James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords Episode 4: Chapter 5 - The Dao of the Dew
🕑 Added 2023-08-15 17:00:05 +0000 UTCThe sun was climbing the eastern side of the sky as the Jaeger squad loaded up the dune buggy and set off for Malibu.
Surprisingly, they didn’t run into any trouble while they were inside LA. The Warlord’s Blessing of the Bwner carried them through the city untouched. Clay had always heard that the Warlord of the West had the most dangerous area on US soil in an iron grip, but it was amazing to see what that really meant—nearly every creature in Los Angeles was allied with Shieldwall.
Outside of LA was another story.
As soon as they reached the border of PwnrBwner’s territory—a stretch of the old Pacific Coast Highway positioned between a massive scrubby hill and the open ocean, the first glimpse of which had all of the Jaegers gaping in wonder—a thunderbird with huge batlike ears that crackled with electricity swooped down, lightning bolts screeching from its hooked beak. The bird tried to scoop Chonk up in its talons, but the mechacoon’s hedge-trimmer arm showed the bat-bird what a colossally bad idea it had been to single him out of the group.
As it turned out, the thunderbird was only a distraction. From the scrubby hill came an ambush of thrown stones, spears, and even a couple flint knives. Grunting and howling filled the little valley as a small contingent of troglodytes swarmed the dune buggy.
“Hold ’em off!” Clay yelled, pulling the Camera Obscura from a drop pouch attached to his belt.
Griff lobbed balls of arcane energy at the cavemen and cavewomen, pushing them back with the brilliant explosions, and Bacon Bits breathed gouts of blue flame at them. That gave Clay just enough time to finagle everybody into frame for an Obscurement. The Camera snapped and whined, producing a hasty polaroid that effectively hid the Jaeger squad from view of their enemies. The troglodytes stopped in their tracks, looking around in wonder and muttering, “Where hairless meats go?”
Joe grunted, offended. “I am covered in a luscious coat of hair. Chonk, too. Clay’s working on his beard, Griff’s got the silver fox stubble going on. Heck, even Alex’s legs are furry—”
“Uh, excuse me?” Alex snapped.
“Oh come on, like you’ve had time to shave since we left St. Louis. My point is, it’s unfair to call us hairless just because we don’t have the bathmats these dudes and ladies are sporting. Even our resident reptile has a better beard than they do,” he said, hooking a thumb at Bacon Bits.
“Thank you, Joe Jaeger.” The Greater Blue Wyrm preened. “I grew it myself.”
The closest caveman scowled, a furrow developing in his huge shelf of a brow.
“Me not see hairless meats, but me still hear yak-yak.” He pointed a club at the dune buggy. “Kill invisible yak-yak!”
The troglodytes unleashed a bevy of rocks, spears, and clubs.
“Oopsie.” Joe punched the accelerator, and the dune buggy’s tires screamed on the cracked surface of the old highway, fishtailing briefly before they gained traction and roared away.
Clay conjured a Minor Shield of Warding to cover their escape. The troglodytes’ primitive weapons bounced off the glowing translucent barrier, and soon they were well out of range.
“So much for a peaceful first look at the ocean,” Alex yelled, the wind whipping her blonde hair around her head.
“You’ve got nineteen minutes and six seconds of peace now,” Clay told her, checking the Camera Obscura’s countdown timer. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
They all expected the density of hostile monsters to increase the farther they got from PwnrBwner’s territory, but when they stopped to renew the Obscurement, still a good ten miles from the Temple of the Dew according to their maps, nothing tried to murder them.
“Listen to that,” Griff said, just barely audible above the hum from the dune buggy’s engine.
“What?” Joe twisted around, looking. On the seat beside him, Chonk’s ears twitched this way and that.
“The quiet,” the old weed said. “Eerie. Like something’s scared the local wildlife away.”
Clay’s hands tightened on his M4. He could feel that weird silence Griff was talking about pressing in on them from all sides, but he wasn’t so sure he agreed that everything had been scared away. It felt more like the place was holding its collective breath, waiting for a predator to pass.
The question was, were they the predator or was there something even bigger out there?
That disquieting silence only got heavier the closer they got to the quest marker on their maps. They passed by a seaside stretch of rotting beach houses and derelict mansions and didn’t see a soul—creature, human, or otherwise. The least Clay had expected to see out here was seagulls—on the netshows and news clips, you always saw them soaring over beaches and strips of water—but the skies were empty. Almost suspiciously so.
For a few miles, the highway curved away from the ocean, heading inland through more of those rolling scrubby hills that the locals—back when there were human locals—called mountains, then veered sharply back. As the buggy came around the corner, the Temple of the Dew rolled out before them.
