The Gaming Outpost

Robert Magellan cracked his neck, and then made a sqwishing noise with his lips to encourage his Golden Retreiver, Rover, to finish up decorating the signpost.  Heavy clouds were coming on toward the harbor, and the hillside town, and Robert glanced at them puzzled.  A shape almost seemed apparent in those vaporous mists of dark portent.  Rain was coming, and thunder, but something more.  And then he heard a scream from up the street.

Without thinking, he was running, and Rover came with him.  Going downhill along the street, they came on a young girl tangled up in green vines, and Rover whined a peculiar note.

“Good boy.” Robert said, casting his eyes out into the unnatural deepening dark of the further slope of the street that led down to the cold, stony beach, and the piers, and small boats.  The girl murmured, but her mouth was caught by a vine, and she could not speak.

Twisting purple strands of energy richochetted down the New England street, enlightening the dark of the moon, tossing ozone into the air to twitch the nose, and halting in a flash of white at the man’s held up palm.  He rocked back and forth in his penny loafers, and wished he’d had the good sense to wear his boots for this night’s  dog walk.

“That’s going to do you no good.” He said, striving to sound calmer than he felt.  A woman in a long black dress, slit up her right thigh, and boat shaped at her neck to display her significant curves walked barefoot out of the shadow.

“A fellow adept.  I thought I felt some working of the Art.” She nodded.  He bowed slightly in response, always keeping his eyes on her, while murmuring ‘heel’.  Rover took its accustomed postion behind his right heel, and crouched down, but the dog’s eyes were bright with fury and keen attention.

“Save me.” The girl muttered, spitting out enough of the entwining vine to beg.

“The girl is mine.  She cast spells, and is a member of my coven, mine to do as I will.” The witch said stiffly noting his interest.

“Ah.”

“Step aside then.”

“I’m not a member of your coven structure.”

“A free warlock then?” The witch’s eyes widened. “Impressive. The Bolts of the Twilight Doom are not easily withstood. And you without formal training.”

He shrugged, neither agreeing or disagreeing.

She looked thoughtful.

“I am a witch of several centuries of life.  I can call spirits from the Astral, from the Ethereal, from the Past, and from the Shadows.  I can bind the dying to life.  I can call storms and wreck ships. Do step aside. It would be a shame to destroy such a gifted newcomer.”

“Well. If credentails are what is wanted. I am a verser, a traveller of many worlds and times, immortal in my own right, and a Worker of Power, and an Adept of the Inner Path, and a minor student of the Outward Spiral.”  He smiled faintly.

“This means nothing to me.”

He shrugged.  She huffed. She frowned. He shrugged.

“Look if you’re immortal, like you say, then you should know that this girl is but a mayfly, a flicker of a candle flame, nothing.”

“I must disagree. She has her life. I have many lives.  It is my duty to protect hers.”

And with that the Witch struck, for she had been gathering power all the while.  And lightning flared in the Heavens, and began to fall.  And the verser ran toward her, and embraced her for in a fatal tenth of a second, he saw that the Witch was truly his superior in the Arts Magica.  And so he embraced her, and the lightning fell on them both, and consumed them in a fury that cracked the stone for ten yards in all directions, and with a boom that was heard all over the small town, and tumbled the sherriff out of bed thinking that a terrorist had unleashed a bomb.

The verser and his dog were elsewhere, and the foolish girl was pulling herself free of now powerless strands, and the church bells were ringing.

Ding, dong, the witch is dead.

Up to my arms in suds, I groan.  Rapping knuckles against the rough steel edge of the metal box used for cooking twenty pounds of refried beans, I leaned forward into the mountain of warm suds above the industrial metal sink filled with water hot enough to redden your skin just in time for the Little Tyrant, the balding, histrionic, hateful assistant manager to stick his head in the humid greenhouse of a tiled kitchen from his air conditioned office.

“I pay you to work, not to sleep.  You ungrateful….”

I was ungrateful.  This world did owe me.  See, I had come to this universe from another with an advanced PDA with software a decade in advance of everyone else.  So, I found a company in the computer biz, and offered them a deal.  Brilliant new programs, and I get ten percent royalty.  You have no doubt heard of SuperCom, and its remarkable advances.  It’s taken the world by storm.

