Wasteland Warlords Episode 3: Chapters 4 - 6

Chapter 4 - Hollywood Hills

“You want to go into LA?” Alex said. “The epicenter of the Inhabited Zone? Where the monsters are so thick that the US government gave it up as a loss twenty years ago, and the Warlord of the West took over?”

Clay stuck up his hands in a take it easy gesture. “It’s not like we’re going to rock up to his doorstep and pick a fight. The Hollywood sign’s on the north end of town in the hills, at least ten miles from Shieldwall.” They’d all seen clips of the action when they were kids; that flyover shot of the OLL in the sign burning had been a favorite of the news bloggers for a while, and they still showed it sometimes when they talked about the Merge. “We slip in, find this Diebolt guy, get some answers, and slip back out, full stealth. The Warlord won’t even know we set foot on his territory.”

“Yeah, Short Stack,” Joe said. “We’ll get killed way before he hears we were in the neighborhood, so don’t even worry about it.”

Clay glared at his brother. “I meant because we’ve got the Camera Obscura.”

“For twenty minutes at a time,” Alex said. “And where are you going to find a 110-outlet when its charges run out?”

“It runs on runes, too,” Clay said, digging the Camera out of his pocket so she could see the Item text for herself. “With one of Joe’s fyeularunes, it’ll keep going as long as we need it.”

Griff had been quieter than usual during Clay’s presentation, sitting and staring solemnly into the cook fire. He finally looked up.

“You seem to have it all figured out, lad,” he said. “But I’m here to tell ya, the Warlord’s the least of our worries in LA. There are Artifact Structures all over those hills and the mobs’re so thick you couldn’t beat ’em back with a stick. Any time the Camera’s protection wears off, we’re sitting tortles.”

“It’s not like we’re defenseless,” Clay protested. “We’ve got two insanely powerful Incants on our side, and you aren’t such a slouch yourself. If we can’t handle a couple mobbings at this level, then we shouldn’t be out here in the wasteland. We’ve got to do this for Bacon Bits. Nobody else is going to rescue her. We can’t leave her there with that Voodoo dickhead.” He looked from Griff to his wife to his brother. “Come on, guys. She needs us. No Jaeger left behind.”

“Aw, shucks,” Joe said. “You know I can’t resist when you go all noble jarhead on us. This idea is stupid as hell, but Lumberjack Joe Jaeger never met a stupid idea he didn’t like.” He slung an arm around Clay’s neck and gave him a noogie. “I’m in, you big sexy Marine you!”

Clay shoved his brother off and raked his hair back into place.

Across the fire, Griff pawed at his bristly chin. “Well, we’re up the Hearth without a Heat Resistance spell ’til we have a better idea what we’re up against. As annoying as the piglet is, I’ll admit I don’t much care to see her enslaved to that lizardman. Besides, we need to find you a dungeon lord to kill, lad, and if anybody’s cruising for death, it’s this Voodoo Daddy. Seems to me this scholar of magic is the best lead we got.” He nodded. “Aye, lad, let’s do it.”

That just left Alex opposed. Why in the world was she so against this?

“This Diebolt guy could know what we need to get revenge for Bacon Bits,” Clay told her. “Don’t you want to kick that lizard’s ass and get your talking pig sidekick back?”

Instead of rallying her like he’d hoped, Alex’s face darkened.

“Sure, and what if this time it’s not Bacon Bits who gets zombified? What if it’s Joe or Griff or—?” Tears sparkled in her eyes, and her fists shook at her sides. “What if it’s you? How am I supposed to go on if I lose you?”

Clay crouched down on his heels in front of her. “Hey, Crazy-san, take it easy. You’re not going to lose me. Remember what you said when the docs told us there was nothing else we could try?”

Alex swiped away a stray tear and refused to look at him… which meant she did remember, she just didn’t want to say because she knew it wouldn’t help her win the argument.

“You told me it didn’t matter what some jackoff in a white coat said, you weren’t going down without a fight.” Clay caught her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. “It doesn’t matter what the big, bad Voodoo Daddy tries, I’m not going down without a fight. Besides, I know if I do end up zombified you’ll burn that motherfucker’s dungeon to the ground to get me back. That’ll be another Save in your column, which we both know you could use. You’re behind by like three now.”

That got a reluctant laugh out of her.

“Asshole.” She shoved him, barely a touch of Ettin strength behind the push, but it knocked him onto his backside in the dirt. Putting his enhanced Dex to good use, Clay tucked and rolled back to his feet.

He grinned at her. “That sounds close enough to a yes for government work.”

“Fine.” Alex stood up and wiped her eyes. “I guess we’re going to LA.”

***

Despite Clay’s assurances that they could do this, they were taking the trip into the epicenter of the IZ seriously.

They spent the rest of the afternoon scouring the Sooq for ammo, potions, and runes. Anything they could carry that might possibly come in handy in LA. That was where it had all begun twenty years before. Portals had opened throughout the city, dropping otherworldly monsters in amongst the movie stars, game programmers, and fast-food workers. Planting medieval mead halls next to Starbuckses, and sticking an active volcano smack dab in the middle of the San Gabriel Mountains.

The highest concentration of monsters in the Inhabited Zone was still there, but they had spread like a cracked egg flattening out in the pan, inhabiting the surrounding mountains, desert, and coast. And of course, there was the Warlord of the West to worry about. You didn’t mess around with the only human who had built an empire in the deadliest sector of the wasteland. Rumor was, back in the early days even the good ol’ US federal government tried to go toe-to-toe with him and came out missing the whole damn foot.

