Moe Lane

This is likely the last Snippet. First draft is in the can, folks.

The good news about the moldworker mage was the same as the bad news; he was a damned moldie himself. Hell, half of these guys were from working around the stuff. But they didn’t know how to throw magic around.

We were lucky that the mage wasn’t so mold-raddled as to try to cook off some fireballs, because those are bad indoors and the backblast don’t play favorites. But he also knew how to shoot steam out of his fingers, and hit us with a wave of the stuff just as we were regrouping from smacking the fighters around.

You ever get a shot of live steam in the face? The kind that the really Old Americans used to have? It’s not good. It scalds and blisters and even if you don’t lose an eye you’re gonna be blinking and blind for a little bit, and the mage got half the Brute Squad in his first attack and and got the rest to tangle themselves up. Or so I figured out later; me, I was blinking and blind.

If the moldie mage was smarter he’d have run then. Nobody good enough to hold off a Brute Squad by himself would ever be working in a moldworks, and he had a decent path to the door. But the icemold in his blood was doing the talking, and it said to keep shooting kens in the face with live steam. He was really piled it on, too. Panic and no sense of preservation will do that to you.

The problem is that kens — well, it’s a nasty lie that barbies don’t feel pain the way we do. That’s something that cabrones say so they can feel smug about looking down their noses. But a ken ain’t going to let something like being scalded keep him from going and messing up whoever is doing the scalding. It’s one of the things that keeps the barbie tribes alive and kicking up north, so why change what works?

Kind of amused at the different types of professional assumptions I can play with when it comes to these characters.

They’re in the Brute Squad! And, yes, it’s an official name. Much about New California becomes clear when you realize the influence a movie like THE PRINCESS BRIDE would have on their culture.

I almost wrote this up as ‘Dude took out three people.’ I don’t know what I was thinking.

I don’t know how authors did this before they invented word processors. I well and truly do not. It’s just so much easier to edit now.

I gotta do something while the book’s out to the beta readers, after all. So far, I have it broken down into three main categories:

I liked this guy. I hope I don’t kill him!

I will need to put these two into more scenes.

Kind of liked that particular literary reference at the end.