The Missile 2
Copyright© 2025 by Zen Master
Chapter 4: Shuffling Tiles Around. Oh, and Riots and Guns
We had a little bit to do, arranging the chairs and all, but mostly it was just busy-work waiting for the meeting. The third guy, named Rick, asked Cindy if she wasn’t worried, getting left in a strange place with strange men.
She smiled at him and said “I used to, but I’ve found a solution to the problem. Sam, I’m being attacked. Please save me!”
As soon as I understood what she was saying I had my mace and shield out. All three of the men had all looked at me when she said my name, and the two younger ones both jumped. Ron exclaimed “Shit!”, and then had the good manners to look sheepish and apologize.
Cindy said “My Dad has told me more than once that I’m too pretty for my own good. I don’t worry any more, now that I have Sam. Besides, if I was really scared, when you all looked at him I would have pulled my staff out and beat your heads in.” While she was saying that, her staff appeared in her hands.
“When the police came in to investigate, I’d just say “I don’t know who did it. I found them like this. I mean, where’s the murder weapon?” And she stored her staff again.
She had to have practiced that. I was pretty sure she still didn’t know anything about actually using it, but the threat was still there. Would she need a lot of training, to brain someone who didn’t see it coming? Maybe she was right. I sure hoped so.
Anyway, that demonstration reminded me of our armor. “Jim, we brought our armor in case you wanted us to get all dressed up for show & tell. It’s in the car and we can’t get it right now, but what do you want? Bring it in and be all dressed up before the meeting? Put it on while they watch? Or, just leave it in the car?”
“I think we want it, in case they want to see it. I’m not sure I want a bunch of strangers watching Cindy change clothes, though. Let’s go ask the witch about a changing room.”
So we all trooped out and down the hall to the reception area. “Helen? Do we have anything we can use as a changing room? If we ask Sam and Cindy to put their armor on, I don’t think we want them to have to do it in front of everyone.”
The witch answered “No, that would cause needless trouble. Huh. They could use the restrooms...” as she pointed at the two with doors side by side “ ... but I don’t want them not available if someone needs them. How about the storeroom?” She pointed at another door behind her.
Jim asked “Is there enough room in there?”
Helen walked over and opened the door. “As long as they don’t need TOO much room it should work. Just about every other room has a window in the door.”
“That should work. You can go one at a time.”
Cindy said “Oh, no. I need help with some of that stuff, and Sam knows how it works.”
Helen asked “So, you are a hunter, too?”
“Yes, Ma’am. I’m on Sam’s ‘Team Newbie’.”
“Well, if you need help, you need help. Just, rest assured that I’ll have my ear up against the door listening for any ... extracurricular activities. And I have a key to the lock.”
“Oh. THAT could be embarrassing! Thank you for letting us know. I suppose we’ll have to do something to block the door before we start working on our extra credit projects.”
“Oh, you’re a quick one! Well, if you need it it’s right there.”
“Thank you, Ma’am.”
We were holding hands on our way back to the meeting room, and I whispered something in Cindy’s ear.
She answered loud enough for even Helen, behind us at her desk, to hear “I am NOT a crooked lying sack of shit, Sam. I merely ... exaggerate sometimes to make a point.”
Dad got back with dinner before the meeting, but not in time for us to eat it first. Helen let him put it in Meeting Room One, a much smaller room between the reception area and our room, and we shuttled back and forth as we had time. Dad stayed in there to keep it from disappearing. Jim had Rick outside at the doors to help the people who couldn’t find or read that sign, and he stationed Ron at the counter for people who got lost passing through Helen’s area. We never did get our armor out of the trunk.
I got a text from Matt that he couldn’t make it, and George showed up with his father right before we started. We ended up with I think 24 ‘New Class’ Weapons, a bunch of parents, and a half-dozen older Weapons who wanted to see what was going on. Eric showed up, too. I’d figured he would, since he’d said he lived in Birmingham. I shook his hand. Cindy gave him a hug and said “I need pictures after this.”
The meeting was half presentation on what Portals were and who Weapons were and what ALPRA could do for them, and half just a bull session. Me, Cindy, Eric, George, and another guy were ‘veteran’ Divers. Rick was off on one side, minding a video camera for the Discord feed. As near as I could tell, I was the only ALPRA employee (as opposed to contractors) present who was also a Diver.
