The prize wall was broken into tiers of display cases, each lined with buttons and blinking lights. An automaton smiled from inside a service cage: a raccoon in a black mask and striped robber shirt, dual-wielding bubble blasters.

  “Trade Tokens, Get Totally Tactical!” Its jaw flapped slightly out of sync with the words.

  “Don’t even try smashing those boxes,” said Tex. “They’re unbreakable, and if you try it then the raccoon won’t sell you anything. I saw some guys do that at the one back in Clear Falls, and they could never go there for gear again.”

  “How does it work?” asked Roy.

  “You insert tokens in the slot. When you have enough for something, the button lights up. Press that and the raccoon slides along and gets it for you.”

  “OK,” said Bastion. “Let’s take stock of everything they’ve got before we start spending. We don’t want to buy a load of low-grade stuff, then see something amazing and not have the tokens for it.”

  Luckily, the tiers were easy to follow.

  At the bottom was the garbage. Tiny bits of plastic crap that cost 5-20 tokens. The kind of things you’d see on the floor and not even bother picking up.

  Key chains, bouncy balls, and yoyos. Tiny bags of candy and off-brand push-pops. Brittle figures made of a single piece of plastic with joints that didn’t move. Fake tattoos, stickers, and rubber ducks that Roy doubted would even float.

  Roy was used to seeing the value in junk, and even he didn’t want much of this.

  “Do you guys see anything workable amongst this trash?” asked Bastion.

  “Yoyo’s, maybe?” said Roy. “You’d need a really specific theme, though.”

  “None of us is becoming a yoyo-er, Roy. I don’t know how you’d even fight.”

  “Like a comic book villain,” Roy said. “Those guys are kind of the masters of weird theming. I’ve never seen anyone try it, but I bet it would totally work.”

  “Fake tattoos would do something,” said Tex. “I took a good look at Skeeter on the way in. The way he keeps his vest open, I’m damned sure his tats make his knives so fast.”

  “That could work for me,” said Kyle. There’s like, guns and grenades and eagle pictures in there. Real action hero stuff.”

  “The plastic vampire teeth would work,” said Samantha. “If we had a vampire, you know.”

  Before moving on to the non-garbage rows, Roy really tried to think outside the box, scanning the small figures and keychains to see if anything as unassumingly useful as Samantha’s skeleton key was mixed in there. If he’d seen a sword or gun one, he would have gone for it.

  The mid-tier prizes cost 25-75 tokens, and at a glance they looked far more promising. To start with, there was a fair amount of wearable stuff, good costume pieces. Disregarding all the raccoon-branded T-shirts and baseball caps, there were monster masks and goggles that caught Roy’s attention.

  “Those skeleton masks are worse than what I’ve already got,” said Samantha. “I could pick up a spare, though. Also, that zombie mask has me thinking, maybe it’d make the real zombies assume you’re one of them and leave you alone.”

  “Has anyone tried that?” Roy asked the group. Cadet training hadn’t mentioned it as a tactic, though maybe you had to be in special forces for that kind of training.

  “If they did, it was in the early days after the Warp,” said Bastion. “There’s really not enough zombies left to even worry about it.”

  “I’m getting some goggles,” said Tex.

  “Thinking of switching costumes?” Kyle asked.

  “Maybe. I could go anime samurai instead of traditional, but I’m thinking more along the lines of mundane utility. If Ryan’s plan comes together, we’re going to be blasting the shit out of everything. These would keep the gun-smoke out of our eyes.”

  There was a lot of miscellanea in this tier too, things they couldn’t see any use for. More raccoon merch: mugs and plushies. Inflatables for swimming pools, sadly not in the shape of tools or weapons. Slime pods with squid-like aliens inside. All kinds of spy gear toys that would have been very useful for someone with the right theme back at the wizard tower.

  Most importantly, there were weapons.

  First up was a glow sword, broad-hilt and cross-guard coloring the surrounding cubes with prismatic light.

  “Want to try that out, Roy?” asked Tex. “It’s a western-style blade. More your thing than mine.”

  “It does look really cool, but I’ve got a lot of attachment to the sword I already have.”

  “You made your normal sword glow before. Just learn how to do that again,” said Bastion.

  “Wait, really?” said Kyle. “That’s way stronger theme magic than normal.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got something weird going on. Magic that I can’t get working reliably.”

  Next was a laser pointer, which they considered getting for Nate’s sniper rifle, and a bubble blaster.

  “Too sci-fi for the prospectors,” said Samantha. “Maybe Casey could use it. You know, like, soda bubbles? There are more water guns here, too.”

  After that came the things they were here for. Plastic dynamite and TNT. Toys that would work as real explosives within the context of West Town. Silver painted plastic guns with smoke pellets. Quick Draw brand. 600 tokens each.

  “Steep price,” said Bastion.

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  “We’ll have to pay it,” said Tex. “At least for a few of them.”

  Roy moved on to the top shelf. Prizes worth thousands of tokens. The stuff that was there to make an impression, but that no one usually had enough tokens to buy.

  A giant version of the plush raccoon, which had to lie sideways across multiple containers to fit.

  A gi with a raccoon logo printed on the back.

  “That martial arts guy back in Bay Town would love that,” said Roy.

  A boom Box stereo. “We should get that for the saloon,” said Samantha. “All the music comes from those crappy computer speakers right now, and…”

  Roy had stopped listening. He was looking up, taking in the grand prize.

  It was modeled on a glossy black muscle car, 1:10 scale, with a giant spoiler, chrome wheels, and exhaust pipes as large as the ones on a real car. Next to it was a controller shaped like a racing wheel, with glowing buttons and rubber grips. It was permanently powered on, as evidenced by the neon green under-glow.

  The price was a whopping 3000 tokens.

  “Wow. Look at that,” said Roy.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Bastion.