Its mine. I did not read the fine print, nor did I realize the peculiarities of the law how I had to register a new innovation with the Office of Novel Plans from the local government of all the provinces, each and every one, to have it regarded as mine.  There are twenty provinces.  This law was designed, in my opinion, as a way for large and well-connected, and well-lawyered corporations to mess over some peniless inventor.  Add in a bought and paid for judge, and I’m out of my product, my PDA is seized as I ‘illegally have Supercom’s programs on it’!!, and I have to pay nearly fourty thousand in court costs.

I’ve come to realize that when the strong deals with the weak, the strong will eat the weak.  You may ask me why I do not just verse out?  One, I’m glad to see this world benefit from my technology. Two…revenge is a dish best served dishwater hot.  Right now, I’m working in the kitchen of Supercom under another name.  Soon, I’ll be moved up to chef’s assistant for the executives of Supercom.  Then, then they will regret having crossed me.  For even the weak can bite the foot that steps on them.

The sun bit down through thinning blonde hairs to his scalp, and Marcus Del Toro worried that he would be sweaty which did not make a good impression on future clients.  Getting in to his old Dodge Dart, he cranked up the air conditioning, before hitting the gas.  An oven hot blast of totally dry air hit him, and he endured it believing this got him to the chill faster, and that the arid atmosphere would wick off any sweat.  Whipping out backwards into traffic, he lurched across two lanes accompanied by horns and screeches of breaks.

“First Rule of City Driving, bozos.” He yelled out the open windows as he left his main dragside two story behind.  His brother had taught him the first rule which was ‘aim at the most expensive looking car on the road; they’ll get out of the way’.  Rocking a bit, he pushed the gas, and scooted on down Lawrence Way toward downtown Cane City, named for the sugar cane spreads outside the city.  Ducking right in the two lane to get around a Little Old Lady who drove like her nom de guerre, but gave him a finger like a frat, he began rolling up his windows as the air conditioner turned chill.

Wincing, from the hot metal handles of the door window handles, he slammed on the brakes, and came to a jumping halt behind a white van, tagged with rust.  Seeing that no commando squad was going to jump out, and enliven his day by kidnapping him, he reached over to the right, and began cranking up that window at full extension of his arm while the air conditioning blasted directly   into his face.  Ah, it was good.  But with the window halfway up, he had to tag the gas again, and take off, veering a bit toward the right, and some large brick mailbox that he managed to miss by a sudden jerk of the steering wheel back the other way.

Two more streets, and he had the radio on, and he was caught at Presley and Lawrence so he finished his window uppage, and wiped his neck with a tissue, which he discarded with a violent flick into the passenger feet stowage.  Now all he had to do was worry about being hot, wish that OPEC did not have it in for America, and hope he made the sale.  He really wanted those new sub-woofers.

Arriving downtown in the pre-stressed concrete garage built just two years ago, he parked, dried himself again, marched briskly in suit and tie to the elevator, stopping to get a drink of water, and eye the gang signs graffitied into the concrete block wall of the elevator core with a sense that the world was coming to an end, and nobody in power gave a rip, and then he was down, and heading into New Tech, LTD..

Flirting with the secretary, and with the concession stand girl, he bought an iced drink, and slurped it down as he rode another, smoother, air conditioned elevator up to the tenth floor where New Tech had its hq.  They owned the building, but rented out the other nine floors.

“Marcus.” His boss, Bob called, holding a smooth  and small black shaped object in his hand. “Take a look at this.”

“I thought we were selling the Sheikh on….”

“We are Marcus, but this just came in. Very odd.”

Marcus took it, and saw tiny keys, suited for a child’s fingers, and a screen big enough….hmmm.

“Its a toy.” He said as he pressed the ‘on’ button absently.  It went on. Brilliant colors. Sharp. Clear.

It was a cat, a common orange housecat reaching out with a paw for a ball.  But the detail, the clarity, it was as good, or even bettter than you could get with a zoom camera…

Startled, he lurched.  This was impossible.