Some of the participants were kinda rowdy. Not really trouble, but disruptive and getting worse all the time. I looked for the off-duty policeman or state trooper that should be there for a government vs public meeting, before I realized that me, Eric, and George should be able to handle any trouble we got.
I had to think about that, some. Did I want to use my Portal System weapon to hurt people? No, I didn’t, but I also wasn’t going to let a riot develop that got innocent people hurt.
In the event, just showing what was available did everything needed. At least, that was what I thought. Jim was talking about what ALPRA could do for Hunters, and a guy in the back, maybe mid to late 20s, yelled out “Do we get paid?”
I’d been getting pretty aggravated at the lack of respect shown by some of the adults, and that was the last straw for me. I waved at Jim and stepped up. “Excuse me, but these people...” waving at Jim and Eric “ ... are trying to explain how they might be able to help you, and these people...” waving at the people quietly sitting and listening “ ... are trying to listen to what they’re saying. It would be a LOT easier if they didn’t have loudmouth jackasses heckling them from the back. You weren’t getting enough attention, so you blurted out a blunt question. Fine, I’ll just blurt out a blunt answer. ‘Yes’. Now, jackass, you’ve gotten the answer you came for. It’s time for you to leave so everyone else can continue the meeting.”
“I don’t have to do anything that some punk kid tells me.”
I asked George to “Cover me?” and called my mace. “Listen, jackass. You can shut your mouth on your own and leave on your own, or I can shut it for you, and then drag your body out the door and down the steps.” Then I said “Choose wisely” as I started walking towards him.
He took off. I followed him on out the door, and asked Helen to call the police about someone ejected from the meeting for being disruptive. She told me to lock the door, which sounded like a really good idea. What if he came back in with some buddies? Or a gun? Ever since the state deregulated weapon carriage, everybody and their brother carried three.
When I got back into the meeting room “I apologize for that. Helen’s calling the police. We’ve locked the doors so he shouldn’t be able to get back in before they show up. Now, can we just try to be polite for a while?”
THEN I noticed that Eric had his humongous axe out, George had his sword and shield out, Cindy had her staff out, and the other adult Diver had his big honkin’ sword out. Awesome. When I got back to where I’d been staying, I stored my mace again and said “Look, no one has to be here. If you don’t want to be here, leave! Causing trouble for someone who’s trying to help you is just STUPID!”
Jim looked at me. “You do remember that this is going out live, right?”
I sighed. “Yeah. Still, they were trying to cause trouble. Should I have waited until they got enough people pissed off to start a fight? When we first started, I looked at them and looked around for the police who usually do security for these things, and I realized that whoever organized this probably thought that we could handle it ourselves. Sorry if I overstepped there, but I’d rather eject him before the riot starts.”
Fuck me. I was going to get fired the day after I got hired. Still, everyone was polite for the rest of the meeting.
Jim wound his talk up quickly after that, and we broke up into a bunch of conversations. The kids my age wanted to talk to me and Cindy and George. Their parents wanted to talk to Jim. The older Weapons wanted to talk to Eric and the other guy.
The big question was “How do we form a team?” All I could do was liken it to playing scrabble.
“You need to look at all the tiles, all the Weapons here, and see how you can put them together to make a word, or a Portal team. Can you get together, either on Discord or in person, and get to know each other? Once you know who’s available in your area and what they can do, start moving the tiles around and see what you can put together.”
I pointed at where our team was drawn on a white board, in ‘combat formation’. “You’ll need a couple of people like me and George and Eric, who can stand up to whatever you run into. You’ll need someone like Matt and Margie, who can help with long-range firepower. If you can, get someone like Cindy who’s smart enough to see it when we screw up, before things get too out of hand. That’s it. We were a test, to see if it would work. Everyone seems happy with the results, so the PRA is letting us stay together a few more times. Once we know what we’re doing, the adults will go help another team of new guys, and us four will start taking in new guys, two at a time. Before long, YOU guys will be doing the same thing for others. As long as you stay on Level One of the Pinks and maybe the Violets, you’ll be fine.”
“That first time for us? We put our team together first, the four of us, and they gave us Eric and Margie to keep us out of trouble. They taught us a LOT! The PRA made us come in Saturday morning and spend all day practicing stuff so we could work as a team. We didn’t actually go in until Sunday. They’ll do the same thing for you, for your first Dive.”
“What if we don’t want to go in?”
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