Wasteland Warlords Episode 2 - 1 Gamestop and Chill

“Will you watch your lightning lances?” Alex snapped. “That’s the second time in two rooms.”

“Two rooms and a corridor,” Joe corrected. “And it’s not my fault Chonk wanted to play with the controller. He’s a curious guy. He’s got to know what we’re doing.”

Clay glanced up from his book and checked the big front windows of the abandoned GameStop. The peeling game posters let in flashes of sunlight and glimpses of the ruined strip mall outside. There was no overt indication that Gearhead had discovered their current hideout yet, thank God. But it would only be a matter of time, he reminded himself. The angry Incant was nothing if not persistent. Persistent and murdery.

“Then give Chonk one of the disconnected controllers to keep him busy,” Alex groused. “Stop letting him use yours. This is the first time I’ve ever even seen a copy of Edge of Earth and Sea, let alone gotten to play it.”

“He would know if it wasn’t connected. Wouldn’t you, Chonk?” Joe tapped the little mechacoon on its wet nose. “Yeah, you’d know. You’re a genius.”

“You guys sound like junior high kids,” Clay said absently.

His wife and brother looked a little like it, too, sitting cross-legged on the dusty moth-eaten industrial carpet of the rundown GameStop like kids playing video games after school. An ancient Infinitab SuperPlus—powered by one of the Fyula runes Joe had been collecting—projected the shot of a dank cave lit by bioluminescent mushrooms and crawling with glowing goblin-esque creatures onto the wall in front of them. A timer appeared on the split-screen counting down until Alex’s tank respawned.

“Are you sure you don’t want to play, babe?” she craned her neck to look back at Clay. “Abandoned game stores don’t come along everyday—especially not ones with thirty-year-old award-winning Game of the Year editions that don’t require a stable uplink.”

Joe stopped cooing at his half-metal half-fur pet. “That’s got to be a grammar violation. All those negatives? C’mon, judges, do the right thing.”

Clay shook his head. “I think there was one too many nots related to the store, but I was kind of too focused on my book to pay attention.”

That was about half true. Splitting his focus between watching out for their mechsuited enemy and trying to learn this new spell didn’t leave a lot of room for playing grammar police.

“One—” Alex stuck up one finger. “—I love how much of a nerd you are. Two—” She faced Joe, putting up the second. “—tie goes to the speaker.”

“What? We never made an inconclusive ruling rule.”

She shrugged like there was nothing she could do. “It’s about time somebody did. The doubt would’ve always been there.”

“Whatever. In our hearts we know the truth: Joe was robbed.” He started thumbing through a player menu, splitting the screen a third time. “Seriously, bro, they’ve got controllers aplenty in here. We can add you to the party. What do you want to be? Warlock? Druid? Rogue? We don’t have a rogue yet.”

“Nah, I’m okay.” Clay flipped another page in the spell book. “Rogue was never my thing, anyway.”

“Cleric? The way Shortstack here keeps dying, she needs somebody throwing health bombs her way.” He was interrupted by a slap on the arm from Alex. “Ow! That hurts a lot worse with Katotes’s strength stats behind it.”

Although Joe was prone to hyperbole, he probably wasn’t exaggerating by that much. Since taking down Katotes back in the Bakersfield Marriot, she’d bludgeoned, smashed, and eviscerated her way up to level 9. She was leaps and bounds stronger than either Clay or Joe, could see in the dark, and had a nasty trio of abilities. Battle Instinct allowed her to use a sixth sense of sorts to anticipate enemy attacks, while Goliath Grip let her wield two-handed weapons—such as her kusarigama—in one hand. With Uncanny Reach she could preternaturally “extend” her weapon mid-swing, landing blows against targets well-outside her effective range.

She was a nightmare on the battlefield and could break bones with a slap if she wasn’t careful.

For what felt like the thousandth time, Clay pulled the Monocle of True Seeing from his pocket and slipped it over his eye. It was indestructible as far as they could tell, and although it didn’t have any immediate combat applications, it was invaluable. With it, he could see anyone’s basic character sheet.

