The Singularity Requiem · Session Seventeen
Hollowbone · The Long Help · The Gladsea
Overnight, somebody painted a six-fingered handprint on forty doors in glitter and dried blood, and under each one, in letters that somebody learned very recently, three words.
I AM FLICK
Nobody asked Flick. Flick was asleep.
The water queue has stopped being a queue and become a procession. The ornamental cup has been taken down off the tank and is now being treated with considerably more reverence than the tank. Seek’s ashes are still in the fire, because nobody has decided whose job that is, and nobody is going to, because that happened yesterday and this town does not do yesterday.
Two bikes are missing from the racks. There is a note.
“Gozot has a bearing. I have the tag, and I have a man with no legs and every reason on this planet to keep talking. We will be back before you need us. If we are not, the bearing is scratched inside the tank hatch. Do not come looking.”
D.
And the Long Odds went up at first light with Raven aboard, who has not slept since the Pits and would not say why.
So that is four of you. A god, an android, a brain, and whatever Scope is, in a town that has decided you are the answer to everything.
Three middle-aged skittermanders are waiting outside the Pits. They have a pitch.
“We got no fuel left. We got no water. But what we do have is you.”
The plan was to steal it. The plan was stated out loud, thirty seconds into the evening, with real confidence.
“We were going to start stealing the water. But we are already basically royalty to these people.”
Mac
“I think we use it to organise a war party, kill the skittermanders we do not like, and take their resources.”
Mac, immediately
“Keep their clothes for outfits.”
Delaeo, without pausing
And then Nina looked at the mud in the floor of the Pits and did something nobody at the table saw coming.
She built a pump.
Not a good pump. Deliberately not a good pump.
“There is no nuance to this device at all. It is just going to be the bulkiest, chunkiest, stupidest looking piece of shit you can imagine. So you cannot possibly fuck it up.”
Nina
She taught it in drawings, released one at a time, because she has worked with military personnel before and knows exactly what happens when they get ahead of themselves.
The roll was a 28. The safety briefing was as follows.
“Have you seen those diagrams of quality, speed, price? You can have two, but not all three. Ours is speed, safety, quality. We are totally lacking in safety.”
Mac
“If you touch it, you buy it.”
Delaeo
“You might lose a limb. But that is okay. You still got five others.”
Mac
Then the Pits came up. Forty feet of water, straight up, out of a floor that has been mud for longer than anyone here can count. Skittermanders went up with it and came down laughing. A town that had been rationing four cups a day was suddenly standing in a lake, underground, in the dark, screaming.
One of the oldest skittermanders in Hollowbone, named for precisely what you think, said “I have heard this before”, and then quietly stepped in and helped make it work.
The town doctor arrived at the build site with his amputation tools, because he always carries his amputation tools, on the off chance.
“It is okay, guys. I got this. Who was injured?”
The doctor
Nobody was injured.
He waited.
Everyone went quiet.
So Slyder pointed at the smallest skittermander in town, who had spent the entire morning screaming “where is my fucking water” at the mayor, and who was therefore, by the ancient and unwritten laws of spite, the patient.
He needed an ear. A rusty nail was produced.
AN EAR NAIL
Nina mentioned she was sitting on three hundred and sixty five bones, and then asked, reasonably, what a bone actually is.
They are bones. Skittermander bones. Mostly harvested off rival tribes. Slyder demonstrated by peeling his own skin back to show the matching collar bone underneath and letting it snap shut again with no blood, which the table took extremely well.
Nina, who believed she was rich in something abstract, discovered she was rich in something specific.
Then Slyder went shopping. A fleet costs one hundred and twenty. Slyder explained, warmly and at length, that the holy resurrectionist Flick has holy missions and must be properly cared for, and the fleet cost eighty. Nina bought two of everything.
One hundred and sixty bones. Hug rigs. Doof wagons. Spree balls. Eight and counting scrap bikes.
“You are going Care Bears in Mad Max.”
Kevo, on a vehicle called a hug rig that exists to kill people
The last musician drowned a few nights ago, which raises a question, because there was no water a few nights ago, and nobody answered it. So Slyder climbed onto the doof wagon and picked up the bass himself.
Hollowbone came out to see you off, and did not stop at seeing you off. Six deep on both sides of the canyon mouth, throwing things.
