Ree dumped the contents of her apron onto a table, checking what she’d actually brought with her and not just what she thought she’d tossed in. She’d been talking to her dad while getting ready for work, and he’d been cracking her up with stories of his last doomed date, this one with a life coach who had no degree and no experience, and as far as her dad could tell, just quoted The Secret to people. But hey, whatever works.
She had her lightsaber, a small CCG sideboard, two more healing potions (almost time to buy a new copy of Descent), a DS9-era phaser, and her most important tool, her phone. Rather than getting a separate iPod for media, Ree had just hollowed out the memory of games, apps, and music, and loaded it up with movies and film clips for an on-the-go Geekomantic grimoire.
So, what to watch? She probably wouldn’t have time for a full movie or even a TV episode, so she loaded her playlist and started scrolling—she’d retitled the videos for easier power sorting.
ALPHAS—Superspeed—“The Quick and The Dead”
BUFFY—Bruiser suite—“Chosen”
HARRY POTTER—Wizarding—“Deathly Hallows animation”
SHERLOCK—Sherlock-vision—“A Study in Pink”
SPIDER-MAN—Whatever a Spider Can—Spider-Man and more.
Ree scrolled, pondered, then looked up. Several other customers were staring at their own phones and tablets.
“Let’s coordinate. What are you all using for power boosts?” Not every Geekomancer could use genre emulation straight from the media—some, like Eastwood, had to destroy a physical object to get the power, the way that she used potions for healing.
“I’ve got The Matrix,” said Chandra.
“Conan the Conqueror,” said Talon as she hefted a longsword from the armory section of the store.
Ree looked around, but the others weren’t volunteering.
“Thanks,” Ree said, then went back to her pondering. Pearson’s magical underground wasn’t like the Dresden Files, where the magicians had a White Council, or Harry Potter, with the Ministry of Magic. In Ree’s experience so far, it was more like being in a subcultural scene—you knew some people well enough to call friends, and everyone else was just kind of there. It was less pressure, but it meant that people weren’t big on watching one another’s back.
Out of the people there, Ree had fought alongside only Drake, Eastwood, and Talon. Uncle Joe would be all cards, all the time, tearing into his CCG collection for one-shot magic effects. That is, if he could bring himself to destroy any cards. This was, after all, the guy who would reorganize Grognard’s card sleeves to be alphabetical by author and who sleeved cards as soon as he opened his booster packs.
As for Chandra, Ree didn’t know what to expect. She didn’t know how either the punk or Uncle Joe moved in combat, whether they communicated, how well they stood up under pressure. Nada.
Heading out into the sewer was going to have all the awkward of a first RPG session or a pickup group in an MMO—lots of chaos, no established rhythm or cohesion. If they were tripping over one another like newbs, the night was not going to end well. And where a TPK in a game would mean a lousy evening, a wipe here would be substantially more permanent.
Ree took a seat and hit play on her favorite clip from Spider-Man, hoping that the climbing and jumping would help her take the fight 3D—if she was standing upside down on the ceiling, she’d be less likely to trip over her fellow geeks.
When the clip was done, Grognard coughed and gathered people’s attention. He stood by the door, wearing a chain shirt over a padded gambeson, as well as gauntlets and shining metal knee and elbow cops. Against his shoulder, he held a glaive-guisarme, one of the obscure polearms beloved by the late Gary Gygax, Godfather of D&D.
“Everyone ready?” he asked.
The chorus of clicks, chunks, rattles, and powering-up sounds continued for a moment before fading.
“Here’s how we’re going to do it,” Grognard said. “My shop, my call. Everyone stay tight, and watch one another’s backs. If they split us up, we’re hosed. First priority is keeping them out of the shop. If they get in, we have no place to fall back to. If you see a gap through their numbers, you do not go alone. We all get out at once, or no one gets out. We have food and water here to last several days, even without power, so we can take them in waves. But the wards on the door won’t last forever, not under that amount of pressure, so we have to clear the hall first.”
