Chapter 18: Missed Connections (Patreon)

A thin sheet of metal sat on a belt, it had no conscious knowledge of itself. It simply was. It moved forward with a frightening amount of speed, following the jaw-droppingly rapid pace of human industry. There were sheets of metal in front of it, and ones behind.

It could perceive neither of them.

There was a stomp hiss as the piston ahead of it came down, stamping tiny circles out of the metal sheets. Over and over, the sheets ahead of this sheet were stamped, thousands of tiny metal circles following the belt down while the scrap steel followed the rails to a waste stack to be melted and reused.

As the sheet came under the die, it felt no fear or trepidation that it’s form would be cut to tiny pieces to be spread all over the globe.

It simply did not care.

The fraction of a second before the die came down, a glimmer of golden energy interfered with one of the cutters, shifting it just a tiny fraction of a milimeter out of alignment.

The die came down.

Thousands of tiny metal circles emerged from the eviscerated sheet metal.

Jeb was concerned with only two of them.

This is a new dream, Jeb thought idly as his consciousness followed the path of these two tiny misshapen circles. The circles went forward under another die, and were combined with a tiny explosive, a little piece of brass…

That looks like a centerfire primer. Jeb thought, his experience identifying the two defective bullets a few stages before they were complete.

A plate of cut brass was rolled around the primer by a machine that treated the metal like play-do. A station later, the bullets were filled with a scientifically calculated amount of powder, followed by a dollop of lead crimped into place. Once that was done, Jeb was looking at a belt full of nine millimeter bullets.

Not really sure where you’re going with this, dream, Jeb thought, crossing his non-existent arms.

The two bullets with malformed primers rolled off the assembly line just far enough apart to go into different boxes.

That was where Jeb’s consciousness split.

One Jeb followed each of the two boxes as they were shipped across the country, rattling around in the back of a big rig, subdivided to individual UPS trucks, then delivered by underpaid, overworked women in brown to small stores.

For lack of a better word, Jeb’s ‘left’ consciousness watched with growing anxiety. He was very familiar with this bullet’s destination. Sure enough, a Jeb, perhaps five years younger than he was currently, walked in the door, ringing the little bell.

Jeb could see the bounce in his step, the relief flooding his own face as he paid the twenty three bucks, plus tax.

I still remember being pissed and not knowing why. In hindsight  it was because I knew I was paying over twenty bucks for a single bullet.

Something wouldn’t let him bum a 9-mil off one of his friends at the range, though. The bullet had to belong to him.

I chalked that up to a strange sense of pride, or maybe caution that I would guess what the bullet was for, Jeb thought, following himself home with the ‘left’ consciousness. Maybe it was something else.

He watched with growing trepidation as Young Jeb hummed, loading his nine-millimeter one bullet into the magazine at a time. The last bullet to go in the magazine, unnoticed by Young Jeb, had a malformed primer.

“You’re not gonna use the whole magazine, you suicidal idiot!” Jeb criticized himself. Loading the whole gun was one of the ways Jeb had tricked himself into it.

You can’t just kill yourself. You’ve gotta sneak up on it, like a skittish colt. Jeb’s subconscious was totally on board with the plan, while his conscious brain thought everything was hunky-dory. I mean, he wouldn’t load the full magazine if he was planning on offing himself would he?

He wouldn’t be cleaning his apartment with the gun laying out on the table if he was planning on offing himself, would he? Blood spatters aren’t clean.

He wouldn’t be cleaning his gun if he was planning on offing himself. Why would it need to be clean?

It was right about the time he cocked the gun that Jeb’s conscious brain realized what he’d been slowly edging toward. That was the moment it either ran away skittishly or gave up. It gave up. It agreed with his subconscious that blowing his brains out was the way out of the nightmare.

Jeb watched himself cleaning the already clean gun, his thumb heading toward the safety.

“Yeah, I don’t wanna watch this anymore. Let’s go see what Righty is watching.”

***Jeb’s ‘right’ consciousness***

The bullet Righty was watching was loaded up into a separate eighteen wheeler and transported across state lines. This particular box of ammo was delivered to the residence of a certain senator’s daughter living in Oregon.

