Chapter 11: Something’s missing (Patreon)

“Something’s missing,” Jeb muttered, tapping his fingers on the book as he pondered.

Jeb had scoured the base and the city around it and wiped all the nukes therein out of existence, but something still felt like it was missing. Jeb wasn’t a munitions guy, he couldn’t tell for sure if something was a regular missile, a fuel tank or a nuke, so he’d gone ahead and simply turned every questionable metallic object bigger than a toaster into a bigass puddle of water.

Still, he felt something was wrong, and it stemmed from his Deal with Vresh. When he completed his part of a Deal, there was a distinct sensation of things falling into place, like the tumblers of a lock, or the stars above a blood altar.

Jeb’s last tumbler wasn’t cooperating. Someone had spilled soda on it, and it had become sticky and obstinate. That sensation was proof positive that there were still nukes in Nellis somewhere, and he couldn’t stop until he’d gotten them all.

“Something’s missing? Like what?” Smartass asked, picking up a butterknife and using it to saw a piece of his sandwich off. The dull blade was comically big in her arms, but it did the job.

“Like a nuke.”

“Well, did you get all of them?” Smartass asked.

“Apparently not,” Jeb grumbled, flipping the page of Sonic Mysticism 101 and scanning its contents. “I just don’t know where else I could look.”

“You could take a geiger counter?” Ron asked, his elbows on the table. Jeb had gotten a sweetheart deal from the necromancer for his necroplantation’s products, and Mrs. Everett always made sure to feed the ginger his own produce whenever he came by.

Today that meant sandwiches.

“I could whip up something that could help narrow it down, but after the state you brought Legolas home in…I want fifteen percent.” Eddie said. The wild-haired inventor was seated to Jeb’s left.

Jeb scoffed.

“As soon as I told you how much I was going to be paid for finishing the Nellis job, you switched to charging me percentages. Why is that?”

The whispy haired roboticist shrugged innocently.

“The singularity is expensive.”

“Please don’t do that,” Jeb said, wincing.

“I figure things are already fucked, so cracking general intelligence on magical robots couldn’t make it much worse.”

“We’re sitting in a mansion in clean clothes, eating BLT’s on a lazy Saturday morning and things ‘couldn’t be much worse’? Jeb asked incredulously. “Obviously you and I have different standards.”

“Eh, fine. Then if you want a geiger-sniffing bot, the price is a hundred and fifty bulbs.”

“Dude, I still own you!” Jeb cried with faux indignation. “Make me a nuke-finding robot!”

“Oh yeah, I forgot to submit the emancipation paperwork.” Eddie scratched his chin before shrugging dismissively.

“Are you sure you looked everywhere?” Nancy asked, temporarily leaving her animated game of super-tag to join the ‘grown up’ table, where most of the adults of the orphanage had gravitated to. The little girl had a sour-looking fairy riding on top of her mop of black hair.

“Of course, I looked everywhere in Nellis that could conceivably house a nuke! Top to bottom, end to end!”

“My dad always said the thing you’re looking for is in the last place you look.”

“Of course it’s in the last place you look, because you stop look-“ Jeb froze under a flashbulb realization.

He thought back to his exact wording when he’d proposed the Deal to Vresh, his superhuman Nerve providing him the exact phrasing.

I will eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons originating from Nellis for a thousand bulbs.

Originating from Nellis.

Agh, son of a bitch!

“Shit!” Jeb cussed, picking up his half of the sandwich and taking an angry bite. He’d spent half a week interrogated about the two bombs Meyers had thought he’d stolen, and now he had to go solve that mystery for the old bat.

Jeb’s job wasn’t done until the last two were accounted for. Because they’d originated from Nellis.

If you wanted to get overtechnical about it, they probably originated from somewhere else, then were moved to Nellis, but at the time he’d made the Deal, they had been at the Air Force Base, and now they were somewhere else. As far as the Deal was concerned, that was enough.

At least he hadn’t accepted payment yet.

Jeb swallowed and flipped the page again, quick scanning for any references to names followed by an apostrophe and a technique, like Zesh’nei’s Translation.

“Good read?” Eddie leaned over. To the old man’s eyes the book was blank, but they saw him reading, and the notes he took had to come from somewhere. And in Pharos, stranger things had happened.

“It’s like trying to piece together basic physics from a book about catapults.” Jeb muttered. What the hell even is backscatter diffusion? There were many references to principles that the creators of the book assumed were basic knowledge. Jeb had to figure them out from context for the most part.