  “That’s a Revus Bandit, like the one we saw when we fought the gator-men. It’s like fate.”

  “If it were the real car, I’d almost agree with you, but that thing’s a toy. What could we even do with it?”

  “Carry bombs, scout ahead, deliver snacks.”

  “All wildly impractical,” said Bastion.

  “Is this because it’s not the flying one?”

  “No, and it’s definitely not because Skeeter wants it. It costs more than our share of the tokens. West Town would have to buy it, and they don’t want to.” He turned to Samantha and Tex. “You don’t want to, right?”

  “Well…” said Samantha.

  “No,” said Tex. “Ryan was insistent on guns and explosives. We show up back in town with just a really cool toy car and we’ll be the ones getting shot.”

  “So you agree it's cool?” said Roy.

  “Of course I do,” said Tex. “It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. It makes me feel sick that we can’t buy it right now.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,” said Roy. “It sucks having to be responsible.”

  “What are we buying?” said Bastion. “Let’s run through the list before you three talk yourselves into it any more.”

  “Fake tattoos,” said Kyle. “As many as my share will get me.”

  Roy hadn’t been aware that Kyle was even getting a share.

  “Not, you know, a weapon?” said Bastion.

  “There’s nothing here that fits.”

  Kyle threw his tokens into the slot and mashed the button, causing the raccoon to jerk back and forth with one packet at a time.

  “We’re getting a dozen sets of goggles for the group,” said Tex, already paying. “Anything else from the low or mid tiers?”

  “The laser pointer and bubble blaster for Nate and Casey,” said Samantha.

  After that, it was just a matter of buying explosives and guns. Progress quickly ground to a halt there, because there were two types of explosives available.

  “Does anyone here know what the difference is between dynamite and TNT?” Tex asked.

  “Dynamite is more powerful, but unstable,” said Bastion. “You get any sparks near those sticks, and they’ll blow up in your face. It’s civilian stuff, for mining and demolishing old ruins. TNT is what the Republic military uses in their artillery shells. You need another, smaller explosion to trigger it.”

  “How many people before the Warp knew the difference?” Roy asked.

  “Not many. Just look at these things, they’re almost identical.”

  “Neither of these are real explosives,” said Roy. “All their power is coming from magic based on what the average person thought they’d do. I think they’ll be pretty much exactly the same.”

  Bastion shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “If it might be more powerful, and it’s the same price, we want the dynamite,” said Tex.

  “Get at least one TNT, though,” said Bastion. “Since we can time that explosion better than we can with fuses.”

  Roy pressed the TNT shelf’s button once, then hammered the dynamite button a few dozen times. It’d take a while to dispense them all, but all they had left to do now was wait. They’d got what they came for, and they’d successfully resisted the temptation to buy the RC car, which also meant they wouldn’t have to hide it from Skeeter on their way out.

  They wouldn’t have been able to anyway, because moments later, he and a handful of other raiders strolled in, already sipping from the cans of Krazee-8.

  “Yo, this shit’s pretty good,” Skeeter said. “Think we can cut a deal for more?”

  “Sure,” said Bastion. “We can come back with another batch sometime. What else do you have to trade?”

  “All kinds of shit, man. We get it all out here. Weapons. Costumes, if you don’t mind a few blood stains.”

  Roy casually moved his hand behind his back and pressed the button on the gun box.

  "Not like we’ve got much use for that stuff. I never knew much about how this magic shit works. Got lucky, I guess. With my ink, and my hard face, I just looked like I was good with a knife, and, whaddaya know—I was good with a knife, from the very first time I picked one up and cut a guy."

  Skeeter took another big gulp from his can of Krazee-8. He was talking faster now, accompanying his words with jittery hand gestures.

  “Not much to it when it came to this group’s costumes. Got the idea from an old movie poster. It was this wasteland with guys in mismatched armor, bats and blades. Simple. We can kill anyone we come across with it, though. Turns out magic is easy.”

  Roy looked around, sizing up their equipment.

  Some had hubcaps as shields. Less authentic-looking than Roy’s, but if junk was the theme, they’d hold well enough.

  Some held baseball bats, a mix of wood and aluminum, with things driven through or duct-taped on to make them more deadly: rusty nails, shards of glass, plastic cocktail swords.

  One bulky Raider held a beer keg on a pole, and the weirdest weapon was a giant foam hand with a pointing finger. It had to do something painful, or he wouldn’t be wearing it.

  Footballs and frisbees were collected in boxes and held in backpacks. The balls had the same enhancements as the bats, and the frisbees bore disposable razor blades and shards of ultra-discs along their edges. Javelins were stacked along the entryway wall.

  “Yeah, things are going good. I’ve got this place, a gang that follows orders, good weapons.”

  Skeeter downed the rest of his krazee-8 and crushed the can with his fist.

  “Man, it's so easy to take stuff here. Star City had more to steal, but out here, with no sheriffs around…it's all just up for grabs, you know?”

  He staggered on his feet.

  “Most people just drop their shit when I tell them to, but there was this one guy with this crazy spiky hair. He raised his fist and started calling out the name of an attack. It was a really fucking long name too. I’d cut his throat before he even finished it.”

  The raiders broke into raucous laughter, spilling their drinks down their armor.

  “But why should I put up with that kind of bullshit? I should be able to ask for whatever I want and have them hand it over. People should bring me stuff like one of those old-timey warlords.”

  Skeeter swung around, pointing at random people, eyes bloodshot.

  “I should have everything I want. Walter’s head on a spike, the tokens he stole back, more weapons, as much Krazee-8 as I can drink. Is that really too much to ask? No. I can have it all.”

  He placed his hands on his hips. On his knives.

  “I can have your stuff too.”

  The room erupted into a storm of blades, bats, and balls.