James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords Episode 4: Chapter 9 - Bootleg Brewing
🕑 Added 2023-08-24 17:00:03 +0000 UTCThe Sooq’s resident apothecary—a snakeheaded naga clad in a long, ratty bathrobe that had seen better days—wasn’t too happy about being rousted out of his rack in the wee hours of the morning. That was, until he saw the gold gleaming in Clay’s hand.
There were two languages everyone in the wasteland spoke fluently. The first was violence. The second was barter. Clay had learned that there was no such thing as contentment on this side of the wall. Resources were scarce. And competition was fierce. As a result, everyone needed something. Admittedly, the things people needed didn’t always make sense to Clay. Tajira, the cat lady Dungeon Lord of the Sooq, had gladly given away the Camera Obscura for a magical Saltshaker, and Diebolt had parted with an alchemist’s beginner set for a bunch of stupid plush figures.
Neither made sense to Clay, but he supposed sometimes what made life worth living was the small comforts. Like the old, dog-eared paperbacks he picked up for more coin than rightly made sense.
The naga merchant, Prin, was no different, and it turned out what he wanted was sparkly and gold. His shop was tucked away inside a vintage school bus with a custom paint job. The interior had been completely gutted, the seats ripped out and replaced with sleek hardwood floors and dark wooden panels meticulously carved with intricate mandalas, trumpeting elephants, and the traditional dragon-headed nagas of Thailand. The carved panels were accented with gold. So much gold it almost physically hurt to look at. Additionally, gold statuettes adorned end tables and nooks carefully recessed into the walls.
Gold and red paper lanterns hung from walls and the ceiling, and matching pillows took the place of chairs or other furniture—which made perfect sense to Clay’s mind. Why bother with chairs if you didn’t have legs?
Clay was happy to contribute to the naga’s interior decorating fund if it meant scoring what he needed to manufacture more “divine brews.”
The front portion of the converted bus served as Prim’s shop, and the naga had everything Clay needed and more. Jars full of oversized bee stingers and desiccated eyeballs. Baskets loaded with bundled herbs, odd fruits, and bits of dried monster intestine—the last was apparently a key ingredient used in certain stamina elixirs. Interestingly, though, the one thing he didn’t have any of was Mountain Dew. When Clay noted that particular shortfall, Prin shut up tight as a clam. When Clay pressed him on the issue, the best he got was a noncommittal answer about “long-standing trade agreements with the Incants of Malibu.”
Prin’s reluctance spoke volumes—especially now that Clay knew the score.
Although the naga was staunchly unwilling to talk about whatever deal he had with Rhett and Cassidy, he immediately brightened when the subject switched to talk of potions. Poisons in particular. The tome Diebolt had given Clay covered the basics of alchemic brewing and provided a host of simple recipes for the standard brews found throughout the wasteland—Healing, Magicka, and Stamina regen potions. It didn’t cover much past that.
Prin, on the other hand, was a master Alchemist who had learned at the feet of Zyra the Shadowblade, Septic Brewmaster for Roark the Griefer himself.
“I have forgotten more about potion making than the next ten alchemists ever learned,” Prin hissed.
Clay took that claim with a small grain of salt, considering the source of the info. Still, biased or not, the snakeman had an additional tome he was willing to part with, called Principles of Bootlegging, and a handwritten recipe for a signature poison he’d concocted himself called Prin’s Merciless Bite.
Clay left the school bus with four plastic shopping bags full of ingredients and crafting components. He’d also picked up the tome and extra recipe, even though it cost him damn near an arm and a leg—it didn’t help that Prin had added an “inconvenience” tax for waking him up before the butt crack of dawn. Then he just had to make a stop at a few convenience stores and bodegas on the way.
He made it back to the Malibu water treatment facility just as the sun was peeking over the eastern horizon.
Hopefully red sky in the morning meant a brewer’s delight or something that Clay was too tired to make rhyme. He rubbed gritty eyes and started packing his purchased and looted ingredients down into the sewers.
Belowground, in the conjunction where Clay had received his path from the animatronic fortune teller, the Jaeger squad and the Brothers of the Dew were just digging into breakfast. Joe and Chonk were the only ones joining the brothers in downing cans of soda, but there were platters piled high with fresh grapes, almonds, and party-sized bags of Funyuns.
The best surprise of all came when Clay found Griff and Alex. They had scrounged up a bag of green coffee beans from the ruins of a Starbucks down the street and spent the morning roasting, grinding, and percolating.
“You look like you could use a drink, sailor,” Alex joked, holding out a steaming mug to him. “Fresh out of the French press.”
Clay’s mouth watered. Was there any better delivery system in the world for caffeine? He’d had caffeine pills, energy drinks, and cigarettes, but none of them held a candle to a hot, black, delicious cup of joe.
“You’re a miracle.” He gladly—almost reverently—accepted the coffee, downed half of the scalding liquid in one go, then pulled Alex into a kiss with his free arm. “I’ve got half a mind to marry you.”
She laughed. “The other half will have to marry Griff—he supplied the fire.”
“Appreciate the kind regards, but I think I’ll pass,” Griff said, raising his hands with a good-natured grimace. “No offense, lad, but bearded and burly ain’t my type.”
“Clay, dig in!” Joe offered him a platter of grapes, nuts, and Funyuns. “These guys know how to eat, I’m telling you. Grapes from some old local vineyards, almonds from what’s left of the Mr. Nutz brand nut orchard out in the canyon, and chips from the bodega down the street. Couldn’t have cooked it better myself.”
