The somber note brought an end to the interrogation. For the last five minutes, it had mostly been a lot of “I don’t know” and “I’m not sure” and “I don’t remember anyone like that,” anyway. Kurt had shared most of the hard facts we had, and even his excellent memory for people hadn’t been equal to recalling specific faces from a sea of thousands.
As the crowd started to disperse, I stepped forward. “Can anyone tell me anything about the buildings south of here? We’re trying to get to the ValuCo center.”
“Sure,” a man said. “Right south of here’s a private gas station, but beyond that are a bunch of the cargo offices. You might want to head west after that. More cargo offices, but you’ll cut south right after you pass Blucifer. There’s some more buildings between here and ValuCo, though I can’t tell you what they are.”
“Utility stuff, mostly. I think,” a woman called out. “Look, will you guys take anyone with you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve had bad experiences with other people, and-”
“We’ve had worse experiences alone, Vince!” Kurt snarled. “They can come.”
“Okay! Fine! Fine!” Having only one eye made Kurt’s glare twice as effective. “Anyone have enough points for another ability before we go? I don’t. I’m up to 236.”
“Only 137,” said Byron, sounding frustrated.
“185 here,” offered Davi.
“...71.” said Kurt.
I stared at him for a moment, his glare fading as he looked away from me. “Okay, fine,” I said. “No new abilities for us, then. Team Always Forward?”
JoeyT shook his head. “Zephyr didn’t get any more points just now, and the rest of us had our second abilities by the time we reached the last warehouse.”
“Alright,” I said, frustrated. “Maybe after the next building.”
The people staying behind launched a barrage of abilities at the initial crowd of spacedogs, giving us a much smoother exit. We left with a crowd of fifteen-or-so people in tow, although they hung back and only helped a little with the fighting, using a smattering of ranged abilities: Ice Bolt, Fire Bolt, Force Shield, and a few others I didn’t recognize.
In spite of the longer distance we had to travel, the trip went more smoothly. The private gas station was nearby, but it wasn’t worth detouring for - it was just a place for the airport’s fuel trucks to fill up. There wasn’t a convenience store or any passenger cars, like a typical gas station might have.
We had more eyes watching out for monsters, and more hands wielding melee weapons to take them down. Zephyr and Davi had joined us on the frontlines, while Kurt had taken their place with our sleeping beauties on the cart.
“I’m not going to try to hit monsters with a stick when I can’t even see them coming!” he’d snapped. “Just give me Zephyr’s bolts. I’ll try to get points that way, I guess. And I’ll open your damn doors.”
Zephyr - who was nearly as short as Davi - had struggled with the sledgehammer her friends had set aside for her. She could lift it easily enough, but swinging it accurately was a different story. The momentum of the heavy hammerhead made her stumble, almost dragging her around. We hadn’t traveled too far before Davi grew curious. “Let me try!”
Zephyr handed off the hammer willingly enough. “Be my guest. I was about to try switching to one of the pieces of rebar. Unless I use Assisted Strike, this thing is impossible to aim.”
Davi swung it experimentally. Her feet stayed staunchly anchored to the ground. “Doesn’t seem so bad to me. You can use my axe instead if you want.”
“Really?” Zephyr sounded delighted.
“Yeah! Sure. I-”
“This doesn’t make any sense!” Byron cut in. “Davi, what do you weigh?”
“Uh, wow, personal questions much?”
Byron made a scoffing noise. “Come on, Dav. I’m serious.”
She shrugged. “115. Ish.”
Zephyr stopped giving her new axe an admiring inspection. “What? That’s ten pounds less than me. You’re lying. No way the hammer drags me around and not you.”
Davi glared. “I’m taking my axe back if you’re calling me a liar! Do I look heavier than you? I’m like… four inches shorter!”
“Maybe it’s the abilities.”
Everyone turned to look at me.
I shrugged. “The rebar seemed lighter than I expected, and Kurt seemed to think it should weigh more. I didn’t really worry about it at the time - my second ability was supposed to make me faster, which has to do with muscles, so I thought that might be it even though it didn’t say it would make me stronger. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe just… getting abilities does. Avalanche and JoeyT don’t seem to be having trouble swinging their sledgehammers around. I’d thought it was because they were taller and heavier, but maybe having a second ability helps. Zephyr doesn’t have hers.”
Byron scoffed. “Vince, you’re smarter than that. Even if a second ability makes you stronger, that wouldn’t make you immune to physics. If Davi is lighter than Zephyr, she should be tugged around more by the hammer, no matter how strong she is.”
“And why, exactly, would having a second ability not let you laugh in the face of physics, Sir Fire Mage?”
Byron had already raised an angry hand, ready to argue with me, but my final phrase made him freeze. “Point,” he said finally. “That’s actually a damn good point.”
