Save State Hero -Ch6- (Patreon)

Clicking his tongue, Edmund picked up the receiver on the phone and put it to his ear.

“Hey,” he said, feeling very strange with both Alina and Dorothy staring at him.

“Hey hey. Just wanted to… uh… just wanted to chat! Things didn’t really go the way I expected the other day and-well-you know-that… er… yeah. Just wanted to chat.

“You didn’t read the text message so I figured you were at work. Saw you were signed into the system so gave you a call,” explained Romina. She sounded uncertain and remorseful at the same time. As if she had more to say and was working her way up to it. “You don’t mind, do you? I didn’t see anything on your calendar.”

“Actually, I can’t really chit-chat,” admitted Edmund. “I’ve got two visitors in my office from the consultants. I’ll be working with them and we were just having a meet-and-greet thing.”

“Wait, really?” asked Romina, sounding surprised. “Oh! Consultants like Ryker? Is he there? I could throw up a stream real quick and have him on. Things always get interesting when he’s around.”

“Ah… no. He left me with two assistants that I’ll be working with,” Edmund explained. “He had to go and take care of stuff. He’s probably wandering around.

“But uh… did you forget that I’m not at HQ? I’m down south. You’re house-sitting.”

“Ah! Right. Yeah. Yeah! Cool. Cool, cool, cool,” mumbled Romina. “Just uh… hit me up later when you can.”

“I’ll do that. I’ll call you when I get a chance. I’ll talk to you later,” Edmund said and then set the phone down on the receiver. He did it rather awkwardly given how nervous he was feeling, smacking it against the phone itself rather than the cradle.

“Ah, who was that?” asked Dorothy when Edmund looked back up.

“Romina. She’s in the… er… marketing department I guess you could say,” Edmund responded.

“You’re not dating her,” Alina stated firmly.

“No. I’m not.”

“We’re both single, too,” Dorothy chimed in, pointing at herself and Alina. “It’s hard for me to date as a wizard and Alina… well… do you even want to date?”

“I mean, yes? I do want to date But my standards are a bit rough to fit,” Alina confessed, her facial expression finally changing as she looked to Dorothy. She looked like she was considering something. “They have to taste good for one. That’s a hard thing to pass and for people to get over.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” Dorothy muttered then she looked back to Edmund. “Well, I think you’re rather handsome Edmund. I don’t think for a minute that you couldn’t get a girlfriend if you actually tried.”

Alina looked back to Edmund and then chuckled softly.

“She’s lying. She saw a photo of you a while back when Ryker started talking about working with you and she’s been trying to figure out how to dress up for this moment,” Alina deadpanned. “She’ll ask you out tonight, tomorrow, or the day after we finish the work. Better you prepare your answer now.”

“Uh,” Edmund offered as a poignant counter-point.

“Anyways!” Dorothy enunciated and then stood up, grabbing Alina by an elbow. “Let’s move on to the first project. Getting to know one another! I hear there’s lots of fun breakfast places nearby. Let’s get going, shall we?”

Leading Alina to the door Dorothy opened it and pulled the other woman outside, hissing at her under her breath as she did so. Saying something that caused Alina to laugh at it.

“Well aren’t they fun,” Edmund mumbled and got up and turned off his computer. Work for the moment, could wait.

He checked to make sure he had his keys, wallet, and cell phone, then exited the office. Making sure it was locked he looked down the hall.

Alina and Dorothy were still arguing as they walked further away from him.

“Shame they aren’t the ones I wanted to date,” Edmund lamented ironically. He wasn’t interested in either Alina or Dorothy.

They were certainly attractive, but that only was only part of it. He needed more than just someone being good looking.

***

Sitting in the car, Edmund stared out over the hood at the intersection. They were currently waiting for a red-light.

“Doesn’t feel like a different w—” Alina started then paused. “Doesn’t feel like a different wait time for a green light. I thought intersections were supposed to be super short in the south.”

Edmund considered that, his brows furrowing.

He hadn’t heard that one before.

“Not everything about the south according to rumors is real,” Edmund said with some venom to the words. “A lot of it is. Whole hell of a lot. Especially now that I’ve seen other parts of the country. But not everything.”

“Cousins marrying cousins?” Dorothy asked helpfully from the passenger seat. She had a playful tone in her question.

“Doesn’t happen as much as you’d think, but second and out happen. With smaller communities you end up related in more ways than you think. You wouldn’t even know if someone is related to you until a lot later, too,” Edmund responded without too much thought. He’d met a number of people who’d been dating family in one way or another.

“It’s not like you go out of your way to find out if you’re related. Get like a hair and send it off to one of those DNA places.”

“Isn’t there a movie about that?” asked Alina with a chuckle.

“I’m pretty sure there was yeah,” Edmund answered as they sat there waiting thinking on it. “Atacaga or something or other.”

“Wanna give Dorothy a hair so she can go get your DNA pulled out, Edmund? It’d save us some time,” Alina asked with a throaty chuckle.