A brother trailed after Joe, trying to snatch the platter back, but Joe just held it out of the little guy’s reach.
“Cool your banana hammock, bud,” Joe said. He rolled his eyes and told Clay, “Technically, I’m not supposed to consume anything except Mountain Dew until I finally reach Body Purification. But”—he whipped his head around to the brother fussing over him—“that doesn’t mean my bro can’t have a balanced breakfast. Especially of the Funyuns.”
“Thanks.” Clay took a handful of the rings and popped them in his mouth, then grabbed some grapes and almonds so he’d at least get a little nutrition along with all those empty carbs. “But I can’t hang around. I’ve got Deep Mysteries to unravel.”
The brother hovering around Joe clasped his hands together, eyes shining.
“The Oracle of Deep Mysteries has made a breakthrough on his path,” he intoned, voice filled with awe.
“Well, I’m hoping to, anyway,” Clay said, avoiding the little guy’s gaze. He doubted the brothers would be overjoyed to hear Diebolt’s opinion on their vague, hippy-dippy methods. He was, however, reasonably sure that they were going to be thrilled when he started churning out Dew-based potions by the barrelful.
Alex frowned. “Clay, you need to sleep sometime.”
“Not anymore, thanks to my beautiful wife and her genius coffee-making buddy.” He shot her a reassuring smile that she didn’t return. “Seriously, I’ll grab a nap later if there’s time,” he promised, backing toward the tunnel that led to their maintenance slash rec room.
“Yeah right.” Alex followed him into the dimness of the side tunnel. “We both know you’re not going to rest until those settlers are out from under Cassidy and Rhett’s control. This is you enlisting and getting shipped to Jordan all over again.”
“Except this time, we’re going to whup the bad guys’ asses together.” He held up his rustling plastic shopping bags. “And thanks to Diebolt, I might just be able to load us up with enough potions to level the playing field.”
She let out a long breath and ran a hand through her hair. They’d been together long enough for her to know that when he got that half-manic gleam in his eye, there would be no stopping him. Not until he finished whatever scheme he had rattling around in his head.
“What can I do to help?” she asked.
“Would you have the brothers bring me a keg of every flavor of Mountain Dew they’ve got?”
He thought her eyebrows might climb right off her face, but she just nodded and turned back toward the chow hall, moving with purposeful steps.
For the next several hours, Clay holed up in the rec room, kid’s chem set, ingredients, and ancient alchemy tome spread across the ping pong table, wire-caged lights humming overhead.
First he worked solely on health, Magicka, and stamina potions. They had the most basic recipes and required the fewest ingredients, and in a fight, the Jaeger squad was more likely to need restoratives than anything else. Once he’d leveled up from Quack to Bootlegger, the Magicka requirements for each potion were cut in half, and Clay switched over to the more complicated stuff. Resistance, fortifications, and even some low-level cure disease potions. Permanent stat potions were still way out of his league—those sat at the Master level under “One Man Medicine Show”—but he was inching in the right direction.
Alex and Joe drifted in and out while Clay worked, his wife sweaty from the strenuously slow Dao of the Dew training, and his brother with offerings of lukewarm soda “to keep you sharp.” Clay was pretty absorbed in what he was doing, but he figured he could use the caffeine. After that first tooth-achingly sweet drink of MD Classic, however, he set the can down and didn’t pick it up again. Chonk made sure the Mountain Dew didn’t go to waste, gulping down the can like he was trying to win a chugging contest, then scampering back to Joe with the empty.
By the time Clay was scraping the bottom of his acquired ingredients, he was just high enough level to complete the potion he’d been looking forward to all day.
The material components consisted of distilled Code Red for the base, Warheads, Red Hots, a tincture of Bramblethorn, and a fine powder of Heartbane Root dissolved into the bubbling solution. As the potion burbled, he fed it a measured stream of his Magicka, stripping away the various affinities and merging them into something new. Something far more potent than the sum of their parts. The last bit was delicate work, especially for this particular brew. At exactly the right moment, he had to make the arcane energy surge to curse the potion and turn it from a restorative to a deadly poison.
Finally, it turned the exact shade of bloody magenta the recipe said he should be looking for. He took it off the Bunsen burner and stoppered it. The fumes ate halfway through the rubber plug, but thankfully didn’t make it out.
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Prin’s Merciless Bite (Poison)
Area of Effect Potion: 30-foot radius from Point of Impact.
Target: Prin’s Merciless Bite only affects enemies within the Area of Effect.
Effect 1: Deals 500 points of Infernal Fire Damage on impact
Effect 2: Deals 10 points/sec of Necrotic Damage; duration 1 minute
Effect 3: Lowers Resistance against Poison by 50%; duration, 5 minutes
Uses: 1
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He held the deadly concoction up to the humming fluorescent light, appraising his handiwork. He was holding what amounted to a thermonuclear grenade. All of the deadly blast power of a nuke, concentrated on his enemies and completely harmless to his allies. The sort of thing that could end a war as soon as it started.
Carefully, he carried that last potion through the tunnels. He found the abbot in the meditation conjunction.
Before he could speak, Abbot Rakshas’s yellow eyes locked on the item in Clay’s hand.
“You have done it,” he said. “You have uncovered the deep mystery of the Divine Elixir.” He pressed his paws together in front of him and bowed over them. All around the room, other brothers did the same, nearly folding themselves in half as they honored Clay.
When he rose, the abbot smiled at Clay, revealing wicked-looking canine fangs.
“You are ready for the Battle of the Dew.”
