James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords Episode 4: Chapter 4 - Wasteland B&B
🕑 Added 2023-08-12 21:00:03 +0000 UTCNessa turned out to not only be PwnrBwner’s lieutenant but also his girlfriend. Most of the legends Clay had heard about the Merge had referred to her as “the Uberbitch,” but she was a lot nicer than the nickname let on. And around her, they got to see a surprising new side to the Warlord of the West.
During the first course at dinner, she asked, “Is it kind of stuffy in here?”
Immediately, PwnrBwner snapped his fingers at a Dragonkin in a waiter’s black-and-whites.
“Yo, Murry, open that window. No, the one behind Tots.” He went right back to what he’d been saying, as if he didn’t even notice he’d done something nice for her. “And if you guys manage to off Cassidy and Rhett, we can finally restock Nessa’s nasty-ass soda fountain.”
“Man, I’d kill for a Suicide,” she said. “Scott used to keep Shieldwall’s employee lounge stocked with all the flavors of Mountain Dew they had before the Merge. He thinks it’s gross, but honestly I’ve always been kind of addicted to it.” She waved a hand tipped with skull-painted nails toward the west. “But when those jizzwads Cassidy and Rhett took over, the Temple stopped trading with us. Obviously, Mountain Dew’s not the only reason I’d love to see them get what they deserve, but it’ll be a major fringe benefit.”
“Preaching to the choir, honey,” Joe said, raising his hand like somebody testifying. “Have you ever tried mixing half moonshine, half Dew? I call it Lumberjack Joe’s Axetreme Thirst-Quencher.”
Alex rolled her eyes. “Stop trying to make that a thing. It’s not one.”
“When the world catches up to my sophisticated tastes, it will be.”
“Besides, we agreed puns are an automatic ten-point deduction.”
“Actually, I think Joe might be onto something there,” Nessa said. “Next time we get some Dew in, I’ll try it.”
“What the hell, Ness?” PwnrBwner snapped.
“Untwist your panties, loser. I meant when I can drink again.” Nessa smiled as she gently rested a hand on her stomach. “After the little guy’s born.”
“Or the little chick,” the Warlord said.
At the mention of the baby, Alex squeezed Clay’s hand under the table. Clay felt a pang in his gut.
“Is this your first?” she asked, obviously making an effort to sound casual.
“Nah, this one’ll be lucky number thirteen.” The Warlord leaned back in his chair proudly. “Nessa was worried it’d be hard to knock her up again since we’re so old, but I’m a pretty fucking great shot.”
“Tactful, too,” Nessa said sarcastically.
“Can’t help but notice it’s a sight quieter and less violent around the castle than last time I was here,” Griff said, checking over his shoulder like he was looking for somebody to spring a trap. “Where are the little… uh… angels?”
“Spending summer vacay with Uncle Kaz and Uncle Roark,” PwnrBwner said, hooking a thumb vaguely southward.
The old weed let out a bark of laughter. “Can’t imagine that’s going well.”
Pwnr shrugged. “Whatever, they’ll be good. I told them Zyra would catch ’em in her gross spiderwebs and eat ’em if they started acting like little pukes.”
“They inherited their dad’s paralyzing fear of spiders,” Nessa explained.
“Hey, I’m not afraid of anything. I just think they’re gross is all.”
“Just think,” Joe said, “someday your kids could be evil overlords over the whole West Coast. The Pwneric Empire.”
“Damn straight,” PwnrBwner said.
“Congratulations on the thirteenth,” Griff said, his wrinkled features twisting into a smile as he toasted with his cup. “Whether it be a lad or lass.”
Nessa beamed. “Oh, it’s definitely a boy. A mom knows these things.”
“Fuck you, you don’t know,” PwnrBwner said. “You’ve been wrong literally every time.”
“My ass I have. I guessed the last six straight!”
“No you didn’t! Where’s Chad? He knows.” PwnrBwner pointed at a Dragonkin. “Tanner, go get Chad!”
“So about these Incants,” Clay said, hoping to steer the conversation into less tender territory for Alex. She was tough as hell in a lot of ways, but this was a painful subject for them both, and he could tell from her shaky smile that she was barely hanging on.
“Yeah, I’ve been chewing this quest over, too,” Griff said. “Waltzin’ through the front door of the Temple isn’t going to work. If we want to come out of this with our hides intact, our best bet’s to catch the Incants by surprise.”
“Is there a secret entrance through the throne room?” Bacon Bits asked. “That would be ideal.”
“Nah,” PwnrBwner said, shaking his head. “The place wasn’t technically a dungeon before the dipshits took it over. The cult that lived there originally was nonviolent—the karate kind of nonviolent, like those old Shaolin movies, except these guys worshipped Mountain Dew instead of, I don’t know, Shao or whatever.”
“Mountain Dew, as in the soda?” Clay asked, unable to hide the doubt in his voice.
