Author's Nightmare: Chapter 130 (Patreon)

Beam POV: Day 104

Current Wealth: 222 gold 0 silver 37 copper

While Solitaire was busy fighting for his life, I had a challenge of my own to contend with. Putting on my pants. 

As far as struggles for an Olympic athlete went, there were certainly less ignominious ones to be having. Still, it beat bleeding to death in the middle of some arena. 

“You’re not going to ask for help?” Helena asked, sticking to me like a shadow since I’d been hurt. She was doing better recently, much better. Almost back to fighting strength. I doubted she’d last long if someone of actual power attacked us, but I’d still put my money on her against non-superhumans. 

“Would you give it?” I frowned, surprised by her question. 

“No.”

I sighed, and continued the task of getting my fucking pants on. 

“Do you think Solitaire will be alright?” Helena asked, once I’d finally finished. It wasn’t that I couldn’t move much, or even that I couldn’t move fast, it was that I couldn’t move consistently. Something that was fine one moment would be pure agony the next. 

“Why wouldn’t he be?” I asked, distractedly. 

“I don’t know.” She replied, quickly enough that Shango or Solitaire would’ve read something in it. My pants, though, were a far more pressing concern. Little bastards were trying to run away from me. 

“He’ll be fine.” I sighed. “Solitaire always is. Do you know anything about his mother?”

Helena hesitated. 

“Bits and pieces.” She replied. “Some mad magus, right?”

I felt a smile at that. Yeah, it was about right. 

“More or less. Well she was about the best person anyone could ask for in terms of teaching about survival. I’ve seen Solitaire disappear for weeks on end while police- uh, guards- searched for him and they didn’t find so much as a trace of his existence. And you’ve seen how…Careful he is.”

She relaxed somewhat, and I finally clothed myself. I got to my feet, wincing, sighing. Everything hurt.

Everything hurt, and I still didn’t remember why. It wasn’t like I’d been concussed- god knew I’d felt a few of those and they were different from this. It was like I just…Hadn’t done anything. But everyone else remembered what I didn’t, and my body certainly agreed with them. 

You there?

Of course, the voice said nothing. My little helper had been awfully quiet since the fight, quiet enough that I’d been left to simmer with the question of what was going on. She seemed to be diminishing in what she knew of me. Time was my thoughts were being answered with her words before even I’d noticed them, not anymore. She questioned me on occasion, didn’t always know what I was doing. I didn’t know whether that was good, but it was definitely relieving. 

“You’re not allowed to train, you know.” Helena noted, and I froze. Eyed her, considered exactly how much she’d been sticking to me, and what her current condition was.

Not enough to win a fight reliably against anyone who might be sent to assassinate me, but more than enough to bully me in my current position. I reminded myself just how sneaky Shango could be when he felt like it. 

“Well, fine.” I said, doing my best to hide just how fine it wasn’t. “I wasn’t going to anyway.”

“Yes you were.”

Helena, if anything, had gotten harder, not softer after being brutalized in the arena. I wasn’t sure why. Obviously I was happy to see her keeping her chin up and spine steely after such an ordeal. At the same time though, it made it rather unpleasant to find yourself at odds with her. 

“Well, whatever I may or may-”

“OH MY GOD!?”

That didn’t sound good. I didn’t hurry to the source of the noise- well, actually I did, but my body only allowed for so much hurry before the risk of an impromptu disassembly became too much to ignore- but I reached it soon enough all the same. 

Elizabeth was the source of the  scream, and Shango was standing right next to her as both of them stared aghast through an open door. The door to Solitaire’s lab. 

“What’s-”

“-Don’t.” Shango snapped, turning to me before I could even finish the sentence. “Just…Holy shit, just don’t.” He closed the door, swallowing, sighing. “We need to get him some better locks.”

Well, we sort of already had. Or rather Solitaire had. The actual mansion was about as impenetrable as something you’d compare a mansion which had recently been renovated by a schizoaffective terrorist to. 

“He’ll be back soon?” Elizabeth asked, suddenly seeming worried. “I don’t want…That left unattended.” 

“He’ll be back soon.” Shango promised her. “Beam, how are you holding up?”

“I’m not.” I growled, feeling a twinge in my everything just from him saying it. God, I might have gotten the worst ass kicking in my entire life yesterday. Well, worst so far. 

Including the bear. 

“That’s a shame, we might need you to be fighting-ready sooner rather than later.” Shango said it with the same, easy smile he said most things with, but he seemed tense at the same time. It was the face he had on during deals. Not relaxed, just forcibly controlled. 

“Tournament’s over.” Elizabeth added. “Means attacking us won’t be fucking with money anymore.”

“As I was thinking.” Shango agreed. Helena shifted behind me. 

“I won’t be ready for combat for a while.” She noted. “And Beam will be longer.”

“So we play for time.” Shango smiled. It didn’t even come halfway to his eyes. “Shouldn’t be too hard, Solitaire’s already made enough toys to overthrow a small nation.”

An exaggeration, at least by Earth standards, but I could believe it might have actually been true here. Our limit now- and for a while really- had just been on manpower. The sooner we could see to that, the better. 

“We’ll need men.” Helena noted, as if she’d read my mind. Smart, our new friends, all of them. 

“We can’t get them.” Shango sighed. “Not without rising infiltrators.”

“And why not risk them?” Elizabeth cut in. “Our reputation’s spread now, so it’ll be easier to find recruits, and we’ll be that much scarier for people willing to spy.”

Shango pulled the exact face most men did when we found ourselves pinched between two women with good points, and hesitated. 

“We’d need to have them all watched.” He noted.

“Would we?” Elizabeth countered. “Solitaire told me not to step into his laboratory without permission or I’d be instantly killed, was he lying?”

Shango paused again.

“...Probably not.” He admitted. 

“So what’s the problem then?” Helena added. “We don’t need to recruit a whole gang- we can pick them partly at random, just a few dozen. Train them up, arm them. Hell we can even see about changing the loyalties of any spies when they realize what sort of equipment they’re getting.”

That hardened his eyes, rather than softening them. 

“And in doing that, we’ll be giving them all samples of Solitaire’s technology to run off with and show around to be studied and replicated.”

It was my turn to reply, then.

“Uh, Shango, I don’t think you realise how hard that would be. We’re talking about guns right? How many people in this world do you think can copy them?”

“I’ve heard of some who have weapons like yours.” Helena noted. “We fought them on occasion, Eastern raiders weren’t that uncommon in Vittonia, but they looked and worked differently from yours.”

Probably she was describing one of the magitech factions with arcane, gravity or wind-based force guns. And she was right in those being different from our weapons, though not by as big an amount as I’d have liked.

“The powder is already being sold off right?” Elizabeth asked. “And that’s what makes them work.”

That, it seemed, was what had Shango decided. His posture shifted, crumpling as his mind changed and threatened to crush the rest of him beneath its titanic weight. 

“Fine.” He sighed. “Fine, fuck it, you’ve won me over. If you can convince Solitaire then we’ll do it.”

We all blanched, at that. Elizabeth, myself, even Helena in spite of her soldier’s stoicism and newfound fondness for him. Solitaire was not the most predictable chap. Ask him not to rig a grenade under your bed and he got pissy, ask him to invite strangers into his home…

My odds of being reflexively shot in the face this week were upsettingly high, I decided.