The icy water in his cup went up, and out, and down.  It hit the ‘Nokia’.  Marcus had little control over himself, he was so startled, shocked, and amazed, even enchanted by the clarity and power of that little screen. Then there was a flash of light.

Marcus sat up, and blinked. He blinked again.  Why was he imagining himself on a plain of orange grass?

“Boney! Boney!” Came the cry down the night-shadowed streets, rushing into alleys, and around blind corners, seeking its prey.  Me.  I scrambled up a brass-nailed gutter, grasping at ivy to help me, hearing shouts from inside the house, curses directed my way for I in my pursuit of life and safety damaged their prized house with its stucco exterior, and two stories of height.  My fingers were being cut, and sliced, and under my fingernails a bit of ivy worked, and I cared not as I gained the tile roof only to look at a gable window opening, and see a man with a shotgun to defend his rights to property, and he was frantically opening the window.

I dove backwards off the roof, and did a reverse swan dive to land on my feet on the first story roof of the building across the alley.  It was done well, a moment of perfect stillness, and the shock of landing was done before I realized it, and my ankles hurt not.  Rushing away on the tilted roof, tiles falling, I heard the shouts of the gang of Necki who pursued me, sought my life, for I am an Ork, a half orc, they say, but its not true.  They heard the noise I made and the hideous dogs they owned howled, dogs trained to kill men, for I am a man.

BOOM.

A searing pain in my right calf, and I leap to the next building.  There a hide in the shadow of a parapet, and I see two holes in my right calf.  Nerving myself, I leap to my feet, and bolt across the flat roof, fearing….

BOOM.

The man with the shotgun will be proud of himself for chasing off a half-orc burglar although I am nothing of the kind.

I ran to the far edge of the roof, and saw that the next house over was too far, and behindf me I heard the belling cry of the pursuers.  So, with hope, I jumped, and made to run, but in the shadow of the wall there was a brick loose, and I went down with a snap that drove black dots in front of my eyes, and pushed a curdled scream from my lips.  Rolling over in agony, I saw that my leg bone was clean snapped through, the pale white bone, like that of my hair, pushing out.  Dead, I was dead.  Surviving for two years in Brindisport after the ship had left me here as a ‘no good Pallordian’ because I had been too clever at sleeping with a knife in hand for my Necki shipmates to beat me to submission while I slept, and this was my last night.

Still, I looked about, found the brick, and took it in hand.  I could maybe take one of them with me.

Out of the shadows they came, tall, well-fed (for the poor do not chase Pallordians having more urgent concerns involving food), and a black as midnight, and good toned as the dark, healthy earth that grew all manner of crops for them.  They came on all sides, and their dogs came with them, growling, panting for the kill.

“I’ve caused no trouble.” I said, leaning against that wall of brick with my weapon hid in the shadows at my right leg.

“You enslaved us once.”

“Hundreds of years ago, and I was hardly born then.” I replied, mockery coming too easily to my tongue.  If I could show proper submission, perhaps they might let me live.  If not, I had a rock and a knife.

“You being disrespectful.” I heard the cocky challenge, and saw the half-dozen around me, and rage spawned in my heart.  Yes, by all the gods, I was disrespectful.  My folk had built this town, made the canals, and then repented of their sin in slaving, and given them to the Necki, and in return I, their descendant was called a half-orc, as if I really looked like one of those pale, slimy man-eating monsters.

“Mercy.” I gasped, showing my leg.  But that only brought cruel laughter, and jests, but for one who suggested leaving me be.  But he was overrulled.  And since I was to die, I closed my eyes, and prepared to give them what for so that they would be enraged and rush me, and I might kill one or two and die quickly, but instead I heard the rustling of bird’s wings, and the light step of dancer’s feet.

Opening them, I saw a cloaked man, darker even than the Necki, a full-blooded Drevnecki of the Old Blood that ruled this town, and he stood in front of me with his back to me.

“Go now.” He spoke, and I wondered how I was to go.

“Not you.” He whispered with a slight turn my way.

“Hey, your lordship, you can join in…” Thump. The cloaked man moved, and suddenly one of my pursuers was flung to the ground as if he’d been tossed from a horse.

