Our next outing was… startlingly routine.

TAF and my group had gotten used to fighting monsters, and we’d gotten used to working together. This time out, we took down the monsters quickly and efficiently. Maybe too much so?

“Vince! You gotta hold back. Bolero and John aren’t getting a chance to tag them,” Kurt yelled.

“Sorry!”

I tried to slow down, experimenting with ways to adapt my kata to the smaller spacedogs. It was a difficult process, but I did make one valuable discovery: if I hit the black spots on the shoulders, the monsters flinched. After learning that, I made a game of it, trying to strike the vulnerable spots and use the moment of hesitation to pin the monsters to the ground for Bolero and John to hit.

Even the injuries weren’t as terrifying. Yesterday, when a spacedog clawed Davi’s ankle, I was honestly worried that someone would die. Maybe Davi, because she couldn’t keep up, maybe the people we were pushing along… Maybe me, trying to do too much at once and getting jumped by an enemy I didn’t see. The spacedogs didn’t take too much effort to kill, but they were still dangerous. Kurt’s lost eye proved that a moment of inattention could cost anyone; the image of his blood-coated face was something I was still trying to blank from my memory.

When Davi misjudged a swing and pulled a muscle in her arm, a few quick pats on the back from John and Bolero had her right as rain.

There was an alarming moment when JoeyT tripped, allowing a spacedog to spring onto his back and snap at his neck. A Force Shield from Davi kept the mistake from being lethal, and I hit the monster and sent it flying, using Powerful Blow to ensure a one-hit kill. It was a close call, but we handled the injury itself smoothly. Kurt rushed over to irrigate the cuts on JoeyT’s back, with the healers right behind him. Instead of exhausting themselves getting our ally to perfect health, they each offered him a little aid and stepped back as soon as the cuts scabbed over. We retreated inside the building and took a break. I fetched food for the group while Bolero and John slowly brought JoeyT back into fighting shape.

“Good to go back out?” I asked.

JoeyT shook himself. “Yeah. I… guess so. Footwork, right?”

I grinned and nodded. “Even when you’re moving to attack, you’ve gotta keep your balance! Try not to lean so much weight over your front foot, and when you’re on flat terrain, you want to try to slide your feet.”

“Slide them?” JoeyT asked doubtfully.

“Well… not exactly. But you want to lift them off the ground by the smallest amount you can and move them smoothly. It’ll help you detect obstructions or pits in the ground without getting tripped up by them, and you’ll be able to set down your foot to change direction with very little warning.”

Bolero snorted. “Your footwork’s never gonna be perfect. I don’t know what we were thinking, going out in normal clothing! There’s a whole warehouse available. There’s gotta be something more protective than, well, nothing.

That caused another delay. I didn’t really mind: it gave me more time to snack. The armor… I wasn’t sure about. Obviously, protective gear is good, but finding protective gear that didn’t limit our mobility or vision might be hard. It existed, sure, but I’d have been more confident in a sporting goods store or something similar. What were we gonna get here? Winter jackets? I guess those would be okay… some protection, only a small mobility loss, though we’d get hotter more quickly.

When Bolero returned, I was glad I hadn’t voiced my doubts out loud: he’d struck gold. The winter jackets didn’t seem worth it to me - not with the ability to heal - but I gladly accepted a pair of ski goggles, as well as a helmet and fleece muffler. Those would protect my eyes, ears, and neck without making me too much hotter. The wide goggles wouldn’t limit my vision at all! Actually, with the tinted lenses, I’d probably be able to see better. It was a giant, sport-oriented pair of sunglasses.

We made our way around the outside of the warehouse. This time, we didn’t venture into the employee parking lot, but looked through the legions of semi trucks slowly, carefully inspecting each prospect.

Most, John eliminated without even looking at them closely. “Nah! That hasn’t been on the road five years.”

Some, he peeked at, but without much hope. “Maybe… seems on the older side, but look at those curves. Someone at least tried to make it aerodynamic, and trucks mostly didn’t care about that until the past twenty years or so.”