The best thing to do was steer clear of southern LA like their lives depended on it. Because they did.

They set out loaded for bear at first light the next morning and made it out of Santa Clarita without a single skirmish. For the most part, the city was inhabited by nocturnal creatures anyway, kokopellis and crocturnals and the like. On top of that, the Jaeger squad’s new alliance with the Sooq kept away a lot of the locals that did come out during the day.

Joe’s refurbished dune buggy ate up the miles between Santa Clarita and LA. Since they’d crossed the containment wall, Clay had gotten used to having to hoof it everywhere they wanted to go in the wasteland. A few days ago, all that had changed again when Joe rebuilt the buggy from pieces they found in an old machine shed in Soledad Canyon. Being able to hop in the buggy and go wherever they needed to was insanely convenient. It gave Clay a new appreciation for what a helluva revelation it must’ve been the first time a caveman hooked a cart up to a horse and hopped in.

Clay was just starting to think this trip was going too well when they ran into their first sign of the locals.

Twenty miles out of LA, as they traveled through the mountains, the I-5 ran between two steep rock walls, surrounded by signs warning of Falling Rocks, and still showing the rounded holes where the dynamite had been packed in to blast the road through. At the narrowest point, huge boulders and primordial-looking cedars from the forests higher on the mountainside had been dragged onto the road, setting up a blockade.

Joe covered Bertha’s engine case with both hands. “Don’t look, Bertha. It’s ugly.” He shook his head. “Splintering trees all messy and uneven instead of giving them a nice clean, honorable death with a top-of-the-line Poulan Pro Classic. Breaks your heart to see it.”

In the back of the buggy, Clay turned in a slow circle, scanning for danger. He didn’t want to get surprised by anything that could snap a tree in half like a twig.

A branch in the blockade line suddenly twitched as if something had bumped it.

“They’re invisible!” Clay took aim at where the creature would be and fired, realizing as he did that he could see a faint shimmering in the air. Then ten faint shimmerings, all headed their way. Whatever they were, there were a lot of them. He fired, round slamming into the meat of something with a dull thump. Purple blood sprayed. “Aim for the light distortions!”

“The what?” Alex snapped, Mossberg pointed in the general direction of the blockade, but not aiming at anything in particular.

Joe leaned over the wheel of the buggy, the old .44 Magnum he’d picked up in Camp Liberty in hand, squinting out the windshield. “You mean light distortions like sunlight that looks weird or ‘light distortions’ as in ‘not very heavy’ distortions?”

Clay locked in on another target and fired. “Dammit, Joe, just start shooting that way!”

“They’ll be Sasquatch Savagers,” Griff hollered, though it was obvious even the old weed was having trouble. He launched a ball of crackling blue arcane energy at the blockade, but it wasn’t near any of the shapes lumbering toward their dune buggy. “Slow but crafty. Don’t let ’em surround us!”

Thinking quick, Clay cast Control Light and upped the brightness of the distortions until ten hulking apelike outlines glowed neon green. One was sprawled in front of the barricade. The rest were lumbering toward their dune buggy.

“Those,” Clay barked, lining up the fastest of the monsters in his sights.

“Why didn’t you just say so?” Joe fired off the .44, barely clipping an ape silhouette in one of its long swinging arms. “Stupid ranged weapons.” With a slight clanking sound, Joe encased himself in his mech armor and hopped out of the dune buggy, Bertha revving in his hand. “Taste my chain, Squatches!”

Alex’s Mossberg boomed once, then she gave up on shooting, too. Switching to her kusarigama, she waded into the melee behind Joe.

More faint distortions were skidding down the mountainside to join the fray.

“Shit.” Clay downed a magicka potion and lit them up, too. “Griff, we gotta bring the barricade down!” He jumped out of the buggy. With a boost of speed from the Naga ring, he sprinted to the rock face and pulled himself up onto an outcropping. From there, he had a much better angle; one that wouldn’t end in somebody taking a bullet by friendly fire. Down below, the Squatches were swarming Alex and Joe.

Joe was planted right in the center of the road, his chainsaw squealing in defiance while he goaded the Sasquatches.

“Hooey!” he hooted. “I don’t even need to see you furballs, I can smell y’all comin’ a mile off. Like old gas station sushi left out in the July sun.”

The barely visible Sasquatches converged on him, but with his heightened constitution and reinforced mech suit, Joe could take a helluva beating.

“Yeehaw, now we’re having a party!” he yelled, wheeling Bertha in a wide arc and splattering gore across the asphalt.

Alex darted through their ranks, using her Goliath Grip and Uncanny Reach ability to lash out with her kusarigama while staying well outside of the Sasquatches’ reach. Joe tanked and she dealt enough damage for ten times her number. Her overpowered strikes cut through their tough hides with ease, raining arcs of purple blood like a magical cloudburst.

Problem was, they weren’t making any headway toward getting out of there. There were just too damned many Squatches, and more were pouring in all the time. With their Incant abilities, Joe and Alex could square up one on one with anything short of a Dungeon Lord and walk out with a W—but there was a certain quality in quantity as Clay’s old Marine Corps machine gunner buddy was wont to say, and the Squatches had plenty of that.

