Wasteland Warlords Episode 3: Chapter 3 - Secondhand Books

As promised, bonus chapter number 2! 

No one spoke as they pulled into the Sooq and parked the dune buggy outside their little circle of tents. Clay hopped out of the back where he’d been riding as their gunner and offered his hand to Alex, helping her down from the vehicle. She accepted the proffered limb and didn’t let go of his hand even when her feet hit the ground. Instead, she just squeezed it tighter. He pulled her into a hug. Their gear scraped awkwardly together, but she snuggled in deeper like she could burrow in far enough to escape this shitty day.

Joe stayed in the driver’s seat, playing with the keys. Sensing his owner’s mood, Chonk trilled softly and patted Joe’s arm.

Griff kept his hat brim turned down and his face hidden.

Finally, Clay slipped out of his wife’s arms.

“We’ve gotta get Bacon Bits out of there,” he said, breaking the fragile silence that had enveloped their party.

“Clay…” Alex sighed.

He knew she was going to protest. That she would be the voice of reason no matter how much it hurt. She was strong in that way. But Clay wasn’t ready to give it up yet. “She’d be furious that voodoo douchebag in that stupid tiny vest has her soul trapped. We can’t just forget about her. For better or worse, that ridiculous pig is a member of the Jaeger squad and we don’t leave our own behind. Not ever. So I say we reload, we get back in there, and we save her. Period.”

Joe shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re going to force me to be the rational one here. Bro, do you even understand how outclassed we are? Our attacks barely touched him. Your bullets literally bounced off him.”

“First off, for literally to be correct there, you’d have to say that the bullets bounced off his shield, not him,” Clay snapped. “Second, if bullets won’t do the job, we buy a fuckin’ rocket launcher and shove it down his throat. Let’s just see how he wards against that.” He glanced over his shoulder at the flea market stalls set up around the campground. “Somebody here’s got to have some heavy artillery for sale. That shield of his could only soak up so much damage before it dissipated. Couple rounds from a fifty cal oughta set him straight.”

Alex rubbed his arm. “We’re all upset, babe, but you saw what he could do. We’re lucky he didn’t zombify every one of us.”

“He didn’t bother with us because he wasn’t interested,” Clay argued. “That petty asshole only wanted Bacon Bits’s soul, and only because she had the guts to challenge him. I’m not letting somebody stomp around like some voodoo Godzilla enslaving everybody smaller than him.”

“I’ve seen a heap of different schools of magic in my day, lad,” Griff said, finally raising his face and fixing his ice blue eye on Clay. The old weed’s scarred features were stony with regret. “But I never came across one like this. We go back in there, we’re dead.”

“Or worse,” Joe said, eyes wide. “ZombiePops. Chibi’s not a good look for me, Clay, and plastic makes me chafe.”

“On top a’ all that, I reckon he’s like as not to have changed the locks since we left,” the old weed continued. “No way we’d get in the same way. We’d be fighting our way up through every floor, with the whole dungeon on high alert.”

“Come on,” Alex said softly, tugging Clay toward the tents. “Let’s get some food and some rest. Standing around here arguing isn’t going to help anything.”

“Yeah, never argue when you’re hangry,” Joe said, nodding along in agreement. “I’ve never once made a good decision when I’m hangry, in point of fact. Just avoid hanger and hangovers. That’s my motto.” But Joe’s typical happy-go-lucky sense of imparting a brilliant piece of wisdom upon the world was missing from his lecture. Even Chonk was sitting slump-shouldered on Joe’s lap. They were trying to put on a brave face and lighten the mood, but every one of them looked utterly defeated.

A fist clenched Clay’s gut. The Jaeger squad had gone through a lot since making it to the IZ, gotten their asses whooped good on multiple occasions, but this was the first time they’d really and truly lost.

Clay ran a hand through his hair. He wasn’t going to get anywhere arguing with them right now. They were hurting and disillusioned. They needed time to lick their wounds. His stomach growled. And maybe they needed food, too. Joe was right about one thing at least—going hungry never helped morale.

“Fine,” Clay said. “We’ll eat something, get a little rest, and regroup.”