This time, though, he was going to take notes, write down anything he didn’t fully understand, then cross-reference it with his other Ability book to see if he could puzzle it out.

“I didn’t even study this hard in high school,” Jeb muttered to himself, writing down backscatter diffusion in bold and underlining it before writing down his guess of what it was. Probably has to do with the physics of ray-form Myst without a focal point.

“Learn anything cool?”

“So far, just this.” Jeb said, clearing his throat.

Jeb began to hum.

As his vocal cords resonated, he very slowly fed String Myst into his voice box and let it unravel, flung in all directions by the vibration.

Jeb’s voice deepened unnaturally, and all the plates on the table, silverware, and cups full of water began rattling against each other violently. The table shook, shimmied and creaked as rapid waves of kinetic Myst washed over it.

A moment later, Jeb stopped, leaving only a faint ringing in the silver forks.

“At its most basic, Sonic Mysticism is a way to use your voice to create an area of effect. Not particularly useful for telekinesis, but it would be amazing for mind-affecting abilities or healing. They even mention pairing it with Zesh’nei’s Translation, which is like the holy grail for me.”

Jeb had written down the page number and a cliff note of every mention of Zesh’nei’s Translation in the entire book, but it was always in passing, never quite explaining how it worked.

What he’d learned so far about the technique was that it allowed a Myst-user to change their Myst from one kind to another. Mastering the ability was the basic requirement for the Wizard title instead of Myst-user, according to the context clues.

Having been alerted to its existence, Jeb was determined to unravel exactly what it was and how it worked.

“Not useful?” Ron sputtered. “That was nine-tenths of the scene where Gandalf rolls a nat twenty on his intimidate!” Ron said.

“Do it again, do it again!” Nancy shouted.

“I suppose there is that.”

They were gradually finishing up their meal when the stool walked in through the front gate.

Jeb blinked and rubbed his eyes to make sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. A wooden stool with four long legs was walking smoothly across the yard toward them, attracting attention from all the children at play, who gathered around it like a flock of vultures.

“Whoah, what the heck!?” a little kid shouted at the top of his lungs.

“Is it a monster!?” another shouted grabbing a stick and poking the stool. This unleashed a furious game of Poke The Weird Thing. To the stool’s credit, it ignored them with patience reserved for saints and other fictional characters. It simply continued moving along as best it could, towards…him.

I know someone who could do that, Jeb thought, eyes narrowing.

Then one of the pokes knocked it over, causing the stool to topple onto its side, legs wriggling like a toppled beetle, and Jeb decided it was time to intervene before Poke the Weird Thing became Bash the Weird Thing.

Jeb launched out of the chair and stumped over to where the children were crowding around the magic stool. Jeb had to admit, it did look rather poke-worthy, but that was beside the point.

“Alright, get lost, urchins.” Jeb said, shoving his way into the circle and grabbing the scuffed-up stool before they could do any more damage to it. A bar towel clung tightly to the top of the stool, something he’d assumed was upholstery from a distance.

There was a chorus of ‘awww’ as Jeb took away their new toy, but the circle of orphans quickly scattered with shrieks of laughter when he growled at them with his new ‘technique’, shaking the very air. At least, I think they were shrieks of laughter. Never can tell what they’re shrieking about.

Small children shriek a lot.

Jeb lugged the stool back to the shaded picnic table and set it down beside the table. He slid his pen and a new piece of paper over towards their side of the wood.

“So, what do you want, towel?” Jeb asked, not meeting anyone else’s gaze. He felt awkward enough talking to a towel perched on a walking stool. Making eye contact would make it weird for both of them. Still, stranger things had happened in Pharos. Jeb just couldn’t think of any off the top of his head.

The towel raised itself up and wrapped around Jeb’s pen before it began writing in rather elegant cursive.

Lost contact with Casey Thompson. Presumed captured. Requesting assistance from former allies. Compensation offered, Logistics aid gratis.

That confirmed it. He’d met Casey Thompson in the Impossible tutorial. The teen mom had the S-ranked class Giver of Life, which allowed her to create living objects with roughly the intelligence and no-nonsense attitude of a forty-year-old professional.

They were smarter than Casey was, in many ways.

“What kind of compensation?” Jeb asked.

Many of us have taken side jobs without Casey’s knowledge, and combined our earnings to create a slush fund for emergencies. We are currently offering three hundred (300) Imperial marks to each person directly involved in her safe return.