The magazine was loaded by someone else’s hands, then loaded into an immaculate glock that had never been fired, which was then delivered into the hands of Sasha Collins, who placed it in a holster under her arm.

“You gotta rack the slide numbnuts!” Jeb shouted.

Lefty showed up.

“Sad show over there. How’s it hanging here?” he asked. “Hey, isn’t that the senator’s kid that got eaten by a cougar?”

“Yes, yes it is.”

Apparently Sasha liked to hike through cougar infested mountains, and today her luck finally ran out.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Sasha said as the cougar stalked toward her. A cougar weighed about the same as a human, but it was literally born to kill. Rich kids? Not so much.

She pulled out the gun and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

“Safety.” Sasha muttered, flipping the safety off with her thumb and pulling the trigger again.

Nothing happened.

Sasha looked really panicked now, and the cougar was even closer. The woman was quick enough on her feet to realize she hadn’t engaged the first bullet. Sasha wasn’t dumb.

She pulled back the slide, the defective bullet making its way into the chamber.

‘Left’ Jeb and ‘right’ Jeb Inhaled a sharp breath through their teeth.

Sasha pulled the trigger again. The cougar was only fifteen feet away now.

Click. Instead of a bullet tearing out of the barrel and killing the cougar or scaring it away, NOTHING HAPPENED.

“It’s a dud, rack the slide again…” Jeb said as his consciousness combined, sounding like a tired range instructor. But while Sasha was pretty quick on her feet, her gun failing her three times in a row was just too much for her to handle. She turned to run, and that’s where things got messy.

“She would’ve been the first female president, you know, had things taken a different course. But you just had to try and kill yourself.” A familiar voice rose above the screaming and growling.

Mab. The as-of-yet unseen benefactor who seemed to delight in keeping him safe in the evilest way possible.

“Don’t try to guilt me. I’m fairly sure the first female president is gonna be crazy evil, because all presidents are evil, and if a woman wants into that club, she’s gonna have to out-evil them. It’s part of the job. We both know you didn’t have to save me.”

Jeb had seen the tiny glimmer of Myst that had changed those two primers, after all. Having gotten a bit more experience, Jeb realized he’d followed the path the Myst had taken that had swapped Sasha Collin’s Impact for his own.

The poetry of two defective bullets created by the same manufacturing error killing one person and saving another was not lost on Jeb. It was classic fairy bullshit.

“Does this mean I’m going to be the first female president?” Jeb asked, his voice oozing with sarcasm.

“She was the most appropriate sacrifice in the web of causality surrounding you.” Mab said. “If you don’t wish for more blood to be on your hands, stop trying to kill yourself and accept your destiny.”

“Ooh, is this the part where you don’t tell me what my destiny is and then fade away mysteriously, leaving me mentally off-balance?”

“…You humans really have hardened your dreams against us, haven’t you?” The voice spoke, part frustrated, part amused. “I blame video games.”

“You put that spell on me, you’re responsible for those deaths,” Jeb shot back, giving the sky the finger. “Don’t you dare think you can make me beholden to you.”

“You already are. Ah, but now that you know about the spell, the responsibility for deaths caused by it will be partly yours.”

Jeb wasn’t planning on killing himself anymore, but he definitely wasn’t going to say as much to Mab. That might constitute a promise. And you never promise a fairy queen anything. He’d rather keep his options open.

“Your destiny, Jebediah Trapper, is to be my-“

“You know what? Fuck this dream. Jebediah out.”

Jeb looked up at the sky, where The Spike hovered above him. As soon as he directed his attention to it, the metal beam, the last lingering phantom of his PTSD, began plummeting down, crushing him into the cheap G.I. bed and popping him like a grape under a bowling ball.

***Elsewyr, The Death Wilds***

Mab’s eye twitched, the greatest sign of displeasure the immortal had made in four hundred years. Her courtiers, each a powerful immortal in their own right, reflexively flinched backwards, taking a safe distance from their queen.

“I blame video games,” She muttered, taking a sip of her C’lackcha.