Dorothy gave her companion a side eye that could melt the glass window next to her. Alina just gazed back at the other woman.

Edmund really had the feeling that Dorothy was mentally younger than he or Alina. That what she was likely feeling was puppy love or infatuation.

It felt immature and incorrect to him.

“You feeling that spicy Alina?” asked Dorothy with a strange coldness to her words.

“Ah… no. Sorry. I’m just playing around. We can just—”

“Ohhh nooo,” reported Edmund’s phone.

The caller ID listed it as “Legion” and nothing else. That meant it was someone calling from a phone line rather than the Encampment app.

“What the fuck?” Alina asked.

“Ohhh nooo,” Edmund’s phone helpfully repeated before he could hit the accept button.

“Edmund,” he said, staring at the console in the of his dash.

“I need a hand,” said Faith.

“Okay,” he responded. They were technically on a line that might not be perfectly clean. That meant that he had to be rather careful with it rather than speaking freely.

“Undocumented Super. Need someone to take a registration. Pretty likely a police task force will be there to assist,” Faith explained. “I’ll also be providing a containment team for you. Low level Association Supers who’ll be key for this.

“You’re just there to make sure things go according to doctrine and that’s it. I’m assigning it to you because you’re in the area and the transponder from your vehicle puts you at about ten minutes away.”

“I understand. I’m unarmored and outside of uniform. I also have two consultants from… from the consultant with me,” Edmund finished.

“Containment team has spares. You can use those for the time being. I can see you already put in the temporary forms for the consultants so that’s fine. Any questions?” Faith asked, she sounded like she was trying to get something else done at the same time.

“What am I dealing with?” he asked, feeling like that was the most crucial piece of information.

“We don’t know. Anything else?”

Sitting there, Edmund hesitated.

Then the light turned green.

“Nope. Send me the address,” he finished and then pulled off to one side. Pulling into a small parking lot for a convenience store.

“Thank you,” Faith said and disconnected the line.

“That was a bit odd,” Dorothy murmured, turning to look at Edmund.

“Unsecure line,” Alina answered before he could, waving a hand at the dash. “They’re just being safe. We do the same thing. Burner phones and the like. It makes sense.

“I like it. I like all of this, actually. This is a lot of fun so far. More than I expected. Warner’s kinda boring all the time and more like a dad figure.”

“I mean, he is a dad so that makes sense,” Dorothy countered, looking at Alina.

Edmund was quietly trying to ignore both women. He was looking at his phone and waiting for an address to come through.

Then it did.

Tapping it, he routed it to his map app and then plugged in the shortest possible route. It wasn’t the fastest, but it was the shortest.

Time to friggin’ play crazy taxi I guess.

“Tighten your belts. We’re gonna drive a bit erratically I’m betting,” Edmund warned.

“No one drives like Daria does so… whatever. I’ll be fine,” Alina murmured in an offhand way.

Edmund had no idea who Daria was, but he imagined she was probably a handful.

Dorothy was the opposite of Alina. Tightening her seatbelt and pulling it close into her lap. Then pushing herself back into the car seat.

Ugh. I’m going to be pushing another save-state today. This is happening way too often. This is way too much on my poor brain.

Not thinking about it, Edmund dropped down yet another save state. Right on top of the one he’d made when he met Alina and Dorothy.

Immediately there was a sense of vertigo that rushed over him.

“You alright? Your heart-rate just spiked and it’s real slow now,” Alina asked curiously.

“Oh yeah, just… you know… realizing we’re gonna break a bunch of laws,” mumbled Edmund. He put the car in reverse, cranked the volume on the navigation app.

“Turn right on Quail Hill,” announced the phone.

“Ha, right,” Edmund said then whipped the steering wheel to one side, causing the vehicle to slide around facing the correct direction.

Edmund stomped on the gas pedal and pulled them into oncoming traffic.

“Oh shit!” squeaked Dorothy as Edmund blew through an intersection.

“Continue for two miles on Quail Hill,” provided the phone.

Edmund dodged around a car and ended up bouncing up an island divider and crushing several bushes with his bumper.

Only to rebound off the island, slam into a car and bounce into the right side of traffic.

“Oh my god you’re worse than Daria!” screamed Alina.

To which Edmund reloaded the save-state

Flooring it this time into reverse he whipped the steering wheel around before the app could even tell him where to go, then gunned it.

“Oh shit!” squeaked Dorothy again, though in a different pitch this time.

Edmund blasted into oncoming traffic once more.

This time he successfully dodged through the cars, went up partially onto the island with his right side tires, then came back down. Blowing through another intersection.

And getting obliterated by a luxury sedan.

Edmund reloaded the save-state again.

Reverse, steering wheel, oncoming traffic.

Dodge, doge, right.

Intersection.

Island, ease off.

Stop for intersection.

Edmund steadily worked through each situation in his mind as it came up. Committing it to the reload list he compiled when he got into these situations.