Nessa shrugged. “I guess one of them found an old recipe from before the Merge and started making it. They were pretty good. So good that I couldn’t tell the difference between their knockoffs and the legally legit stuff. Other people must’ve thought so, too, because lawyers tried to serve papers all the way out there demanding that they stop making it. Obviously they couldn’t enforce that, and the whole legal uproar garnered the Temple a lot of attention. They sort of gathered a following after that. Mobs who wanted to renounce the mindless, violent life of a video game monster and turn to the simple life of brewing the Dew and searching for enlightenment.”
Joe nodded thoughtfully. “I get it. Sometimes, right after you pop the top on that thirteenth can of the morning, you get this Spark of enlightenment out of the Pitch Black, like you’re holding a Livewire in a can, and suddenly the Voltage on this world jumps up in your face and tells you the secret to life…” He waved a hand through the air like he was wiping away the tensions of a lifetime. “Peace. Enlightenment.”
“Stroke,” Alex said. “Aneurism.”
“Fuckin’ A,” PwnrBwner agreed, pointing at Alex. “But these doofuses built a whole temple to it. Kind of tourist-trappy. You could go visit it and sample their unlicensed Dew. Tots here probably would’ve joined up with ’em if I hadn’t convinced her that was stupid.”
“When the Incants took over, we assumed the Dew worshippers were all killed,” Nessa said, “but word got to us a few weeks later that the survivors went underground—literally. As in, they fled into the sewers under Malibu and decided to stay down there.”
Clay caught Griff’s eye for a second, then asked the question they were both thinking.
“Think they’d show us the way in?”
PwnrBwner shrugged. “Probably. They were pretty cool for a bunch of soda-drinkers. A mutual ally told us they were holed up under the Malibu desalination and water treatment facility.” As the Warlord spoke, a secondary quest marker popped up on Clay’s map. “I’d start looking there.”
***
When the dessert course—made up of towering plates of Death by Lava Cake—was cleared away, the question of whether they would stay the night or move out right away came up.
“Thank you all for your hospitality,” Clay said, “but we’d probably better get on the road. If we leave in the next hour, we can make it to the Temple while it’s still dark. I’d like to do a little recon before we try to find the Mountain Dew cult. See what we’re up against from the outside.”
“But you’ll need a good night’s rest if you’re going after Cassidy and Rhett,” Nessa said, her dark brows coming together. “Not to mention you’ll have to go through the armory and pick out some decent gear.” She eyed each of them in turn, settling back on Clay. “No offense, but a plus-two cuirass isn’t going to make up the level difference between you and anything but a Puffball.”
“You can camp out in the bailey,” PwnrBwner said like the matter was decided. “There’s plenty of room for your tents out there.”
His girlfriend shot him a flat look. “We have like a thousand empty rooms, and you can add more just by selecting it from the Warlord Throne. They’re staying in the guest rooms. Period.”
PwnrBwner gave another one of those put-upon sighs. “Yeah fine, whatever. You guys are staying in the guest rooms.”
“Come on,” Nessa said, patting Alex’s arm. “I’ll show you guys to your rooms.”
“No, you won’t,” the Warlord said. “You and Scottina Junior—”
Nessa grimaced. “Literally the worst name you’ve come up with so far.”
“—are gonna go rest, and I’ll show your dumb guests to their dumb rooms,” PwnrBwner finished.
Gently, the Warlord of the West escorted his girlfriend to an ornate door on the far wall. Assured she was taken care of, he spun on his heel and faced the rest of them, completely missing the look of adoration Nessa threw over her shoulder at him before disappearing inside.
“All right, dickbrains, follow me,” PwnrBwner snapped, waving a hand for them to keep up.
Clearly the Warlord wasn’t as much of a jerk as he acted like—at least not to his girlfriend. That made Clay feel a little better about potentially allying with a guy with the attitude of an overgrown entitled teenager.
“No, he’s a total dick,” Alex said once they were ensconced in their room for the night. She came out of the bathroom, wiping her wet face on a plush towel. “He just knows she won’t let him get away with it, and he loves her for it. It’s kind of cute, in an awful, I’d-never-want-it-to-be-us sort of way.”
Clay huffed a laugh. “That could never be us. Unlike the Warlord of the West, I realize that I married way out of my league.”
“That’s what it is.” She snapped her fingers. “I was trying to figure out what this room reminded me of, but it’s the place where we spent our honeymoon.”
He glanced from the mile-deep mattresses on the massive hand-carved four-poster to the stocked dark wood bookshelves and the top-of-the-line projector screen and game console.
“Yeah, now that you mention it, a luxury suite in a castle does have a lot in common with that vacant slum apartment my cousin Andy let us borrow for the week.”
Alex whipped the towel at him.
“I finally had you all to myself; I couldn’t have cared less where we were. Besides”—she craned her neck, looking into the en-suite bathroom—“I was talking about the shower. It looks big enough for two, just like the one in the honeymoon slum.”