******

Jeb leapt out of his sleeping bag, groaning and rubbing the fading pain out of his chest, his heart hammering against his ribs like it was trying to get out.

Despite the pain, Jeb was chuckling to himself as he slipped into his duds. It was like hanging up on the president. You’d have to be a crazy bastard, but god-damn if it wasn’t satisfying as hell.

Jeb snapped on a ball of plasma, lighting up the campsite as he looked around the pre-dawn gloom for his shaving supplies.

Not because he needed it. Jeb’s vision was fairly decent in the dark nowadays. No, he was doing it in order to cycle the spell into his repertoire. It reminded Jeb of memorizing combos on a fighting game and then deliberately overusing them until they became second nature.

There was nothing easy about changing from telekinesis to crackling plasma, but with enough practice, Jeb should be able to call on it at a moment’s notice. Jeb used the age-old tradition of counting Mississippi’s to keep track of his progress.

Three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi…

Bang! The ball of plasma destabilized and erupted violently. Another good thing Jeb had figured out was the technique of pinching off the supply of Myst before the detonation became more powerful than a firecracker.

The ability to abort a reaction would serve him well when he moved on to more dangerous kinds of magic.

No explosions at all would be better.

Jeb took care of his morning ablutions, then slipped his leg on, stretching in the morning sun with a ball of plasma above him.

Bang!

“It feels like a good day for hunting pirates.” Jeb said as Legolas approached. “If we snag a few more Ability books, we might be able to piece together more hints for making the Translation work better.”

The little drone’s LED blinked red.

“We won’t be able to piece together more hints?”

Red.

“It’s not a good day for hunting pirates?

Green.

“Huh. Are they up to something that makes them hard to fight? Did they gather together and fortify or something?”

Red.

“Are they coming after me?” Jeb said

Red.

“You know what, let me get my pencil. We can do Morse.”

Green.

Jeb grabbed his pencil and started jotting down Legolas’s message, using green blinks to represent spaces

T-H-I-R-D. green. P-A-R-T-Y. green. K-I-L-L-I-N-G. green. P-I-R-A-T-E-S.

Huh. Jeb thought, tapping his pencil against his chin. Sounds like another bounty hunter is horning in on the buffet I set up. He needed the scrub pirates to imperil themselves through enough incompetence that they’d be willing to sell their Abilities to survive. For that they needed to be alive. The more dangerous ones were worth a significant amount of money, but money wasn’t Jeb’s primary focus at the moment.

Unfortunately for Jeb’s plans, the inept, weak-willed scrub pirates were the easiest ones to track and defeat.

Goddamnit.

Jeb had to at least see what the damage was. Maybe he could convince whoever it was to spare the mooks and just take the named bounties. The only problem was, if Jeb did that, the other bounty hunter would instantly grow suspicious, wanting to know why on Pharos Jeb would care enough to spare them. They would immediately think he had some kind of angle.

Which he did.

Then they would try to spy on him, or interrogate the ones he’d ‘saved’, possibly forcing him to kill them, or worse yet, spreading information about what his ring could do, which infringed on the domain of the gods.

The most pragmatic solution was to kill the other bounty hunter, but Jeb didn’t wanna be that kind of monster.

I guess we can always hope the guy’s an unrepentant puppy kicker/lobbyist with no family who moonlights as a serial killer. Things rarely played out that way, but Jeb could always hope.

Jeb poked Smartass awake, then picked himself up with telekinesis, rising into the air before following Legolas toward the nearest nameless pirate mook.

There wasn’t much left of the guy.

He’d been…for lack of a better word: Splatted.

“Gross.” Smartass said, before making retching noises directly into his ear.

Jeb ignored her and knelt down, studying the scene.

This particular nameless pirate mook had been a keegan, and something had hit him hard enough to turn him inside out. That was made even more impressive because Keegan were so thin, that their body was quite tough. Not a lot of soft tissue to turn inside out.

“So from what I can see, we’re either looking at a Myst user, or someone with a really big hammer.” The guy’s body had essentially folded around a spot on his upper torso.

