We were deposited on the front steps of the City Hall of New Rampage City in front of black shoes, thin socks with a swirling, floral pattern, and formal slacks that looked comfortable and expensive. I smelled sweat, aftershave, hair product, shoe polish.
DuChamp was wearing his most formal blazer over a burly barrel chest, which was otherwise bare except for the bandolier. He propped his knuckles against his hips to menace us with his considerable pectoral musculature. Over one shoulder was slung some kind of belt of polished gold, wide and wrought with intricate symbol and glyphs that I could not read. He wriggled his mustache with pleasure, and Commander Zideo squinted at him as though trying to make a decision.
The crowd of Street Toughs chanted “Crime! Crime! Crime!” although, from their tone, it was becoming less and less clear to me whether this reflected the ecstasy of accusation, or the celebration of crime itself.
The mayor of New Rampage City quieted the crowd with a gesture. He clasped his hands behind his back, professorially, which strained the single button of his sports coat. “You know,” he said, his deep voice carrying, “when I first came to New Rampage City, it was a real mess.” The Street Toughs elbowed and shushed one another excitedly, their anticipation palpable.
“Ya had… illegal activity… in the streets.” He was pausing every couple of seconds for the crowd’s benefit, either to give them time to understand, or leaving space for them to cheer if they so desired. “Ya had… illegal substances… sold in dark alleys. Ya had… malicious individuals… roaming the town.”
“That’s us!” whispered one of the audience, who was then punched in the gut by his neighbor.
“There was…” Here, his mustache horse-shoed into a scowl. “Crime.” He spat the word like a loogie.
“Crime!” shouted the crowd. “Crime! Crime!” Again he quieted them.
“In short? It was not good. Not a place you’d want to raise your kids.” He nodded at his own point. Looking around, I saw no kids, nor any particular parental resemblance among the onlookers. I did, however, see someone holding forth a large sign of protest that said “CHAMP 3:16,” whatever that meant. DuChamp spun on his heels in the courtyard, pointing to us. “Look around you! Do you see any of that anymore?”
Zideo did not understand that this was rhetorical. “Abso-”
“No, of course not.” DuChamp stomped back over to us. “And do you know why?” He knelt down and it was like a mountain kneeling. A mountain with great hair and a weirdly charming jawline.
“Are you gonna tell-”
“I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’m the mayor of this town. And I’m tough on crime.”
“Crime! Crime! Crime! Crime!” The shout went up. He let it run its course. The thugs and hooligans applauded, shook fists, cracked whips. DuChamp put his grapefruit-sized fists in the air. “I’m MAYOR Bo 'Da Champ' DuChamp!” he bellowed, shaking the belt in one hand with each shout. “And I! Approve! This message!”
The citizenry of New Rampage City nearly rioted. They screamed, pumped their fists, chest-bumped one another. A shirtless thug with no shirt beat his chest. A woman with a patch eye and tight leggings slapped herself in the face repeatedly. A guy in a leather vest howled like a dog, sounding for all the world like my cousin Dermot. It seemed to me that the Street Toughs were a very different tool of the Boss Council than the Sorrow Troopers. Where the troopers were regimented and disciplined, if melancholy, these humanoids were hewn of a more chaotic essence. I noticed, too, that most of them were possessed of a highly specific human feature that Commander Zideo had once, long ago, described (referring to his friend Franklin) as a “punchable face.” Now I know this is almost certainly by design.
DuChamp put on the belt, tamping down abdominal muscles like tennis balls. The cheer that went up among the Toughs sounded like it was ten times their number. They whooo’d like animals smelling blood. They shook their signs. (I now noticed others being brandished, though I could not decipher their meanings: “CRIME SUX,” “JUSTICE FOR KARATE SUSAN,” “NOTICE ME CHAMP-SAMA,” and “YOU’RE MY WORST NIGHT-MAYOR.”) DuChamp whipped off his sports coat and threw it into the crowd. He stomped in front of us, and made a flat spear edge of his hand, pointing his elbow at Zideo. They shook each other by the shoulders in excitement. My growl was swallowed up by the uproar of the crowd, but the mayor had a voice that carried, low enough to only reach us a couple feet away and no further.