This is not his first rodeo, Ree thought, as if the way he handled the weapon and moved in the armor left any doubt. Most armchair generals and old-school miniature geeks didn’t have practical experience in battle because really, in twenty-first-century America, most people didn’t have combat experience, unless you were in gangland or live on a military base. But Grognard talked like a veteran sergeant or master chief.
“Got it?” he asked. Everyone nodded.
Note to self: Sometimes Strength or Will can replace Charisma for leadership checks. True story.
Grognard turned to Ree. “Keep an eye on everyone. What are you specced with?”
“Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man,” Ree said.
“Then you’re on flanking duty. But don’t stick around and try to hero it up if things get bad. I have no interest in training another employee anytime this decade, you hear me?”
Ree saluted with her lightsaber. “Aye aye.”
Grognard grunted in approval. “Form up. Tall folk in the middle, melee folks in front. Area attacks first so we can clear some ground, then we take and hold it. Don’t let them cut us off from the door, and for the love of Gygax, communicate out there.”
Eastwood piped up. “The rutting little things can jump more than you give them credit for, so don’t think you can keep on top of them. Some snort like bulls before they charge, so watch out for that, too.”
Ree didn’t bother looking at Eastwood. She’d learned all of that firsthand. But it was good advice, she had to give him that.
A quick head count told her something was off. Ree looked over her shoulder and saw that Wickham was still standing back in the store section, adjusting the straps on her outfit.
“Care to join us?” Ree asked, trying to bleed as much snippiness out of the statement as she could. It wasn’t usually a great idea to antagonize people you’re hoping will watch your back.
Wickham huffed, struggling with the straps. “I can’t imagine what un-evolved brain-damaged fool made this abysmal excuse for a harness.”
Ree shared a look with Grognard and walked back over to Wickham, her weapon down. “Here, let me. This was made by a lefty—that’s why it’s still on the shelf.”
Wickham sighed in exasperation, tossing her pistol aside. Restraining another eye roll, Ree went to the ranty model to help her out.
“Hold still a minute.” Wickham did, and for a moment, they were just two women, one helping another with a wardrobe malfunction.
Until Wickham opened her mouth again. “You’re a poor excuse for a lady in waiting, but considering my options . . . ” she said, gesturing to the rest of the group. Talon and Chandra were the only other women present.
“And you’re a crap excuse for a noblewoman, so we go together just fine,” Ree said, flipping a strap and releasing a clasp. The Spider-magic was fueling her natural tendency toward quippy retorts. Thankfully, she’d established that banter seemed to come free with the genre emulation. “There, that should do it.”
Wickham straightened herself out of Ree’s grasp and stretched, testing her range of motion. “That will have to do.”
Ree crossed her arms. “You must have missed the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ unit in kindergarten.”
“I skipped kindergarten,” Wickham said.
“I rest my case.” Ree threw up her arms and went back to the door, her lightsaber out again. “Sorry,” she said to Grognard.
“And what happened to ‘Protecting the other patrons is not my responsibility’?” Ree asked in Wickham’s direction.
The Li
eutenant scoffed. “I realized that the only way out of here would be to make an opportunity myself. Try not to get in my way.”
Wickham sauntered over to the group, owning the role of Cordelia for their motley Scooby Gang. Since Wickham was looking away, Ree allowed herself the most indulgent of eye rolls as she followed.
Grognard unlocked the door, then hauled it open with one swing. He dropped into guard with his glaive-guisarme, Ree activated her lightsaber, and the others powered up their various weapons.
“Here we go!” Ree said.
Chapter Four
Dysfunctional Raid Party
The mass of gnomes looked like a beehive. They were stacked on top of one another, falling and scrambling over one another to get to the group.
Uncle Joe raised several cards over his head, tore them with a whoop, and a wave of fire pushed forward, enveloping the gnomes. They screamed and scuttled backward, and the group stepped forward into the sewer. Eastwood tossed out a handful of industrial-grade glow sticks, which filled the tunnel with yellow light.
