Roy initially mistook the sheriff’s office for a functional armory, but when he looked closer, he noticed all the guns were simply painted onto the wall. Another photo opportunity. The rest of the room was taken up by a desk stacked high with empty soda bottles, though it was the man sitting behind it that commanded his attention.

  The first thing Roy noticed about Sheriff Ryan was his extremely badass mustache.

  The second was that he was missing an arm and a leg.

  ”Get the staring out of the way. Everybody has to do it before they can talk to me like a normal guy,” said the grizzled cowboy from a chair with thick monster-truck tires mounted to its sides.

  “I didn’t mean to be rude,” said Roy.

  “It’s fine. Well, for you it is. I still have to put up with this. People keep saying I’m lucky to be alive after being ripped apart by a gator-man, but I don’t feel so lucky most days.”

  “We had a run-in with gator-men ourselves,” said Bastion.

  “How many?”

  “Three, but—”

  The sheriff cut him off.

  “For us, it was dozens, all at once. Our boat got stuck in shallow water, and they straight up chewed it to splinters. We had to wade through the swamp, and they were popping up everywhere. Bullets did nothing, so I was useless in a fight for the first time in my life. Same for my cousin Nate. Tex and Sam put in good work, and Casey blasted a big one into chunks so small it couldn’t regenerate, but in the end, there were just too many.”

  “I’m sorry,” Roy said.

  “We should never have gone there. Nate kept telling me to try treasure hunting somewhere easier first, but I had to go for the big score. Everything I tried before that always worked out for me, so why wouldn’t this time be the same?” He shook his head. “And this guy back in Bay Town kept telling us how many tokens we could sell our loot for. If I ever go back there, I’ll smash that oversized clock right into his teeth.”

  “Mayor Bigtime sent you to the swamps,” said Roy, thinking aloud.

  “Mayor now, is he? It’s all worked out very nicely for him, hasn’t it? Sitting pretty while he sends others out to get chewed up. And before you say it, I’m well aware of the irony that I’m literally sitting here, forced to do more or less the same thing as him while other treasure hunters take the same risks. I at least try to be straight up about how dangerous things are around here. Gator-men are only the start of it.”

  “We didn’t only fight gator-men. There were also two thieves, plus the Rabbit.” Roy went on to recap the previous day’s events, how their belongings were stolen, and they barely got to an Elixir in time.

  “We had plenty of Elixirs at least,” said Ryan. “Soda is Casey’s main passion, other than yours truly. She threw a gallon jug of the stuff down my gullet back there. It saved my life and closed the wounds, but it didn't grow the limbs back.”

  “Maybe someone could find you a better Elixir, one that can regrow limbs,” Roy said hopefully.

  "You think if that kind of thing existed, I wouldn't have drunk it already? That I wouldn't have moved heaven and earth to find it? Do you think I'm sitting in this chair just for fun?" He paused to compose himself and took a breath. "Have you actually heard of something like that?"

  "No," said Roy. "But that doesn't mean it isn't out there somewhere.”

  “More than just the elixirs were stolen from us,” said Bastion. “We lost a lot of Ultra-Discs. The thieves didn’t look like the gangs around here; one wore a top hat.

  “Can you help us with that at all?” asked Roy.

  “I have good news, bad news, and then more good news for you there. Nate came back from a scouting run last night, and he saw someone matching that description, pulling things out of his hat and receiving a bag of tokens in return. The bad news is he saw this at the wizard's tower, and that place is a fortress.”

  “Damn it,” said Bastion. “Just how strong are they?”

  “You fought a few of them last night, right? And from the sounds of it, your friend is real lucky to have survived it. There are dozens of wizards at the tower, and their wands work better there, and they recharge pretty much instantly, so you can’t bait out spells ‘til they’re used up and get them while they’re vulnerable.”

  “Fuck,” said Bastion, pressing his hands to his forehead.

  “Now for the extra bit of good news. You’ll never get your discs back without help, but we can offer you that help. If you do something for us in exchange.”

