Know Your Roll

by Matthew Siege

  “Gotcha. I prefer our vices to Sanguine’s ‘virtues’, anyway.”

  The old Gearblin met us halfway up the ramp. “Ya heard what dey did?” he demanded.

  “I was there.”

  He peered at me, trying to decipher my meaning. “Can’t ‘ave been easy viewin’. Sorry I bopped ya on da head, but she made me promise.”

  “I get it. No hard feelings.”

  “You okay ta fight?”

  I smacked my fist into my open hand. “More than ever. How’s the Mech?”

  “As good as she’s gonna get. You’ve got all da ammo she can ‘old in dere, an’ a lot less scrap to play wit’. We’ve got some repair crew standin’ by to bail us out if dere’s a lull in the fighting, but dat Head Canon’s only gonna give ya one good blast. Make it count.”

  Patch shrugged. “It’s basically a souped up railgun, but the only way to load it is manually. By the time you popped the cockpit and slammed another round in you’d be dead. Right now it’s loaded with a Pepsi can that it can throw farther than the planet’s curve at somewhere close to twelve miles a second. It’ll fire, though. Once.”

  “A Pepsi can?”

  She shrugged. “It could be anything metal, but I thought it was appropriate. The choice of a new generation and all that. Also, we infused the boring hydraulic fluid with tech-tuned healing potions. Not everybody’s sure it’ll help, but it can’t hurt.”

  Bingo pointed at a trio of sentry guns mounted on the near wall, aiming at the closed doors. “Ya like? Swiped ‘em from Source, who can aim an fire ‘em remotely. Ain’t much, but it ain’t nothin’.”

  His hand dipped nervously to his pocket as he fished out the silver ring.

  “No more secrets,” I said, stopping in my tracks. “Before I find my grave, would you mind telling us why you’re always fiddling with that thing.”

  Bingo surprised me by handing it over. “Guess ya deserve ta know.”

  Silvered Ring of Regret

  Description: Behind every silver lining, there’s a cloud. This wedding ring has been subjected to more magic and experimentation than the Platform itself.

  Use: This ring’s wearer will skip backward in time 1/3 of a second, just long enough to have not put the ring on in the first place.

  Durability: 2/10

  He cleared his throat, embarrassed. “Dat’s where da money went. Da mech cost a lot, but ‘twas nothin’ compared to the resources I funneled at dat t’ing. Embezzled so much that Rule of Cool went belly-up, all fer a chance to go back an’ make things right with her.”

  “Who is ‘her’?” Patch asked.

  “Mother’s Mother’s Mother’s Mother’s Mother’s,” he was ticking them off on his hands. “I lost count, but I married da first of ‘em.”

  The Ring of Regret sat heavy in my palm, the silver so weathered and worn that it felt like I could crush it. “The past’s gone,” I told him. “Worrying about it waste’s the time you have left.” I took a couple of steps to the side of the ramp and looked down at the magma below. “Want me to get rid of it for you?”

  He thought about it for a few long seconds, eventually sticking out his hand. “‘Preciate da offer, but I’m not quite ready ta give up on it.”

  “You sure?”

  “Give,” he demanded gruffly. I almost dropped it anyway, for his own good but I couldn’t risk alienating him right now, mere minutes from the fight of our lives.

  Once it was back in his possession, he slipped it on for a moment, flickering and returning to the instant before he’d attempted to equip it.

  Patch narrowed her eyes, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Put it away,” I told him. “We’ll be lucky if any of us are alive to regret anything in an hour. For now, it’s time to get our heads in the game.”

  We walked the last of the perilous ramp together. As we neared the hangar’s plateau, I could hear the bang of tools and the low, grim hum of Dreg work songs coming from up ahead.

  When three of us arrived, the assembled throng stopped what they were doing. I could tell by the morose pall that hung in the air that they already knew about Mother. Some of them were crying, while others were glaring at the titanic doors or reaching up and covering one eye with their palm.

  “Patch, why’re they doing that? Is it magic?”

