanical’s armored hull. “Then make it that way again, Raze. For all of us.”

  We kept on working until our fingers bled and then scabbed over. After some more finessing we managed to slot the ‘Hero Within’ console over the existing joysticks and down into the groove between the Killer Instinct and Space Paranoids cabinets.

  Nothing had power yet, but just brushing my palm across the ‘Player 1’ start button felt good.

  We didn’t stop there. Patch and her team were working like things possessed, and I had to cross my fingers that Bingo was doing his part. If he couldn’t make the generator fire up, we were dead in the water.

  There was an escalating weight on my shoulders, and the closer we got to the beginning of the raid, the more I was feeling it. Heroes were supposed to be heroic, and I had no idea how to pull that off.

  Hang on. There’s a Hero right here. I could just ask him…

  “Illgott?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve never done it before.”

  “And?”

  “Well… What’s it like?”

  He wiped at his face and put the last of the items in the shopping cart before lifting it back up to me. “Well, they say it’s natural to be unsure, especially if you lack practice. Supposedly it’s instinctive, but my Papa used to tell me t
hat his first time was like trying to line up a broom handle with a garden hose using only your-”

  “Holy shit, Illgott! I meant what’s it like to be a Hero? I’ve only been one for a little while.”

  He held up his hands as realization hit him a split second before

  Contested Friskiness Roll

  Raze: 15

  Illgott: 13

  Result: Raze Success

  Damage: 1

  Hit Points Remaining: HIDDEN

  my thrown wrench did. “Ouch!” His head was too tough for that to slow him down though, and a moment later he said, “Okay. Well, do you want the truth?”

  “We’re all gonna be dead soon, so what’s the point in telling tales? Lay it on me.”

  “You aren’t a Hero yet, Raze. Yeah, you’ve got the stats and the skills and all that shit, but none of it means anything if you don’t aim it in the right direction.”

  “Did you?”

  “Not until recently.”

  “That’s a big ask, considering I don’t even know how to level up.”

  “It’ll happen when it happens. Everything will make sense once you figure out your purpose.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. What level are you, anyway?”

  His beady eyes darted back and forth, trying to work out what component he could hand me as a distraction. There wasn’t much left, since we were pretty much done. “Not sayin’.”

  “Very helpful.” His refusal, combined with his Knack’s ability to hide his stats from me, set me off. It probably shouldn’t have, but I was under too much stress for people to be concealing things from me willingly.

  On top of that, he’d dispatched the Mage on his doorstep with such ease that he could’ve done something about the way the Dregs had been treated long before this. What gave him the right to lecture me on my ‘purpose’, when he’d ignored their plight?

  “That’s rich,” I told him. “How in every hell do you have the balls to give me advice? In all our years together I’ve never seen anyone do closer to nothing than you.”

 

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