“Who cares?” said Kurt. “Figure it out later. Get your asses moving before we get attacked again.”
We reached the cargo building without major incident. The people behind us took a few injuries, and JoeyT got slashed along his calf, but we had a few healers among our followers and the wounds were quickly stabilized and slowly repaired.
The building didn’t have much to offer us, other than another 40 people ready to join our retinue. There was plenty of food, of a sort, since the cargo facility had held several pallets of raw asparagus, but it had already grown slimy and moldy in the heat. A pallet of raspberries had suffered a similar fate.
There was nothing to drink.
It made sense - liquid is heavy, and drinks generally last a long time. There wasn’t much reason to go to the expense of shipping them by air.
It was still a disappointment.
Byron had enough points for a second ability, which he agonized over for a while, passing a piece of rebar from hand to hand as he thought. “I should really take something for melee.”
I shrugged. “You’re still earning points.”
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Yeah, but you guys are doing all the killing. I’m just a leech.”
“That’s true,” I said. “For now.”
“You think things will change?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But let me ask you a question: what’s the last game you played where the best strategy was to fill your party up with one kind of character?”
Byron furrowed his brow. “Uh… I guess Gearbullets had that one messed up patch where it didn’t make sense to play anything but a Derribot.”
That wasn’t my game, but I’d heard about the incident. “That was because of the infinite ammo glitch, right?”
He nodded. “You could just run around holding down your trigger and spraying death.”
“Okay. Any other times?”
My friend was silent, thinking.
I patted him on the shoulder. “I’ve played a game or two where you could run a party with five of the same character. But… it sure as hell isn’t common. Nine times out of ten, maybe 99 times out of 100, you’re better off with a mixed group. Even if some members don’t hit as hard as others, you’ve got less of a chance of running up against something no one can handle. If you’re willing to stay on the mage track, I think you’re doing the rest of us a favor.”
Byron gave me a skeptical look. “You just called me a leech.”
“You called yourself a leech; I just agreed with you.”
“Same thing!”
I shook my head. “If you need to be carried for now, my backpack’s up to the task. You’re the one taking a risk, not me. If each of us had to fight five spacedogs in a row, I’d probably end up in much better shape than you… if we were fighting alone. We’re not. I don’t mind picking up the slack to give our team more options in the future.”
Byron grew thoughtful. His eyes skimmed the air in front of him as if reading something I couldn’t see - which he probably was. “More options, eh? Twinkles was trying to get me to stick with the mage route. Maybe I can find something that splits the difference. Magic, but not just for attacking. Wait - this could work!”
Byron shivered, then gave his piece of rebar an experimental swing. “Definitely lighter, and my ability had nothing to do with my muscles at all.” He held up his hand, and a thin blue flame jumped out from his index finger, too bright to look at directly. Byron smiled, then abruptly lost the smile with a yelp. “Shit! That’s hot. Damnit, I took a clunker.”
“What was it?”
He grimaced, shaking his hand. It didn’t look visibly injured, but he was clearly in some pain. “Something called Focused Flame. The description said it’d create an intense flame at close range. I thought I could use it as a last-ditch defense and maybe as a welding torch too. Would have been handy to put some sides on the cart, maybe make armor or weapons. Instead I got some shit I can only use for a second or two without burning myself.”
I frowned. “We’ll have to try to find you some welding gloves.”
“I guess,” he said. “Why isn’t there a damn wiki for this shit? Our lives are on the line and we’re wandering around in the dark.”
Privately, I was disappointed too. We’d made it maybe a third of the way from the airport to the ValuCo. TAF and our group opened our last water bottles right after we left, sharing them amongst ourselves. It made the crowd behind us pretty angry, but they weren’t the ones in the vanguard. Even the drink I got - probably about five ounces or so - didn’t feel like enough. The day was hot and we’d been working hard, taking only short breaks.
The second cargo building was much like the first: it had “food” of a sort, but not food anyone was yet desperate enough to eat. Rotten berries of various types, mostly, stored in gigantic supposed-to-be-refrigerated caverns that were now sweltering unairconditioned metal boxes.
No water.
I felt thirstier and thirstier as the day wore on.
We took a longer break in the third cargo building. One of the workers had taken some kind of freezer ability, and others had copied her so there was actually food present… but without water, I didn’t feel like eating much. Blueberries might be mostly water, but they don’t replace a cool drink. After a handful, I stopped. I’m not sure if it was making my thirst worse, but it felt like it was.
We waited there to give Bolero and John time to wake up. The 30-foot statue of a terrifying blue mustang - known to the locals as Blucifer - stood across the street, signifying that it was time for us to head south.
On the one hand, that was a positive - we’d made it about halfway to our destination.
On the other hand, the buildings would be more spread out from this point on, we were already exhausted and in the early stages of dehydration, and the day was more than half over.