Even if they hadn’t had the quest marker, there was nothing else that insane structure could have been. It was easily the weirdest thing Clay had seen since crossing the containment wall. At first glance, it appeared to be a cross between Angkor Wat and some kind of crazy Mountain Dew-themed fractal art. Levels were stacked on top of one another and layered in every direction, with every surface sporting Mountain Dew logos, bottles, and depictions of people and creatures Doing the Dew while engaged in X-treme sports and activities.
The Temple covered a huge stretch of beach. Wrapping around its north and east sides was a shantytown of salt-faded shacks built from whatever the inhabitants had been able to scavenge: bits of corrugated tin, shopping carts, cracking vinyl siding, rotting doors, cardboard, vehicle parts, metal storage containers, and driftwood.
With his superhumanly enhanced vision, Clay could see a handful of people moving through the encampment. They shuffled along with stooped shoulders, dragging their feet toward the temple with gleaming shields, swords, or breastplates hefted onto their shoulders like bags of animal feed. Weird that they were carrying the gear instead of wearing it. They all had on a mishmash of mundane and magical items, a couple decent, but nothing like the beauties they were taking into the Temple. As time passed, the people who entered the Temple trickled back out, this time without the top-level gear.
Although Clay really had wanted to check out the lay of the land, he’d had a second objective in mind when they came out for recon—making sure the Warlord of the West was telling the truth about the local settlers being forced to farm magical items for the Incants. Pwner didn’t seem to have any reason to lie about that, but Clay wasn’t the trusting sort, especially not where Incants were concerned. But everything he was seeing seemed to indicate that the Warlord had been on the level.
Down below, a brilliant yellow force field surrounding the Temple and shantytown flickered for a second, then disappeared. A lanky form clad in full armor and a black tabard strutted through the empty space where the barrier had been a second before. The yellow wall flickered again, maybe powering back up? Cassidy Morgan, the Hexblade Crusader, strode toward the temple, the light bending and shifting around him.
Weary settlers scrambled to get out of his way, bowing and scraping like serfs before a king as he passed. Suddenly, Cassidy stopped. He snapped his fingers at one of the men and said something too quiet even for Clay’s preternatural hearing to pick up. Shaking, the hapless settler dropped to his knees in the sand, hands clasped. Begging, pointing toward one of the broken-down shacks.
The malevolent light around Cassidy got darker.
Clay’s skin prickled, and he started to reach for his revolver. But even with the weapon’s magically enhanced range, a bullet wouldn’t make it half that distance. They could try to run in and save the begging man—assuming they could bypass the invisible barrier—but Clay doubted they would make it down the dunes in time. He scowled. This was one of the many parts of fighting a war he hated, having to decide whether saving one person in the short term would ultimately get a bunch of people killed or enslaved in the long term.
Cassidy raised a gauntleted fist, and the man was violently ripped off his knees and lifted into the air. The man’s hands scrabbled at his throat, eyes bulging, while his feet kicked weakly.
Joe gasped. “Holy crap, Clay. We’re fighting Darth Vader.”
“Who?” Alex whispered.
“Don’t you dare pretend to not know who I’m talking about, short stack,” Joe said. “Not this time.”
Down below, Cassidy raised his other fist. A glass potion bottle shot out of the struggling man’s junky body armor and into Cassidy’s waiting hand. With a flick of his arm, the Hexblade Crusader sent the man crashing into the wall of a nearby shack and stalked on toward the Temple of the Dew. Left behind, the man pulled himself up to a defeated slump and covered his face with his hands. His whole upper body shook as he wept.
“Think it was a healing potion?” Alex whispered, voicing the same thought running through Clay’s mind.
Griff let out a pent-up breath. “Somebody awful important to him must be in a bad way to risk holdin’ something back from a man like Cassidy.”
Clay knew from personal experience just how expensive a healing potion could be—even the bottom-tier potions went for hundreds of thousands of dollars on the other side of the containment wall. That wasn't true in the wasteland, however. Here, anything but Ultimate Health Potions were basically trash. That greedy bastard Cassidy wouldn’t even let the settler keep that much for himself.
“Let’s go,” Clay growled, his voice tight with barely contained rage. The sooner they convinced the Dew cult to show them the way in, the sooner they could break those people out from under Cassidy’s thumb.
***
Before heading across town for the water treatment facility, they renewed the Obscurement. The stealth spell almost seemed pointless given the lack of local wildlife, but as they got deeper into the ruins of Malibu, Clay was glad they’d taken the time to do it. Settlers from the Incants’ encampment dotted the streets, searching for something, anything to kill and loot so they didn’t have to go back to their oppressors empty-handed. If word of a new group of wastelanders coming into the area had gotten back to the Incants, any chance at taking Cassidy and Rhett by surprise would’ve been blown.