“You can’t…”

The skirling sound of a blade, a deathblade, full four feet of shining steel, being drawn riveted everyone’s attention in that street.

“I won’t ask again.” The cloaked man said, his voice full of velvety menace.  And they fled, and he turned to me, and I saw a kind face, dark as the good earth, and honest care was in his eyes.

“Why?” I asked him as he crouched down to pick me up.

“Because in another world, I was as they are, but then I met a man who told me of a God who did not see the skin, but only the heart.”

“Sounds nice.” I said, and passed out.

Cool breezes riffled around his throat, and up into the facemasked helmet as Paul Morris swung the Yamaha Custom Roadster motorcycle  out into traffic.  It caught the eye of wide-eyed boys in the back of a truck hauling several bales of hay just in front of him, and an appreciative glance toward his heavy cycle from the coed with the streaming hair in the convertible he roared past.  Thundering up the road, he passed a paint-flaked green garbage truck, saw the driver in the mirror give him a double-take as we came up on the left side, and he and the driver exchanged nods, the garbageman going back to bored.  Paul darted forward as a bump in the road slowed the garbage truck, and flew lightly, his butt rising in the air to go with the flight, and came down.

Standing on his breaks, he swerved right behind a truck with a shotgun across the back window.  By this he knew the pick-up truck driver would be cool.  There was something about carrying guns, at least in this society, that settled people down.  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  The trucker went to his right in the four lane road, and Paul opened up, letting the heavy bike leap to its higher potential. In seconds, he had bolted down the road, and was tapping the edge of ninety while in a forty mile per hour speed zone.

A clot of traffic slowed him up to sixty, and he slipped in between an irritated businessman in an expensive lux car, probably afraid of him scraping the mirror finish of the paint, and cut left at the first chance to wheel ninety degrees on to Cooper Street at an easy fifty miles per hour with the wind rushing past his neck, bearing the scent of the several dozen rose bushes that guarded the edge of Cooper Street Flowers, and past them he started to sniff scents that rumbled his stomach as he passed Burgeria, and Burrito Panchos, and Patrone’s Pizza on his right.  Regretfully he promised his stomach ‘later’, and ran the bike back up to an easy eighty before being caught by a traffic light.

The two men, one immortal, both elderly in years if not in body, stood side by side on the sloping brown lawn of the mortal’s mansion home looking down into the valley where the metropolis burned in the fires of rage, and hate, and literal flame. Beyond the hundreds of well-fenced palatial homes in the gated community, the rioters spread.  Downhill, if he was still there, Roger the Security Guard was praying very hard, but in all likelihood, both men knew Roger had scrammed.  He had not been trained or taught for battle, but for politely ignoring drunken underage girls brought from the city for a party in a nice car.

“How long until they get here?” The immortal, one Jefferson Coolidge Clark, known as Clark to his friends of whom the other man numbered.  Clark was a verser, a freakish accident of extradimensional physics, and others said the needle in the hand of angels keeping the Multiverse together.

“You’re the expert in TEOTWAKI, as you told me, what five decades ago?  The End of the World As We Know It, and you told me it was coming.” Michael Althidge, one of the fortunate few, a man with enough money and the right genetics to buy a rejuvenation treatment so that he stood to watch the End in a thirty year old body instead of a seventy year old one.  On the other hand, perhaps not so fortunate.

“Recriminations do little good, and you’ve already repented.  I saw your last two films.  They were brilliant, and ….”

“They were good. And by that I mean Good with a capital ‘G’. I took ten years off after the ‘Laugh Riot’, after I’d seen what I’d done.  Sick I was.  I wondered where you were.”

“I was watching, but from a distance. You were figuring it out on your own, and remarkably not getting trapped in dead-ends of thought.”

“I figured as much, later.” Michael said. He sighed. The memories of those years when he could write nothing, when his fourth wife left him, and all about him, he saw the subtext prophesied in Laugh Riot come to pass, the subtext that he had not even been aware was there when he made the film–those memories were painful, but a healing pain.