  “Yeah, now that sounds exactly like Bigtime,” said Bastion.

  “Well, I never said we were different, just that I want him dead.”

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Roy, knowing he was already on board with whatever it was.

  “Before I explain, you should talk to my other scout. Kyle, you can come in now.”

  Roy turned around, half expecting the old demolitions expert to walk through the door. Instead, it was young Kyle, the action hero energy drink addict.

  “Hi Roy, Bastion. Good to see you guys again.”

  “So wait, said Bastion. “Was he here the whole time, and you just called him in now? Or did you schedule him in later than us just for dramatic effect?”

  “The latter,” Ryan said, leaning back in his chair. “Kyle, tell them the story of how you got here.”

  “Well, I already told you guys how I wanted to be in the special forces, so I could use magic and wear a cool costume. After I failed the tests for that, they put me on guard duty. It was just standing in front of the Star-Power Tower all day, boring as hell. I deserted, because I wanted to come here instead. Well, a few days later, I got caught and put on a prison ship. It was like, this big floating aquarium in the shape of a shark.”

  “What was that like?” asked Roy. “It sounds cool.”

  “It was probably cool before the Warp,” said Kyle. “But as a prison, it was miserable. They emptied some of the old tanks and put us all in there, but then people started getting sick, so they brought them out onto the decks, on the shark’s fins. The guards said they let us out there because they wanted us to get where we were going alive, to this place they said was a labor camp in a place with runaway magic. It sounded real bad, but after a while we noticed that the guards seemed nervous too. Like, they’d never done this before. They were the ones with guns, so I thought they’d feel more at ease, but they were kinda twitchy with them after a while. They killed a few guys after the first couple of days.”

  “I get this feeling this story’s about to take a turn,” said Bastion.

  Kyle nodded. “We sailed away from the coast, out into the open ocean, and everyone knows you aren’t supposed to do that, because of all the sea monsters and stuff. The guards got even twitchier then, but the next time one of them pulled the trigger, his gun jammed.”

  Roy had a good idea what had happened. Only the best-equipped units in the Republic had newly made weapons. Most of the guns were antiques, jumbled-together scrap, or repurposed toys.

  “Theme magic was keeping their guns working,” he guessed. “When the setting changed, they didn’t have enough resonance to fire them anymore.”

  “Sounds about right,” said Kyle. “Anyway, the guy he was trying to kill rushed the guard and threw him off the side of the ship. The other guards tried to shoot him, but their guns jammed too. They pulled out knives, but they were outnumbered twenty to one.”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “Now I really get the feeling it’s going to take a turn,” said Bastion dryly.

  “Some of the prisoners were real criminals. Nasty dudes from the Star City gangs. This one guy with tattoos took a knife from a guard and whirled around like a demon. It was a massacre. Blood all over the deck, pouring over the sides. Real sharks started circling the ship. A sea snake came…”

  “Let me guess,” said Bastion. “The ship’s gone now.”

  Another nod from Kyle. That was a shame. Roy would have liked to see a ship like that.

  “The half of it that was left ran aground in the swamps. I thought being locked up was the worst thing that’d happen to me, but it got so much worse after. There was no food or fresh water. Gator-men would rip your legs out from under you. You couldn’t sleep, or slimes would crawl onto your face and drown you. One guy found a box of candy bars and tried to trade them for a bottle of water from the ship, then…

  “We know,” said Roy. “ A rabbit, right? The same thing came after us.”

  “Just the two of you, and you’re alive?” Kyle whistled. “Now I know you guys are pros. At the start, there were five hundred of us. Less than a fifth of that survived.”

  “What happened after that?” asked Bastion.

  “By the time we made it out of the swamps, the knife guy was in full control. Skeeter’s his name. He was in one of the big gangs, back in Star City. He called himself a cutter. That was like, his theme and his job, you know? He’d cut down anyone the gangs wanted gone. People were scared of him, so they did what he said. Others saw that and wanted to get on his good side, share in the scraps of his power.”

