Chapter 12: Offers and Decisions

It turned out the folks on Tarkin’s Roost were surprisingly eager to negotiate. They had opened channels to Elias even before the battle was over.

If they left, would Reforged not track them down?

Elias told them the terms the leadership would agree to.

“Leave the planet. Don’t come back. And I would suggest you guys drop the tag, or if you’re that attached to it, go so far away that we’ll never see it. Now, or in the future. That’s what you get right now.

“And let me just remind you that we won’t have a reason to track you down if you don’t destroy stuff on your way out or take stuff that was never yours to begin with. Contrary to what your guild leader thought, we didn’t start this conflict, and we’d much rather not continue the conflict, that is, unless you guys decide to give us a reason to continue it. Much safer to give everyone involved a clean break, yeah?”

A couple folks thought that was a little harsh. I mean, surely they had the right to take what was in the bases they owned, right? They were getting out of the way. What more could Reforged want?

Elias explained patiently. “Your MACs? Take them. Your personal gear? Take it. Anything you brought here yourselves? Fine. But the factories were ours before you landed. The stockpiles were ours before you landed. You don’t get to empty the cupboards because you occupied the house for a week. And if you think our terms aren’t generous enough, you can decline them. And then I ask Amy if she would mind enforcing these terms. She’s still a bit twitchy that Darren didn’t give her a chance at proper catharsis. You folks wouldn’t be as satisfying as he would have been, but hell, she can make up for it in quantity instead of quality. Ask the folks who were in Galensview if they felt properly attended to.”

His voice hardened.

“The reason we’re being so hardass on this is not because we personally hate each and every one of you. We’re making sure the only thing you get from this is OUT of our space, because you guys are an object lesson to others that we don’t like playing rough, but we will if pushed. That lesson loses its potency if you get to carry out the floorboards and the good china after squatting in our Airbnb for a week.”

They considered the terms carefully. Then they looked at their numbers, and then they looked at their rapidly diminishing numbers in guild chat and the RelayChat server, and decided that while the terms SUCKED, they were really the best they were going to get.

A couple of them were petty enough to take small amounts of Reforged stuff with them. Just a personal rebellion against a complete defeat.

Elias knew it would happen. He was just glad enough that it was over. Maybe they’d be looking over their shoulders for Amy and her forces saying, “We’d like to talk to you about that six platinum you stole from Tarkin’s Roost. We’d like to discuss a repayment plan. Taking pieces out of your WarMAC seems like a great start to the repayment. Only the start, though. Compound interest, don’t you know?”

Slowly, life came back to normal. Or at least as close to normal as Reforged ever came.

Kevin showed up one day in full lumberjack gear. Red flannel shirt. Suspenders, and yes, a large axe that looked like a Babe Ruth-sized baseball bat with a sharpened bit of metal attached to it that looked like it might be capable of felling a maple in one vicious swing.

Even a dang trapper hat, with the furry ear flaps down to cover his ears.

People looked at him for a couple hours. No one dared ask what he was doing, because really, that would be just encouraging the next stage of whatever insanity Kevin had planned.

Finally, Adrian decided that his need to know outweighed the fear of being hit with a punchline.

“Ok, Kevin. Spill. Halloween is still like six weeks away. What gives?”

Kevin looked at him as if to say, “FINALLY, someone bit!”

Kevin said loudly, “Geez, Adrian, I’d been hoping all day that one of you WOOD ask me that question.”

Amy heard that pun and decided that such wordplay was a violation of the Geneva Convention.

Kevin then protested that he never signed it.

That was a bad idea, as Amy then explained that if he never signed it, technically what she was about to do to him wouldn’t be classified as a war crime.

That was the cue for a chase scene all around the Training Center, as Kevin alternately pleaded with Amy to stop CHASING him and threatened to report her to The Hague.

He only stopped running after Amy collapsed in tired but happy laughter.

He was rather pleased with himself.

He never got to use the “I wanted to Axe you all a question” line, but then Elias would have accused him of repeating the same gag twice, and Kevin was a connoisseur of insanity, not a mass producer of weirdness.

He just felt that after being under so much stress for so long, people needed to watch something absolutely ridiculous, just to remember to have fun. Money well spent.

And really, even the axe was a good investment. It went up on an unused portion of wall in the kitchen, next to a taped-on drinking glass. The sign, of course, read “In case of drinking emergency, break glass.”

Marcus had howled with laughter when he saw it. He had to be talked out of actually doing it to bring the joke to its proper conclusion. They reminded him that if he ever stopped leasing the floor, having to explain an axe strike in a kitchen wall, even one that was due to a (drinking) emergency, would probably be expensive.