Know Your Roll

by Matthew Siege

  Patch nodded enthusiastically. “Mother kept calling him that, didn’t she? How come, Silvertongue?”

  “Quit it, you two,” he spat. “I’m just Bingo. Left da last name behind, already told ya dat.” He hurried off, rubbing his injured face and glancing back to make sure we weren’t following him.

  “Let him go,” I said. “He’s headed in the direction of the food. We probably won’t get a decent answer out of him until he’s eaten his fill, anyway.”

  Even though there were a lot of Dregs in front of him, I had no doubt that Bingo would beat most of them to the food, wherever it was. He’d acted like he’d known where he was going, and I’d already seen firsthand how effective his willingness to knock over kids and push past old people was at earning him a massive head start.

  “Good call on getting the grub,” I said to Patch, once Bingo had resumed his mad sprint down the tunnel. “Since I’m assuming it was you who bought us access to it.”

  “Only because you got me the Credits to make it happen. Once it looked like most of Hallow was on fire, I figured we’d need a way to feed the masses.”

  I sighed. “Yeah. The masses…”

  “Don’t feel bad. Every King needs subjects, right?”

  “I suppose so. I always had a feeling that you’d find a way to invite a bunch of visitors. Our new recruits seem like a lot of work for not a lot of reward, but that isn’t their fault. Besides, I’m the one that dragged them into this.”

  “It’ll be fun, like a big sleepover!”

  I sighed, wishing I could be as buoyant as she was. “It’ll be a big sleep, that’s for sure. Like, forever.”

  THE BRAWL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING

  begins in

  7 hours - 20 minutes - 2 seconds

  The silence that followed wasn’t necessarily my fault, but it did put me in an introspective mood. I’d done a lot of things wrong over the past couple days, and I wanted to apologize to her before the inevitable. “Patch, I’m…”

  “Yeah?”

  This was harder than I thought it’d be. I’d always prided myself on my ability to apologize without meaning it, but now that I actually was sorry about something I didn’t know where to begin.

  She saw how much trouble I was having and, good-natured as always, tried to let me off the hook. “You and me are good, Raze. I’m not going to waste time holding the past against you, especially not when our future’s so uncertain.”

  “But-”

  “Look around you, sweetie. Everybody here came from something worse than they wanted for themselves. Nobody’s perfect. I’m sorry that I bugged you about the dreams when you weren’t having them. I shouldn’t have, just like you shouldn’t have gotten Bingo drunk and stashed him at the arcade or gotten all of these poor people wedged in the middle of an unwinnable war. See, we’ve all got our faults.” The giant smile that split her pretty face took the sting out of her words.

  “You’re incorrigible, aren’t you?” I asked, beaming back.

  “Damn straight. I’ve also spent all the Credits you earned for us, by the way.”

  “No point in saving them. Did you get anything good? Other than the food, I mean.”

  Her eye twinkly mischievously. “You’ll see. But yes…”

  When she got like this, it was easy to get the secret out of her. “Whatever,” I said, watching her closely, “but I’m not going to get my hopes up.”

  As predicted, she was too excited to hold back. “I found a map room! It’s got all of the Powers That Be kingdoms on it, and when you lean in and put your ear near their cities you can hear and smell all sorts of things!”

  “Okay, I’m interested. What else?”

  “There are a bunch of enhancement chambers, but I couldn’t get in to any of them. Source says that we can only access them once the ‘base is secure’, which I assume means ‘not about to open its doors automatically and let a bunch of Heroes destroy it’. He did tell me what some of them did, though. There’s a teleportation chamber, a Manufactory, a Techmage facility, and even an R&D lab.”

  “Nice. Is there anything that can help us now, though?” Planning for posterity was just fine and dandy, but we needed to focus on the present.

  “Yep. I bought access to a bunch of the lower levels! Source was powered them up for us, but I had to go down to Hallow to see if you guys were okay before I could investigate.”