  “Sort of. My people have a legend that the architects of Darkwell plucked out one of their eyes as a sacrifice to the shadows that cloaked it. They’re paying their respects.”

  I snapped my fingers. “Is that what the eyepatch is for?”

  “Yeah.”

  I reached up with my hand and covered one of my eyes in solidarity. When I did, the older Dregs squared their shoulders and planted their feet. All of the evacuees were present, even Esper and the other littles Mother had led back on that last, fateful hike.

  I’d always thought of us as a teeming horde, but the mountain’s grand scale put the lie to that. Fifty generations of hurt and hardship had made our numbers dwindle to the point where I recognized almost every face in front of me.

  If it weren’t for the fact that the doors were about to swing wide, this base could be a paradise that offered us anything we could ever need.

  I picked Zazzer from the crowd and waved him over. “Got a job for you.”

  “This seems to be happening a lot.”

  “This one’ll make us even. If I know you, you’ve already cased the joint which means that you and your boys probably know the mountain better than me. Find a radio and head down to the tunnel Rule of Cool cut toward Hallow. The Heroes know about it, and I’ve got a hunch that they’ll try to breach it. If they do, I want to know.”

  “On it,” he said, racing off.

  “Crap,” Patch said. “He didn’t even try to weasel out of it and send Botha.”

  “He knows how dire it is.”

  We walked through the ranks of Dreg to the Mech. Even more of them gave the sign of Darkwell, and Patch flipped her eyepatch down in acknowledgement.

  The Mechanical was a thing of wicked beauty. Patch and her team had repaired every gap and seam before painting it a rich Havelock Blue that contrasted perfectly with the crisp gunmetal shades of her armaments. Here and there I saw yellow and black hazard lines and crimson pinstripes.

  Even the glassteel canopy gleamed from a fresh spit polish.

  “Your handiwork?” I asked Patch, pointing up at the lovingly illustrated shark face placed directly below the cockpit. It made the machine look like we’d yanked a fighter jet right out of the Rift and whacked mismatched legs on to it, and its sharp teeth and fearsome gaze gave me hope.

  “Yup.”

  As I swung around to the left to climb up into my seat, I saw that someone had hung a trio of fresh skulls from the blast shield bicep above the Voidsaw. Directly above it they’d welded a stylized image of Mother Mayeye’s stern face.

  Illgott uncoupled the last of the hoses and tossed some spent fuel rods on to a hoverhaul. “Whose skulls are those?” I asked him.

  He started to answer, but a thunder of Dreg voices cut him off at the pass. “Mother’s!”

  My first instinct was to call for quiet, but that was the old way, the ‘keep your head down’ way that we’d been forced to live for too long already.

  Instead, I went with it, climbing halfway up the Mechanical’s frame and standing on the shark’s face. “And whose Mech is this?” I shouted.

  “Mother’s!”

  I threw my arms wide to encompass the desperate mob. “And whose people are these?”

  “Mother’s! Mother’s! Mother’s!”

  “Damn straight. Now do her proud!” My voice was raw and ragged as I jumped into the cockpit.

  Bingo and Patch were already climbing up through their hatches and squeezing into their seats. As soon as the external openings were shut, I flicked the switch that sealed them up, insulating us from the Dreg cheers and pumping canned, stale air inside.

  I brought the crew comms online and added the e
xternal speakers to the mix so that the Dregs could hear me. “I think we’ve got a name for the war machine,” I said, my voice booming across the hangar as I patted the ‘Hero Within’ console. “I christen her ‘Mother’.”

  The roar of approval made the Mechanical tremble.

  I could see my crew members through the metal tubes that led to their places, and when I looked down at Patch she was smiling. “Good choice, Raze. Way better than Blasterella.”

  Bingo grunted his approval into his mic. “Time fer da ‘venging.”