With a few halfhearted murmurs of assent, Joe, Chonk, and Griff headed for the tents, heads down and backs bowed.

Alex stayed. She stared up into his eyes like she was looking for something.

“You okay, babe?”

“Just down, not out.” Clay shrugged off his M4’s sling and started stripping off his sweaty gear. “Listen, while you guys get some food together, I’m going to take a look around the Sooq—” She took a breath to protest, but he cut her off at the pass. “Not for a rocket launcher. I just want to see if anybody here’s got some old paperbacks. Something to help take my mind off things for a little while, is all.”

That dragged a smile out of her. “You know, normal people just eat a gallon of ice cream.”

“Not saying I won’t get one of those, too, if somebody here’s selling.” He kissed her cheek. “See you in a bit.”

***

The Sooq was basically a magical junk sale, with creatures of every sort camped out in RVs, converted busses, Airstreams, and camper vans. Elderly folks in straw hats and cooling neck wraps slathered sunscreen on their red, green, blue, or multicolor faces. As Clay threaded his way through the maze of stalls, he kept on the lookout for the wasteland equivalent of the crotchety old geezer with the collection of dogeared paperbacks.

He wandered for nearly half an hour but eventually found the books out in front of a massive fifth wheel, guarded by a decrepit hag and a beautiful young woman. Both wore pristine white blindfolds and fanned themselves with the type of cardboard fans Clay was used to seeing in the hands of old ladies at church.

He nodded hello as he browsed their rickety card table stacked with an assortment of musty leatherbound spellbooks and water-stained Stephen King and James Herbert paperbacks—then he realized he was nodding hello to two people wearing blindfolds.

“Nice afternoon, huh,” he said instead.

“It’s too bloody hot,” snapped the young woman in return. Clearly not one for social calls.

The old hag gave her a poke in the arm with her fan. “Mind your manners with the customers!”

The young woman sighed, but made no move to apologize.

“Anything I can help you find, sonny?” she asked in a biting tone that warned Clay he’d better not ask.

“No thanks, ma’am, I’m just browsing your spellbooks.”

She snorted. “There’s a chance! And here I thought humans couldn’t read.”

“Mogrifa!” hissed the old hag. “You can’t say things like that right in front of one. It’s not their fault they can’t read.”

“Don’t tell me what I can and can’t say, Mogrifa!”

Clay was so confused. Were they both named Mogrifa? What kind of name was that anyway?

“You’ll lose the sale, blast you!” the older one grumbled. “Wait until he’s bought something and gone before you run off at the mouth.”

Clay ducked his head to hide a smile. “To tell the truth, I wasn’t able to read spellbooks before—my base Intelligence wasn’t high enough—but I managed to get my hands on a couple stat boosting potions. A lot of these spellbooks are still beyond me, but not all of ’em.”

“See?” the young woman said triumphantly.

The old hag flapped her fan dismissively at the young woman and turned to Clay.

“What school of magic are you studying, sonny?”

“I didn’t realize there were different schools,” he admitted. “I’ve just been picking up what I could, mostly cantrips.” Then a thought occurred to him. “My family and I recently fought a dungeon lord who used some kind of Voodoo magic against us. Don’t suppose you have anything that would counteract that?”

“Voodoo, eh?” The old hag shook her head. “Never heard of it. Can’t be one of the original schools from Hearthworld.” She pointed a finger as gnarled as a tree root at a long folding table supported in the middle by dusty cardboard boxes. “Cantrips and low-level spells’re over here. From the sound of it, the ones on that card table are too advanced for you.”

“Oh, now who’s spouting off?” the younger woman sniped.

While the women bickered, Clay moved over to the folding table. He wished he could buy out everything they had—horror novels included; it’d been a while since he’d read a good book just for the fun of it—but even with their new trading partnership, he didn’t have near enough gold to swing that. Books were rare, even out here in the Wasteland. Instead, he started flipping through the musty pages of the old tomes, searching for spells within his current reach. When he was an Incant, he would come back for the higher-level books.

“Handle with care,” growled the young woman, an eerie black aura beginning to grow around her head and shoulders.