There was silence until flames touched on the nearer skyscrapers, and it went up quickly, the flames leaping from floor to floor on the exterior of the building.  Perhaps someone inside had poured fuel oil down the exterior of the skyscraper or opened windows to provide fuel and oxygen to the coming flames.

“I’d say an hour.” Michael said.

“You’re right, I’ve seen TEOTWAKI a number of times.  Saw the Goths invade Rome, and the Celtic priests slaughtered by a Roman bishop, and watched as a certain paperhanger began to rant about Jews and jobs and the environment. But that’s there.  This is your home. You know you’re home better than I do.”

Michael fell down weeping in his lawn, and Clark knelt beside him.

“We had such greatness.  We could be conquering the solar system right now.  Instead, we’re watching our cities burn, and soon, the mobs will turn to the rural areas which already have their plans to build cannon lined walls across the interstates.  Soon, this mob will be dead of starvation or countrymen gunfire.”

Michael shuddered.

“Where did it begin?” Clark prodded.

“O tempora, o mores.” Michael said. “Some Sumerian complained that kids these days had no respect, and drove their chariots too fast.  So we thought complaints about morality were eternal and banal.  What we did not consider was that no one spoke Sumerian anymore.”

“I do.” Clark admitted, and Michael chuckled, patting his friend’s hand.

“Only you then.” And Clark did not disagree.

“We thought we could be eternally hip, be the endless rebel.  We forgot many things in this quest.  We forgot among them that the job of the old was to be the curmudgeon, to tell the young whippersnappers ‘to get off our lawn’.”

They sat there, and the rioters advanced.

“Now what?” Clark prodded.

Michael looked at him confused.

“I…?” He looked blank, and Clark just stared at him, and Michael’s face flushed in anger for a reason unknown to his conscious mind.

“Going to stay here. Watch the rioters burn your house down?  Die?”

” Well, yeah.” Michael seemed a bit defensive. “After all, I can’t stop that. Can you?”  Clark shook his head at the growing firestorm that had reached the first line of hills of the rich and powerful.  No, not even with his powers and skills could he stop that boiling cloud of madness that spread with fire and murder.

“Then what?” Michael’s teeth bared in challenge, and pain.

“Were you forgiven from your sins, Michael?” Clark asked softly.

Michael turned away, his eyes suddenly tearing up.

“You know the answer.”

“Then why do you seek to pay for them anyways?”

“Its not that. Its…this is the end of the story.”

“God’s a better director than you, Michael, and I don’t think this is your closing curtain.”

“Yeah?”

“This is the word of prophecy to you, Michael. Go to the country, and walk, and when you find some gathering of people, tell them why this horror happened. Eat of their bread if they will give it freely, and then walk again.” Clark spoke, and his voice had a peculiar, cutting power, an assurance not given to normal voices.  It was a demand, but in the same calm sense that gravity is a demand.  Gravity rarely shouts. It is. It need not shout.

And thus Michael rose, and walked into the dessert, only taking with him a rollagon with water, and five packs of beef jerky, his Bible, and his Scriptwriter’s ‘Bible’.  And in the dessert, and the plains, and the mountains, he testified to the Lord and to the people for many years, and such was his faith that he walked past mountain lions and bears, and passed through locked city gates for the Lord had given him a charge, and he would let neither the works of man, nor the creatures of nature stop him until being very old, he died.

–The Tale of Michael the Wanderer.

The girl in the library of the Twin Constitutional Monarchs of Denver, that huge collection of books gifted to the city by those monarchs, straightened up in her chair, cracked her back, and saw a man looking her way.  This was not unusual for she was attractive and modestly dressed, but in such a way that was very charming.  She smiled tentatively back, and got up to put her book back.  He stepped over to her, and took it with graceful ease.

“Let me…ah, you read of Michael the Wanderer. A fascinating man.”

“True, but there is so much myth and legend about him.  They say he crowned the Twin Monarchs, the first monarchs the year before he died.  Which is impossible. Because he died a decade before then.  Other things, contradictions….Its hard to put together a good thesis on him.”

“Perhaps its all true. Perhaps he ….”

“Came back from the dead to crown the twin kings?”

The man smiled.