A boom rocked the hillsides and the air strobed blue as one of Griff’s bombs splintered a boulder in the barricade. It didn’t create a hole they could drive through yet, but it was a start.

The old weed took aim again.

One Squatch seemed to have figured out their plan, because it turned and lumbered toward Griff like a jumbo jet gaining speed on the runway. Its long arms came up, ready to rip the old weed in half.

Clay zeroed in and nailed the monster ape in the head. As the creature died, whatever illusion had cloaked it suddenly dissipated. The Sasquatches were seven or eight feet tall and covered with thick muscles and shaggy, unkempt hair. Dull black eyes were situated beneath a prominent sloped brow. The creature tumbled into the side of the buggy, rocking it on its shocks, and disrupting Griff’s next shot.

Undeterred, the old weed hopped over the slumped carcass and blasted the barricade again. A section of cedar exploded into toothpicks, debris and dirt cartwheeling through the air.

Joe whooped as he caught on to what they were doing. “Hell yeah! It’s lumberjack time, Chonk!”

Snagging the mechacoon, Joe kicked on his rocket boots and blasted up and over the Squatches’ heads. He dropped on the opposite side of the barricade and set Chonk down on a branch. Together, the little trash panda and the mech suited redneck started sawing through the back side of the barricade, helping Griff open a hole, while Clay and Alex kept the Squatches busy.

“We’re through, lad!” Griff shouted, his gruff voice triumphant.

Clay leapt down from the outcropping and jumped into the dune buggy’s driver’s seat.

“Hang on,” he told the old weed. He gunned the engine, rolling over fallen Squatches, and shot into the throng. “Alex, get in!”

Snapping out her kusarigama one last time, she drove back the green-lit beasts swarming her and swung herself over the buggy’s tailgate.

The engine roared as they jounced through the battlefield, flying toward the barricade.

“Come on!” Clay yelled to his brother as they tore through the hole, ragged bits of tree screeching along the sides and scratching the paint.

“Don’t worry about ol’ Lumberjack Joe,” Joe yelled, grabbing the chittering mechacoon from a branch. “Chonkie and me’ll fly ahead and scope the highway out!”

As the Jaeger squad sped away from the destroyed choke point, healing and stamina potions were passed around. The Squatches continued to follow them for nearly half a mile before finally giving up the chase, out raced and out classed by the dune buggy. After another handful of miles, once they were sure they weren’t being followed anymore, Clay pulled over and topped up his magicka. Joe flew back to let them know he and Chonk had spotted at least three more ambushes over the winding ten-mile stretch ahead.

They were in the thick of things now. If they got bogged down again there was a damn good chance this lonely stretch of highway would be the end of the road for all of them.

Thankfully, they’d come prepared. Maybe they weren’t the strongest sons of bitches in LA, but they didn’t need to be so long as they were the sneakiest sons of bitches.

Clay pulled out the Camera Obscura. Joe had applied a fyeularune to the side—which meant the Camera slowly regained charges overtime—but the effect still required activation, and it would still only work for twenty minutes at a time. Everybody squeezed into the photo—Joe yelling “cheese!” again—and Clay activated the next charge.

“Another keeper,” Joe said, gently tucking the polaroid into his mech suit.

Clay switched spots with Joe, giving his brother the wheel and climbing into the gunner turret on the back of the buggy. They rolled through the next ambushes without much problem. The creatures lying in wait offered a lot of confused looks and grumbling but posed no real resistance. Hard to stop what you can’t see, as Clay and the others had just learned thanks to the Squatches.

When the first charge wore off, however… Well, that was a different story. Within seconds, they were neck-deep in Banded Gila Demons. Between Alex and Griff, they knocked back the stocky lizard creatures, while Joe sent the dune buggy tearing ass down the highway again and Clay fought to snap a selfie that would cover them all.

That set the pattern for the rest of their trip into LA: twenty minutes of relative peace with the wind in their hair, followed by a frantic five to ten minutes of monsters swarming out of the desert and onto the buggy while Clay finagled everybody into the photo at once.

The fighting grew more strenuous the deeper into the ruins of the urban sprawl they drove. Before long, there were dozens of different creatures all attacking at once, and the roads were clogged with abandoned cars, forcing them to slow the buggy enough to crawl over the rubble on the sidewalks. The sun had begun to set before they made it to the Hollywood Hills. Wearily, they cut across country, off-roading eastward and up the slumped little mountainsides.

“There it is!” Alex said as they topped a rise.

Clay turned to follow her finger.

Perched on the hill ahead were the charred remains of the Hollywood sign. The H and Y had taken some serious damage when the first O and LLs had burned, but the WOOD was still standing strong. A reminder of a different age.

There was definitely something off about the D, though. It was hard to pinpoint what exactly, but for a second, it didn’t look flat like the rest of the letters. It looked almost three-dimensional. Then, like a door slamming shut, the giant letter went flat again.

Was it possible this Diebolt guy could be watching them?

Clay checked the timer on the Camera. Still eleven minutes until they were visible again.

But they weren’t technically enemies. At least as far as Clay knew, the guy was allied with the Sooq, which made them friendlies. So maybe he could see through the obscuring properties of the camera.

Joe had started to slow down, looking for a place to pull over, but Clay didn’t think that was their play here.

“No,” he said, shaking his head, mouth set in a grim line. “Drive us right up to his front door. We didn’t come all this way to stay strangers.”