“Way ahead of you.” Clay picked up her tiny frame and carried her into the bathroom.
He had locked the guest room door as soon as they’d gotten inside, but just to be completely sure they wouldn’t face any unforeseen interruptions, Alex locked the bathroom door, too.
***
Before sunup the next morning, the Shieldwall chef laid out a huge breakfast buffet that Joe declared “worthy of the nicest hotel back on I-70.” Clay pointed out that the biscuits and gravy were hot and that the scrambled eggs didn’t look like they’d come in a can, so the whole thing was better than those hotels, but he couldn’t convince his brother that anything less than congealed gravy and runny eggs was the way to go.
All jokes aside, the food was otherworldly, and Nessa hadn’t been exaggerating about the buffs. A 15% bump in Stamina, Health, and Magicka regeneration for eight hours, plus a 10% boost to all elemental resistances for four hours. Clay had never even seen a potion capable of adding those kinds of benefits, much less a delicious breakfast. If they survived this whole thing, maybe one of them would have to look into picking up Cooking as a profession.
After the hearty breakfast, they headed to the Shieldwall armory.
The Warlord wasn’t awake yet—he liked to keep odd hours, apparently—but he’d nonetheless had one of his Dragonkin underlings set out a few items the night before that he thought would suit them. Clay had been left a crucifix-shaped Amulet of the Western Cleric that gave a ten percent bonus to one of the skills he’d just unlocked called Friendly Fire.
While anyone who’d ever served in the military knew Friendly Fire meant accidentally getting shot by friendly forces, the Mystic Fateslinger’s version of Friendly Fire was a little different.
Friendly Fire: The Mystic Fateslinger deals in life and death in equal measure. While a spelled bullet can take the life of an enemy, it can just as easily restore friends. Shooting allies heals them for 10% of the spell’s damage, while critical hits add a double health bonus.
Clay was expecting generic loot, something the Warlord wouldn’t miss, so getting something specific for his class was completely unexpected. The Dragonkin escort also gave him a set of cowled Obsidian Glass mail that was twice his previous armor rating and came with a +5 bonus to both Strength and Constitution. It was even considered medium armor, which added to his movement bonus thanks to his Fateslinger passive, Mobile.
For Alex, PwnrBwner had found a full set of samurai armor—Dou torso armor, Kusazari for the legs, and Kote for her arms—each piece enchanted with Frenzy and Movement bonuses that would boost her already insane Bloodborne Striker class. Joe got a new attachment for Bertha that basically made her into a massive chainsaw sword and regained Health for every bit of bleeding damage he inflicted on an enemy.
For Griff, there was a wide-brimmed hat enchanted with 11% Elemental Damage Resistance to replace the unenchanted one, which was more or less falling apart on his head, and a new Peerless sword and shield of Obsidian Glass.
The old weed gave the sword a few practice swings, then shook his head.
“We’ve been going back and forth over swords for a while now, the Warlord and me,” Griff drawled, returning the shining black set to its shelf. “Pwnr thinks I oughta give up my trusty notched short sword and buckler for something a mite flashier,” he said, patting the buckler strapped to his back, “and I think he oughta mind his own weapons.”
“It should be the Warlord and I,” Joe said. “Right, Clay?”
Griff stuck up a hand. “Now, don’t you silly pups go lumpin’ me in with your word games. I talk how I talk, and I don’t plan to change it.”
As they headed out of the armory, though, Joe elbowed Clay in the ribs.
“Seriously,” he whispered, “I was right, wasn’t I? That was a grammar violation.”
Alex pushed her way between them, looking like a fawn squeezing between a pair of grizzlies.
“You do not get points for someone who isn’t playing.”
“That’s not the word on the street,” Joe said as if it couldn’t be helped.
Alex looked at Clay. “Judge, rules ruling?”
“I think in this case, there’s got to be an allowance for style,” Clay said matter-of-factly. “Like Griff said, it’s how he talks. If you start messing with his wording to make it adhere to strict grammar rules, you lose the flavor, and he ends up sounding like everybody else.”
Joe blew a raspberry. “I’m chock-full of flavor! Why don’t I get an allowance?”
“Because you talk badly,” Alex said.
“What you just said is wrong in every way I can think of.” Joe pointed at her. “Clay, sic her.”
“She was modifying the verb, so the adverb is correct,” Clay said. “It just sounds wrong because you’re not used to hearing it said the right way.”
“What about starting a sentence with ‘because’?”
“Technically, it’s not wrong. It’s a stylistic choice.”
Joe shook his head. “The second we get to a communications device, I’m calling Mrs. Henderson and telling on you.”
“Mrs. Henderson?” Clay said. “From third grade?”
“I know you can’t use ‘because’ at the beginning of a sentence, because she told me so. A lot. I even had to write it fifty times once. Apparently, I ‘don’t listen the first time,’” he grumbled, making air quotes with his fingers. “Boy, is she going to have an earful for you.”
