by Sara King
While Sam went a pleasing shade of red and scuffed at the dirt with a boot, Tyson said, “You’ve probably never heard of it, but it’s where guys with no life and waaaay too much time on their hands run around pretending to kill dragons with sticks and wooden swords.” He yanked a stick from the fire, the tip still burning. “See me? I’m the great and powerful sorcerer Badmanian and I have come to steal your women and plunder. Cower before me, furglings!” He waved the stick around, scowling at Sam.
“Dude,” Sam whined, “I’m a god. I am so beyond the ‘women and plunder’ stage.”
Tyson lowered the stick with a frown. “You can’t become a god unless you’ve completed the Rite of Ascension.”
Rat didn’t remember reading that part, but it sounded good, so she went with it. “Burning ashes. Did that flaker actually try to become a god without going through the proper rites?” To Sam, she said, “You do know that automatically subtracts 20 levels and curses you, right?”
Tyson’s eyes slid sideways a surprised moment, but he added, “Negative five to all stats.”
“Instantly,” Rat agreed. “The moment you falsely claim godhood. You get smited by the real gods.”
“B-b-but I never said—”
“Pretty sure I heard him use the word ‘god,’” Tyson interrupted, cocking his head as if in thought.
“Yeah, pretty sure I did, too,” Rat said.
Sam blinked. “But I defeated the level forty assassin, turned her into my cohort, and killed the horde of hell-angels who came to take her from me. Four hundred level thirty-five hell-angels is easily thirty levels of XP.”
“You set fire to a field,” Tyson cried, waving his charred stick in the air in disgust. “That was not single-handed combat. The ad-hoc experience for that would be half a level, at most.”
“And the level 40 assassin?” Sam demanded.
Tyson turned and looked Rat critically up and down. “I’d give her maybe level 15. Seventeen if you’re really pushing it.”
Rat frowned. “Thirty-five.”
Tyson raised a brow. “Twenty?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Twenty-five,” Tyson retorted to Sam.
“But she’s the best at what she does!” Sam cried. “That makes her level 40. And I used a snare. You said I’d get extra XP if I used a snare.”
Tyson laughed. “What, does she shoot lasers out of her eyes? Does she grant wishes? Oh, wait, she has mastered her chi and can float.” He turned to Rat. “Can you shoot lasers out of your eyes or float?”
“Nope,” Rat said, crossing her arms.
“Level twenty-five,” Tyson said. “And anyway, you didn’t complete the Rite of Ascension, and to do that, you need the tongue of a tarrasque.”
“But I killed it seventeen times,” Sam whined. “You never told me I needed to save the corpses!”
“Sucks to be you,” Rat said.
Then Tyson said, “So let me get this straight. You ‘killed’ these seventeen ‘tarrasques’—without me—before or after you ‘ascended’?”
Sam swallowed. “After,” he squeaked.
Tyson tisked and shook his head. “That renders all your achievements for the last, oh, thirty levels completely moot because the real gods just ganged up and cracked down on you for deity fraud, no appeals.”
“And he’s cursed,” Rat added.
“And you’re cursed.”
Sam swallowed. “But…?”
Tyson crossed his arms over his chest and peered down at Sam with a dark look. “You’re questioning the DM?”
“I hear that gets characters sex-changes and missing loot,” Rat added.
“Erm…” Sam squeaked, “…no…”
“Fine,” Tyson said. “That puts you at, what, level ten? And because you got so totally p0wned, you might as well reset your stats to something reasonable, like twelves across the board. Oh, and roll a new character. You’re not going to be able to live with the shame, so you’ll hide your connection to your former self as much as you can. Your new name will be…Sue Thongbuster.”
Sam’s mouth fell open. “Sue?”
Tyson raised a rugged blond brow. “Your roguish, street-fighter father thought it’d make you grow up tough. Why, you got a problem with that?” Rat tapped her foot and waited.
“My intelligence was forty-five,” Sam whined.
“Fifteen, max,” Rat said. “You just got your ass stomped.”
