Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other 3 (Patreon)

Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other

Chapter 3

-VB-

When the Heartbroken and I walked through Doormaker’s portal at Contessa’s demands, we found ourselves at a busy street filled with people working. There were technicians, engineers, haulers, movers, soldiers, heroes, villains, and more.

Unlike the Boston that I left, most of the people here were capes and many of the engineers were tinkers from all walks of life.

“Heartbroken. Follow Tattletale,” Contessa directed them as the Doormaker portal closed behind us. She then turned to me. “Your station is right across the street. It has everything you need to start making your medical syringes.”

I looked around some more, ignoring how she just left me here and expecting me to work my ass off… because I probably was -.

Ping.

I paused and looked at the counter of my vision. There was an … alert? Hold up, Rust doesn’t have any alert systems. With but a thought, I brought the alert to the forefront of my mind and found myself looking at …

Oh.

My power wasn’t just an emulation of Rust. I … I triggered among at least one other cape in vicinity. Were there more than one?

Because the alert was letting me know that the “network” of “components” had stabilized, and my other power was available for me now.

This … smelled like bullshit.

It stank to high heavens of bullshit.

There was a single cape. If there were more, then they would have killed me before then. If I was a grabbag cape, then I would have copies or similarities. What about that wendigo bastard was -.

I paused.

Wendigo. That’s what the Teeth cape looked like. Wendigos could turn other people into wendigos. Was the shard responsible for my power using that as a basis for this function?

The “Clone” function?

I pressed on i-.

And then I was suddenly looking at myself from two different places.

““WoW.””

Oh, this was a clone but not a separate person. This was me.

I raised both body’s arms up and did a wave.

And giggled.

Cuz I’m still immature like that.

But my attention quickly focused on my situation when someone walked up to us angrily.

“Hey, this is no time to be fucking around!”

I turned both of my bodies around and saw a tall brown-armored man with the lower half of his face uncovered. Though the armor platings looked like wooden barrels, they also gave off a metallic sheen. This along with the fact that most of the capes here seemed to be tinkers also clued me in as to who this was.

“You’re Cask,” I said.

He was a “brew” tinker and one of the few capes capable of healing. His “patients,” however, would need to drink a lot of his brew for their wounds to be healed, leaving them drunk and very much out of it.

Cask stopped and stared at us. “You know about me?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I’m a cape geek who just became a cape less than a few hours ago.”

He winced, understanding what must have happened to me. Suddenly, he became more understanding.

“So you make clones?”

“I’m a grabbag,” I grinned. “This is my second power.”

“Hoh? And the first?”

“I can make a lot of things … without actually moving my hands. Guns, ammo, and medical syringes.”

“... Show me.”

We walked over to my workstation as Contessa pointed out, and I found a lot of scrap, oil, cloth, and metal fragments there. Sure, they weren’t like the game… but my power didn’t care or differentiate. There were three workbenches of varying complexity, and while everyone else just saw workbenches, my power and I saw access to a core function of the Rust game: the tech tree.

Stopping in front of the Level 2 workbench, I grabbed the scrap metal and began using it to unlock each item along the tech tree. I didn’t unlock just the medical syringes but also medical kits, armor, electrical components, and weapons.

‘Why did Contessa leave so much scrap for me to use?’ I thought to myself as my second body began grabbing the low-grade fuel, cloth, and metal fragments. They disappeared in reality and showed up in our inventory, and we began churning out the syringes.

Cask looked confused. “Are you two doing anything?”

“Give us ten seconds,” I replied.

And ten seconds later, we had our first syringe.

I brought it out of my inventory and into the real world.

Then I grabbed one of the knives and cut deeply into my forearm. Blood dribbled out from the wound almost immediately. Did I hit an artery?

“The hell-?”

And injected myself with the syringe. There was a hiss… and then the wound immediately stopped bleeding. In the following five seconds, the wound closed and didn’t even leave a scar.

“Proven, yes?”

Cask looked at me with an exasperated interest. “Yeah, yeah. Just start making and distributing them around.”

“Will do.”

As the day went on, I gathered all of the scrap metals, metal fragments, and even bits of quality metal discarded by the other tinkers. I turned those into usable pipes, gears, and even gun receivers which I then distributed back to the tinkers.

That’s when they started treating me less as an untested tinker and more as someone to be treated as an equal, though the rotten ones - heroes, rogues, and villains alike - treated me more like an intern.

It was the other capes that treated me right. Unlike most of the tinkers stuck here making shit to be used on the field, most of the other capes were out there fighting, whether it was Scion or something else like the Teeth.

For hours, all I did was make the syringes for the frontliners to use. This felt oddly like what I used to do as Rust farmer. Farm for my friends, watch the base while they went to raid, landmine our territory, roofcamp the shit out of the nakeds, and ignore their whines on global chat.

But then this happened.

“We lost!”

Both of my bodies looked up to see an open portal and a cape using one of my syringes to heal himself. He still collapsed while bleeding like crazy, and someone else who came through with him jabbed him with another syringe.

One of the tinkers walked up and they talked.

It took less than a minute before all of the tinkers realized that the Oil Rig Battle, the battle upon which the united(?) cape alliance attacked Scion, was lost. It took them less than an hour to grab whatever they could before they fled.

That’s when Contessa came along, again. For me. This time, she had a very hated blonde girl with her.

And Contessa demanded I take part in this next bit.

Khepri was soon about to rise up.