Chapter 8: Getting Out of Dodge (Patreon)

Jeb eyed the window, a bit of cold sweat forming on the back of his neck. He could try to make a run for it, but he was fairly sure this lady would take that as an admission of guilt. Not to mention, Jeb didn’t see himself winning any kind of footrace, the inch of hardwood between them notwithstanding.

Jeb took his magic finger off the magic lump and reoriented his attention. It probably wasn’t going anywhere, and he had prettier fish to fry at the moment.

“Yeah?” Jeb called, motioning for Smartass to hide. The fairy tucked herself behind Jeb’s backpack while he clomped his way to the door.

He opened the door and found himself tilting his head up slightly to meet the melas woman’s gaze. She had pale eyes with dark striations through the irises.

“I half expected you to run.” She gave a faint smile.

“Me too,” Jeb said, crossing his arms and straightening his shoulders. “So did I kidnap Ms. Grenore by some technicality and you’re here to deliver the punishment?”

“Well, yes and no. May I come in?”

“Of course,” Jeb said, moving aside and leaning against the cabinet beside his bed. He really didn’t have to worry about tactics or placement when the woman in front of him had enough strength to make them pointless.

“So – ow.” She bumped her horns in the doorframe on the way through, and Jeb decided not to say anything.

“So yes, technically you did kidnap Ms. Grenore, in the strictest sense of the word, and no, I won’t be punishing you for it. The girl is better off with strangers than her conniving Veek of a father, so I figured she was in less danger during a few hours spent with you. No harm, no execution.”

“Are you allowed to bend the rules like that?”

“We exercise our best judgement.”

Damn, it’s kinda like Judge Dredd up in here. Kinda.

“Then what’s this about capital punishment?” Jeb asked.

“I actually wanted to talk about other kidnappings.” She said, idly rubbing the base of her horns.

“Other kidnappings?” Jeb asked. “Which have what to do with me?”

“You’ve shown a talent for dealing with Impossible situations, and a fondness for rescuing children. I thought you would like to put your natural inclinations to work.”

“To work how?” Jeb asked, his nerves settling down now that he knew he wasn’t going to get beheaded on national TV. The mention of Impossible situations didn’t escape his notice, though.

“Many miles to the south, the city of Solmnath is home to a rather large population of human refugees left destitute after the Stitching.

“California had a lot of people, yeah,” Jeb said with a shrug.

“It’s a dense population crammed full of non-citizens with little to no trust in the Empire. It’s a breeding ground of discontent and also…”

She glanced at him meaningfully.

“It’s a perfect hunting ground for a reaper.” Jeb filled in for her.

Packed in like sardines, limited food, no ability to interact with local government, no help from, nor trust in the law. That was a recipe for some absolutely awful conditions.

“Couldn’t you find them?” Jeb asked.

“I probably could,” Vresh said, nodding. “But there are different kinds of reapers. Some of them subtly pick off a child here and there, growing like a slow cancer. Others try to race to the finish line before they can be stopped.”

“What about the third kind?” Jeb asked, crossing his arms.

Vresh’s brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“The ones who hunt other reapers for the government. You’ve gotta be gaining a lot of power from this job.”

Pow!

Jeb’s vision filled with stars for a moment, his cheek stinging from where Vresh had slapped him.

The melas stared at him, her body giving off waves of heat that nearly made Jeb take a step back. He felt his arm hairs curl up.

“Those kinds of reapers exist. I am not one of them. I was born into a house that views service to the people as noblesse oblige. That includes hunting reapers. I take no joy in this duty.”

“Noted,” Jeb said, massaging his cheek. Looks like implying someone is a reaper is a good way to get slapped. Good to know.

“Let me guess, the slow reapers are on the bottom of your to-do list.” Jeb said.

“Indeed. I could spend several days hunting down the man behind vanishing children in ones and twos, but during that time, a few more villages on the outskirts might disappear.”

She met his gaze. “I can’t be everywhere at once.”

Harsh logic.

“I do, however, have the authority to deputize individuals for specific tasks,” She said, reaching into her pocket and producing a dull metal plate. It was about two inches from edge to edge, and fit easily in the palm of Jeb’s hand.