Chapter 5 - A True Shonen Protagonist

The D in the sign continued to oscillate between flat and filled-out as they drove up to it. Going against his instincts, Clay slung his M4 over one shoulder, letting it hang down his back. The Wand of Lesser Inferno was still in a side pouch on his pants, well within reach of his right hand, but it was a lot less conspicuous than the rifle.

“Nobody reach for a weapon unless this guy attacks me first,” he said, hopping out of the back of the dune buggy.

Alex scowled up at the D. “Maybe one of us should come with you.”

Clay grimaced and shook his head.

“He’s been living out here for God knows how long,” he said. “We’re probably not the first band of heavily armed people he’s seen, and if we all come storming up, it’ll look like we’re here to raid his place.”

“As if we couldn’t have all the letters we wanted,” Joe scoffed, rolling his eyes. “D isn’t even top ten. J’s the obvious number one slot, with O and E in a close second and third. C is okay if you like that sort of thing. A, L, and X, meh…”

“Do you ever get tired of stirring up shit?” Alex asked him wearily.

“Not really,” Joe said. He turned to Griff. “G’s pretty decent. I’d put it in the low top ten, maybe seven or eight.”

Clay left them behind and strode—hopefully in a friendly way—toward the oddly blinking letter. The closer he got, the more obvious it became someone had built up the D to be habitable. Doors and windows showed through the flat surface now and then, and the shadow on the ground was wide enough for a small shed, definitely bigger than a thin sheet of metal. Clearly there was some sort of glamor or spell in place, meant to conceal exactly how built up the place was from prying eyes. Even as he got closer, the air shimmered and the door disappeared.

“Excuse me.” Clay rapped his knuckles where the door had been a second before. It looked for all the world like he was knocking on thin air, but the rattle of knuckles on metal carried over the hush of the hills. “I don’t want any trouble,” he said. “I’m looking for Diebolt Neiderdorf. The booksellers at the Sooq told me I could find him here.”

There was a slight creak from overhead. Clay stepped back and craned his neck. A pair of bulbous froglike eyes peeked out of an open window.

“Mogrifa sent you?” a deep voice croaked. “Did she say anything about me?”

Clay rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. He didn’t want to offend the one guy who could help them rescue Bacon Bits, but he also didn’t want to roll the dice that this guy might spot his lie and refuse to help them, either.

“The older lady might’ve mentioned… something about… how she ‘wouldn’t spit on that dippy fool if he were on fire’. Though I might be paraphrasing a little.”

“Oh.” The eyes seemed to deflate a little. “I thought she would have forgiven me by now.”

Clay shrugged. “If it makes you feel any better, the younger one seemed to think the older one would before too much longer.”

That perked him back up.

“Hey, that’s something! No one knows Mogrifa like she knows herself.” A slimy green face appeared in the window, the eyes perched on top. It smiled, thin lips stretching past its face on either side and beckoned with a webbed hand. “Well don’t just stand there. You draw attention we don’t want. Come on up!”

The door reappeared and swung open with a groan. Clay had to jump back to avoid getting smacked in the face.

“I’m not alone,” Clay said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the buggy.

Diebolt ducked back down until only his eyes were peeking over the windowsill again. Furtively, he studied Clay’s family.

“Yes, I see. And are they trustworthy, mmhm?”

“That’s one thing they’ve got in spades,” Clay promised.

The eyes moved slowly up and down. It took Clay a second to realize Diebolt was nodding.

“Very, well. You may bring them up,” the weird little guy replied, before turning and scuttling deeper into his dwelling.

***

Five minutes later, the whole Jaeger squad was ensconced in a tiny living room that smelled like cold Pizza Rolls and looked like a shrine to otakus. Hand painted figurines from some ancient anime had been arranged on a side table, a pile of squishy characters had been stacked in a corner of an old sofa, and a set of commemorative plates decorated in VRMMORPG maps from twenty years ago hung on the wall.

Diebolt bustled in from the adjacent kitchen with a tray full of special edition Mojave Comics Universe cups. A toxic waste green concoction bubbled inside as he passed them out.

Clay looked skeptically down at his. Before he could ask what it was, though, Joe dumped his down the hatch.

“Ah!” Joe sighed, smacking his lips. “That hit the spot. What do you call this sweet, sweet nectar?”

“Mountain Dew Classic,” Diebolt said. “A very rare vintage outside the IZ these days. They stopped making it back in ’71, claiming it caused superdiabetes, but that was just the usual hysteria. I’ve been drinking Classic my whole life, and look at me.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Clay saw Alex set her cup down. Nobody wanted to ask the lumpy little frogman whether the Mountain Dew had turned him into a bipedal amphibian or whether he’d spawned like that and was actually the picture of health for his species.

“Pfft, I never listen to those health nut wackjobs,” Joe said, letting Diebolt refill his cup. “If it isn’t made of vegetables and fiber, they start yelling it gives you this and it kills you that. All a bunch of bunk if you ask me. You only live once, right? I’m smart enough to know I’m here for a good time, not a long time. Besides, out here it’s the goblins that’ll get ya, not the Mountain Dew.”

“Finally a man with some common sense!” Diebolt stuck the empty tray behind a well-traveled recliner, then boosted himself up into the seat. He tugged on the strands of a wispy beard trailing down from his froggy double chin. “Now, you were saying about a new school of magic?”