“Ooh, ooh, does a robot I made count as direct involvement?” Eddie asked after reading the paper.

“And what if she’s already dead?” Jeb asked.

The towel hesitated for a moment before writing.

See that she is not. Our research suggests resurrecting her will be highly impractical.

***Casey Thompson, Level 63 Giver of Life***

The fancy horned butler held up a fancy notepad, eyes half-lidded as he was obviously bored. Casey wasn’t bored, though. She was terrified.

“Do you have any allergies, food or otherwise?”

“I’m allergic to cats,” Casey grumbled, wishing with all her might that she could just scratch her nose.

“Allergic…to…cats,” Lien muttered, penciling that in slowly. “We’ll make sure not to feed you any cats.”

“I’m not allergic to eating them! Dander! It makes me sneeze a lot!”

“So you do want to eat cat meat?”

“NO!”

“So far cats and dogs have been pretty low on the list of desired food, even for people not allergic to them. Odd that there’s so many of them. Any allergic reactions  or odd interactions with medicine or vaccinations?”

“No, I already told you I don’t have any other allergies.”

“Just being thorough.” The butler said, drawing some lines through a couple boxes. “Any medical issues in your family history? Heart disease, diverticulitis, anything like that?”

“I’m seventeen! I don’t know my mom and dad’s medical history!” Casey tried tearing her arms out of the thick bands of steel that held her in place on the examination table, but somehow she was as weak as a…seventeen year old girl.

“And are you currently pregnant or nursing?”

“Damnit, let me go!” Casey said, trying to punch the bastard in the face. The damn butler was stronger than he had any right to be.

“I’ll mark you down with ‘nursing’.”

Casey gave him the finger.

“Alright, everything looks to be in order,” the butler said, setting the clipboard on the table between the sink and the array of shiny torture devices. “I’ll fetch the Master.”

As soon as he left, Casey tried for the umpteenth time to bring the table to life so it would let her go, but for the umpteenth time, her Ability was annulled before it even left her body.

Damnit! The silence gave Casey plenty of time to think. Mostly it was about her daughter. When she’d nearly been kidnapped by the stooges of lesser nobility nearly six months ago, she’d decided to seek out the emperor for help.

Nobody would dare treat her daughter like a juicy bag of XP while the emperor had custody of her. That was a death sentence. It was a Faustian bargain, though. The asking price for guaranteed protection of her baby was high.

It’s starting to feel like I might not come home from this mission, she thought, her heart pounding in her ears. The slow buildup of fear and adrenaline without any way to release it made her feel like she was going to throw up.

Her heart jumped into her mouth when the door clicked open, revealing a keegan in a lab coat.

“Sorry about that wait, I had a previous surgery and it set me back a little. How about that weather, huh?” he asked, sitting down on a rolling stool beside her and scooting over to the table, grabbing her information and glancing over it quickly. “Every time they expand Pharos it messes up the weather for a couple generations. I hear the Ulesians got rain this year. Good for them.”

“Chart looks good.” He grabbed one of the shiny torture tools and every muscle in Casey’s body seized up at once. He rolled back over and put the implement above her eye.

This is it, he’s going to cut my eye out! Casey thought, struggling to turn her head away, but finding herself unable to move. A beam of light came out of the shiny object in his hand, which he then flashed in both eyes.

“Pupillary responses look normal. Can you follow my finger? Good.”

“…What are you doing?” Casey finally asked when he listened to her heart and took her blood pressure.

“Performing a physical. I want to know if any changes in your health may be a result of my experiments. Of course it’s hard to establish a baseline when you’re this stressed.”

“Of cours-“

“Be calm.”

Suddenly Casey didn’t have a care in the world. She still knew she was in some horrible crazy-person’s torture dungeon, but she just couldn’t bring herself to give a shit. In a matter of seconds, her heart rate slowed down, and the keegan nodded in satisfaction.

“One twenty-five over eighty. Excellent. You may resume panicking.”

As soon as he said it, Casey’s fear crashed back into her body, redoubled by the fact that he had just mind-controlled her!

There was a rumble in the distance, and the wheel of the keegan’s chair popped off, nearly spilling him onto his side.

“Sorry, I was recently shot by a weapon with a very high urzosht index, so my Impact is still stabilizing.”

“Uzhosht index?”

“Divide an object’s Mythos by its number of conceivable uses, and you’ve got the Urzosht Index. Bullets have a low number of conceivable uses relative to a strong Mythos, while swiss army knives are the opposite.”