  “These are the raiders that are hassling West Town?” asked Bastion.

  The sheriff nodded. “Now you see why I asked Kyle here. Tell them what happened next.”

  “We came out of the swamps east of here, along the highway. Then we found this place where the fridges magically refilled themselves with food. An arcade-restaurant place. It has this prize wall thing where you can buy stuff with tokens. There’s a thick steel wall around it that nothing can get through, and automaton guards. Skeeter really wanted this expensive prize out of there, but the only way to get it was to pay for it. He started going out with the worst of his followers. They’d come back covered in blood with bags of tokens and pieces of costumes.”

  “Killing treasure hunters,” said Ryan, disgust clear in his voice. “Just so they can loot their corpses.”

  “Hey. I didn’t do any of that. I just hung out in the arcade, playing games and drinking soda. The ones who stayed behind had it all to ourselves, too, since the guys going on raids only drank this krazee-8 stuff, which made them go nuts. It’s not like we were benefiting from the loot they brought in, either. Skeeter kept it all locked in his storeroom.”

  “Keep going,” Ryan was smiling now.

  “Anyone who didn’t go on the raids got treated real bad, you know? We got the worst food, and we got kicked around a lot. It reminded me of being the short kid back in the cadets.”

  That was an odd comment. Kyle wasn’t short now. Maybe he’d just been younger than most when he signed up.

  “There was this guy, Walter. He had it worse than anyone. He was the smallest and skinniest guy there, and he kept trying to make this curtain-robe costume work, which made him an easy target, but eventually, Walter surprised everyone. He went out to this gift shop by himself and found some plastic wands, and got his theme working in a big way. One night when Skeeter and his squad were out of their minds on the 8, he handed out wands to a bunch of the other guys who were low on the totem pole, blasted the storeroom open, and ran out of there with all the tokens.”

  “What happened to you then?” asked Roy. Kyle’s story so far had been so grizzly, he was desperate for it to have a happy ending, which he guessed it would have, since Kyle was here now. Still, that didn’t mean there weren’t even more misfortunes in between.

  “I went with them. I hated being with the raiders and thought the wizards would be better, and they were, for a while. It was good at the tower, taking out any raiders that came after us felt like a real revenge of the underdogs type thing. Then they started stealing from other treasure hunters, saying they had to, to beat the raiders. But I remembered why I wanted to come here in the first place, to be a treasure hunter, not just take from them. So I left and came here.”

  “And it’s lucky for us he did,” said Ryan. “You know why?”

  “I get the feeling you’re about to tell us,” said Bastion.

  “Kyle, tell our new friends where those tokens are now.”

  “Locked in the wizard's tower, above the gift shop.”

  “See, now we know where Walter keeps his valuables. I’d bet anything that’s where your discs are, too.”

  “This place, is it well guarded?” asked Bastion.

  “Yeah, said Kyle. “You’d need to go up the whole tower, and the only way in’s through a building full of wizards. They’ve got spotters on the roof too, with fireball wands.”

  “Then how are we getting in? Bastion asked.

  “With our help,” said Ryan. “You get what you want, and we get what we want.”

  “And what do you want?” Roy was slightly confused.

  “Money, obviously,” said Bastion.

  “Not money, tokens,” said Ryan. “Do you know why we use those in Florida, and not voucher dollars?”

  “I’d assume it’s because this isn’t a real nation state like the Star Republic and you don’t have a central bank that’ll exchange currency for boxes of breakfast cereal,” said Bastion.

  “That’s part of it. Instead of all that, we have something called Raider Racoon’s Loot Stash.”

  “What’s that?” asked Roy.

  “It’s a regional chain of arcades that serves as the foundation of the token economy. Every location has a different selection of prizes. There are weapons, costumes, and all kinds of highly themed utility items. Things that are extremely valuable for treasure hunters to use and trade. Also, every location has an Elixir vending machine.”

  “Yeah, we just used one of those on the road here,” said Roy.

  “And I bet you had a hell of a hard time getting enough pre-Warp coins together to use it.”