Cups. Flowers. Tools.
A child.
And it took most of a minute to work out that the noise they were making was not a name. It was a promise, and the promise was that they are here to help.
“The phrase can I help you just got a whole lot more sinister.”
Mac
“Do not resist. You are being helped.”
Kevo
Forty kilometres of Glad Sea in a permanent duststorm, at speed, in vehicles held together by belief.
Nina took the wheel. The first attempt went badly. Then, ahead in the murk, a spree ball exploded, which was tragic for the spree ball and extremely useful as a marker for where not to drive.
Nina cycled her optical spectra, trading reaction speed for sight, and put the convoy back on the line. Then she reached for the comms to warn everybody.
The comms is a tin can on a string.
The far end was audibly rattling loose against a different truck somewhere out in the storm. A helpful skittermander shouted that she would have to throw it over.
Flick’s solution was to lean out into a lethal duststorm and scream, with hand signals. It worked.
A skittermander on the mast gave Nina an enthusiastic thumbs up for the navigation and was immediately taken by the wind and removed from the campaign.
Nina’s next thought, and this is canon now, was to wonder how many bones a hunting party is actually worth.
The storm broke at the crater, and you saw them first. Perception 32.
Unfortunately you were also playing music at roughly maximum volume, so the window was short.
Nina called a shot on a fuel tanker at two kilometres, from a moving platform, with a bass cabinet pointed at the back of her head. True Strike. The last hero point. Scope fired at the same moment, and a single line of red came out of the middle of the storm and cut into the tank.
The tanker stopped being a tanker and became a column of fire.
Nobody negotiated. Both convoys put their feet down.
Slyder ran the entire battle from the back of the doof wagon on the one working microphone, strapped in and still playing.
“Ram them and burn them to the ground.”
Slyder
It worked so well that the enemy’s own lead rigs collided with each other instead of with you.
Nina crit a driver and then rolled a two, a two and a one, and the mightiest critical hit in the history of this campaign made a truck wobble slightly. Her follow-up went through the armour slit, and the driver who had six hands on the wheel now had six hands on the wheel and no head.
Sound reached into the enemy line and dropped a fireball into the middle of it. Thirty six damage. Both pilots failed. He did it again later to the bike swarm, and the tyres went off in every direction, still burning, taking their friends with them.
Flick was told the shot was so easy he only had to not roll a one.
Flick rolled a one.
Flick burned a hero point, hit anyway, and called GET HIM over the radio for a flanking bonus he did not need.
Nina closed to forty feet, found the weak point, and took an axle apart with acid. Two sets of tyres and the axle went at once and the rig ploughed itself into the sand and stayed there.
Scope drove a hug rig with two tentacles while shooting with the others, then decided mid-ram that they cared considerably more about themselves than about the vehicle, and simply hovered out of the window to put a laser through an engine block.
Somebody put an RPG into your top doof wagon, into the fuel and the batteries. Nina rolled a one on the reflex save, spent a hero point to turn it into a thirty four, and backflipped off a detonating truck holstering rifles on the way down. Scope and Sound did not have this problem. They floated.
And Flick, having shot a rig to a standstill, drove his own hug rig into its flank at speed, rolled it, killed everyone aboard, and leaned on the horn.
“WE’RE HERE TO HELP”
“You are not sure whether they meant our guys or the other rig. It weirdly applies to both at this point.”
Kevo
Then Nina curveballed an ossifying grenade through the damaged viewport slit of a rolling spree ball, announced that she had just Death Starred it, rolled eight damage, and had to finish the job with a second grenade. That one missed, bounced off the shell, rolled around the outside, and was fed through the hole by the ball’s own rotation.
“Nothing like the smell of guzzling in the morning.”
Nina
“Guzz and glitter.”
Amon
The last hug rig stopped. The back hatch opened. Two skittermanders came out of it the hard way.
And then something enormous climbed out after them, carrying an engine block as a mace and a second engine block in another hand, and you could see the second one was still steaming, because she had just torn it out of the truck she was sitting in.
Somebody in the crowd screamed that it was ROAD MOTHER, and the crowd stopped being a crowd.
She looked at you.
“You wanna fuck or fight?”