Chastised, Clay stopped riffling the pages. “Yes, ma’am.”

Not wanting to get on the bad side of the only booksellers he’d found in the Sooq so far—especially when he didn’t know what they were capable of doing to him—he went back to looking through the tomes with exaggerated care.

It was easy enough to separate the spells he had a high enough intelligence stat to learn from the ones out of his reach. All he had to do was flip a book open and see whether he could read the twisting storm of sigils inside. He found three within his intelligence level—Underwhelming Smell, Minor Shield of Warding, and Haphazard Effect—but he only had enough gold on hand to buy two of them.

Underwhelming Smell: Scent a fifteen-foot radius with a natural aroma for thirty seconds. Smell has a 15% chance to fool both opponents and allies within the radius with an Intelligence equal to or less than that of the caster.

Minor Shield of Warding: Conjure a mystic barrier of energy, capable of absorbing 250 points worth of melee or arcane spell damage.

Haphazard Cast: Equal chance for one of the following to occur—(1) opponent is teleported to random location within a 15-mile radius; (2) caster’s hair blazes with Infernal flame, causing 2 damage/second for 15 seconds; (3) all targets friend and foe in a 15-foot radius fall instantly asleep; (4) opponent becomes 15 feet tall with proportionate Strength increase; (5) caster gains triple speed with proportionate Dexterity increase; (6) nothing.

As eager as Clay was to learn every spell under the sun, he just couldn’t see how being able to create a smell and trick people into thinking it was the real deal would come in handy against the Voodoo Daddy dungeon lord. Haphazard Cast would require considerably higher magicka with every shot, but it came with a sixty-six percent chance of a favorable outcome, and only a thirty-three percent chance of a bad result… if you counted “nothing” as bad, which it probably would be in a combat situation.

Haphazard Cast would probably require a bigger time investment to learn, but Clay was confident that if he kept his nose to the grindstone, he’d be able to master it. Plus, it would probably get him the most bang for his buck. Underwhelming Smell was a simple cantrip, but it just didn’t have enough utility to warrant the cost. Minor Shield of Warding, on the other hand, would make an excellent addition to his slowly growing arsenal of spells. Absorbing two-hundred and fifty points of damage wasn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things—Alex did 229 Points of Melee Attack Damage with a single strike from her kusarigama—but it also wasn’t nothing. A spell like that could provide excellent cover in a pinch and would come in handy in all manner of situations.

“Are you going to buy anything or just show off that you know how to read all day?” snapped the young woman.

“You learn it, you bought it,” the old hag agreed for once.

“I’ll take these.” Clay handed over Minor Shield of Warding and Haphazard Cast with the appropriate amount of gold.

“That’s more like it.” The young woman snatched an ancient plastic shopping bag from a bagful of the same hanging off the side of her lawn chair and scooped his purchases into it. “Maybe you should tell him about Diebolt Neiderdorf, Mogrifa.”

“Don’t you speak that name to me, Mogrifa.” The old hag turned up her nose. “I wouldn’t spit on that dippy fool if he were blazing with a mistimed fire spell, much less send a customer his way.”

The young woman sighed and held out the bag of books to Clay.

“Bad blood between them ever since he forgot our birthday,” she said confidentially. “But Diebolt’s studied every new school of magic that has popped up since the Merge of our two worlds. He’s something of an Earth enthusiast. If anybody knows about this Voodoo or how to counteract it, it will be Diebolt.”

Clay felt the tiny spark of hope he’d been hanging onto catch and flare up into a full-blown brush fire.

“Don’t suppose you know where can I find him?”

“In hell, I hope.” The old hag sniffed and crossed her arms.

“Don’t listen to her,” the young woman said, waving a dismissive hand. “He lives in Los Angeles, in a strange structure on a hill. A place marker of sorts, reading ‘Hollywood.’ You’ll find Diebolt inside the D.”

“As in, ‘Damn him to the fiery pits below.’ And you can tell him Mogrifa said so.”

Clay thanked the women and hurried back through the market, eager to tell his family there was still a chance they could take out the Voodoo Daddy and free Bacon Bits.