  “That sounds more like it. How do we get to them?” I’d forgotten that she’d been wandering around in the mountain on her own for a while. There may well be quite a few things she’d discovered that would be of interest.

  She pointed up the tunnel we were walking along. “Food first. If you don’t eat, you’ll be no good to any of us.”

  The closer we got to the origin of the breathtaking aroma, the harder it was not to break into a run the way Bingo and just about everyone else had. In the last stretch of the passage it turned out that neither of us could resist the urge, and Patch and I pushed and shoved each other as we jockeyed for position, racing up the shaft in an effort not to be the last to the buffet.

  Patch was just ahead of me in the final stretch, but all that did was give me an opportunity to

  Contested Friskiness Roll

  Raze: 14

  Patch: 4

  Result: Raze Success

  trip her. She went sprawling, and I leapt over her fallen form. Just as I did she rolled on to her back, taking a good-natured swipe at me.

  Contested Friskiness Roll

  Raze: 12

  Patch: 18

  Result: Raze Failure

  Her attack connected with the back of my heel, tangling my legs and sending me cartwheeling to the ground just beyond her. In the end, I guess it was a tie, since she and I both wedged ourselves through the last narrow doorway between us and the food at the same time.

  “Wow,” I breathed, staring at the scene ahead of me. “You weren’t kidding!”

  “Nope.”

  The vast chamber was dominated by a massive system of pulleys and counterweights. They were in constant motion, hauling up dredges full of slop and messily depositing them into an enormous settling pool that took up the rest of the room. I was stunned by how quiet and well-engineered it was as it went about its never-ending circuit; plumbing the depths, tipping the food out and then descending once more into the darkness hundreds and hundreds of feet below us.

  The food itself was strange, though its odd appearance didn’t change how appetizing it smelled. Even so, I hadn’t lived this long without displaying the occasional burst of concern for my own mortality. “From the smell, I thought this was from the Hallow dumpsters.”

  Patch was so excited that her words ran together. “Itis! That’sthefoodstraightoutofthedumpstersyou’vespentyourlifeemptyingatIllgott’s,alongwithalloftheotherfoodscrapsofHallow!”

  “Slow down and start again… Where is the food from, and why does it look like that?”

  Patch took a huge breath, held it, and then let it out real slow as she struggled to contain her excitement. “You can’t expect it to look the same as it did a century ago.”

  “Come again?”

  “That’s what she said,” Patch teased, “only she probably didn’t. Refractory period, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Do you need me to clarify a birds and bees issue…?”

  “No, you idiot.” I pointed at the constant stream of food getting dragged up and sloshed out. “I want you to tell me why you’re feeding us ancient chow.”

  “Phew. Good, because that other stuff is way, way above my paygrade. I think the reason Hallow’s streets are so pristine is partly because of the way they dispose of their garbage. I’m guessing that Rule Of Cool used underground storage areas linked to Darkwell to stockpile waste until it could be processed but once they got destroyed, the new town kept chucking their garbage in the old holes.”

  I pointed at Bingo, who’d just surfaced from a nearby pool of food. His gas mask was hanging loose ar
ound his neck, and he had most of a grey footlong sandwich smashed down his gullet. He swallowed and submerged once again.

  All around him there were other gluttons doing the same sort of thing. Even the younger Dregs were frolicking in the shallow end, mouths full. “Is that the sort of ‘processing’ you’re talking about?”

  “Sort of,” she said. “I found some old blueprints to a few of the places we haven’t been to in the mountain yet. The gutters that the dumpsters empty into are deep.”

  I took a couple of steps forward, leaning over the hole from which the cornucopia was chugging up from. “Do you think the Heroes could use it as a way in here?” The last thing I needed was yet another entrance to have to worry about guarding. I already had to work out a way to protect the mostly-finished tunnel in the dungeon and the not-so-secret one at the end of the access ramps we’d all just used to return to the mountain.

  Don’t forget about the flue you fell down in the first place. Crap, there was so much to keep track of.