╠═╦╬╧╪

Alexandra Jaeger

Level: 11

Race: Incant

Class: Basic Brute

Alignment: Blood

Exp: 1,218; Exp to next level: 9,240

Available Characteristic Points: 0

Health: 281/281

H-Regen / 5 Sec: 58.5

Magick: 280/280

Magick-Regen / 5 Sec: 10.75

Stats:

· Strength: 51 (45 + 6 item bonus)

· Constitution: 26 (25 + 1 item bonus)

· Dexterity: 28 (25 + 3 item bonus)

· Intelligence: 18

Characteristics:

· Armor Rating: 115

· Melee Attack Damage: 215

· Ranged Attack Damage: 159

· Spell Damage: 167

· Movement Rate: +8.1%

· Critical Hit Chance: 7.8%

· Critical Hit Damage: +64%

Active Effects:

· Darkvision

· Rapid-Regen

· Goliath Physique: Disease, Filth, and Poison Immunity (Permanent)

Bloodborne Striker Skills:

· Battle Instinct

· Goliath Grip

· Uncanny Reach

Player Special Skills:

· Chain Weapons – Oversized (Melee Skill) Lv. 3

╠═╦╬╧╪

He breathed a deep sigh of relief as he dropped the Monocle back into his pocket. They may have been elbow deep in a war-torn, monster-infested wasteland, and, sure, and angry super-powered Incant may have been dogging their trail, but looking at her stats gave him a measure of peace. Every time he saw the Goliath Physique Active Effect, he reminded himself that this was all worth it.

Monsters, warlords, incants—they could defeat all those things with a little prior planning and enough firepower. Cancer? Not so much. But that was one enemy Alex would never have to worry about again. Not now that she was an Incant.

Clay just needed to figure out a way to deal with all those other things.

“You guys have fun.” Clay patted his book. “I’m going to keep working on this spell.”

Seeing Clay wasn’t going to change his mind, Joe and Alex went back to clearing the cave in Earth and Sky without him.

Clay forced his attention back to the creased pages of the tome Sludge Slick.

[A thin sheen of oily sludge, appears within line of sight of the caster and lasts for 1 minute before evaporating. The sludge is extremely slick and has a small chance of causing those in the Area of Effect to slip.]

Focusing wasn’t easy. His eyes kept straying back to the windows, and a couple times he had to get up and take a closer look at the sky. Just to be on the safe side. Still no sign of Gearhead. Fingers crossed, but they might actually get a decent night’s rest for once—something they sorely needed after tirelessly working their way from Camp Liberty, near the ruins of Bakersfield, all the way to Santa Clarita—over a hundred miles of treacherous territory and deadly threats.

Although, truth be told, Gearhead was the biggest threat on the radar by a country mile and the mean ol’ SOB had been running them ragged since they left Camp Liberty.

Clay could concede that maybe they deserved some measure of it. They had robbed the Incant of his stash of Stat boosting potions and inadvertently wrecked his workshop in the process. Not one of their better moments, Clay knew, but at the time it had seemed like their only road forward to kill Katotes and save Alex from the cancer that had wrecked their lives.

And, in their defense, they hadn’t actually known it was an Incant brewing the potions at the time. Griff had conveniently forgotten to mention that when he pointed them toward the potions, for reasons he still hadn’t fully explained.

They had since tried to make it up to the Gearhead—offering to pay damages, replace machinery and salvage parts, do whatever he thought was fair compensation, but apparently his wounded pride was irreparable. Nothing but their heads on a platter would appease the crazy Aussie. While every one of the local Camp Liberty Incants were assholes, Lynes was a special class of nasty. He loved nothing more than power, and Clay, Alex, and Joe had undermined that perception of power.

There’d been a lot of ribbing directed at Gearhead around Camp Liberty afterward, and the other Incants refused to let Lynes live it down, constantly reminding him that a trio of weak-as-kittens tumbleweeds had blown into town and taken him down a peg.

They’d already been planning to leave Camp Liberty to search for dungeon lords Clay and Joe could take out, but having an angry, grudge-bearing Incant hopped up on stat potions and thirsty for their blood had turned that exit into a grab-what-you-can-carry-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-run. Their quick and stealthy departure hadn’t been enough to keep Gearhead at bay, unfortunately. He’d been launching fresh attacks damn near every day and rousting them out of one hiding spot after another. They’d barely had a second to breathe since leaving Bakersfield, let alone been able to settle in long enough to find info on local dungeon lords.

Add to that the fact that they had to keep upping their game, not only so they could stay a step ahead of the Gearhead, but also just to make their new life out here work. Survival was a fulltime job in the wasteland. Alex might have gained insane health regeneration and all the benefits of a dungeon lord’s hit point system, but Clay and Joe were still highly breakable humans. A bullet to the brain or a torn-out throat meant the end of the road for them, whether they caught it at full health or not.

That sort of looming threat never completely faded to the background, even while they were holed up in an old video game store, ostensibly safe.