“Actually, he travelled through time to do it.”  She stared at him, and then burst out laughing.

“Good one, mister. What’s your name, if I may be so bold?”

“Clark.  And I hope I can convince you Michael was as said.  For the first step to the end of the world as we know it is forgetting the past.”

“Well, you can try to convince me over a cup of coffee.” She smiled, and he nodded, following her out of the library.

Running up the too narrow treaders built for gnomes, and ducking under the respectbar built into the cavern roof, which bar forced you to bow to Isolde, goddess of the hunt, statuetted on the end of the hall, Jackson passed Lady Gillian of the Hawks, who affected not to notice him, but loudly mentioned ‘stinks’ to her several well-garbed girlfriends who all tittered in laughter as he left them behind.  In order to not being forty years in debt when he left the Academia Magica, he worked three jobs while attending the Academia.  It left him little time to arrange the seven layers of wide scarfs that served as a shirt, or to properly pleat the kilt in second year green.

Turning left at the T in the hallway, he raced up further, the floor turning from packed earth to cobblestones, and came to a halt before the golem built into the doorway.  It looked at him, and a chill of thaumaturgical magic washed over him, comparing, tasting, see if he really was Second Year Albert Jackson, formerly of East Grove, Pennsylvania, and a second string point guard in basketball, and now dimension travelling magician.  He passed, and the golem stepped back sideways into the wall, leaving enough room for him to pass by into the changing room.

Li and Roslyn were already there, suited up in silk booties, leather gauntlets, face mask, and hair net in preparation for the Lab next door in  TL1 or Thaumaturgical Lab One.

“:Late again, Jackson.” Li said with a smirk. His seven scarves were laid over his shoulders and down his chest, and then tied off with the kind of casual elegance that Jackson figured he would never achieve in twenty years, even if he had time to try.  Some people were just born looking good.

Hurriedly, Jackson stripped off his manure boots from his mucking out the wyvern stables, and put on a pair of silk booties, and then felt around for his leather gauntlets.  He could feel the faint build up of resonance in them, of past memories of spells made, and such things could make a spell more pwoerful, but certainly made it more unreliable.  A proper academy taught mage would never wear leather gauntlets more than one day before having them washed in heavy soap so as to remove the memory of previous emotions, and intents, and spells.  But Jackson reasoned correctly that such cleansing was expensive, and only went twice a week.

Dressed, he walked out the side door, and into a room full of wooden tables.  Each was occupied, except for his.  The students of thaumaturgy stared at him, and Professor Horton frowned a bit, and then gestured for him to hurry up.

“Class, now that we are all assembled, let us consider thaumaturgy.  It is the taking of an item that has significance to the owner, and then working your magic through the item using the principles of Sympathetic Magic.  It is extremely demanding when it comes to concentration and emotional control.  You have been learning this for months.  You’ve learned to guard your items behind wards and illusions so that no thief can take them.  You’ve learned to wear face masks so that no wizard can call your breath to be his own inside a bottle, and then sell your life’s breath to an enemy.

Of all the disciplines of magic, thaumaturgy is the most demanding.  Even more so that wizardry, or sorcery, or magecraft.  Even more so that pain lords who cut themselves, the thaumaturge is always thinking, full of emotion, but controlled.  He is neither golem nor weeping lass, and he always, always is seeking understanding without relent.”

We heard the ominous lecture, and waited for some new kick.

“Now class, do you think you’ve done a good job at protecting yourself?”

No one wanted to answer and draw the beak-nosed attention of the teacher.

He waved a right hand, spoke but one word, and then student by student each floated into the air.

“I have not stolen your gear, nor sent a spriggan to cut your hair in th enight.”

Jackson hung uncomfortabley in the air with the others until the teacher decided to have mercy.

“Each of you has used the same testing lab desk for the last ten weeks.  You’ve built up resonances on each desk, individual resonances.”

A chorus of self-incriminationg moan followed.

“Now each of you is going to thorougly scrub your desk with lye soap to remove the resonances.” The teacher waved his arms, and then took his hands to a fingerpoint to fingerpoint setting in front of him.  “Think, my children think. Your enemies and rivals will be thinking. ”