  “I knew you’d think of that,” she said, “but there are some pretty hardcore grates made from weird metal fitted over the disposal holes chutes.”

  “It’s probably made of Mechronite.”

  “Yeah, Source told me about that stuff. Whatever it is, I don’t think we have to worry about them sneaking in this way. Even if the grates didn’t hold, and I’m pretty sure they will, can you imagine the Heroes mucking through this? No way would they put up with the stink.”

  “Awesome,” I told her. “At least all of the unwanted guests you invited without consulting me will have plenty of food to steal from us.”

  “Exactly.”

  I might as well raise my earlier concern right now. “Hey, do you think you could find a way to stop the Heroes from rappelling down into the base from the top of the mountain?”

  “Done. All of this power puts out a lot of heat, and that’s getting sucked up the flues.”

  “Oh, I didn’t think of that,” I said. Relieved, I pretended to fish around in my back pocket for something. “Give me a second while I find you a gold star…”

  I was only screwing around, but I dislodged the envelope Illgott had given me from Mother. It dropped to the ground behind me, and I whirled to pick it up before she could.

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t know, yet. Mother Mayeye wanted me to have it.” I started to cram it back into my pocket, and then changed my mind. “Actually… Do you want to open it up with me?”

  “Does a Finggrol snarf a Rexin when the first rains fall?”

  I tapped my foot, waiting for the answer. “No?” I asked, when it wasn’t forthcoming.

  “Yes! Sorry, I keep forgetting that I’m not from around here. Anyway, let’s see what you got.”

  I tore the envelope open, glancing up to see if Mother Mayeye was in sight yet. She wasn’t.

  Inside I discovered a thin, wooden box inside and another envelope. This new one had the words ‘NOT YET’ scrawled across the front, and the smear in the ink of the ‘T’ showed me that she’d written it in a hurry.

  I ignored the message, tearing the paper across the top with the edge of my thumbnail and yanking out-

  “Another envelope,” I growled, and this one’s message was much more blurred than the other, since it’d been rubbing against the inside before it dried.

  ‘I MEAN IT, RAZE.’

  “Hilarious,” Patch said. “That woman is comedy gold.”

  “Whatever,” I scowled, stuffing it back in my pocket. “At least I still got something out of the deal,” I said, spinning the wooden box in my hand.

  “No you didn’t,” she said, pointing at a name burnt lightly into the surface. “That clearly says ‘Patch’.”

  I brought it close and peered at it, then handed it over. “Ripped off.”

  Patch fluttered her lone eye at me and popped open the box. I didn’t even bother to look at what was inside. The smell of the food was luring my attention away from gifts that I either wasn’t allowed to open or had been intended for someone else all along.

  I grabbed a quick meal and tried to do a headcount of the nearby Dregs. It wasn’t easy because of the milling, running, swimming, and exuberant eating going on, but there were certainly a lot of them and, as Patch had said, there’d be even more elsewhere in the base.

  How many subjects did the mountain king have, anyway?

  “Raze?” Patch asked, interrupting my thoughts.

  “One sec,” I said. I was in the middle of an inventory of useful Dregs, individuals with skills I could use like Zazzer and Kell and Botha and Illgott and-

  Has anyone figured out where Mother is, yet?

  “Get your butt over here and check this out!”

  Patch had taken a big, shiny gold coin out of the felt-lined box. I hurried over and she held it out to me. In big letters above a filigree of cogs and intricate machinery were the words ‘Rule of Cool’ and below it their slogan ‘Gadgets, Gizmos, and Gimmicks Galore’, just like she’d written on that scrap of paper with the Konami code on it.

  “That’s cool, but didn’t we already know your dreams were prophetic?”

  “What? Oh, hang on.” She turned the coin over. “Sorry, wrong way around…”

  When she showed me the other side of the coin, the only sound I could hear was the rush of blood to my brain.

  Engraved on the gold coin was a handsome Gearblin. There was a silver twinkle inlaid in his eye, just as there was a wide slab of silver inlay coloring both his impressive mohawk and his tongue. The artist had depicted his shoulders as well, and it looked like he was wearing a suit and tie.