The drive to mitigate that threat was what kept Clay working while Joe and Alex were playing. He had to make a way for them not just to survive out here, but to thrive. There was nothing for them back in civilization, and he and Alex wouldn’t have gone back over the wall even if there was—not now that they’d tasted real freedom. And God love Joe, but he had never fit into the cookie-cutter mold of what people considered normal. Clay had never seen his brother happier than out in the IZ. In his tin chainsaw chaps over jorts and sleeveless flannel shirt, with Bertha on his hip and Chonk on his shoulder, Joe was finally in his element.

To that end, while Joe had been collecting every magical rune he could get his grease-stained hands on over the past few weeks, Clay had been stocking up on books.

There hadn’t been many physical copies in the civilized world to start with—paper books were a hassle to manufacture, and nobody wanted to pack them around, so mainly only artisan companies still turned them out. But since coming to the IZ, they had come across almost as many hard copies of books as Clay had seen his whole life, barring his fifth-grade class’s field trip to the Library Museum down in Rolla. So far since leaving Camp Liberty, he’d found ten books. The things turned up everywhere, from the ruins of apartment buildings to the bodies of the creatures they’d killed.

In fact, more than half of the books had come off dead mobs. Apparently, the creatures of the Merge really had a thing for reading.

Of those books, Clay had turned up three legit spell tomes—Beguiling Call, Control Light, and Sludge Slick. All minor cantrips, and all requiring varying levels of ridiculously high Intelligence to read. A regular human couldn’t do it; their base Intelligence Stat was simply too low. When Joe or Alex looked at the thick tomes all they saw were indecipherable squiggles and ancient sigils with no meaning. Griff—their wizened guide to the wastelands—had explained that Intelligence had nothing to do with IQ and everything to do with Magicka.

Due to the incident with the Gearhead’s stat potions, Clay’s Intelligence was augmented well above the average human’s base stat—where “well above average” translated to “just enough” to read the lowest-level spell tomes.

Popular opinion out in the civilized world said that only Incants could do magic. Even folks inside the containment wall believed that old saw. But last week, after tons of arduous study and poring tirelessly over the lowest-level spell text they’d looted so far, something had finally clicked in Clay’s brain and he’d learned how to cast Control Light. Sure, a one-minute stint of being able to brighten, dim, or change the color of any existing light within a measly thirty-foot radius wasn’t all that useful in the grand scheme of things. And true, casting it completely crushed his Magicka and left him feeling like a wrung-out dish towel. And yeah, without being an Incant, there was no way to regenerate Magicka outside of chugging a constant stream of potions.

But all that was beside the point.

The point was, he could learn a spell. Regular ol’ non-Incant Clay. Stock up on enough of them and he could handle whatever came their way, even without killing a dungeon lord.

Sludge Slick, which they’d looted off a crusty wraithlike creature dressed as a pirate, was just inside the ballpark of what Clay’s amplified Intelligence allowed him to read. Like being a human dimmer switch, the ability to throw down a layer of slippery sludge was pretty lame compared to some of the stuff he’d seen Incants do—Alex’s insane new Ettin-level strength and regeneration included—but he was still dying to learn it. Every new spell was a step in the right direction.

The entrance let out an electronic chime as the door opened. Joe had slapped one of his mini Fyula runes on that ancient mechanism, too, claiming it gave the store some much-needed ambiance. Ambiance aside, Clay was all for that upgrade. It was basically a free alarm system.

“Well, I must not a’ been gone too long,” Griff said, shaking a cloud of sand and grit from his black leather duster. “You’re all still right where I left ya.”

Alex and Joe were too engrossed in their game to do more than utter a grunt and throw a wave over their shoulders.

“Find anything interesting?” Clay asked, sticking a finger in his book and flipping it closed.

The old weed shook his head. “Wind’s blowing in a storm, but that’s about it for excitement. Area’s fair dead. No sign of local Dungeons. Few koko infestations here and there in the rubble, but of course they ain’t talking.”

Clay frowned. The little kokopeli-shaped shadowmen gave him the creeps, with their faceless, light-absorbing bodies and that eerie flute music. They’d been dealing with kokos since getting into Santa Clarita, and so far, they hadn’t found anything that killed them. Physical attacks passed right through them, regardless of whether it came in the form of a magical weapon or a mundane bullet. Griff’s arcane bolts didn’t fare any better. Basically, the best they could figure was not to rile them up, and when they did, to haul ass as fast as they could manage.