The front was emblazoned with what appeared to be the bust of a Melas woman.

“Show that to the right people, and it’ll open doors.” She said.

“And the wrong people will get me lynched, I assume?” Jeb asked.

“Yep. It has one additional function. If the plate is broken, I will know it, along with exactly where it was broken.”

“Interesting,” Jeb muttered, staring down at the burnished token.

What we’ve got here is some kind of magical bat-signal.

The art was sort of a stylized painting of the enforcer, all solid black lines depicting the melas. The simplicity of the design drew more attention to her shape, which was, in a word….curvy.

“And if I wasn’t interested?” Jeb asked, glancing back up.

“I wouldn’t do anything to you.” Vresh said with a shrug. “I may have to mention you to my superiors though.”

“You know, when the Impossible Tutorial reported the examinees had broken out, I missed the culprits due to the time dilation, but I remember the description of their leader.”

Vresh tapped her lips in thought.

“A one-legged man with brown hair growing out of his face. Telekinetic Myst Core. Mystic Trapsmith Class. Odd then, that when the humans who completed the Impossible tutorial were teleported to the emperor’s palace, nobody by that description arrived. The humans themselves seemed pretty confused and distraught.”

“Jebediah Trapper,” she said, wiggling her fingers ominously. “The one that slipped away. I wonder what my superiors would do if I were to give them your location. I’m sure they’d have a lot of questions.”

“Relax,” Jeb said, his voice flat. “I never said I wasn’t interested.”

“Oh,” she straightened, ominous voice – and fingers – falling away. “Good.”

Jeb seemed to only be able to keep his shit together for extended periods of time if he was under a ridiculous amount of life-threatening stress.

Why not save kids while he was at it? That was killing two birds with one stone.

“How far away is Solmnath from here?”

“About three week’s journey to the south. Follow the coast, and you’ll eventually come across it.”

And a decent place to get lost in.

“When you find the one vanishing children, deal with it yourself if you can. The mark should only be broken for emergencies that threaten the lives of hundreds, not you specifically. I’d prefer you save it for a rampaging Leviathan or something.”

“Alright,” Jeb said, pocketing the mark. He hoisted his backpack up and onto his shoulder. There was a tiny grunt from where Smartass was hiding in one of the pockets.

“Then if that’s all, I’ve got a destination in mind, and something to do when I get there.”

Vresh nodded and moved out of the way, allowing Jeb to leave the room without any further discussion.

***

Jeb closed his account at the inn and asked for directions to the nearest caravan heading south.

Kalfath’s major export had been crude oil lenses that got shipped south and east to major cities to be refined and used for lamp fuel, lubricant, Firestarter, what have you. They were also shipped up north to be used to heat homes.

Garland Grenore was an oil baron in every sense of the word except he lacked a title.

More recently though, the desert town had experienced a boom of prospectors and had begun shipping lenses of everything from lumber to gold and fish.

It was with one of these caravans hauling the bounty of Oregon that Jeb bought himself passage south to Solmnath for a cool five bulbs.

Long distance travel in the Empire isn’t as easy or as safe as it was on earth. The caravan wasn’t interested in giving a human passage at first, but when he made the coins dance over his palm, they were willing to compromise.

It didn’t matter who you were: Myst cores made people dangerous.

Jeb spent a lot of the time riding in the back of a wagon, just watching the dusty desert roll by. It was almost as hot in the shade as it was in the sun. Jeb felt for the melas in the driver’s seat, the hot sun beating down on him as he guided the draft animals.

The draft animals seemed used to it. They were some kind of dark brown, thin-haired ungulates with proto elephant noses. Like those fat pygmy…things you see on the Discovery channel every now and then.

The comparison stopped there.

The draft animal’s noses were covered with teeth at the end and they seemed pretty adept at biting holes in cactus before suckling as much moisture out of them as they could. The noses were always looking for something to latch onto, and more than once, he’d witnessed an irritated melas driver boop a snoot for being too inquisitive.