At least we’d have more strength for the next stretch. Not only had our band of followers swelled again, putting at the head of a pack of close to 200 people, Zephyr and Kurtis had finally scraped together enough points to choose their second abilities. Interestingly, Kurt had only 144 points, the lowest we'd heard of for someone able to get a second ability. We'd met people with 142 and 143 who couldn't take them, so 144 was probably the true threshold.
Kurtis took something called Missile, an ability that would let him accelerate small objects to dangerous speeds.
“I don’t want to be in melee,” he said. “I’ll just keep up with my bolts. At least this way I can get points and actually start helping as more than a magic key.”
“You might have to get a lot of points,” I said. “I’m over 300 and I still can’t get a third ability. I hope we’re able to.”
“We have to be able to,” Kurt scoffed. “Otherwise, why would we be able to keep earning points?”
"Some kind of leaderboard? Nah, you're right. If points earned us one thing, they'll likely earn us more," I said.
Byron nodded. “Agreed. The question is, when do we get a third one? We know the second came at 144. Unless it's semi-random, it's probably the same for everyone, and that's a very interesting number: 12 squared. Hard to figure out a pattern off of just two data points. I might have hoped for one at 288, but if you're over 300... I’d say best case would be a third ability at 432 points, worst case would be a second just over 1700 points.”
“1700?!” said JoeyT. “No way.”
“It’d be twelve cubed.” Byron made a face. “I hope it’s not that, but we need more data to really extrapolate.”
Since we were waiting around anyway, we took the time to repeat Byron’s earlier test, with Kurt lifting the heavy sledgehammers before and after he took the ability and swinging them around.
“It’s subtle,” he said. “But… yeah. I can definitely feel a difference. It’s easier to pick up and doesn’t pull me around as much when I swing it.”
“Awesome,” said Zephyr. “My turn now. I’m taking Biological Augment: Armored Skin.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I saw that. I was tempted, but I was worried it would make me less flexible.”
She shrugged. “I’m more worried about getting sliced up again. That was terrible.”
“Not being able to dodge will get you hit more often.”
She rolled her eyes. “I don’t think my skin is gonna be my major issue there, ninja man.”
“Fair,” I said. I’d been critical of her Assisted Strike choice - and I still was - but I had to admit Zephyr hit the enemies much more frequently than most of our party, now that she was up and moving. It still seemed like a waste in the long run, but it was helping her in the short term. And I had to admit I was interested in seeing Armored Skin. Maybe I’d take it myself.
“Here goes,” said Zephyr. She was silent for a moment, then gave a slightly panicked wail, hands dancing around to scratch at skin rapidly breaking out in lurid purple patches. “Eeeeugh! What is this? This veels terrilul.”
“Zephyr?” Avalanche’s voice was concerned. “Lily?”
“Aaaaaah! I liss ah had. I ha’ scales!” Her hands came up to her mouth as she spoke, feeling at a series of toughened plates that had replaced her lips. As she did, the rest of her body continued to shift. Her hair was pushed into a mohawk shape, and the shape of her skull warped slightly, forming gentle slopes that integrated her nose and ears.
“Does it hurt?” Avalanche asked.
“No. No… just…” Zephyr waved a hand, then paused to look at it in distress. “I didn’t exkect this. I... I sorry, Ashley.”
Avalanche was staring at Zephyr with a horrified expression. "It's... it's fine. Are you... are you okay?"
The shorter woman, fortunately, was staring at her hands. She didn't notice the expression on Avalanche's face. "I didn't exkect this," she repeated.
“At least it looks tougher,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. "Is it?"
She tapped gently on her skin with her axe. Not hard, but the axe was fairly sharp. I'd have expected to get at least a small cut, and I saw nothing. “I guess?” Zephyr said. She still looked crestfallen, shocked by her transformation.
I couldn’t blame her. When Davi and I had taken Biological Augments, we’d looked exactly the same from the outside. I’d expected an ability that affected the skin might show a visible change, but I’d been thinking of something more like a heavy whole-body callus, not this kind of… anatomical revamp. It took all of us by surprise. I almost wished we were heading right back out to fight monsters, if only for the distraction, but the next leg of our trip would be a long one. None of us wanted to head out while under strength.
JoeyT asked me for some tips while we waited. I gave him some pointers on keeping his body balanced better and using his whole body to put force into his swings, but we didn’t really practice. “I don’t want to wear myself out,” he said. “We’re gonna need to leave soon, and I want to be rested.”
When our sleeping healers finally woke, we didn’t have any water to share with them.
“Crickets,” John said. Even the non-swear sounded shocking, coming from him. “I hope we can find water soon.”
“I’m sure the ValuCo will have drinks,” I said. “We just have to make it there.”