Ree did her best Steve Ditko Spidey-fingers, unleashing a net of webbing that pinned a handful of gnomes to the far wall. She jumped forward and swung up, the blue blade strobing across her vision. She caught two of the gnomes, but several more leapt out of the way. As soon as her blade swung past, more of the miniature monsters scuttled forward. Their nails clicked on the concrete floor with the strange familiarity of her golden retriever, Booster, trying to get purchase in the linoleum kitchen back at her dad’s place.
She let loose another dose of webbing, then jumped and stuck to the ceiling, leaving her sword arm free to continue swinging.
Ree’s spider-shtick attracted a dozen of the gnomes’ attention as they tried to climb over one another to get to her. Even with their considerable ups, they fell short, putting them just in range of her lightsaber.
From her vantage point, she saw the rest of the group as they fought, each in their own style.
Out front, Grognard tore through the creatures, swinging the glaive-guisarme around as easily as a broom at closing time.
Talon covered Grognard’s back, following his movements and keeping the gnomes from sneaking through legs and flanking the group as they formed a semicircle out from the door. She fought with practiced efficiency, the longsword always striking and blocking at once as her hands moved in concert, levering the pommel around for maximum precision.
On the other side of the group, Eastwood fought with lightsaber and blaster in perfect harmony, managing not to chop his hand off even as he wove and dove through the crowd at a breakneck pace. He was a jerk sometimes, but he’d earned his Badass bona fides years ago. Gnomes jumped at him by the dozen, like they’d all decided he was the most delicious dish on the menu.
Drake stood back, picking his targets quickly but deliberately, squeezing off shots that thinned the herd rushing at Eastwood.
Wickham hugged the side of the door, taking shots where she could. She wasn’t comfortable in a fight, but she’d logged plenty of practice time somewhere—range or arcade—so her shots connected more often than not. Trouble was, her peashooter only seemed to stun the gnomes.
A musty wind hit her cheek, and Ree looked down to see that the gnomes clustered beneath her had started to get smart. Two gnomes held their hands together, boosting up the others. Ree wanted to know where they’d picked up cheerleading techniques, but that would have to wait. She flattened against the ceiling to avoid a tall gnome’s swipe, which fell just inches short.
The magical energy from Spider-Man was waning, as she’d only gotten a quick dose of the film. Rather than spending the energy on another burst of webbing, she cut the arm off the next gnome that got a boost. The gnome crashed into its accomplices, which would scatter them for a bit. Ree pulled out her phaser and zapped a few more, then turned and dropped one that had managed to Xenomorph its way along the ceiling, just a few feet from Wickham’s head.
The sizzling gnome fell to the sewer ledge in a heap at Wickham’s feet, and the model looked up to Ree, who saluted.
“That’s two you owe me,” Ree said with a grin, then turned back to her cheerleader gnomes. She picked off the two boosters, hoping that they were the bearded brains of the operation. If Wickham responded, the sound was lost in the din. Gloating was hard to do when you were dead, so she could wait.
“How you feeling, boss?” Ree asked, her voice echoing in the sewer over the sound of clanging metal, exertion, and snarling.
“They don’t seem to be running out of friends! Somebody pour on the AoE!” he called.
“On it!” Uncle Joe flipped through a card binder, then pulled out several cards, which he tore in half and then threw, Gambit-style. The card shreds flew true, exploding on impact. The blasts engulfed a dozen gnomes, but as the dust settled, more had filled the space, hopping over their charred compatriots.
“I didn’t think there were that many in the whole city!” Ree said.
“Recent surveys put their numbers at under a hundred. We’ve seen at least twice that,” Drake answered, his voice level even as his firing routine had become more harried. He stopped as one of the crystals in his aetheric rifle went dark, and cleared the gem, replacing it with a ruby red one that Ree knew as his flamethrower mode.