“Yeah,” Clay said, nodding. “It’s called Voodoo. It’s not exactly new to us, though. We’ve had it—at least one version of it—on Earth for hundreds of years, but this is the first time we’ve encountered it out here in the wasteland.”

“Mmhm, mmhm.” Diebolt nodded. “What you’re facing is probably nothing at all like the Voodoo you humans were used to seeing in your day to day lives.”

“We weren’t used to seeing it at all,” Alex said. “Not in our part of the country, anyway. There were people who practiced it as a religion, but there wasn’t any real magic here before the Merge.”

“But you had rites and rituals and things like this, yes?” Diebolt said, waving his hand impatiently. “The Merge is greatly misunderstood in your world. Many of you believe that when the Merge occurred it simply shoved Hearthworld in wholesale, completely unchanged from the game that it was. Facile! An absolute glossing over of the facts. What happened, in my opinion, was that the Merge took the fantastical ideals already existing in the zeitgeist of both Earth and Hearthworld and combined them into something new. An amalgamation, if you will.”

He clapped his wet hands together with a slimy slap. “This is why so many new schools of magic were created—because you humans had ideas about ‘magics’ that Hearthworld inhabitants never dreamed of. Magics you had been keeping compartmentalized in other VRMMORPGs like All Haints’ Day, Black Magic Bureaucrat, Viking Dance Party IV, and so on. Dungeons spawned which embodied these new ideals, and that is where we get dungeon lord classes such as Bardic Valkyrie, Red Tape Paladin, and in your case, this Voodoo Shaman.”

Joe leaned back on the sofa and smirked. “I think I fought a few Red Tape Paladins down at the DMV when I tried to get my CDL so I could haul all those feral foxes across state lines. You wouldn’t believe how much they hate it when you don’t fill out their forms.”

“It is their greatest weakness,” Diebolt agreed in all seriousness.

“Well, that might explain where it comes from, but it doesn’t tell us how to go about counteracting the Shaman’s Voodoo,” Clay said, trying to steer the conversation back on track. “The Mogrifas made it sound as if there was a way to neutralize his spells.”

“Oh, yes. Oh my yes. She’s right.” Diebolt waved a hand. “In Hearthworld, there was a system of checks and balances referred to as the Primal Creation Wheel. Here, however, the wheel has become more of a—” He cast around for a second for a word. “—a mirror. Equals and opposites. For every new school of magic that has arisen, its nega-magic has also arisen.”

Griff frowned. “Nega-magic?”

“Like a nega-ninja,” Joe said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “If you’re wearing black, he wears white. If you’re a red-headed stepchild, he’s a green-headed one. They just flip the colors so he’s opposite.”

“And he does all the counters to your moves at the same time you attack, so you never get anywhere,” Alex explained. “It’s super frustrating.”

“Good,” Clay said. “That’s exactly what we need. We want to be the thorn in Voodoo Daddy’s side. So what kind of nega-magic are we looking for exactly?”

“Well, the magic of the Wyrd West, obviously,” Diebolt said. “The issue is that you, not being an Incant, NPC, or dungeon lord, cannot take on the magical class that counteracts Voodoo.” He gestured from Alex and Joe to Griff. “And the Incants and NPCs on your side already have classes of their own, none of which are compatible with the Wyrd West school of magic.”

Griff grunted. “So the lad’s got to kill the dungeon lord and become an Incant to get a school of magic, but he can’t kill the dungeon lord ’til he’s an Incant with the right school of magic? That’s a helluva catch.”

“You might say it’s bigger than a catch-21, but not quite the size of a catch-23,” Joe said fighting to withhold a grin.

“First Proust, now Heller?” Alex threw up her hands. “Seriously, Joe, when did you read books?”

He aimed a finger gun at her. “Audiobooks, short stack. What’d you think I was listening to out in the shed when I was working on Chickzilla?”

“Guns and Roses? Lynyrd Skynyrd. Some dumb country-metal, swamp rock band. Definitely not Joseph Heller on tape.”

“The more you know,” Joe said, miming a rainbow with one hand.

Clay wedged his way back into the discussion.

“There’s got to be a way around the technicalities,” he said. “I’m not an Incant, but I’ve been able to learn some low-level spells and cantrips anyway. What if I learned magic from the Wyrd West school?”

“Aha,” Diebolt said, raising one stumpy finger. “Now you’re thinking like a true shonen protagonist. As it happens, I have managed to come by a fair few items and runes from the Wyrd West that might-well help you in your battle against this Voodoo Shaman. Oh yes, indeed. But I won’t give them away to just anyone who walks in off the street. First, you must prove yourself worthy.” He spread his hands in the air and shouted at the ceiling, “Twelve impossible labors there shall be!”

“Twelve?” Alex looked scandalized.

Diebolt blinked. “Is that too many?”

Joe shrugged. “It’s a lot, dude,” he said, “even for a manga character.”

The frogman tugged his chin hairs while he reconsidered. “What if there were only three impossible labors?”

Joe’s eyebrows jumped up. “Just three? You’re real bad at negotiating. Haven’t you ever heard of middle grou—”

“Three works for me,” Clay interrupted before his brother could convince Diebolt he should require six or eight. “But I have an objection to making them impossible. If, by definition, they can’t be done, then there’s no way to prove myself worthy. Which means I’ll just be wasting my time here instead of finding a better solution somewhere else.”