  “Oh,” Patch said, “before I forget, I got bored and played the Claw Game a bit more. It’s a lot easier now that you’ve installed it up there. I won you something. Might not mean much, but…”

  I was about to ask her what it was when my gaze fell on it. She’d managed to get the ornery claw to snag Fibble, who now sat lovingly wedged on my dashboard. The cute little guy’s snaggle-toothed grin brought out one of my own, in spite of everything.

  “Thanks,” I told her. “I didn’t want to say, but I always wanted to win that dude.”

  “I know. Anyway, let’s do it to it, and all of that.”

  And here we are, the moment of truth…

  I cut the juice to the outer speakers and cleared my throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, you may have noticed that your Leadfoot has turned on the Fasten Seat Belt sign. Stow your luggage and your bullshit in an overhead bin and return all folding trays to their full, upright position. If you’re seated next to an emergency exit, and everybody is now that Illgott and I installed ejection seats, try not to hit the flashing red button under the glass cover to your right.”

  The Dregs scattered, the repair teams scurrying to their newly constructed safe zones as the rest took shelter deeper within the base.

  “Here goes everything,” I said to myself, aiming my finger at the ‘Hero Within’ console’s ‘Player 1’ button and closing my eyes as I stabbed at it. I’d put the ‘Player 2’ one in Patch’s console and ‘Player 3’ in Bingo’s, and I heard them smash them in sync.

  The world went dark and silent as the glassteel electrics and the external feeds all cut out at once. “Patch?”

  “No idea, but I’m trying to fix it.”

  “Bingo?”

  “Same answer.”

  I didn’t know how to do the things they were doing, but I trusted that they were doing them at their best. It was hard, since faith was a new thing for me and I hadn’t had much chance to practice it.

  At the moment, it had as much chance of imploding as the Mech did.

  Which is a lot.

  Cog-nition: 25% chance to receive an Epiphany when firing up their personal vehicle. Epiphanies can encompass knowledge on any subject.

  Intrinsic Ability Roll: 24%

  Result: Insight Given

  Trouble Shooting: 20% chance to identify the source of technological error. 20% increased chance to spot stealthed enemies and ambushes, and 20% additional damage to enemies revealed using this skill.

  Intrinsic Ability Roll: 88%

  Result: Failure

  I felt my new insight drag my awareness down, into the wires and amongst the electrics. I could sense the components reaching out for each other as the fusion generator spooled up, which told me that the circuitry wasn’t the issue.

  Even so, something wasn’t right, and we were dead in the water until I figured it out.

  Chapter 35

  “Raze…” came Patch’s tentative voice through my earpiece, “how we doin’ up there, buddy?”

  “Shithouse,” I growled into the mic. She had to know that us not roaring forward in a blaze of glory was a very bad sign, so why was she bothering me?

  “Let da bossman be,” Bingo told her. “He’s got dis. Prob’ly.”

  “Thanks, man,” I said, even though at the moment my only solution was to jam my thumb down on the red ‘Player One’ button again and again.

  That was when I heard him say, “Don’t get me wrong, Patch. I’m worried too, but on da off chance he flukes dis, it’ll look better if we backed him. ‘Sides, we’re dead in seven minutes, anyway.”

  “He’ll work it out. If not, it was nice knowing you both,” she said, though I didn’t hear any sadness in her voice. “And we didn’t give up! When we meet our maker, that should count for something!”

  I opened my eyes. “If you guys are going to talk like that, at least isolate your coms.” Before either of them could respond I flicked the switch that killed conversation between us. I needed answers, and something told me they weren’t going to come from those two.

  Not this time.

  THE BRAWL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING

  begins in

  6 minutes - 41 seconds

  “Assuming the wiring’s good,” I muttered, “what else could be wrong?” Talking to myself might make me sound crazy to everybody else, but it helped me organize the chaos that was currently running rampant between my ears.

  My focus was shattered as the hangar’s rogue generators came online. They were hooked up to the doors, and Patch hadn’t been able to find a way to reroute them. Bingo’s attempts at sabotage had been thwarted as well, and there was only one reason they’d be powering up.