“She’s not the DM!” Sam cried. “Tyson, tell her!”
“How much XP would you give for that crap?” Tyson asked Rat conversationally. “Thirty?”
“A loser trying to gain levels he didn’t earn by soloing a Rodemax?” Rat asked. She’d had plenty of experience with that, with the Bagas. “Ten, max.”
“Hey, I used a sling that time,” Sam whined. “I should at least get double XP.”
Tyson rolled his eyes. “Fine. So you defeated, what, a street kid who got conscripted by a Rodemax. Twenty sounds about right.”
“Twenty thousand?” Sam asked, looking excited.
“No, twenty.”
Sam muttered something and slumped down on a log.
Chuckling, Tyson turned to Rat and said, “Wanna play a sorcerer? The party needs a sorcerer and it’ll be a pleasant change to his egotistical bullshit. He always goes for the intelligence stat. He can be an uneducated, knuckle-dragging furg from the barbaric mountain-lands of Bumfuck Nowhere, and he still maxes out his intelligence stat.”
“Intelligence is innate, not learned,” Sam whined.
“Shut up,” Tyson said. “So,” he said to Rat, “you wanna play?” The big blond, whom Rat had seen single-handedly execute a serial rapist only the day before, looked like a big, painfully hopeful kid. Sam, too, was watching her excitedly, the mountainous cogs in his brain switched off, leaving bare yearning in its place.
A game. They wanted her to play another game with them. Immediately, Rat remembered Sol’dan telling her that one of the most important things about being a successful assassin was to never let them drag you into their world. Keep them at a distance. If it could be avoided, never reminisce with your targets over a drink, never meet their families, never play cards with them. Just kill them and move on.
And, for the first time since Sam had shoved Max off the bluff, Rat remembered that Sam was a target. “Actually,” she said, quickly snagging her gun from where she’d set it against a log, “on second thought, I’d better not. Gotta go see what I can do to eliminate Max.” She needed to get her head on straight, and fast. She started heading back into the darkness, mentally preparing herself to find the nearest sniping position and take out a man who could outwit a Huouyt Rodemax with a piece of underwear.
Sam’s hand on her shoulder made her flinch. Rat swallowed hard, fought the impulse to punch him in the throat and break his neck, then turned to face him.
Sam was grinning like a Jreet in a melaa pen, and immediately, Rat’s guts curdled with understanding.
“It’s Tuesday,” he reminded her. And winked.
The Secret to Good Chicken
Tuesday, 56 Days after Judgement…
“There’s no food,” Rat complained, still sprawled limply on the bed, covered in oil, “how do you want me to cook you breakfast without food?”
Sam lifted his head off the pillow and gave her a one-eyed squint over the covers. “We had food last night.”
“That was last night.” For her part, Rat didn’t feel particularly inclined to move. It had been a good massage. “We were talking about it. Over cards.”
“I was trying to beat you at cards,” Sam said. “While dancing and singing and doing gymnastics. I wasn’t paying attention to the inane stuff.”
Rat lifted her head off the pillow. “Talking about the inevitability of starving to death is inane?”
“We’re not going to starve to death, so it was pointless, and therefore inane,” Sam said, returning his head to the bed. “Seriously, you gun-toting brutes have no concept of
long-term planning.”
“Says the guy who threw the book on hydroponics in the fire,” Rat said. Too late, she realized that, in order for her to have seen that, she had to have been watching him through a scope.
As her mind scrambled for something else to say to cover for it, Sam sighed, deeply. “You too? Seriously? Tyson will not shut up about me setting those books on fire. Like they somehow contain the keys to civilization or something. What you guys aren’t realizing is that you’ve got the world’s greatest encyclopedia right here in bed with you, and that anything in those books, I know better.”
“So what if you died?” Rat demanded, grateful for the reprieve. “Where would that leave the rest of us?”
“Don’t let me die,” Sam said, going back to drooling on his pillow.
“That’s not a good plan,” Rat argued.