“Yes, I see that now,” Diebolt said. “Very true, very true.” He raised his hands again and crowed, “Three moderately difficult but not impossible labors there shall be to prove your worth!”

Joe rubbed his hands together. “Now we’re talking! Moderately difficult is exactly the right amount of difficulty for my brother. My only question is when does Clay start?”

“Now’s good for me,” Diebolt said, hopping down from his recliner. “Does that work for you? Or is there some other scheduling conflict, mhmm?”

“No, that’s… Today is great,” Clay said. This wasn’t at all how he’d expected this to go.

╠═╦╬╧╪

The Three Moderately Difficult But Not Impossible Labors of Clay Jaeger

Diebolt Neiderdorf, reclusive scholar of Hollywood, has agreed to grant you three magical rewards in return for the completion of three labors, which will prove your worth. Beware, however, that no test is what it seems.

Labor 1: TBD

Reward 1: Increase of +15 Intelligence

Labor 2: TBD

Reward 2: Wyrd West Quickdraw Weapon Set

Labor 3: TBD

Reward 3: Wyrd West Nega-Voodoo Rune

Failure: Fail to complete the current labor.

Penalty: Forfeit that labor’s reward and possibly be unable to complete a subsequent labor, if it depends upon one of the previous labors, which it probably will.

Restrictions: TBD

Accept quest? Yes/No

╠═╦╬╧╪

So far since coming to the wasteland, Clay had only seen a couple quest forms, but even he knew they were usually more specific than this. There was no way to guess what he’d be doing, maybe because Diebolt himself hadn’t decided what the tasks should be yet. But the rewards… With plus fifteen to his Intelligence stat, he’d bet money he could read half those spell tomes back at the Sooq, not to mention they would have a way to defeat the Voodoo Daddy and get Bacon Bits’s soul back. The payoff was too good to pass up.

Hoping he didn’t regret it, Clay selected Yes.

“Excellent!” Diebolt started to clear away the cups of Mountain Dew Classic, then stopped. “And thank you all for bearing with me. I’ve never officiated something like this before. This is all very exciting. It’s like I’m one of the official examiners in one of my favorite manga, Hanta Hanta.”

“Not a problem, my man,” Joe said. “Jump in with both feet, I always say. It’s the only way to learn.” Chonk chittered in agreement.

“You’re doing great.” Alex patted the frogman on the lumpy shoulder.

“Well,” Diebolt said, puffing up a little, “I have been practicing, just in case.”

Chapter 6 - The Three Labors of Clay Jaeger

One of Diebolt’s illusion spells and thirty minutes in the dune buggy later, they were standing on the rim of a rumbling volcano. Heat and sulfurous smoke rose from the caldera, and in the center of the cauldron, thin crusts of basalt floated on a lake of bubbling lava.

“Behold the Hearth!” Diebolt shouted, gesticulating ceremoniously. “Transplanted to Earth from the world that bore its name. As you can see below, in the belly of the Hearth, a Plus-Ultra Phoenix has laid her clutch of eggs.”

Clay tracked the frogman’s hand waving to a nest of pumice floating on one of the rock floes below. Three charcoal-black eggs lay in the nest, glowing from some kind of orange lace patterning their shells.

He got a bad feeling that he knew where this was going.

“Phoenix eggs, the fragilest of the egg kingdom, but also the most valuable.” Diebolt’s voice wavered a little at the end as he ran out of air. He sucked in a deep breath to continue his mighty intonation, but got a lungful of smoke instead.

The frogman doubled over coughing violently. While Joe slapped him on the back, Alex dug out a plastic jug of water from her rucksack. Clay knew this was all happening around him, but his mind was racing, trying to figure out how he was going to complete the task he was pretty sure Diebolt was about to ask him to do.

“Thank you,” the frogman choked as he accepted the jug from Alex. He gulped it down, then wiped his mouth with a sleeve. “Hoo. Much better.” Clearing his throat, he continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “Your first moderately difficult but not impossible labor, should you choose to accept it, is to retrieve one phoenix egg without breaking its shell. Do this, Clay Jaeger, and I shall grant thee your first reward!”

That tracked, considering the basalt floes looked about as thick as a Saltine cracker.

Clay nodded and licked his lips—dry from the searing heat of the magma below. He thought back to the quest text: no test is what it seems.

“Were there any restrictions besides not breaking the shell?” he asked.

“None!” Pronounced the frogman in that same ceremonial tone. “The only rule is that there are no rules!” He shrugged. “Except don’t break the egg, obviously. Because then you can’t give it to me, and phoenix eggs make excellent breakfast skillets.”

Clay had started toward the rim of the volcano, but when he heard that, he stopped.

“Wait, I’m sorry.” He glanced at the frogman over one shoulder. “You want this for a breakfast skillet?”

“It matters not!” Diebolt intoned thrusting his hands into the air. “The task is your only concern!”

Great. So he was going to risk his life for breakfast food. Still, as long as Diebolt made good on his promised reward, Clay didn’t care what the guy did with the egg.

Clay steeled himself, then cautiously climbed over the rim and half skidded, half walked down the bowl to the edge of the lava. Sweat poured down his face and stuck his shirt to his back under his Cuirass. He swiped wet hair off his face and got a better look at the surface of the lake of fire.

From this angle, the basalt floes looked a little sturdier—some were even thick enough to qualify as basalt bergs—but none looked very stable. Clay reached out with one foot and tested the one closest to shore.