“Act hurt,” he muttered.
“What?”
DuChamp’s struck at my human. I would have leaped in front of it, but some instinct held me back. His hand whistled through the air, a full three or four inches from Zideo’s nose. A warning shot?
Zideo blinked. The crowd held its breath. “Oh,” said Zideo. He snapped his head sideways, the wrong way, and threw his hands over his nose, yelling. “Ow!” The Toughs burst with a wall of noise more solid than any auto-scroller limit. Arms and signs were in the air, bodies jumped up and down, savoring the punishment they perceived and chanting “Crime! Crime! Criiiiiime!”
Zideo looked around and understood how much depended on his actions. “Oh no,” he said, his words lost in the din. “My nose.” He looked at me and shrugged, and I would have returned the gesture had my shoulders worked like that.
DuChamp pulled back his hand, his great sausage fingers spread wide, and concealed that he spoke, letting the words out of one side of his mouth while dramatically flexing. “Grab onto my wrist.”
“Your wri-hey!”
The enormous man engulfed the top of Zideo’s head in his hand, and my human’s hands went instinctively to the wrist anyway. He might as well have grabbed onto a fallen log, scrabbling to hold on.
“And now,” announced DuChamp, his voice booming over the crowd and shaking my own belly with its sonorant vibrato, “I’m going to drag this criminal BY HIS HAIR,” and here he winked at me, “back to City Hall. As you know, the Da Champ is judge, jury, and execution. Now the defendant will PAY for… his WHAT?” He put a hand to his ear.
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“Crime! Crime! Crime!”
While they changed, he pretended to dust something off his nice slacks, and whispered to me. “Bite my leg. You can’t hurt me!”
When in Rome, I thought. I lunged, and sunk my teeth into the leg. It was the perfect chew toy—tough as rawhide, but with enough give for me to latch on. He dragged me effortlessly and never flinched with pain.
Up the steps we went, Zideo holding onto the log wrist, I the ankle, and DuChamp closed the door behind us, a luxurious balsa that actually fit into the doorway.
He stood Zideo up, and drew the cardboard venetian blinds down in the windows facing the plaza. “Sorry for the show. You alright, pal? You can let go now.” To my shock, he was actually petting me. His skin was not smooth and reminded me of used-up sandpaper. There had once been grit there. His fingers were too big for a good ear rub, but he patted my back the right way, and I sat pretty for him. I didn’t hate it, I’ll say that much.
“What the heck is going on?” said Zideo. “And how do I know you’re not Xue-Fang?”
“Hang on,” he said. The interior New Rampage City City Hall looked like if an eight year old had expanded a treehouse into a municipal building. A waiting room with cardboard sofas and fake fake plants. An informational desk with a crude receptionist cut from the same, pinching an old style of phone I had never seen in Lisa’s house between ear and shoulder, its cord no more than a child’s scribble of a loop-de-loop. The mayor raised up one foot, and stomped hard, although I was certain it was a fraction of the force he could muster. Shockwaves shook the door in its jamb and vibrated the walls and ceiling, threatening the scotch tape and nails holding everything together. “Make a hurt sound. Loud, and believable.”
“Oh. Um. OUCH!” announced Zideo. The responding cheer from the plaza was ecstatic.
“We don’t have much time. Do you have transportation for us?”
Zideo cocked his head. “’Scuse me?”
“You didn’t escape the Purple Deeps by yourself, right? Do you have a ship for us? A spell? How are we getting out of here?”
Zideo shook his head as though he could dispel confusion. “Bro, what? I was headed back down there to save my friends. It’s just us.”
“What do you mean it’s… wait.” He clapped his meaty hands together, and the blinds rattled in their tracks, then pointed to Zideo.
“Aughgh! My… knee!”
DuChamp made a condescending face. “Show don’t tell, Player. Now, tell me clearly: You’re saying the Princess doesn’t know about my offer to defect, and you’re not here to give me safe passage back to Ludopolis?”
“Guy, even I didn’t know about it.”
“Then how the… Hang on, gimme one of your shoes.”
“What? No. What?”
“Give it to me,” insisted the mayor. “It’ll buy us a minute or two.” Zideo reluctantly pulled off the Jordan-shoe and handed it to DuChamp.