  The entire Mech bay vibrated ominously as the motors and servos set into the hinges screamed, their torque whipping the air currents into dust devils.

  I was on the edge of freaking out, and when I made the mistake of glancing down at Patch I could see her staring back up at me.

  “Raze, are we going to be okay?” She was the most optimistic of us by far, and the doubt and worry in her voice shook me almost as much as Mother’s murder.

  “We’ll make it through,” I told her.

  “Promise?”

  I crossed my fingers and said, “I do.” I thought for a second, then leaned down toward her. “But if you wanted to work your magic, I wouldn’t say no.”

  “Huh? Like get out and push?”

  “Quit it with the coyness. I know you can use that d20 pendant to influence rolls. I saw you do it with the claw game and the arrow in the dungeon.”

  “It doesn’t really work that way…”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t say, because you told me not to…”

  “Spit it out. The doors are about to open. If you’ve got a solution, let’s hear it.”

  Patch shook her glow vial, and in its red light I could see that she was chewing on her nails. “Okay,” she said, “but I need to bring up a subject you told me never to broach again.”

  I grit my teeth in frustration. “Fine, if it’s that fucking important to you, we can wait until we’re married!”

  “Not that… Have you accepted RNGesus as your Lord and Savior?”

  “Fuck that noise,” I sneered, ignoring her and wildly pushing Player 1 again, followed by clicking Subscribe, smashing the like button and tapping the notification bell in quick succession, just in case.

  Nothing good happened, and Source decided it was time for a couple of lively rounds of ‘distract the only guy who can get us out of here’. “Mister Raze?”

  “Why are you in the Mech?”

  “Patch um… patched me in once I offered to help with target acquisition and your spam folders.”

  “Fantastic. What do you want?”

  “The situation has become drastic enough for me to step away from my programming and be momentarily useful.”

  “It’s that bad, huh?” I took the deepest, most hopefully cleansing breath I’d ever taken in my entire history of being and let it out really, really slowly. “What good is programming if you can break it?”

  His voice give a little shrug. “The benefits of Patch finally upgrading my mind, I suppose. By the way, have you accepted RNGesus-”

  “Get fucked!” I shouted, reaching for the switch that would shut him down, hopefully forever.

  “Wait,” he yelled, forcing the electrical panel to arc a series of sparks up into my hand before I could finish the action. “I was just li
ghtening the mood. You’re forgetting about the key. You can’t activate the Mech without it.”

  What a waste of time. “There is no key. It’s all startup buttons.”

  “Yes there is.”

  “No, there’s not.” I fought through the pain of the near-electrocution he was firing up at my hand and cut his power. I hadn’t lost any hit points, so he must have been closely modulating the current.

  I felt guilty about disconnecting him, which was probably a sign that Patch was rubbing off on me, and not in the way I would’ve preferred. Maybe I should’ve let him talk, even if he was wrong. What else did I have to do in the

  THE BRAWL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING

  begins in

  5 minutes - 8 seconds

  before our certain deaths? I dragged the lights in the cockpit up to full power and started scouring the rig for something I’d missed.

  Decipher (Visual) Roll

  Cunning Roll: 19

  Result: Success

  Damn it. Source had been right after all. I’d been in such a hurry to re-assemble the cockpit from the arcade components that I’d gotten lazy once they started snapping together with such eerie precision. They’d needed a clean, but I’d skipped it in favor of repairing the mission-critical stuff. I hadn’t even bothered to wipe the surfaces down, which’d left a lot of grunge and graffiti on the panels Illgott had dragged up the mountain.

  My entropy had nearly cost us everything. By refusing to scrape off the centuries of detritus, I’d missed the big keyhole concealed beneath a fossilized wad of Wrigley’s Spearmint.

  I used my thumbnail and some elbow grease to dislodge the gum, causing it to bounce past my right foot and fall into Bingo’s chamber where it lodged unnoticed in the midst of his mohawk.

  “I found it!” I shouted, turning Source back on. “You were right.”

  “Now all you need is the key.”