It dipped, then flipped completely over under barely any pressure.

He walked down the line a bit and tried another. It crumbled under his boot.

“Joe,” Clay yelled up the hill. “Would you fly over there and bring me one of those eggs?”

“You got it, bro, Lumberjack Joe is on the case!”

Joe hopped over the rim, insta-changing from his jorts and cutoff flannel shirt into his mech suit. Rocket burners roared, blasting him easily across the lake to the nest in the center.

But the second he picked up one of the eggs, it shattered into a million pieces, lava-bright egg yolk running through his fingers.

“Oh shit!” Joe shot straight up, flailing his hands and flinging burning goo everywhere. His rockets flared as he flew over and landed next to Clay. “The inside of those things are insanely hot. Look, it melted the palms of my gloves.” He held up his hands to show where the metal had run.

Clay scowled out at the phoenix nest. The insides had to be in excess of a thousand degrees. No test is what it seems.

Was there a way he could use that heat? Hell yeah there was, though Diebolt was going to be angry if he really did intend to turn the egg into a skillet. But he’d said there were no rules, and the idea Clay had churning in his head had actually come courtesy of the frogman. So in a way, this was all Diebolt’s fault.

“Is your mech suit strong enough to fly us both out there?” Clay asked, peeling his Cinderscale Cuirass off over his head like a dirty t-shirt.

“You mean with me cradling you like a baby?” Joe asked. “Easy peasy!”

Holding the cuirass in one hand, Clay slung his other arm around his brother’s neck.

“All right,” he said, “Let’s do it.”

Joe swept him off his feet, and they shot through the smoke and fumes to the phoenix nest. Clay twisted around, getting Joe to hook him around the waist and dangle him over the eggs.

“Keep me as still as you can.”

“No problemo!” In spite of his hearty assurances, Joe’s voice was strained. The suit might give him a strength boost, but Clay was no featherweight.

Working fast, Clay rearranged pieces of pumice around one of the eggs, until he had something that would function as a reservoir. Next, he cast Sludge Slick inside the bowl, using the thick oily matter to stop up the holes, transforming it into a bowl that would hold liquid. That done, he dumped the water from his canteen into the reservoir. The water hissed and steamed, letting off a few lazy bubbles in the process.

He swathed his left hand with the Cinderscale Cuirass, which had an 18% resistance to Fire, then he poked the other egg. Immediately, it fell apart, spilling its goo under the reservoir and adding the yolk’s heat.

The water instantly erupted in a violent rolling boil. The glowing latticework of cracks on the unbroken egg began to darken and fill in as it cooked from the steam. Within seconds, all the water boiled away.

The steaming egg, now completely black, sat whole and undisturbed in the center of the bowl.

“Hard boiled phoenix egg, coming up,” Clay said.

Gently, he picked the egg up with the makeshift Cinderscale glove. Thank God, it didn’t crumble. Cooked, the thing felt as solid as a softball in his hand.

He nodded at Joe. “To land, Jeeves.”

“Roity-o, guvna!” Joe said in a terrible English accent.

A rush of rocket boots later, they landed on top of the volcano. Clay hopped down from Joe’s arms and held out the phoenix egg to Diebolt.

The lumpy little frogman clapped. “That was awesome! And for the record, I wasn’t going to eat it anyway. Phoenix eggs give me terrible indigestion. But it was so cool! The way you guys zoomed over there, then when you poured the egg yolk on the bowl and the water went whoosh! Clever, inventive, brilliant!” Regaining his dignity, Diebolt accepted the egg and cleared his throat. “Clay Jaeger, you have proven yourself worthy of thy first reward! I grant thee +15 to your base Intelligence!”

Clay felt something turn inside him like a key opening a rusty padlock. Intelligence was something of a misnomer because it really had nothing to do with the mind and everything to do with the ability to cast and conjure magic. Fifteen additional points was substantial—especially for a human who wasn’t an Incant—and all of a sudden, Clay could feel magic thrumming in the air around him. Could feel it moving and cycling through his body in time with the rhythmic beating of his heart. The world swam a little on the edges, then the feeling past as things snapped back into focus.

“Hot damn,” Joe cheered. He elbowed Alex. “You thought you married a smarty-pants before? He’s going to be insufferable now.”

Alex grinned up at Clay. “Lucky for him, I think nerds are sexy.”

“On to the second moderately difficult but not impossible task!” Diebolt cried, raising the phoenix egg high. “Clay Jaeger, I demand you stand this egg on its tippy-tip—” He pointed to the narrow end of the egg. “—on top of the Capitol Records Building’s pointy spike thing.” Then he jabbed Clay in the chest. “And this time, no help from Joe or anybody else.”

***

Clay spent the whole ride down from the mountains and through Hollywood planning for the second task. He was pretty sure he knew how to get the egg to stand on end. It was a measure of how weird his life had gotten that that was the easy part to figure out.

What he doubted was how he’d get to the top of a skyscraper in the IZ alive without flying. It was exactly the sort of place that tended to be infested by the biggest and the baddest of the dungeon lords. They had faced a Tier 3 way back in the ruins of Bakersfield, over a hundred miles from the epicenter of the Merge, and just recently gotten their asses handed to them by a Tier 4 in Santa Clarita, still thirty miles out. Going on that alone, he’d be facing at least a Tier 5 smack dab in the middle of LA, and if that wasn’t a suicide run, then Clay was an Army gal.