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We opened the hoods anyway, a strange experience. After one of us checked under the truck for monsters and gave an all-clear, John would rummage about under the front of the grille for a latch. Unlike on a passenger car, the hood wasn’t a simple single panel. Instead, the entire front end of the car would tilt up on hinges along the front bumper, revealing the engine. For a few, John could open the hood himself, with a bit of effort. For most, we needed at least two people’s strength to overcome rust and the weight of the massive piece of metal.

Each time we did, John looked inside, peering at an arcane array of components and shaking his head in disappointment.

Finally, we found one that John was excited about, an ugly green cab with a long boxy nose. “Ohh, cross your fingers boys and girls! They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.”

By the time we got the hood open, I was cautiously excited too. It’d taken four people to get the rusted hood open, leaving only JoeyT and Twinkles on monster watch duty.

I didn’t really know what I was looking at when it came to car engines, but I could tell that the inside of this truck looked different than the rest. A lot of the engines we’d looked at seemed… if not pretty, at least designed with the thought that a human being might look at them sometime, with colored, high-contrast parts. This one was a near-uniform dull shade of brown. There were still wires but… not so many? And there, on one side of the engine, I saw something really promising. I reached out to tap a thick band.

“John, is this belt driving a fuel pump?”

John clapped his hands gleefully. “You bet it is!”

“Want me to try to make it run?” Kurtis asked.

“Just… just for a second,” John said. “That sludge makes me worried. Be a right shame if we found a good engine and trashed it by messing about.”

Kurtis frowned at the engine’s grimy silhouette. He hesitated and, to my surprise, managed to activate his ability without touching the engine at all. It made a low rumbling sound as it started up, but stopped as soon as the glow from his ability faded.

“Shit,” said Kurt. “It didn’t work.”

“No, no. Wasn’t thinking. Wiring’s slagged, right? There’d be no way to carry the voltage to the ignition coils. Don’t think any truck would have started running without that. Sorry to make you waste your time. I think… I think this truck is gonna take care of us, even if it takes some work.” The older man reached out a second belt running off the engine. “See this? Been wracking my brain trying to figure out what it’s attached to, but I think I heard somewhere that semis use compressed air to power their brake system. If this belt runs the compressor, we might not need to muck with the brake lines at all.”

“Compressed air? Not hydraulics?” Davi asked. “I would have thought semi trucks and airplanes would use the same thing.”

I waggled my finger at her. “Ah, but keep in mind that it’s not what the wheels are doing that make the plane stop, not really.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s true. It’s mostly wing spoilers and reverse thrust.”

“Not sure of all the reasons, exactly, but it’s good for us!” John said. He had climbed up onto the frame of the semi truck and was bent over the engine, right arm plunging deep into a gap between components. His eyes were shut tight, his face contorted in focus as he rooted around.

That was trust, right there. I turned my back to him, joining the TAF members in scanning our surroundings. We’d cleared the area before we’d opened the hood, but it had been several minutes since then, and all my co-workers - and myself, honestly - had been pretty fixated on the exposed machinery.

“What’re you up to, John?” I asked. “If you’re gonna keep messing around with the truck, the rest of us need to go on guard.”

“Be… just a… minute…” John grunted. “Oh! Got ‘em!”

I glanced over my shoulder to see John stand upright from the engine, a handful of wires clutched in one greasy fist. As he moved, some dust fell out of the ends, catching the sunlight in a burst of coppery glitter.

“Well,” I said. “Guess that explains what the aliens did to break the wiring.”

John looked crestfallen. “I was hoping they just disconnected it.”

“It’s just one more problem to solve,” Kurt said. “Can we get the battery out? If we can, I want to move indoors to do some testing and planning.”

John pulled open a plastic cover. “Yeah. It’s right under here. If you can unbolt it, I think we can just lift it out.”

“Incoming!” yelled Twinkles, and I realized I had let myself get distracted again.

Raising my staff, I spun, scanning the area. There: behind the fence were two rodents streaking toward us, one right behind the other.

I ran forward to meet them, activating Powerful Blow as I slammed the first monster into the ground, then quickly pulling back to meet the second monster’s leap. That left both on the ground, and a pair of ability-enhanced stomps was enough to end them.

“Damn, Vince! You’re stealing all the XP!” Twinkles called.

“Maybe… but…” I closed my eyes.

Points: 441 (Threshold reached. Ability selection available.)

“I’ve earned my third ability.”