Either was a possibility, but as Jeb studied the scene, he began to lean more in the direction of Myst user. There were no tracks aside from the victim’s, implying the other person was a flyer.

Okay, we’ve got a flier who can turn people inside out, that sound…familiar. Assuming I’m not sleep-murdering, then the list of people who can do this kind of shit is pretty short.

It sounded like Meyers.

Jeb hadn’t seen a mutated corpse of the severe old woman, so there was a possibility she’d survived The Roil.

Then why didn’t she come after me? We were in the same area last night.

Jeb was aware that the constant bright lights and explosions at his camp were a dead giveaway. Since his practice with Zeshnei’s Translation was bright and loud, he’d made sure to trap the shit out of his campsite. If anyone that wasn’t him, Legolas, or Smartass came within range, they’d be mincemeat. Perhaps Meyers knew that too. She’d done his Debrief and seen his Ability in action, after all. She probably knew attacking Jeb in an area he’d prepared was suicide.

His antics had been so obviously a trap that he’d been spared an attack in the middle of the night. How amusing.

“Legolas, keep an eye out for that old lady who knocked you out of the sky last time.”

The drone wobbled and flashed a green light, raising higher into the sky before spinning, keeping his cameras searching for threats.

“What should I do?” Smartass asked.

“You just focus on not getting killed by crazy old women.” Jeb glanced around the barren desert. There weren’t a lot of places for the fairy to hide. “Try to stay small and inconspicuous.”

“I excel at being inconspicuous!” Smartass shouted, saluting him before diving into a nearby shadow between a rock and dirt. As long as she didn’t move she was rather hard to spot.

Not bad.

Then she dove to another shadow, grunting as she executed a rolling dive before vanishing into the next tiny shadow. Then she did it again.

I stand corrected.

“Next.” Jeb said to Legolas.

The drone led him to more pirates, mashed much the same way as the other. This time it was five from the original group Jeb had scattered. They had joined up and were doing alright for themselves, by all accounts. Their corpses were spread around a cold campfire, a makeshift tent, and a half-eaten desert lizard about the size of a large dog.

Like the first, they were turned inside out through sheer brute force. Jeb used telekinesis to grab their heads and hold them in front of himself, tugging out his stack of bounty fliers.

“Hmm…there we go.” Jeb muttered to himself when he recognized ‘Skinny’ kat’chek, a mid-level Melas of ill-repute. Two bulbs.

Jeb returned the head to its body, then began the unenviable task of turning him right side in.

“Hey,” Smartass whispered from the shadow of a rock. “What are you doing? That’s super gross.”

“If our friend who’s turning people inside out is a bounty hunter,” Jeb said, straightening out the corpse and putting the guts back in place. “Then they’ll have severed a finger, taken an eye, a strip of belly fat, something to feed to the grinder and prove they’d taken care of the bounty. Otherwise they don’t get paid.”

Try as he might, Jeb couldn’t find any mysteriously missing pieces of the corpse. That ruled out two things: Cannibalism and bounty hunting.

So he either had a crazed person, a reaper, or a serial killer.

Those categories aren’t exclusive, obviously, Jeb thought, eyeing the sky above him. Again there were no tracks other than the people who belonged here.

As a precaution, Jeb made a dozen flyswatter traps designed to smack any flier that wasn’t him or his companions out of the air. It’d buy him some time and stifle an ambush.

Fighting in 3-d space wasn’t Jeb’s forte, not like Meyers. Jeb was going to assume she would win in a straight-up dogfight.

He took the bounty’s finger before he rose up into the air and checked out a couple more pirate camps, finding more or less the same scene in every direction.

Well, shit.

The desert had small rolling hills, the occasional boulder, cactuses and low, scraggly brush.

Not a whole lot of cover. Jeb couldn’t see the killer, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still around. Jeb considered his options.

He could travel further out from his support base and look for another group of pirates, possibly under the watchful eye of a crazed serial reaper who was likely salivating over the idea of killing him for his Impact, or play it safe and return to base, debrief with Eddie.

I wonder, Jeb thought, rolling his eyes and keeping his head on a swivel. He picked Smartass up and they started heading southwest, back toward Solmnath.