The water treatment facility obviously hadn’t been in working order for a long, long time. Black water that looked thick enough to walk on stood stagnant in the aeration pools, grass and trees grew up from the cracks in the cement walkways, and the chain link fences were slowly succumbing to rust.
Joe found a secluded spot between a pair of rust-stained holding tanks to hide the dune buggy. Everybody climbed out, weapons in hand. They hoped the Dew cult would be welcoming since they were both allied with Shieldwall and the cult was ostensibly nonviolent, but the Jaeger squad had too much wasteland experience under their belts to walk into any unknown territory without some insurance that they could fight their way out again if they had to.
The entrance was on the side of a squat red brick building; a metal door with a peeling sign that read Authorized Personnel Only barred their entry. The door was deadbolted from the inside, but Joe’s Everyman Tool made quick work of dismantling the mechanism and there were no secondary traps or wards to worry about. A lock like that wouldn’t keep out even the weakest Incant, but it probably served to keep random mobs from wandering into the plant.
Compared to the bright noonday sun outside, the inside of the building was black as pitch. That would have been a problem for Clay before, but when he became an Incant, he had picked up his Voodoo Daddy predecessor’s reptilian ability to see heat signatures. It wasn’t technically dark vision, but it worked just as well for picking out threats—at least ones who couldn’t thermally camouflage themselves. He and Alex went in first, M4 and shotgun in hand, to clear the room.
Clay had expected a sort of damp, dank smell in a water treatment plant, but what hit him instead was a tingly, sugary scent like carbonation. He could almost feel the bubbles popping in his nose and clawing their way into his sinuses. Plenty of smell, but no one waiting to jump them.
“It’s all clear,” Alex told the others, leaning out the door.
While Bacon Bits glided across the room to check the far doors, Chonk scampered around checking the scattering of candy bar wrappers and other trash for leftovers.
Joe sucked in a huge sniff, filling his lungs. “Ah, smell that Dew! Somebody’s cooking Code Red up in here.”
“How do you know it’s Code Red?” Alex asked in a hushed whisper.
“How do you not know it’s Code Red?” he shot back. “That tang. That kick. The sweet, sweet aroma of liquid ambrosia delivered straight from the tap of the gods. It’s unmistakable.”
Metal scraped across metal, and Clay spun around to find a bright orange heat signature shaped like a duck’s head staring up at them out of a grate in the floor.
“No one who can recognize the Code by scent alone is an enemy to us,” it quacked. “Infinite carbonation be with you, brother,” the inhuman voice intoned.
“And also with you,” Joe answered with extreme sobriety. Then he turned and grinned at Clay, shooting him the double thumbs-up. “We’re building rapport!”
“I think it should be ‘a rapport,’” Alex said. “Clay?”
“Works both ways,” Clay said. He addressed the speaker hidden in the grate below. “We’re looking for the former inhabitants of the Temple of the Dew.”
“Not all those who seek find,” the voice replied philosophically. “You did, though.” A feathered wing slipped out of the shadows and beckoned them down. “Come. All will be revealed in time. Specifically, the time it takes you to climb down into the sewers.”
Clay had a quick internal debate about going last and covering his squad from above with Friendly Fire versus going first and being able to see and open fire on anybody below who might attack them. Ultimately, he decided going first would work out best.
He sat on the rim of the grate, feet dangling into the unknown, and felt around until his boots hit a metal rung. Pulling the Ace of Spades, Clay started the descent. With his improved dexterity, climbing down one-handed wasn’t the gamble it would’ve been for a normal human.
Joe clamored down next in full mech suit, metal boots clanking on the rungs. About ten feet down, the tunnel opened up onto a larger room lit with hanging florescent lights.
Clay paused where he was and glanced around, scanning for threats. Only two creatures stood below, their arms tucked into the billowing sleeves of their monklike robes, which were an eyewatering shade of neon green and red. The bigger of the pair looked like a two-legged hyena, with a black nose and long white fangs, a strip of darker hair running down its humped scruff and into its collar. The other was a giant duck. They waited with patient smiles on their snout and bill.
Clay turned himself around on the ladder and hopped down, his boots splashing in a small puddle of stagnant water.
“Welcome, friend,” the hyena said, bowing. “I am Abbot Rakshas. This is Brother Saxony. Infinite carbonation be with you.”
“Uh, thanks. Clay Jaeger.” He nodded to them, holstering the revolver. Joe clanked down beside him. “This is my brother, Joe.”
“Lumberjack Joe, if you want to get technical,” Joe said.
“Ah yes,” said the hyena, Abbot Rakshas. “The instinctual Dew Brother.”