Casey stared at him blankly.

“Anyway. Let’s get to the heart of our little visit, shall we?”  He reached into his pocket and produced a little metal ring. He blew through it and a cloud of grey smoke rolled over her, sinking into her bones for a moment before pulling back out and showing him her Status.

Casey Thompson

Accolades: Baby Mama, Genesh’s fury, Roadhouse!

Giver of Life, Level 63

Body 55

Myst 45

Nerve 32

Abilities: Mommy’s little helpers, No I in Team

“A balanced build, can’t go wrong with that.” The keegan said as he scanned her information. “I lean a little heavier into Myst and Nerve, but that’s my prerogative. Stats are high for your level, but an S-ranked class combined with access to stat potions will do that.”

“I’ve experimented on quite a few S-rank classes in my day, but Bringer of Life is a new one for me. Artificial life was never my favorite discipline. So I’m a little lackluster in that regard.”

He reached into the pocket of his lab coat and produced a little plastic toy. It was a crab with little articulated legs.

“Bring this to life, please.” He said.

“That’s it? You’re not gonna cut me open to see how I tick?”

“Oh, no, I’ve got plenty of data on human anatomy already. The only thing you’ve got that I’m interested in is your Class, and that’s not buried in your squishy human organs, but if what you’re lacking is motivation, I could probably find that buried somewhere in your squishy human organs. Bring this to life please.”

“I have to touch it.” Casey said.

The keegan nodded and placed the crab in her hand. With a little zap from her Ability, the crab woke up to artificial life, standing up on her palm and taking a few tentative steps before the madman scooped it up and placed it on a flat surface to her left side. It looked something like a bandsaw combined with an x-ray machine, with a flat, glowing surface.

The platform glowed for a moment before a beam of light shot straight up through the crab, tearing the delicate Myst architecture out of the toy and suspending it in the middle of the table.

“Hmm…working artificial musculature on the legs, and jointed properly. The incredible thing is, how does the spell know where to put the legs? We'll have to have you bring things to life blindfolded to rule out user auto-suggestion.

Ooh..A very complex information network. Only a few hardcoded beliefs, the rest is a learning variant of Dione’s Revolving Storage.”

He pointed at a tiny cluster of light near the ghostly crab’s center.

“You see that? That’s where their fanatical devotion to you is hardcoded. It loved you so much it would have died for you.”

He glanced down at the unmoving crab beneath the three-dimensional map of it’s circuits. “I suppose it did.”

Casey ignored him, trying her best to bring the table she was lying on to life. If she could get it to unlock the manacles keeping her in place, she would be free!

Nothing happened. Again.

“Do you experience any fatigue, short or long term memory loss, nausea or confusion as a side-effect of using your Ability?” He asked, rolling over and checking her pupils again.

“No?”

“What are your parent’s names?”

“David and Casey.”

“What did you have for dinner today three years ago?”

“Nobody remembers that!”

“If I let you go right now, what would you do?”

“I’d stab you with that pointy thing on the tray and run, bringing everything to life on the way out to cover my escape.”

“Good choice. You definitely don’t seem confused or addled in any way.” He muttered, rolling back over to the 3-D rendering of a crab. “The question I’m pondering is, how does it standardize the intelligence of your creations? How do they know enough to function as soon as they’re created? The most common spells that create intelligent life draw the first spark of consciousness from their users, which temporarily result in the symptoms I described. Somehow, though, you’re able to create yours with no backlash.”

The keegan stood and tapped the ceiling. A moment later, an ominous contraption unfolded from the ceiling, thick as a man, with odd ribs that narrowed to a lens-shaped disk at the end. He grabbed a handle on the side of the machine and tugged it smoothly over her chest.

“You’re gonna feel a little pinch.”

***Jebediah Trapper***

“So we’ve got a guy capable of easily kidnapping enforcers.” Jeb said, working through the problem aloud to help him sort everything out in his head.

“That’s a rare character trait. Enforcers are very strong, since they’re supposed to keep a lid on out-of-control power growth by Reapers. If they could be beaten, they wouldn’t have value. All this together implies the guy who kidnapped Casey is crazy strong, and furthermore there should only be one of him.”

Jeb tapped his finger on the table, the dots connecting to paint a dreadful picture.

“Since people who can beat an enforcer in a straight-up fight are incredibly rare, the likelihood is, the guy from Nellis is the one who kidnapped Casey. Odds are, this guy is the one who sold Meyers the Roil repellent monolith as well…In exchange for nukes.”