There was no deliberation. There was not so much as a pause. Four separate people answered at once and every one of them answered the same way.
“It is hilarious that this came out as this kind of badass opera and the default almost immediate response was fuck. And how quickly that came out.”
Kevo
“That is pretty funny. I was not prepared for a follow-up question.”
Amon, regrouping
Slyder cast Enlarge to meet her eye to eye and instantly destroyed every piece of clothing he owned, which is how the mayor of Hollowbone finished the evening in a loincloth.
Nina opened negotiations by drawing on approximately ninety terabytes of research material downloaded off the station network, on the stated grounds that ninety percent of a network is devoted to this subject, so it must be important.
“Why is it so great? Why is there so much material covering it? Like ninety percent. She is a networked android. Ninety percent of the network is devoted to this stuff. So it must be important.”
Nina
Sound, a disembodied brain with no stake in any of this whatsoever, was moved to ask what any of it was actually for.
“Come here, big guy. Between us we have ten sets of arms.”
Nina
And then, for the permanent record, the last thing said before the fade to black.
“I do not have the anatomy that is required for all of this. But I still have tongue, and I still have fingers.”
By dawn the two convoys were one convoy.
Road Mother is one of the heads of the Welcome, the tribe out of the deep Glad Sea, and the reason everybody else out here is poor. They do not raid. They welcome you. Alive. You were supposed to prove yourselves before they would welcome you, and what happened instead is that you welcomed them, thoroughly enough that the entire arrangement inverted.
One action. One tribe.
Somebody has painted a six-fingered handprint and I AM FLICK on her armour in engine grease. She is fine with it.
“I am sorry, who is this and why is she with us now?” “Oh. That is our war wife.”
Kevo, rehearsing the conversation with the rest of the crew
She gave you what her people had. The fallen star is a ship. Decent size. No survivors that they could see. Sky people, just like you. Her crew got as far as stripping exactly one thing off it: a ship-scale coil rifle, four to five hundred kilos, and not one single round of ammunition.
Flick drew a symbol in the sand and she nodded, because she had seen it before.
VANGUARD
She crests the crater rim ahead of you at dawn, sets the engine block down in the sand, and winks.
Two hundred metres below you is a starship that came out of the sky and did not get up again. Off to one side of the crater floor, something black and glassy is catching the light.
Hollowbone has water now, a religion, a war economy and a navy, and all of that happened in a single day.
Somebody is going to notice.
And you still have not answered the Cutlass.
Android · Hunter · Network specialist
Solved a planetary drought with a drawing and a 28. Decapitated a man through an armour slit after the worst critical hit ever rolled. Disintegrated an axle with acid at forty feet. Backflipped off an exploding truck on a hero-pointed natural one. Curveballed a grenade into a moving sphere and called it a Death Star. Closed the evening by citing her research background. Reloading is for bitches.
God, allegedly, of Hollowbone
Woke up a god he did not campaign for and has still not commented on. Rolled a natural one on a roll that specifically could not be failed, hero-pointed it, and called GET HIM for a bonus he did not need. Solved a comms failure by screaming. Then drove a truck sideways into a stationary truck full of people while leaning on the horn.
Contemplative · A brain with opinions
Two fireballs. Both maximum. Four failed pilot checks between them. One entire bike swarm reduced to burning tyres travelling independently in several directions. Also the only being present with the presence of mind to ask what any of this was actually for, and the only one who did not have to jump off anything.
Whatever Scope is
Opened the battle at two kilometres, out of a duststorm, with a red line and a fuel tanker. Drove a war rig with their feet. Abandoned a moving vehicle mid-ram on the entirely reasonable grounds that they matter more than it does. Aided brilliantly all night and rolled abysmally whenever it was their own turn, which they have correctly diagnosed: better at giving orders.
Mayor, in a manner of speaking
Sold a fleet at a thirty three percent discount using a religion he invented the previous evening. Conducted an entire vehicle battle on bass guitar from the back of a moving stage. Spent the second half of the night as the largest and least dressed mayor in the recorded history of Kindly. Still nobody knows what he looks like, including him.
Head of the Welcome · War wife
Absorbed everything you had, walked out of the wreckage carrying an engine block in each hand, asked one question, got one answer, and joined. Now wears your god on her chest in engine grease.