With a Geronimo-like squall, Chonk leapt out of the hole overhead. Joe caught the half-fur, half-gear ball and plopped the mechacoon on his heavy steel pauldron.
“My little buddy, Chonk Esquire,” Joe said, gesturing toward the coon.
Griff came down next, followed by Alex, who had Bacon Bits in her vest pocket. The Greater Blue Wyrm had been too large to fit down the tunnel and had reluctantly opted to return to her teacup pig form so she could be easily carried instead.
Once the introductions were complete, with much more bowing from the hyena abbot and his duck brother, Rakshas turned to Clay.
“Why do you seek our humble sect, friend? I hope it will not cause offense, but I must say, you do not seem the type who wishes to join our search for enlightenment and the secrets of the Dew.” He nodded his furry head to Joe. “Lumberjack Joe, however…” He rubbed his furry chin thoughtfully as he regarded the mech-clad warrior. “He has the spark of one naturally gifted in our ancient arts. A Dewd, through and through.”
Alex shot Clay a look that clearly said Give me a break.
“It’s like they can see right into my soul,” Joe said in awe.
“Although I’m sure my brother would make a great acolyte,” Clay said, “we actually came to Malibu with a different purpose in mind. We’re lookin’ to take down the Incants who are currently occupying your Temple. A mutual acquaintance of ours, the Warlord of the West, said you might be willing to lend us a hand and show us a way to get back in.”
Rakshas hmmed, a deep, rumbling sound.
“We do indeed know of the Warlord. His She-Mistress’s love for the Dew is legendary, even amongst our people. We might be inclined to lend you the aid you seek, but first answer me this. What will you do with the Temple should you succeed in defeating the Hexblade and the Madlad?”
Clay glanced around at his family. They had discussed this as a possible negotiating point on the drive out.
“If you all want it back, it’s yours,” he said. “We’re mostly in this to free the people the Incants enslaved and find out what they know about one of our friends who went missing.”
“This is a very generous offer,” the abbot said, scratching one furry ear. “As you may know, we are a nonviolent sect. We cannot retake our home ourselves. And though it is true that the Dew is a state of mind—may it be ever carbonated—we would greatly enjoy the return of our brewing equipment.” His beady black eyes glimmered with amusement. “Having a liquid representation of said state of mind makes meditating on the Dew all the easier, as I’m sure you can understand.”
Clay nodded. “We don’t need you to fight. Just show us how to get to Cassidy and Rhett. We’ll take it from there and do our best to get your Temple back to you.”
“Dew our best,” Joe corrected. “D-E-W.”
Rakshas hmmed again. “Your hearts seem pure and your intentions true, but I fear your small group cannot defeat Dew-surpers as powerful as the Hexblade and the Madlad. Though you be mighty, you are still many levels below them, and they have been boosted to extremity by the stat potions of a third—the late Gearhead.”
“People underestimate us all the time,” Alex said with a shrug. “And those people are dead now. We can take these guys with some prior planning.”
“Your misplaced optimism aside, we will not show you the passage into the Temple until we are certain we are not sending you to your deaths,” the abbot said. “Although we ourselves will not fight, there are no tenets of faith preventing us from training you. We will instruct you three in the ways of the Dew until you have advanced along the path to the top of your personal mountain. Then and only then will you be capable of defeating Cassidy and Rhett.”
“As it was foretold,” the duck quacked.
Joe slapped his hand on his knee. “Hot damn, we’re the chosen ones!”
Griff eyed the monks. “When exactly was this foretold?”
“Just now,” the duck said. “If it comes true, it will be as it was foretold.”
“Let me get this straight,” Clay said. “You won’t show us the way until we’ve trained in your Mountain Dew paths?”
“Correct,” said Rakshas.
“Question,” Joe said. “Does training include drinking copious amounts of green, red, or purple liquid?”
The abbot stuck one clawed finger in the air. “Sometimes Baja Blast as well.”
“I’m in.”
“Not me,” Alex said. “I do not drink soda. Period.”
“For some, drinking is not the path,” Rakshas said. “For some, the path to liquescence is martial. Hands, feet, and mind, the Warriors of the Dew must master all of these weapons to unlock the power of the Xtreme Thirst Quencher that dwells within.”
“Your sect has a martial art?” Alex asked dubiously.
“Indeed. It is known within the sect as the Dao of the Dew. How do you think we stay in such great shape while constantly drinking what is essentially colored sugar in a can?” the duck asked, indicating his bulky feathery body with a sweep of one wing.
She sighed. “Fine, let’s do it.”
Clay didn’t see any other way around it.
“How long do you think this’ll take?” he asked, thinking of the broken man in the shantytown.
“Time is an illusion, Fateslinger,” Rakshas said. “But if you are quick studies, about a week.”