“No, that’s an excellent plan,” Sam said. “Keep me alive and I’ll keep people alive.”
It was the truth of that statement that had kept her at an internal standstill for two weeks. Because, in essence, she was sleeping with the very thing that could get Humanity past its Sacred Turn—a punishment so severe that it drove most species extinct during the six hundred and sixty-six turns of its passing, forcing Congress to repopulate their planet later with stored genetics. Quickly, Rat had to scramble for a reason he wasn’t important to leave alive, because she once again felt her resolve in her oath to Mekkval wavering dangerously. Unfortunately, as far as she had seen, Sam really was worth more to Humanity alive than dead, and if she killed him, she might be killing her whole species. Desperately grasping for something, she said, “You were eating people earlier.”
“And?” Sam demanded. “Despite what you want to admit, dead Humans are made of meat, and meat keeps people alive. Burying dead Humans is stupid.”
Rat had had this argument with him before, and she was stunned that he simply could not see why it bothered her to eat people. She opened her mouth to argue, but was interrupted by a sudden loud slapping of the tent flap.
“Hey. Sue,” Tyson said as he shook the tent, blessedly giving her the distraction she needed. “One of our guys just came into camp carrying a live chicken. Says he found a flock of them at some farmstead out there. The men are pretty hungry, but you told me to tell you if—”
Sam was on his feet so fast he actually stepped over Rat to get to the door. He slapped the tent door aside. “Take me to them!”
Though Rat was not in the proper position to see Tyson’s face through Sam’s back, she could imagine the single blond brow going up in the pause that followed, the slow perusal down Sam’s body, the nod of approval…
“You’ve seen it before, princess,” Sam said, stepping out of the tent with the big thug.
“Yeah, but not when you were oiled up like a Mr. Universe pageant,” Tyson commented. He twisted and cocked his head past Sam, into the tent at Rat. “What were you guys doing in there?”
“I gave her a massage,” Sam said impatiently. “Then we had sex. Where are the chickens, Tyson?”
Tyson shrugged, then gestured to an unassuming guy standing off to one side of the leaders’ circle, a big rusty-colored bird tucked in his arm.
Immediately upon seeing him, Rat felt that uncomfortable butterfly-feeling in her stomach—the gut feeling she’d come to recognize meant something horrible was about to happen. She sat up quickly, which made the slender, brown-eyed, brown-haired man give her a curious look before the tent flap came down between them.
Ashes, Rat thought, as the feeling in her gut just started to get worse. Ashes, ashes… She scrambled to find her clothes and gear.
She was just beginning to tie her boots when Sam lifted the flap to look in on her, saying, “Hey, they actually found a live chicken. You up for a—” Seeing her, he frowned. “What are you doing?”
Rat liked Sam, but she’d only ever trusted one being in all of Congress with her secret to staying alive on Neskfaat with Zero when no one else had—that it happened to come in the form of gut instincts—and her prince had immediately told her to remain quiet about it, that the scientists of the world would want to dissect her and study her to figure out the secret. That had been decades ago, and Sam was a scientist…
“You wanna leave camp,” Rat said, as nonchalantly as she could. “It could be dangerous. I want to be prepared.”
Sam snorted. “Tuesday,” he said. Still standing in the doorway stark naked, he made a dismissive gesture at her clothes. “Underwear and boots, but that’s it. I’ve still gotta pay you back for the bungie thong.”
Rat considered all the equipment she would have to leave behind due to that command and hesitated. Her gut was screaming at her that something horrible was about to go down, something big, and all she could think about was that meant she had to be prepared or she was about to be dead. “I don’t want to leave my stuff here,” she said lamely.
Sam glanced at her pile of weapons and gear around her backpack, then said, “Tyson will watch it—you’ll have to help carry chickens back. This is the foundation of a civilization that we’re talking about. It’s important we strike now, before some wandering dumbshit eats them.” He said the last with a pointed look in her direction. Then he began to pull on his own ensemble, which included shorts and a T-shirt.