“I did happen upon a bite or two to eat,” Griff said, unloading the deep pockets of his duster. He set a few dented cans of green beans, corn, and Spam, and an old box of KwikMac on a musty bargain bin full of ancient games. “So scoutin’ wasn’t a total loss.”

The sound of the dried noodles rattling inside the cardboard got Joe’s attention.

“Hell yeah!” He tossed his controller to Chonk and snatched up the boxed macaroni and cheese. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—this stuff is worth its weight in gold.”

“But somehow it wasn’t looted when everything else was.” Clay returned the Sludge Slick spell tome to his pack and dug out the pot and pan they’d brought from Camp Liberty.

“You know how hard it is to convince people to eat healthy,” Joe said.

“Healthy?” Clay raised an eyebrow. “KwikMac?”

Joe tapped the faded lettering on the front of the box. “Fifteen essential vitamins and minerals, bro. And that’s probably just in the cheese sauce! There’s no telling how much enrichment they put in the noodles. I lived on this stuff for a year, and look at me.” He waved a hand at himself. “I’m the picture of vitality.”

In his logger’s pants, red flannel, and spiked heavy metal rocker boots, he looked more like the picture of a crackhead lumberjack.

“No comment,” Clay said.

Over in Earth and Sky, Chonk fired another Lightning Lance into the back of Alex’s character’s head, sending her for respawn again.

“Joe, are you—” She saw the mechacoon fiddling with the controls and rolled her eyes. “That’s it, I’m going to single player mode.”

“Aw come on, Chonk’s just getting the hang of it!”

“He’s a wild animal, Joe,” Alex said. “Video games aren’t in his skill set.”

“That’s what I’m saying. It’s not his fault he’s a total newb. He’s been living in the wasteland his whole life with nobody to show him the ropes.” Joe took the mechacoon’s little paw in one hand and its hedge trimmer arm in the other and awkwardly worked the controller with them. “See, he’s getting it, it just takes time.”

“Are you guys ready to eat or not?” Clay asked.

“Yeah, but I’m cooking the KwikMac,” Joe said. “There’s an art to it that I don’t trust you heathens to understand. Once you’ve tasted it made the right way, you’ll see how valuable this stuff really is.”

“How much water does it take to make macaroni, like six or eight cups?” Alex asked, eyeing the scavenged water jug tied to her ruck. With her new and improved strength, it had fallen to her, the smallest member of their party, to pack the heaviest stuff. “That’s a lot to waste on one meal when nobody’s seen a water source in a couple days.”

Joe scoffed. “O short stack of little faith. I used to make this stuff all the time after the county shut off my water. Remember? Back when I was in that Cold War with them over keeping my slightly loved washing machine and mower collection sitting on my lawn, and they wanted me to hide it in a shed and wouldn’t listen to reason about how often sheds burn down?”

“That’s not a frequent occurrence for anybody but you,” Alex said, saving her game.

“I refuse to believe that. Anyway, the point is I’m not going to use up all our water. See, during the Lawnmower Cold War, I learned during that the trick to cooking this stuff is to cut the amount of water you need in half by using your natural resources.” He shook the cans of green beans and corn for emphasis. “In our case, the sweet, savory, delicious juices from our vegetable friends here.”

Clay grimaced at the thought. He’d eaten a lot of subpar food over the years, but the combination of green bean juice and macaroni sounded like a new low.

“I saw that face,” Joe said. “You’ll see. I’ll dress it up just like Mom used to, with some Spam.”

Alex shot Clay a dubious look. His and Joe’s mom had been notorious at church potlucks for her insanely bad culinary creations. She’d also died of a heart attack at fifty-one, probably due to the notion that things like KwikMac were health food.

“I mean, when it’s all you got…” Clay shrugged. “Wastelanders can’t be choosers.”

“It’s not me I’m worried about,” Alex said. “You guys are the ones without health-regen.”

Joe was too caught up in his excitement to pay attention to their doubtful discussion.

“I bet Griff’s never even had Mac’n’Spam before, have you Griff?”

The old weed didn’t look up from packing his pipe with tobacco, but his good eye sparkled with amusement.

“That I haven’t,” he agreed.

“And we call ourselves his friends.” Joe shook his head, digging through the bags until he came up with the game knife they’d been using as a can opener. “I’ll get things going in here.” He pointed the hooked blade at Clay and Alex. “You two—I’m going to need a roaring fire. See what you can find for fuel. Griff, you just sit back, kick your heels up, and prepare yourself for the feast of a lifetime.”