Could he scale the outside of the building somehow? They’d brought cordage and tackle with them from civilization just in case, but so far they hadn’t run into any rock climbing situations in the wasteland.

Joe wheeled the dune buggy around a corner, and the site of Clay’s upcoming suicide run came into view. He’d seen pictures in History and on old documentaries of the Capitol Records Building, designed to look like an ancient stack of records on a turntable, with its needle jutting into the sky. Supposedly, there used to be a light on top that flashed out the Morse code for “Hollywood” all night long.

With twenty years of neglect, however, the shining white skyscraper had taken on a dingy gray cast. The balconies protruding from its formerly perfectly round floors looked bent and crumpled in places, like a giant soda can crushed by an enormous fist. Dark, monstrous shapes dangled below the sunshades that hadn’t been damaged. Occasionally more of the creatures would hop out the windows and flap around the building on massive, leathery wings.

As they got closer, Clay could hear strains of some ancient jazzy music drifting through the streets. On the top level of the building, right below the lopsided, beat-up Capitol Records sign, a behemoth red-furred gorilla easily as wide as a Humvee was swaying slowly and crooning into a massive ribbon microphone.

“Behold, the roundiest skyscraper in LA!” Diebolt announced, returning to his ceremonial voice. “Home of the great Nat King Kong, the dungeon lord who crushed a thousand challengers and wooed a thousand hearts with his timeless and beloved music.”

“Meh.” Joe shrugged. “Give me some good ol’ Country Metal any day.”

“Philistine,” Alex said. She sighed dreamily. “It sounds beautiful.”

“Listen here, short stack, I am A-one hundred and ten percent-Merican and proud of it.”

No one but Clay seemed to care that more and more of those dark, winged shapes were flapping up the side of the building to join the crowd at the musclebound Kong’s rooftop concert. As they got closer, he realized the feathered creatures were some kind of hulking bodybuilder birdmen, wearing…

“Are those…” He squinted up at them. “Are they wearing thongs?”

“Muscle Beach is just a few minutes across town as the shrikebear flies,” Diebolt said as if that explained it. He checked his Solar Wars Episode III wristwatch. “Several of the more size-conscious mobs spend the day there working out.”

Joe craned his neck to see out the windshield. He let out a low whistle.

“Those budgie-smugglers don’t leave much to the imagination, do they?” he said. “Truth be told, the dang things look spray painted on.”

“Exactly,” Alex said. “Now do you see why we refused to go on float trips with you until you stopped wearing thongs?”

“Hey, my thong game was on point,” he said, tapping his chest. “Not like these goobers. You can have too much muscle. You need a more voluptuous body to pull off a banana hammock, such as yours truly’s curvaceous form.”

The dune buggy growled to a stop at the foot of the monster-infested tower, and Clay clambered out. Forget every scrap of plan he’d managed to come up with on the ride over; the swarm of shrikebears and massive singing King Kong shot that all to hell. He was going to have to come at this from a completely different angle. Even if Alex and Joe had been able to help out, there was no way they could take on all of those creatures.

“Well, no time like the present,” Diebolt said cheerfully. He handed the hard-boiled phoenix egg to Clay, then nodded up at the skyscraper. “Upsie-daisy.”

Swallowing, Clay tucked the egg under his arm like a football and pulled out the Camera Obscura.

“No stealth-enhancing items!” Diebolt said in a rush. “I meant to mention that restriction while we were on the Hearth.” He glanced side to side. “I definitely didn’t just think of it now when I saw… um… nothing.”

“Fine,” Clay muttered, shoving the Camera back into his pocket. Not like he could’ve scaled the building in under twenty minutes anyway. Still, that took out the idea of a speed run up through the inside. Getting ripped apart by a bunch of moose knuckled birdmen was not on his agenda for the day.

So he couldn’t make it up to the spike. But maybe he didn’t have to.

“All right,” he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure the frogman wasn’t going to spring any other last-second restrictions on him. “I’m starting the second labor now. Any more catches I oughta know about?”

“Proceed, Clay Jaeger.” Diebolt waved his hands grandly. “And good luck.”

Clay nodded, slipped the egg into his ruck, then did a hard pivot and sprinted down the street in the opposite direction. His boots slapped against the cracked concrete as he passed smashed star-shapes etched with old names he vaguely recognized—The Beatles, Neil Diamond, Taylor Swift.

At the end of the block sat a towering dispensary with a steel pineapple the size of a house on top. The place clearly hadn’t fared as well in the Merge as Capitol Records had—its brickwork was crumbling away, and the whole thing leaned crazily to one side—but with the pineapple, it was just tall enough.

Praying the dispensary’s remaining infrastructure was strong enough to hold at least his weight, Clay took a running jump and grabbed onto the bottom lip of its lopsided awning. He chinned himself up and onto the metal roof. From there, he snagged the hanging ladder of the building’s fire escape and started climbing. Eyes peeked at him from smashed windows, and he heard the occasional snarl, but he didn’t stop. Hopefully, if he could get this over with fast enough, he wouldn’t have to worry about the amount of potential aggro he was drawing.

“It’s a human!” a high-pitched voice shrieked.

A flood of spidery demons crawled out of a smashed window on the third floor, legs skittering on the metal as they chased after him.