  Roy nodded. “Yeah. It was a whole thing.”

  “That’s underselling it a little, don’t you think?” said Bastion. “It was a nightmare.”

  “It always is,” said Ryan. “Most of those coins aren’t themed enough to last; they tarnish, corrode, and eventually snap into little pieces. Tokens never do any of that. They’re as pristine as the day they were molded. The Elixir machines that take tokens are the only ones we can use reliably anymore. People get hurt a lot out here, and healing is at a premium. Plus, there are other kinds of soda in them, all kinds of buffs and boons. It’s a treasure hunter’s candy land, in a land full of treasure hunters. That’s why we use tokens around here.”

  Candy land. Roy liked the sound of that, and from the glint in his eyes, it looked like Bastion did, too.

  “The wizards did us a big favor when they stole those tokens. If they hadn’t, the raiders would be much better armed by now. As it stands, they each have half of what they need to be an imposing force. I say we take it all.”

  “How?” asked Bastion.

  “Thanks to Kyle here, we know exactly where the tokens are kept. You and a small team will sneak in and steal them, then you’ll spend them on weapons at the Raider Raccoons’ Loot Stash. Then the whole town will use those weapons to make the raiders and the wizards back the fuck off. We’ll have the security we need to build up strength, so we can take the fight to them.”

  “Do we need to sneak past the raiders, too?” asked Roy. “Neither of us really have stealth themes.”

  “I know someone who can help with that, and you’ll only need it for the wizards. For the raiders, I have another idea, courtesy of my girlfriend. They’ve kept hounding her about making Krazee-8 for them, and from what Kyle says, they practically need the stuff to function.”

  “Right,” said Kyle. “They’d probably drop dead if they ran out.”

  “It’s a shame we can’t wait for that,” said Ryan. “But I have a different plan. If they want Krazee-8 so badly, I say we give it to them. Use it to buy your way past their guards and then buy the weapons we’ll use against them later. The important thing is to do it fast, before either group realizes what’s going on, or finds out that we just killed a bunch of them. If we’re lucky, they’ll blame each other for that. Hell, it’s half true as it is.”

  “The best kind of true,” said Bastion.

  “So are you in?”

  “What’s the reward?” asked Bastion.

  Ryan leaned back in his chair. “Besides getting your stolen discs back?”

  “Yeah, it seems you’re getting a lot more out of it.”

  “From the way you’ve been talking, it sounds like there’s something more valuable there than just ordinary movies, but fine, you can have a share of the tokens. Ten percent.”

  “Twenty-five,” said Bastion.

  “Fifteen. We really need those tokens to buy as many weapons as possible to defend the town.”

  “Shouldn’t we just help them for free, Bastion?” said Roy. “If this town falls apart, we won’t get anything.”

  Bastion glared at Roy in frustration for a moment, then chuckled. “Honestly, I’m hoping we’ll have gotten our stuff back and hit the road long before the fighting starts…but fine, we’ll accept fifteen.”

  “Good. Now, my cousin Nate’s been keeping watch over the wizard’s tower for a while now. He can lead you there.”

  “I’m coming too,” said Kyle.

  “Assemble your team. I wish I could go myself, but at least some of my friends will join you. Sam and Tex for sure, and there might be others around town you can ask too.”

  “One last thing,” said Bastion.

  “Yes?” said Ryan.

  “Your gun. Have you got any spare ammo for it?”

  Ryan drew an antique pistol from his belt. A massive hand cannon, matched in scale by his remaining arm, rippling with muscle and popping with veins.

  “I wouldn’t be the fastest gun in the east if I didn’t. Nate’s the gunsmith around here as well as the scout. He’s got his own way of making improvised bullets.”

  Bastion pointed to his Dragoon. “Throw in some bullets for this as part of the reward.”

  “I thought we were done negotiating. You can buy some with your share of the tokens. I’ve got to warn you, though, your theme has to be strong enough to make them work.”

  “Already got that handled, assuming you’ve got an extra cowboy hat around here somewhere.”