The caravans were still figuring out their trade routes again, what with the Stitching of large swaths of land into the strange quilt that was Pharos. Roads and trails that had existed previously now ended abruptly, forcing them to forge new roads. Sometimes, they ended with a towering slice of mountain, and they had no choice but find another way around.

The most distinct thing was all the dead Oregon landscape interlaced in with the arid desert it’d been stitched with. Already Jeb could see that most of the vegetation was dying, if not all the way dead, and the desert was slowly encroaching on the formerly human territory.

Owing to the unrelenting heat, Jeb bit the bullet and figured out what a ‘mountain river’ lens could do: Ice cold water, with only the occasional grit and algae. A real man doesn’t filter his mountain water. He gets lockjaw and he likes it.

Owing either to pure mountain spring water, or simply Jeb’s improved tolerance to disease, Jeb didn’t feel any effect, and kept drinking/spraying himself with river water whenever the heat became intolerable…which was often.

Much of the rest of his time he spent messing around with his new gold lenses. Jeb had disassembled the fireball luger for more legal transportation, keeping the Myst engine and the wand itself as far away from each other as practical.

He popped the Myst regulator out of the Beautiful Revenge and rewired it to one of his gold lenses. The gold lenses were about the size of a dime, and they looked like a chip of white quartz streaked with a bit of gold in the center.

If anything, they were quartz lenses with gold impurities, but whatever.

Using the engine and regulator, Jeb was able to spit out over a hundred pounds of quartz gravel rich with gold onto the floor of the wagon, which he then scooped up into the Blue Serpent Furnace in ten pound increments, heated and stirred until the individual materials began to separate based on their density.

Once it cooled, Jeb flipped the whole thing over and peeled off the thin layer of gold on the top, tossing the hunk of slagged quartz out the back of the wagon.

Over the course of an evening, Jeb made his fare back, along with a little extra. Jeb had several of these lenses, and they didn’t look like they would be exhausted any time soon. With a little bit of effort, Jeb could get himself spending money whenever he needed it.

In the immortal words of Forrest Gump: ‘That’s good. One less thing.’

Satisfied that it was possible, Jeb set the lenses aside, and worked on his other ideas.

He identified each of the lenses with the appraiser, tossing the lens up into the grey cloud of roiling Myst. With something as small as a lens, the Myst actually seized on the item, lifting it into the air and making it part of the display.

Jeb took the lumpy antler lens and tossed it up into the roiling cloud.

Raw Stag Lens (Uncommon)

Often considered a pest where they come from, deer are tenacious survivors and delicious prey animals. This particular lens creates a powerful stag of the white-tail deer species.

Curious, Jeb took the lens outside at night and poured a drop of Myst through it, and was gobsmacked when half a dozen tiny stags bolted in every direction. It was one thing to make worms of varying sizes, but seeing a familiar Earth mammal like a deer in miniature just brought back to mind exactly how strange all of this was.

“It’s a twelve pointer,” Jeb muttered as they disappeared into the dark of night.

Well, as long as nobody made any tiny does, that should be fine, Jeb thought as the foot-long stags scattered into the wilderness.

Annihilation lens mixed with fly lens makes void butterflies. Jeb eyed the big lump of antler in hand. What would happen with a buck?

Might be something to see.

Jeb still had a pinky sized piece of annihilation lens along with some dust from the creation of the Beautiful revenge. It wasn’t enough to mix with a stag lens big enough to make a full sized deer.

I’ll have to buy a couple more cleaning wands, and probably some slaves.

Jeb chuckled at the idea of buying sexy elf waifu then kicking her out on her ass because he was more interested in the control lens in her collar.

Come to think of it…

In a flash of inspiration, Jeb had an idea for a gun that used annihilation lenses. All he had to do was attach a spring to the focal slider.

Cock it back, setting the range to minimum, then pull the trigger, allowing a pulse of Myst to travel through the lenses. The focal point rapidly shifts as the spring pushes the lenses together again, boring a hole in a straight line out from the gun.