Jeb smacked the side of his head. That’s why the base was attacked and the bombs were stolen! Meyers must’ve reneged on the agreement!

“And his base of operations was five blocks away, until it magically vanished overnight when Casey went into it and got captured.”

I’ve got a monster living in my backyard, Jeb thought, scowling. And he’s got nukes. Great.

“How do you know she got captured and not outright killed?” Jeb asked the towel.

One of her buttons fell off in the fight. After it witnessed her capture, it left the manor moments before the building was relocated, and delivered the news to us.

“Okay, so she might still be alive. That still leaves me with two huge problems,” Jeb said, counting them off on his fingers.

“Problem one: If the guy can beat people like Vresh and Casey, how am I supposed to rescue her? The guy treated me like a precocious toddler. There’s little point in tracking him down if all that happens is I get captured and experimented on.”

Jeb ticked off the other finger.

“Problem two: I have no idea where to find him. His house can move around, apparently, so he could be halfway across the world and I wouldn’t know.”

“Looking for someone hard to find, huh?” A fairy asked, flitting into Jeb’s field of few. It was the fairy he’d seen grumpily riding around on Nancy’s shoulder. Ari, he thought he’d heard Nancy call her. Her hair was darker than Smartass’s, and she was a bit smaller. It was hard to distinguish facial features on creatures so small.

“I know where you can find the one you seek, and I can tell you, for a price.” She rubbed her fingers together greedily. “But this is expensive information, and so I’ll have to ask for something in return…I’m thinking…” She took a dramatic pause. “Your other leg.”

“No.”

“Fine, we’ve got room to haggle. How about an eye?”

“No.”

“Okay, how about temporary custody over one of your children. Just for a day. I promise no harm will come to them. They won’t even leave the orphanage.” She held up her hand with the girl-scouts sign.

Jeb tapped his chin.

“You want to use temporary authority over Nancy to annul any Bargains she might have made, specifically a Deal involving seven generations of servitude?”

“Ari gasped. “They told you!?”

Wouldn’t stop talking about it when I got back, Jeb thought.

The fairy instantly switched from astonishment to pouting. “It’s not fair!” she stomped her tiny foot on the table. “That Deal was made under duress! I demand it be invalidated!”

“You can spit in one hand and demand in the other and see which one fills up faster.” Jeb said with a shrug. “I’m under the impression Deals are supposed to be unfair.”

She crossed her arms and glared at him, still pouting.

“Alright, I’m willing to pay you one teaspoon of sugar in exchange for the location.”

“That’s a horrible deal!” she exclaimed.

“Well, if you can’t give me assurances that this is the specific person I’m looking for, then all you are doing is telling me a location of questionable usefulness.

“The person you’re looking for is there!” she exclaimed.

“Which person am I looking for?” Jeb asked.

The fairy’s mouth clenched tight, causing Jeb to ponder her reticence to speak. She’s not unwilling to bargain, she just seemed to have a hard time providing specificity…maybe she can’t?

“You can’t directly talk about him, can you?”

“If a person like that existed, then hypothetically they would have a way to prevent nosey fairies from talking about them.”

“Hypothetically.” Jeb said, nodding. “How about a cup of sugar for his location?”

Ari’s eyes widened for a moment before she stuck her nose up.

“Now that you understand my greatness, it’ll take a lot more than delicious, delicious sugar to appease my anger. I’ll take my payment in body parts, children, or not at all.”

Just as she was trying to pry a better deal from Jeb’s calloused fingers, Colt sauntered up from the ‘teens’ table, where most of the older orphans hung out in their odd cliques.

“Hey pops,” Colt called, waving his hand. “Is Ari bothering you or trying to trick you into entering her death-cave?”

Ari froze.

Jeb glanced at the unmoving fairy, then over at Colt, who was blinking at him expectantly.

“I guess you’ll get paid ‘not at all.’” Jeb said, turning toward Colt. “Tell me about this death cave.”

“NOOOOOOO!!!” Ari sank to her knees, sobbing into her hands.

Bzzzt! Smartass swooped in from above and karate-kicked Ari in the spine, sending the little fairy tumbling halfway across the table.

“Get away from my man, mountain skank!”

“Try me, nut-fondler!” Ari shouted, climbing to her feet and tackling the larger fairy.

“Ignore them,” Jeb said, brushing the scuffle off the table and into the grass with the back of his hand before lacing his fingers and staring at Colt. “Tell me about this death-cave.”