The whole time, Jeb didn’t spot a sign of the killer.

He did, however, accidentally swat a vulture out of the air as he passed by another group of corpses. The poor thing exploded into a ball of feathers as a literal giant fly swatter of telekinetic force slapped it straight down to earth.

Jeb winced and mumbled an apology to the twitching bird

*** Abigail Meyers, Level 71 Ace***

Abbie hid in the sun. A favorite trick of hers, made even better with her Specialist abilities.

Her control over the air around her allowed her to lens the light in such a way that she didn’t leave a defined shadow, only a slightly darker smudge on the ground.

A person wouldn’t be able to see it unless they already knew where it was.

She watched Jeb travel from kill to kill, led by the black scout drone with a seemingly inexhaustible power supply. I gotta get me one of those.

She saw the occasional flash of a fairy as well. Her eyes had always been fantastic, and since the Tutorial, they were unnaturally good. Beyond the limitations of physics, even. Making out a creature smaller than a football from about a quarter mile up in the air was no sweat.

Jebediah Trapper and two minor threats, she thought, her jaw clenching. Her fingers sank into the gold plating around the dungeon core, knuckles whitening.

No matter how much she wanted to swoop down and take her chances, success was not guaranteed. The slippery bastard had already proved that when he took out three of her men in a matter of seconds despite seemingly being at a disadvantage.

She should have figured he would ‘key’ his traps to verbal commands. She had naively assumed he would make the equivalent of simple claymores and land mines. Stationary booby traps with well-defined ways to circumvent them. She had assumed if she pulled him away from his barracks and out into a spot he hadn’t been, he would be defenseless.

It was a failure of imagination on her part.

Abbie deliberately relaxed her fingers, pulling them out of the divots in the gold plate. She watched Jeb ponder for a while before choosing the safe route, heading back to Solmnath, his fairy riding on his shoulder, book-bag flapping in the wind as he flew.

You could do it now, A small, less disciplined part of her whispered.

Sure, it looked ideal. Jeb and his fairy were both flying low, barely two hundred feet off the ground. They were looking down and away, and she was above and behind them.

His drone couldn’t look up effectively, either. It was a couple hundred feet above the pair, in an amateur’s equivalent of ‘high altitude’ overwatch.

Abbie could dive, bust the bot and close the distance between the drone and Jebediah’s spine in about zero point two seconds. She’d timed herself.

Seconds were an eternity when you were fighting for your life, but a fifth of a second? That wasn’t much. Maybe he’d have time to twitch or draw a weapon, but not enough to use it, and certainly not enough to speak a code-phrase for one of his ‘traps’.

He’s getting away! Her impatience shouted, Starting to claw its way past the iron bars of discipline she’d established over her lifetime. Her mouth begin to water, her pupils dilated, her heart beating out a staccato rythm it hadn’t in decades.

She was about to kill someone she wanted to kill.

Kill kill kill KILL KILL!

Abbie carefully shifted in midair, aligned so her body was head down, moving until she, the drone and Jeb drew a straight line. Like a spider dangling above a stupid, stupid caterpillar who made the mistake of coming into the spider’s home turf. NOW! KILL HIM!

A vulture exploded.

The voice in her head went silent as the vulture plummeted down to the earth, it’s only sin getting within a hundred feet of Trapper. The traitor had obviously warded himself against other flying creatures coming close to him. Trying to ambush him might have easily become a fair fight.

Fair fights were to be avoided.

Abbie swallowed a physical lump of disappointment. It tasted like blood.

She relaxed her jaw and the bleeding stopped.

You see? She thought to herself. Be patient. Stick to the plan. He’ll get what he deserves when we’re ready.

She ran her thumb over the divot in the gold, smoothing it out.

When we’re ready. Abbie turned and flew further east. She needed more levels. Aliens had them in spades. She needed to move fast before word got out and they sent an Enforcer after her.

From her viewpoint a quarter mile in the air, she could make out a plume of dust in the distance, where a caravan full of alien scum made its ponderous way through the desert.

That’ll do.