William takes on the responsibility of finding volunteers, so until he gets that done, the rest of us split up to do other things. Pops takes the other gunmen back to the outer perimeter to keep watch, while Jessica and her pets help clear out the monster corpses.
“Can you also get some arrows for Emily?” I ask William before we leave. “She’s running low again.”
“Will do,” he assures me.
I stick with Emily after that, and the two of us go through the periphery buildings one by one in search of survivors. We find some dead, others wounded and hiding, but overall there aren’t too many of either. I send away the few we come across, taking a moment to think things over. Now that I calmed down somewhat, I’m starting to have some doubts about the plan.
I’m not so much worried for myself as I am for the men and women that might join me.
Emily is right behind me, and she’s obviously the first candidate. She hasn’t left my side since we met, so I know she’ll come. But I don’t just want to pull her into it without asking yet again. We go into one of the hunting shops, and I wait until I’m sure we’re alone in here.
“Emily?”
The place is in shambles. The windows are broken, the door is on the floor. Displays are overturned, spilling souvenirs and random camping supplies everywhere. It’s been picked through a few times over by now by William’s men, emptied of guns, ammo, and food.
We go through it one more time, adding to the chaos. But I don’t expect to find much, I just want a quiet place where we can talk in peace.
Emily is bent down behind the counter, but she pops up when she hears me calling her name.
I’m rifling through a pile of junk that people discarded haphazardly in a corner of the room, pulling away sleeping bags and tent kits. She straightens her back and gives me a quizzical look.
“I didn’t find anything,” I say, which only confuses her further. “Look, come here.”
She does, walking around the counter without taking her eyes off of me. I meet her half-way, stopping face to face with her in the middle of the room. Thoughts race through my mind and I don’t know how to string them together into something that would make sense.
“I just…I wanted to make sure you’re okay with all of this,” I say, rubbing the back of my head. “I’ve been dragging you from one dangerous situation into the next, but you can say no. You don’t need to come if you don’t want to.”
Emily makes a hurt expression as her cheeks turn red. She crosses her arms and turns on her heels, but I reach out and stop her. I grab her shoulder and she tries to jerk away, but I spin her back around. She doesn’t look up at me, but she shakes from her core under my touch.
I realize she’s moments away from crying.
“No,” I say sternly, “let me stop this kind of drama before it becomes a habit.”
She whips her head up, the movement so fast that her ever present hood almost falls away. The shock is clear on her face, but at least the whiplash stops her from crying.
“When I say something, don’t interpret it in the worst possible way, okay? I didn’t ask that because I don’t want you to come, I asked because you don’t have to. You can go up into one of those buildings and be safe, but if you come with me, you know you won’t be. We might die, so if you join another one of my stupid, suicidal plans, I need to know you’re okay with it. I’ll gladly have you, but it’s okay to stay behind.”
Emily sniffles a few times, her shoulder bobbing up and down. A few tears escape her after all, and she quickly wipes them away with her sleeves. She nods and takes a step towards me, but then she freezes as someone starts slow clapping.
“How sweet,” Jessica says. “Now kiss.”
She’s in the doorway, leaning on the frame with a shit eating grin. Luna is right behind her, along with a few other pets. As she enters, a handful of people follow her in. One of them is Karen, the other is little Willy. I don’t recognize the other three right away, but I think Emily does. She steps to the side, putting me between her and them.
I move to give her a little more cover, just in case.
Then I use analyze on the three — two men and one woman — to get their names. Clarissa, the woman, is a level 13 basic class called Pistol Maiden. The men, Carter and Derek, are levels 15 and 16. Both have adept classes, named Fire Dancer and Flesh Wall.
None have any titles.
“Jessica,” I say, trying to put a bit of annoyance into my voice. “To what do I owe the pleasure? I thought you were busy with cleaning duty.”
Jessica strides right up to me and puts her hands on her hips.
“A little bird told me that you’re planning something fun, and I want in. You don’t even have to ask me,” she quips. “We can skip right to the kiss.”
She puckers up and leans in, making kissing noises. I put a finger on her lips and push her back, but I forgot how much blood I have on my hands. She gags and spits, pulling away dramatically.
“When did you last wash your hands?! God!”
“Jessica.”
“What?”
“How did you know what I was planning, and how did you know where to find us?”
“You need to learn to listen, Jack. As I said, a little bird told me. And you know what else it said? That you're looking for…” she pulls a pack of arrows out of her inventory and tosses it to Emily, who deftly catches them before hiding behind me again, “...some of these.”
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I look at her, unconvinced. She leans in close to little Willy and whispers, “I'm wasting primo material on a dumbass, aren't I?”
Willy shrugs.
“I got Polly to fly around for an after battle report,” she says in an exasperated voice. “Tom told me what you're up to, and he asked me to try and talk you out of it. But I think it's sick as fuck and I want to join.”
“And the others?”
“William already filled us in,” Karen says. “We all volunteered.”
“What's the plan?” Carter asks.
“I only have a rough idea, but it goes something like…”
I stop abruptly and take a better look at the man. He tenses up, and Derek takes notice.
“Something like what?” Carter asks as Derek sidles up to him.
It takes the others a moment to notice as well, but when they do, they start looking around at each other. Clarissa retreats behind Karen, who doesn’t seem impressed, while Jessica shoots confused looks at everyone.