Gotta write this down! Jeb scrambled back to his wagon and wrote down the idea before he forgot. Jeb was forced to write the idea down on a piece of leather because he forgot to buy himself a drafting journal.

Okay, when I get to the city, I am definitely setting myself up as a mysterious and wealthy survivor of the ‘hard’ difficulty and buying a place to work on my magic…and possibly kidnap children.

Jeb’s half-formed, pseudo plan involved buying a mansion with a huge basement then disappearing orphan children, feeding and housing them in secret until the bad guy came sniffing around looking for the other reaper horning in on his territory.

That could work. Killers are notoriously territorial.

It was also kind of a bad idea and a logistical nightmare. Jeb might be able to feed and care for them with magic, but he couldn’t physically keep track of a couple dozen kids and still investigate.

Pros: Bad guy comes to me, doesn’t suspect me of hunting him at all.

Cons: Screaming children pissing and shitting everywhere, getting in my way and stopping me from doing my job.

Wait…Slaves.

Jeb grinned as the plan started to come together. If he wanted to come across as a wealthy serial killer there was no better way to prove he was psycho than to buy some people. These purchased people could help watch his kidnapped children.

I’m such a nice guy.

Jeb chuckled to himself, carrying on with his day.

A week into the ride was far too long to go without conversation, and Jeb managed to strike up conversations with the driver on several occasions. This particular day they were off-roading, and Jeb had the worst case of swamp-ass, aggravated by the jostling of the wagon.

“So how do you stand this heat?” Jeb asked, popping his head out of the shade.

“What heat?” The Melas driver asked, glancing down at him.

“Oh.” Well, that makes sense.

“Are humans a cold-weather species?” he asked, glancing up at the blazing sun.

“I hadn’t thought so, but apparently. We like places around seventy-two degrees fahrenheit, whatever that translates to in alien temp.”

Apparently the System translated for him, because the driver scoffed. “Seventy-two degrees? That’s nothing.”

“So I noticed,” Jeb said, ducking back into the shade.

“The Melas enjoy the oil-rich desert and volcano wilds, averaging a hundred and fifteen degrees, human temp.”

“Damn. This must be balmy then,” Jeb said.

“Indeed.”

“Hey, Brav,”

“Yeah?”

“What do your people know about kidnapping?” Brav actually turned to stare at him, brow raised.

Jeb couldn’t overlook the possibility that the human children were being taken by an alien. It was about fifty-fifty in Jeb’s head.

“Why?”

“I’m looking into missing kids for someone. Is it a common thing for melas?”

Brav barked a short laugh. “Roil, no, it isn’t common at all.”

“Why?”

“Melas babies light themselves on fire as a defense mechanism until they’re three years old or so, they’re dangerous to all but their mother. Same unique chemical reaction. Catching on fire from a flaming baby you’re not directly related to is mildly poisonous.”

“Poisonous, not…burny? Are you hazing me?” Jeb asked.

…

“You’re serious?”

“Of course. Piss off a Melas and you’ll feel the heat.”

“How the…Wow. That explains a lot.”

“Why? What do your human infants do to protect themselves?”

“Scream really loud, I guess? They poop themselves and throw up, too.”

“Acid vomit?” Brav asked, eyeing Jeb cautiously.

“No, just regular vomit.”

“How on Pharos did you survive as a species?” Brav asked.

“I’m asking myself that right now.” Jeb said, shaking his head before he noticed something in the distance. Through the wobbling heat waves, Jeb was able to make out the distinct shape of a car.

“Hold up!” Jeb said, banging on the wagon and crawling out into the open to ride shotgun. “What is that?”

“A human construction of some kind?” Brav asked.

“It’s a car!” Jeb said, jumping off the wagon and running for it.

“This way!”

“Is the human serious?” Another wagoneer called.

“Come on!” Jeb  called, motioning them. “Where there’s cars, there’s road! With any luck, it’ll be the Interstate!”

After a minute of running through the arid desert, the car resolved into a plymouth voyager propped up on a large boulder, where it had crashed when the driver vanished. around the boulder, Jeb finally came in view of the road. He could see where it had been Stitched together with the Pharosian desert. The I-5, in all it’s eight-lane glory, wide enough for half the wagons to travel along side-by side.

