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?

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

I will need to put these two into more scenes.

Dead dude’s Freddie Baldwin Cuaron.

I want to punch this up a bit more though, maybe. Give it more of that old staccato oomph.

“So are you going to go after Wolfie again?” I asked Elizabeth. She looked down at her mug of tea like she had stashed an answer there, then shook her head.

“He’s too powerful. I don’t know what he did to me, when I died. I don’t even know if first edition Elizabeth really know what he did. But, ha, Wolfie is strong. Too strong for me to beat him in a straight-up wizard’s duel.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You know, you shouldn’t have done that. At least, not in the middle of the city!”

Elizabeth looked contrite and defiant at the same time, like she agreed with me and wanted to do it again anyway. “I’m less than a week old. That count for anything?”

“Sure, but don’t go too many times to that well. So, he’s too powerful. You think you can take Wolfie down if somebody else takes the shine off him a little?” I wouldn’t mind it if somebody else did the heavy lifting for a change. And if anybody deserved last dibs on Wolfie, it’d be Elizabeth.

It may be too cute. I don’t really want to explain the joke, though. I’ll let the beta readers have their input before I decide.

Or something. This idea is probably gonna be the new RPG setting AND this month’s Patreon story, though. Efficiency! Cthulhu Mythos!

Also: Patreon!

I needed some more characters, and this one sort of shoved her way forward. I’d object, except that before I was straining to write twenty five words and once she showed up I was pushing a thousand. And she’ll get even more!