“Wait, we’re leaving Tyson?” Rat demanded, not liking the idea of parting ways with one of their best men.
“You’ll have your rifle,” Sam said, sounding amused. “We’ll be fine.”
“I want my pistol, too,” Rat argued, that queasiness in her gut starting to make her desperate.
Sam looked at her like he was considering, then he said, “What’s your bra size?”
Rat narrowed her eyes. “I want my pistol, Sam. And my knife.”
“Your pistol and your knife get strapped to your body in such a way as to block my view of your elegant curves. If we come across evildoers, you may kick them in the face or rupture their kidneys. It would have the same effect.”
Then, without another word, Sam slipped his feet into sandals and headed out the door again, leaving her staring after him, wondering if it was worth breaking the terms of ka-par in order to possibly save both their lives.
Burn it. Rat wasn’t stupid, and leaving her weapons behind was stupid. If Sam wanted her to leave camp without them, the fuzzy-headed furg could try to take them from her.
Rat finished lacing her boots, then strapped her weapons to her body, feeling the tension in her gut ease only minutely with every clip and buckle secured. Something was still wrong, and Rat knew from experience to pay attention to that feeling like her life depended on it, because it usually did.
Predictably, Sam frowned when he saw her exit the tent wearing full combat gear, bristling with weaponry. Apparently, however, he was more excited about chickens than he was willing to argue, because he simply said, “I’ll punish you later. For now, let’s go snag us a flock of self-perpetuating foodstuffs.”
Rat wasn’t quite sure what to think when she felt a little thrill at the calm, matter-of-fact way he had said it. Almost as if…
No.
No way. She did not enjoy Sam’s deviancies. It was just a twisted necessity to communicate on the same level as a criminal mastermind, and she was going along with it because she was waiting for the proper opportunity to kill him, and in the meantime, she found the sex decent.
…she just hadn’t found the right time to kill him yet.
But then again, in the two weeks she’d been waiting for the right time, she’d found plenty of reasons not to kill him.
Rat was so conflicted, thinking about that, that she almost missed it when Sam tossed the live chicken to Tyson saying “Do not eat it,” and marched off into the woods with the guy who had brought it to them. Alone.
Forgetting about her inner battle, she jogged after him.
It was easy to return to the task at hand—staying alive—because as soon as she was alone in the woods with Sam and the man she recogni
zed as one of his scouts, her guts started to twist like someone had stabbed her with an ovi and started wrapping intestines around it. She could feel something Big coming towards them like a Congressional interstellar.
Thus, she hung back a little, allowing Sam to take the lead, every nerve on the alert for an ambush.
“The chicken was this way,” the man said, once they were out of camp. He started leading them through the thickets, cutting across the burned-out remains of a small farm, heading for the bushes across the fields. “We saw a herd of them rooting in a driveway. One was in rut and aggressive. The others appeared to be fertile females, from the multiple sexual encounters they were having.”
“So they’ll produce offspring!” Sam cried, as excited as a Baga in a burning circus tent. “How many were in the herd?”
“I counted eighteen,” the man leading Sam said. “Plenty of food for the Guild, my liege.”
“Did you see any of their ovulations?” Sam asked, equally as enthusiastically. “What about any nursing young?”
Rat twitched, frowning, since, just by being around Sam, she was learning something new through osmosis every day. For some reason, she had always thought chickens just huddled with their young to stay warm, but maybe that’s what the chicks were doing under their wings like that. And what the soot was an ovulation? She hated it when Sam’s language lapsed into technical scientific jargon—usually totally without warning—leaving the rest of them behind.
The scout, however, seemed to keep up perfectly. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, you should have,” Sam insisted. “Where there are chickens, there are ovulations. And we’d get even more chicken, long-term, if we located a den and stole the gestating podlings. If you saw one, the husks were probably brown, maybe even white or green? They excrete clusters of fertilized ovoid cells in concave dens they make from the remnant stalks of grain production, about…” He held up his thumb and forefinger in an O, “…yay big.”