There were hundreds upon thousands of cars littering the road, but only a handful likely had their brakes on, so it would just be a matter of pushing them off the road.

Come to think of it, I wonder if I could scavenge up some gas and get one of these babies running? I could get to Solmnath in style.

“What are you on abou – Eck Ban!” Brav came to a skidding stop in the sandy soil, his jaw dropping in disbelief. “What on Pharos is this?”

“It’s a road.”

“It’s the ruins of a caravan the size of a city,” he whispered, scanning the thousands of cars baking on the blacktop asphalt.

“Well, they weren’t all going to the same place,” Jeb said with a shrug. “I figure if we clear the path, we can get a smooth thirty or forty mile stretch,” Jeb said, motioning to where the road disappeared into the south. “More if the Stitching is oblong.”

“How did humans do this?”

“This is what you’re impressed by?” Jeb asked, turning back to the road. “It’s just a road connecting one edge of the continent to the other that people could traverse in a matter of hours. Is that such a big deal?”

Brav looked like his eyes were going to fall out of his head, so Jeb decided to stop teasing him.

“The wagons?”

“Right, I’ll go get them.” Brav said, nodding before turning on his heel and running to where the wagons waited for them.

“And I…will start looting.” Jeb said, picking up a rock and smashing the nearest window.

All in all, the wagons actually went only a little faster on the highway due to the constant need to move cars out of the way.

On the other hand, the caravaneers were practically crying with joy as they filled all available empty space with human oddities. Glass was especially sought after. Human glass was incredibly clear, and a single glass cup went for a couple silver. They made a stack of carefully detached windshields, also grabbing things like knives, guns, and the odd leather bucket seat to bolt onto their caravan seats.

Jeb didn’t bother looking for things to sell. He was looking for some wheels, dumping ice cold river water on his head every few minutes as his shoe tried to melt to the pavement.

Jeb actually rested on his peg leg every now and then to allow his foot to cool.

The biggest impediment to that was that many of the cars were empty, weatherworn and damaged. When the world ended a few months ago, people had been teleported right out of their cars and shoved in tutorials.

That meant the cars were left running, moving at seventy miles an hour with no human oversight. Only a handful of smart cars had been able to avoid collisions of any kind.

Even the ones that didn’t get badly crunched up had been left running until they went empty.

If this were in town, that would have been a problem, but they were on the I-5.

A fair number of people were on long road trips, and some of them had gas cans in the back.Gas degrades pretty hard over the course of three months, but it’s still usable…barely.

After a couple hours of searching, he found an oversized Jeep with its right front tire blown out. Other than that, there was some minor damage to the fender where it had cruised to a stop and hit the meridian, but all that was fixable.

It’s like me! Jeb thought, glancing down at his own missing leg. Whoever had owned the truck had bought it specifically for off-roading, as the body was lifted, the remaining tires nice and big, and not one, but two spares in the back of the car.

Offroading was going to be the name of the game, so Jeb slapped his hand down on the hood and claimed it for himself, nice and loud so the surrounding aliens didn’t loot the windshields.

After that he hauled the gas cans over, put a gallon in and tested the engine. The key was still in the ignition, so it was just a matter of crossing his fingers and hoping the battery was still alive. The machine rumbled to life without complaint or stutter despite running out of gas before sitting there for the better part of three months.

“It’s aliiiive!” Jeb cackled, turning it off before starting on changing the tire.

Half an hour later, he was tapping the steering wheel and bobbing his head to some kid’s EDM, feeling the wind in his hair as he cruised forward at roughly ten miles per hour.

Jeb could just go offroad and ditch his caravan, but that didn’t seem like the best idea ever.  Not only did Jeb not know where the city was, he was alone. And there was no easier way to get killed or do something stupid and wind up dying, than to go it alone.

Like Into The Wild.

“Is that some kind of magical pre-recorded music?” Brav asked, driving his wagon alongside Jeb’s Jeep.

“Pre-recorded, yes. Magical, no.” Jeb blanked out. He didn’t actually know how a CD worked. “Probably not magical.”