“Clear!” Drake called, and Talon cycled right, opening up a space. The inventor knelt forward and the rifle belched a cone of flame that took another cluster of the gnomes. The repeated blasts turned the sewer into a sauna, including the concrete she held on to with Spider-fu. It was either burn her ass off or lose the higher ground, so she dropped from the ceiling, cleaving through several gnomes as she landed.
When she hit the concrete pathway near the group, the sewer shook.
“Someone needs to lay off the lagers,” Wickham said.
“That wasn’t her,” Grognard said, looking down the tunnel.
A roar shook the walls of the sewer, making it very apparent that the gnomes were no longer the worst of their problems. If possible, the smell in the tunnel got worse.
That’s never a good sign. In her nine months of hero-ing, she’d noticed a clear correlation between “smells bad” and “likes to snack on humans and suck the marrow from their bones nom nom nom” types of creatures.
“Boss?” Ree asked, closing ranks with Drake between one of the adventurer’s bursts of flame. The gnomes on the roar side of the tunnel parted. Even worse sign.
Grognard buried the head of his blade in a gnome’s shoulder, the butt of the haft held down with his foot. Then he used the weapon like a lever, slamming four gnomes into the wall with one heave. “Anyone got a land mine?” he asked.
“Let me check!” Uncle Joe said, flipping through his binder. “I just had a big order for a Direct Damage deck, haven’t had a chance to restock.”
A second roar gave way to the sound of charging and splashing sewage. The gnomes on the far side vanished into the shadows.
On one hand, it gave them a breather. On the other hand . . . “Faster would be better!” Ree said, quoting her favorite space cowboy.
Eastwood holstered his blaster and leveled his Green Lantern ring at the right side of the tunnel. Ree pointed her blaster in the same direction. The group formed their best imitation of a pike formation, reinforcing their position in the direction of the oncoming . . .
. . . Minotaur.
Really? Just what I fuckin’ need.
The beast emerged from the shadows, lit by lightsaber and flare alike. It held an axe that made Grognard’s polearm look like a toothpick.
“Fuuuuck,” Ree said, and they all fired. Fire, laser, and lantern light hit the creature, but it kept coming, hunched over to fit its giganticness into the tunnel. The creature snorted out, and Ree realized that the thing wasn’t going to stop.
Ree knelt to add her lightsaber to the pike formation. From over her shoulder, she saw another beam of green energy, and then the sewer was filled by a half-opaque green-colored brick wall.
The Minotaur hit the wall, and she saw the construct crack. Eastwood was sweating, his teeth gritted so tight, he was risking lockjaw.
Grognard stood, backing away. “You heard him. Everyone inside. We need bigger guns for this thing.”
“The way is clear!” Wickham said, pointing left. We can go!”
Drake said, “It’s a ruse. The gnomes will only be waiting for us around the next bend. This is the proverbial Scylla and Charybdis,” he said as the Minotaur hammered away at Eastwood’s wall.
The cowboy clasped his free hand around the other. His face was drenched with sweat.
“No time,” Ree said, grabbing Wickham by the wrist and pulling her back and into the gap that opened when Grognard pulled on the door.
The group rushed inside, and Ree ducked back into the tunnel to haul a sweat-slicked Eastwood after them as his construct crumbled and dissolved.
The Minotaur’s horn bounced off Grognard’s wards on the door, but the hammering continued even as the brewmaster closed the last latch.
Two sounds echoed at once as the Minotaur hit: the thud! of impact and the zot! of Grognard’s wards hitting the Minotaur back with the magical equivalent of a Mack truck. Ree wasn’t sure which was actually harder.
Ree pushed herself off the door and hunched over, resting her hands on her knees. Eat your heart out, Insanity. Action Hero is the new extreme exercise system. Guaranteed to keep off the pounds, just as long as your life stays consistently perilous.
Attack the Geek: A Ree Reyes Side-Quest Page 3