“Just try not to scuff it.” DuChamp gave it a spinning, backhand toss like a man throwing a frisbee through a window, breaking one of blinds. The crowd outside completely lost control.
“You ass!”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened, then. I saw you fall into the Blunderworld. Start there, and make it fast.”
Zideo hurried through an explanation of the cave systems beneath the Shard’s surface, eliding many details, and of our discovery of the ghost of Bailey Blastoff and the freeing of Nereus. “But then Helmgarth pulled a whole computer out of his backpack, fully, a laptop-ass laptop! And he called the Princess and she made it into one of those musou g-words for a minute. Then we went into the Overworld accidentally, and now I’m here.”
“You can access the Overworld?” said DuChamp.
“I don’t know how I did it. And I probably can’t take anyone with me.”
“You took the dog with you, right?”
The dog had a name, but it didn’t feel like the right time to be uptight about formalities.
“I guess so… I was touching him, and we needed to get up, just, out of there, and it… it just worked.”
“Okay,” said DuChamp. “Then let’s all hold hands, sing a campfire song and get out of here.”
We circled up, the two men holding hands with their eyes closed, touching my back. Zideo tensed and strained. He groaned and made the sounds I have sometimes heard from him through the bathroom door after too many consecutive days of subsisting on an R-Mart snack diet.
DuChamp opened his eyes. “We’re still here.”
“I told you I don’t know how it works!”
The crowd outside began to chant the word “crime,” thirsty for violence.
DuChamp sighed. “Do you understand how high up in the ranks I am with the Boss Council?” He chopped the air toward his belt. “This is a Radian, the Golden Plains Radian. This was part of my, well, let’s call it a signing bonus. They like to promote from within in the organization, but they incentivize traitors to join up too. That’s what this is.” His gesture took in all of the ersatz city behind us, outside the door. “I said I wanted my city back. But my city is gone.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to rule. I want to govern. That’s different. I’m no Boss.”
“Okay, so what now? You pretend to take me prisoner? Or give me the belt and I run?”
DuChamp stood up straight, as though speaking to someone else entirely. “You get the Radian and I get jack squat?” He shook his head. “No deal. I want to join the Game Fellows.”
“Can’t you just beat all these guys up? They’re the enemies from your own g-word right?”
“I’m a grappler, son,” he said. “I can’t take on that many Street Toughs at once.”
“I think I can jump on their heads,” Zideo volunteered.
“Still too many.” He rubbed his clean-shaven chin in thought. It was like massaging a flank of beef.
The crowd of Street Toughs was at the door. They shouted for blood, they chanted and howled and cracked whips.
“So then we fight.”
“What? Like for real? Hell no.”
“It’s the only way,” said DuChamp. “I physically cannot hand this belt over to you. It’s not in my code. You’ll have to beat me one on one.”
“Won’t that kill you?”
His big, meaty hands weighed two ideas like scales. “Eh, only sort of. I’m part of the Bosshood, so I bring my rules with me, no matter which Genre Shard I’m on. Some of ‘em, anyway—the line isn’t clear. So, you beat me, you take my Radian, but since I come from Rampage City (19∞9) originally, I’ll come back during the Boss Rush.”
“The what?”
“I’m guaranteed to be re-implemented at the end, when the Radians are in danger of being collected… by you. I’ll probably be palette-swapped and super OP. When you see me return, you rescue me then. Deal?”
What happened next happened fast. Zideo took his hand reluctantly, and at that very moment, DuChamp noticed the eyes of Street Toughs peeking in through the broken blinds. He smoothly moved into an attack that looked harsh even to me. He swung my human in a wide arc over his head, pounding him into the plywood floor. All of City Hall shook. In the briefest earthquake I have ever experienced, the planks and composite boards came down on top of our heads.
I pressed out of the pile, pushing up from beneath the broken wood planks and two-by-fours. Although we were ringed by bellowing Street Toughs, I did not see either of the humans. Then, planks erupted and DuChamp burst from the rubble, holding a wiggling Zideo above his head triumphantly.
“Rrruuuaaauughgh!” he shouted, flinging saliva. “As mayor of New Rampage City, I hereby declare this a BOSS FIGHT!”