Chapter 20

To say that walking out of there caused mixed feelings would be putting it mildly. By the time I’d gotten home though, most of those feelings had been put to bed.

My last three shifts were a crazy mixture of mundane tasks, asinine paperwork, and sexual frustration. I’d managed the whole trip to France without any female company, and was hoping for a few ‘farewell fucks’ from the ladies, but it was a dry desert. Death and destruction apparently didn’t rev the women up.

Clearing out my locker was like excavating a Time Machine. Dirty t-shirts at the bottom of a pile of other trash reminding me I had once liked ‘210 Pilots’ and ‘EverSpace’ enough to buy one of their shirts. Strange since I can’t even recall one of their songs. A receipt for the new Y-Box that I had been soooo ... keen to get. I hadn’t touched it since, well maybe since I first got my Weapon. I’d been halfway through the new Dead-Red game too. Wonder why I’d stopped?

I binned it all. No need for looking back. I had a few of the nurses numbers still stored in my phone, but who knows if I’d ever be back?

The new job officially ‘started’ Monday. I’d made contact with Mace a few days back and he confirmed that I was off until then. Apparently we were going on a cross-country tour of all the prisons, penitentiaries, jails, holding cells, and lock-ups that our fine country had to offer.

... Yay...

We were three weeks into it, We’d found five incarcerated Weapons in that time and it was Mace who found them. Not one of them had managed to go ‘inside’ a portal yet, so none of them even had their weapon. It looked like it was becoming a pointless exercise, not to mention that living out of a suitcase was getting on both our nerves. We’d stumbled across more Weapons in restaurants and coffee shops than we’d found in jails.

I’d pulled a few one-nighters in various bars and taverns across the province and I’ll bet it pissed Mace off even more because he hadn’t managed it.

“You planning on abstinence as a life plan? ‘Cause man, it’s working!” I piped up at breakfast.

I’d been pounding back as much as I could eat from the ‘free breakfast’ bar at the hotels for the past three weeks and it had my pants feeling tight, so today I was just eating an apple and planning on being hungry for a while. Mace was at the hotel gym every night for an hour or so while I’d been drinking beer and chasing women. I’d kept my balls empty and a smile on my face, but Mace’s pants still fit him.

He took a spoon out of his yogurt and pointed it at me. “I got a nice girl at home...” he grunted, obviously intending on ending the topic.

“I had a nice girl in my room last night” I smiled, “well, maybe not a ‘nice girl’ exactly, but better than no girl!” I wasn’t kidding, that chick had been all about me choking her while fucking her in the ass. It surprised me just how little it bothered me even though I typically don’t get off on that shit.

I was needling him. I’d been blowing off a bit of steam with a girl or three in the last few weeks, he didn’t even have that. I was hoping to use that to my advantage.

“You need an outlet! Since you’re not in the market for an evening with a dirty single mom or bar-tramp, how about we hop on the PortalDiver app for the next town we’re going to and run a portal? We can ‘hook up’ with some group and beat down some monsters!” I flashed my phone at him with PortalDiver already open, and two different groups looking for 1-3 extra weapons for a dive in Kingstown.

“I still need to dump those weapons we got from those Perps too, so we got an official reason to go.” I said as I started typing in our offer to join both groups, hoping he’d just go along with it.

I looked up to find him regarding me carefully. He stared silently for a bit as I continued to type.

“What are you advertising us as?” He finally asked, actually sounding interested but looking down and scraping out his yogurt cup.

“Heavy Melee fighters, one handed weapons with shields and full armour” I replied quickly, typing in our new profile.

“Better leave out most of the references to armour, and come to think of it, leave out my shield too.” He carefully mentioned.

I looked up from my phone. “Why? We’d look like noob Divers!”

“Exactly.” He said after a moment. “Two Level 0 fighters show up with full armour? They’ll never believe we are level zero, they’ll think we’re high level psychos looking for rape and murder victims inside a portal where the evidence can be hidden.”

“That happen often?” I asked, actually surprised.

“More than once, we’re pretty sure about at least a few cases but there’s not enough to prosecute...” he sighed.

I guess I wasn’t the only bad guy around.

I went back to my phone and submitted two applications for runs, one planned for tomorrow afternoon and one planned for the day after.

Today’s ‘work’ was all three prisons in Kingstown, two medium security and one maximum security. We’d visited other medium security prisons beforehand and getting in (close enough) to the inmates that we could scan (and hopefully Loot) them wasn’t all that hard.

Getting into the Max prison the next morning was such a drag that it took us the whole rest of the day just to be told to ‘come back tomorrow’ and all this despite the fact that we had our visits planned, and paperwork signed by the Deputy PM and the Minister of Justice herself. Mace was beside himself, pacing like I’d never seen him do before.

On our way out I collected our cellphones, and started scrolling my messages before Mace ever started the car.

“Whoop! We got an ‘emergency fill-in’ for this evening. Gauge park, Blue portal. Group of three wants two or three more ‘Frontliners’. You ready to beat the shit outta some skeletons?” I shouted, trying to use my ‘overexcited coach” voice, but ending up sounding like a cheesy WWF announcer.

“I’m ready to beat the shit outta something” growled Mace as he drove out of the stupid prisons parking lot. I guessed he’d detected a Weapon or two. We’d discussed the fact that not one but two of the CO’s back there were Weapons, and Mace confirmed that they were level 3’s! They had a number of decent items, and one had somehow ‘lost’ a piece of silver today. I guessed that tomorrow, the other one was going to somehow lose one too.

The next hour was dedicated to stuffing our faces and collecting a few items for our toss-away bags to take into the portal with us. Bottles of water, a roll of duct tape, wet wipes, and other odds & ends.

“Uhh ... Mace, I better tell you, I picked up a cursed item in France. It might actually help here though.” I said sheepishly while chewing my burrito.

“Explain.” He said in a monotone.

“Well, it reads like this:

‘Cretan’s Whetstone’: -1 Sharpness, -1 Puncturing, +1 Impact Applies for all weapons within range when the cursed draws their own edged weapon. Cursed Artifact, Non-transferrable.”

“I grabbed it from one of the honour-guard soldiers, the one that had the gold key but shit was too crazy at the time to talk about it.”

“You’re the magic man, and can take anything from anyone at any time, yet you’re stuck with a cursed item you stole from a Grunt?” He glanced at me. “Have you tried dumping it?”

I looked at my inventory and tried to pull the Whetstone. It came to my hand immediately. I put it down beside my half-finished burrito, completely expecting it to stick to my hand, or magically jump back into my inventory.

It just sat there.

“See, when it comes to Inventory, you’re the fucking Magician. Non-transferrable my-ass.” he laughed, my expression must have been funny. I was totally expecting it to be stuck to me.

“So that stone makes our bashing weapons hit harder and makes the enemies swords and spears blunt? Doesn’t sound much like a curse to me, that’s a hellacious bonus if what I’ve heard about skeletons is true.” Mace pointed out. “And all we gotta give up is that your axe goes blunt for a minute?”

I had thought about it that way, but was still hunh-up on the fact that it (and I) was Cursed.

“Any idea what the rest of the group is?” He asked thoughtfully.

I looked at the App, we were going in with a Fire-Mage, a Rogue, and a Spearman. Not a strong lineup for fighting Skeletons. “These guys need us more than we need them, it doesn’t say their levels, so they’re probably low-levelled. I suggest we ask for a 50-50 split, them-us. Without some help, they’d have to delay or skip their run.”