“Jack?” She asks.
“Weren’t you two with Morris? You know, back when he nearly fucking killed me?”
The two stand ramrod straight, as if my words electrocute them.
“W-we weren’t with him with him,” Derek stutters, raising his arms in a placating gesture.
“We just volunteered with him, but we weren’t with the guy,” Carter adds. “We barely even know him.”
I look to Karen for confirmation, and she nods.
“But you let him kick my ass.”
“He had the mage guy and the gun guy on his side,” Carter says, almost pleading. “We didn’t like it, but cut us some slack, man. We were store clerks before this shit, we didn’t know what to do.”
“Yeah, we panicked,” Derek says.
I take a deep breath to calm my nerves before I ask, “where is he now?”
“He bailed. We were on our way here, and he ranted something about…” Carter pauses.
“About?”
“Look, they’re his words, okay? Not mine. He kept mumbling about that stupid bitch and her new boytoy…”
“It was weird,” Derek adds. “He used some more…colorful terms, but it was basically the same thing over and over again.”
“Yeah,” Carter continues. “Then at some point, he just told us to fuck off. We didn’t argue. He left with the other two guys, but we don’t know where they went. We just came here.”
I take another deep breath. I really don’t want them, I don’t think I can trust them as far as I can throw them. But beggars can’t be choosers.
“Okay,” I say. “You two can join, but I’m watching you. If either one of you makes a funny move, I’ll feed you to the monsters myself.”
“No, sir! No funny business from us,” Carter says. “Right?”
“Yeah,” Derek agrees. “We just want to help.”
“Good.”
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Ten minutes later, I told everyone my plan so far. I'm making it up as I go, incorporating new elements as they crop up.
They're all sitting around me, using sleeping bags for ground pillows. The reactions range from uninterested in Emily's case, to amused in Karen's, to downright pissed in Jessica's.
“That's it?” The latter says, throwing up her arms. “Your plans usually involve big booms, and I can't help but notice the distinct lack of those.”
“Big booms won't work this time,” I say calmly. “We used stationary traps before, but I doubt the skunk will walk into one of those again. So unless you can pull a working fighter jet out of your ass to deliver the payload, we can't do it.”
“We could use Polly.”
“That's…shit, that's actually a good idea. We’ll need to figure out some kind of remote detonator though, otherwise it might be a kamikaze run.”
I use analyze on the rest as we talk. Karen has jumped to level 21 after the last battle, so she now has access to the third lines of skills in her class trees. Little Willy is an Enforcer, like Pops, but he’s only level 16.
Jessica is a bit of a surprise, still stuck at level 5. Barely one level above my own, which is bad news considering how much we’ve both been busting our asses.
Emily is the last one I analyze, and she gained another level out of the battle as well, bringing her up to 18. She sits next to me, checking the arrows she got from Jessica. Pulling out a few of them, running her fingers over the shafts and through the fins, nocking them on the bow. As usual, she doesn’t contribute to the planning.
Seeing that line in her description, the one calling her race a human-veluthrian hybrid, takes me back to that first night on the rooftop when I saw her without her hood. I don’t know what to make of it, and I can’t figure out why she’s trying to hide it. A bunch of people have the analyze skill by now, so it can’t stay a secret for long.
We talk skills for a few more minutes, trying to figure out what tricks we have in our arsenal. As it turns out, we have quite a few. Those get incorporated into the plan as well.
“Is that everything?” Karen asks.
“Pretty much,” I say. “Now we just have to see how it’ll fail and what we can do about it.”
“How very inspiring,” Jessica quips.
----------------------------------------
We get back to the perimeter, all climbing on the roof of one building. I’m silent the whole way, unable to get the Veluthrian thing out of my mind. It doesn’t come as a surprise that Emily didn’t tell me she’s a hybrid, she’s barely spoken to me. The only reason I even know her full name and class is because she joined my party.
All of that bothers me quite a bit. I’m by no means entitled to any information she doesn’t want to share, it’s just that some of it might’ve been useful earlier. But no, that’s not quite it either. I find it hard to explain what bothers me about her, even to myself. She’s quiet, she’s anxious, and she formed an honestly unhealthy bond to me in such a short time. She already followed me into multiple fights, she goes along with crazy plans with no complaints, but I still don’t know the first thing about her.
That’s what gets to me, how one-sided all of this is. How I barely understand her, and how hard she’s making it to understand more.
“Deep breaths,” I tell myself.
She’s not okay, that’s plenty obvious. None of us are right now. I want to help her, and for that I need to understand her better. But for now, the best thing I can do is to keep her close and keep her safe. I have to give her more time and hope she’ll open up on her own.
As that thought finishes playing in my head, I realize that maybe I’ve gotten a bit too attached to her as well. Too much too fast, considering it hasn’t even been a full week since the system appeared. But hell, it feels like normalcy got ripped away from us a lifetime ago.
I get up on that roof first, and I find Pops waiting for us. Someone else is with him, hiding in his shadow much like Emily hides in my own after she gets up behind me. My blood runs cold when I see who it is.
“Jack Harrington!” She hits me with my full name. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?!”
She pushes Pops aside and power walks towards me.
“Mom, I can explain!”