As if they were each a type of split from his run and he needed to move from check-point to checkpoint.

The luxury sedan that’d smashed into them last time zipped past at max speed. Clearly speeding and not giving a damn.

No sooner than they passed then Edmund dropped his foot on the pedal.

“Oh my god you’re worse than Daria, Redemption protect me!” screamed Alina.

“Who’s Redemption?” asked Edmund placidly while weaving them back and forth between the lanes. Going over the double yellows in the center and the unused middle space.

“Just drive!” begged Dorothy.

“In five hundred feet, merge onto the—”

Edmund didn’t hear the rest and tuned it out as he pulled on the steering wheel and pushed the gas down again. The engine roaring as they sped toward the ramp on the left.

It’d put them onto a freeway.

Moving up onto the ramp Edmund zoomed across on the shoulder and wiped out a traffic light. Blasting through it and sending it flying into the air.

Then the car flew into the air.

The onramp had been built in such a way that it moved up to the freeway, but then fell away on a decline.

Leaving Edmund with the onramp becoming a ramp.

Alina had ducked her head down now between her legs and was mumbling something to herself. Dorothy was plastered to the passenger seat with one hand gripping the door and the other the center console.

All the while making a high-pitched whining noise.

“Redemption save me, Redemption save me, Redemption save me!” whimpered Alina in a shriek a second before the car slammed back down into the pavement.

Edmund got control over the vehicle and brought it under control before it could go into a slide.

Okay, need to send a thank you card to Andrea. Learning how to handle an out of control car was totally worth the anxiety it put me through.

“Man, working for a super-villain is so weird,” Edmund said with a laugh as he floored it once again. The car picking up speed as they began to quite literally flicker past other cars.

When the car reached triple digits Edmund glanced at his phone for a split second.

It wanted him to proceed for another mile before exiting to the right.

Looking in that direction, Edmund could see that the off-ramp was filled with cars. Whatever was going on it was creating a traffic jam one way or another.

Edmund took an extra moment to look at the map. Trying to memorize exactly where they were going to end up.

Then he looked up from the phone and spotted where they were actually heading to. It looked to be some sort of big box store with a lot of flashing lights surrounding it.

The car then blasted through a concrete divider and the world nearly exploded with the force of the crash.

Managing to force a save-state load even as he felt his body get torn apart, Edmund blinked as everything came back to the starting point again. Leaving him with a strange sense of his body being destroyed.

“You alright? Your heart-rate just spiked and it’s real slow now,” Alina asked curiously.

“Yeah, you should just… put your head down,” advised Edmund, then tore the transmission into reverse. Whipping the car around, then zipping off down into traffic once again.

Going through each step of the reload once again, Edmund took the onramp a bit slower this time and didn’t end up going airborne.

“Hey, who’s Redemption?” Edmund asked as they slid onto the highway proper. The engine roaring to life as they sped down it.

Alina didn’t respond.

She was head down in the back of the car with her head between her legs.

“Right,” Edmund muttered after glancing in the mirror and seeing where she was.

Up ahead he could see the off ramp again and the location they were going to beyond it. Not too far from that was a a section on the shoulder that didn’t have any barriers.

“Oh, there we go, let’s try that,” Edmund said almost to himself.

“What? Try-no! Let’s not!” Dorothy begged.

Edmund ignored her and pushed the pedal down, aiming the vehicle straight at the shoulder. He put the hood on course to pass right by a speed-limit sign.

Then they exited the freeway and immediately became airborne.

“Fuck no!” screamed Dorothy.

Fuckin’ a! Ha!

Edmund felt his heart racing and his mouth curling up in a grin.

There were a number of things he’d done if only to experience them and rewound time.

Even for him, this was a new one though.

Flying through the air they began to nose dive right before they hit the ground. The hood slamming into the parking lot of the big box store they were heading to.

With a squeal the engine instantly died and the transmission broke, leaving Edmund with a dead car that was rapidly losing power.

They slowly coasted forward with what momentum it had left.

“You’ve arrived,” announced the phone. A moment after that the screen switched to a ‘how did we do?’ type of survey question with five smiley faces as the rating system.

“You hear that? We’re here,” Edmund offered cheerily as Dorothy let her hands fall into her lap. In the backseat Alina lifted her head up and peered out through the cracked windshield.

Then the car came to a final stop next to two police cars and ended up nudging one gently.

A number of policemen turned to face them and then raised weapons and pointed them at Edmund and his passengers.

Edmund sat there staring at the cops.

They stared at him.

Uh… okay.

They need to know who I am so…

Edmund reached up and flicked the switch that would turn on the interior light bar that all Association vehicles had.

With a pop, the light bar turned on and began to alternating flash blue and red. The colors splashing the police officers and cars around them in color.

“Ta-Daaaaa,” his phone stated.

Oh, time to feed Dog.

Thanks Romina.

Couldn’t be down here trying to help out Earline without you handling that for me. Then again… hopefully she isn’t doing anything weird.

Like going through my sock drawer.