  Even though he didn’t have a gas mask or any scars or burns on his face, there was no denying that I was staring at a young Bingo of the past.

  I reached out and touched my finger to the image’s nose.

  Gold Rule of Cool Token

  Description: The Possessor’s crew will be able to perform ridiculous stunts, rule-bending maneuvers and neigh-impossible feats for the sake of an awesome narrative! Death is always an option, but all of yours will be ones they sing about for generations.

  Use: Passive Aggressive.

  Durability: 10/10

  Chapter 27

  While I was trying to comprehend what I was looking at, Patch took matters into her own hands. “Bingo?” she called with sweetly feigned innocence, turning to the swimming pools full of dumpster divers feeding their faces. “Can you come out of there and talk to us for a second?”

  As if summoned like a demon, he surfaced nearby. He had a big slice of Chicago deep-dish pizza in one hand and a fistful of drooling, moldy lasagna in the other. “What?”

  “We need to chat. In private, if you don’t mind…”

  He scowled. “Busy. Eatin’.”

  “Please? It’s sort of important.”

  “Later. Eatin’!”

  “How about now, old man?” I barked. Patch was usually too nice to get this sort of thing done, and time was of the essence. “Get your Silvertongue out here and talk to us, or I’m going to start looking for a way to shove some ‘Gadgets, Gizmos, and Gimmicks Galore’ up you’re your lying clacker.”

  That got him. His entire demeanor changed as he did the unthinkable, and set the lasagna down without taking another bite out of it.

  A scraggly Kobold teenager snatched it away, and Bingo’s prize vanished forever.

  Patch and I watched him climb out, though between the time he did and the time he got to us he’d obviously decided to attempt to derail the interrogation again. “Aren’t ya hungry, boyo? Dere’s miles and miles of food down dere.”

  “My meal got interrupted by an interesting development…”

  Bingo frowned at me, then turned to Patch to try with her. As he did, I saw a dagger sticking out of the back of his shoulder. “You’ve been stabbed!”

  He frowned. “Huh?”

  “Can’t you feel it?” I turned Patch around and unceremoniously used her back to demonstr
ate the spot where his injury was. “There’s a blade sticking out of you right here.”

  “Ya sure?”

  “Yes I’m sure, you dolt.” Judging by the clueless way he was behaving the wound obviously wasn’t life-threatening. It was Bingo after all, which made it a little easier not to worry, since he was tougher than both of us by a lot.

  “Oh!” he said, finally working out what I was trying to tell him. After he’d spent a couple of rotations chasing his tail like a puppy, he finally managed to grab the hilt and yank it out.

  Both Patch and I flinched, but not Bingo. The blade was broken, but it still would have hurt like hell going in, not to mention coming out.

  “Much obliged,” he told me. “Not da first time in da last few minutes. Been doin’ my best ta clear out da kiddie pool, since I’ve got da hit points ta spare an’ dey don’t.”

  “That’s pretty honorable, actually.”

  He shrugged. “Already used Scrapper on ‘em to see if dere was anythin’ good. Dere ain’t, but wanna surprise?”

  “They’re all made of Mechronite.”

  His jaw dropped open, which made him remember to strap his mask back on over it. “How’d ya know?”

  “Patch thought that the gates protecting us from a slop-born invasion are made of the stuff, and I remember you telling me what happened if another metal sat near to it for long enough.”

  He motioned toward the corner. “I gotta use fer it, so I’ve been pilin’ it up ‘fore I get a team together ta melt it down.”

  “I bet Illgott could help you with that.”

  “Prob’ly. We done here?” he asked hopefully.

  “Not by a long shot. Show him, Patch.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Patch?”

  “She’s gone, boyo.”

  If all of that had been a ploy to get her to forget what we may have just discovered about Bingo, it looked like it’d worked. Patch was already inspecting the pile of loot he’d made so far.