“What’s playing the music then?”

“Speakers work by passing a current through copper wire at a rate that makes a vibrating electrical field. The vibration is then picked up and amplified by a set of magnets attached to thin fabric or cloth.”

“So, cloth, copper and lodestone does all that?”

Jeb shrugged. “Basically. You’d have to ask an engineer for more specifics. I’m sure there’s some electronics in there.”

Speaking of engineers…I wonder where all the scientists from Nasa wound up. Jeb was absolutely sure there were some very smart people out there integrating human tech with Myst.

Myst and Myst engines gave the law of conservation of energy the finger. That kind of power would give those nerds wet-dreams. If someone went to an oil refinery and found a Premium Unleaded lens, they could send a ship into space simply based on fuel weight.

Jeb glanced down at the dash of his car, doomed to run out of fuel sometime in the next couple of weeks when all the refined gas in the world dried up or expired.

Hell, I could find a premium unleaded lens. Are there any oil refineries in California? Jeb needed to keep his eyes open for an abandoned gas station.

Jeb tapped the steering wheel some more. Come to think of it, he’d only seen lenses made in nature, hadn’t he?

I wonder if man-made things count as natural. Humans are natural, in the grand scheme of things. What’s the difference between a bird’s nest and a concrete apartment complex in the eyes of the gods? They were both made by animals to breed in.

I wonder if I could visit Silicon Valley and find an AI lens. See if it takes over the world.

Let’s see, there’s all the nature lenses found in Oregon, the beetle lens, the worm lens, the annihilation lens, the flame lenses.

The control lens was specifically described as arising because of the behavior of people.

Hmm…

Jeb would give even odds that Lenses that created advanced sapient-made constructs were either extremely rare or nonexistent.

Still, couldn’t hurt to visit a few tourist traps on the way south. If I can find a candy factory with a candy lens in it, I won’t have to worry about paying Smartass again.

Gotta visit that gas station and see if he could grab one of those analog maps.

Jeb spotted a dark lump on the ground moments before he ran over it.

What’s a chunk of pavement doing torn out of the ground? Jeb thought, pulling up short and hopping out.

“What is it?” Brav asked.

“This pavement is outta place,” Jeb called back, flipping it over with his foot. The dark asphalt radiated heat from the sun beating down on it. Jeb glanced around, but couldn’t see any place it might have come from.

“Oh, a sun lens variant,” Brav said. The orange-skinned man knelt down to inspect the chunk of asphalt. “Good eye.”

Jeb hadn’t noticed it radiating sunlight or the smell of asphalt with his Myst senses, because in this weather, everything radiated sunlight and the smell of asphalt.

“You found it, it’s yours.” The wagoneer shrugged and stood.

“These common?” Jeb asked, picking up the lens and wincing as it scalded his hand. He wrapped his sleeve around it, finally noticing the sunlight rolling off of it.

“Pretty common in deserts. Aristocrats put a higher value on dappled sun lenses or grassy sun lenses, forest sun, or river sun, pretty much anything that smells nice or is refreshing. I haven’t seen that variant before, but I’ll bet you a sun lens that makes the room smell like tar won’t sell for a whole lot. You’ll get maybe a bulb for it? Maybe a handful of silver. Still not a bad find.”

“Fair enough,” Jeb said, loading the lens into the back seat with the rest of his gear before dumping ice-cold river-water on himself again.

God, this lens is a lifesaver, Jeb thought, eyeing the damp river rock with a thin film of algae slime on it before putting it back in his pocket.

“Hey, you guys mind some detours?” Jeb asked, turning around and catching Brav’s attention. There’s some places –“

ZZZ!

A squat, shiny brown ball of armor plating about the size of a basketball slammed into Brav’s side, tossing him into the ground.

The melas wagoneer let out a pained gasp, and Jeb spotted a proboscis about the size of his thumb slipped between the man’s ribs, blood welling around the wound.

ZZZ!

Jeb’s gaze flicked to the side, spotting dozens more chitinous balls flying through the air.

Flying toward him.