“Carl, look,” Donut said. “There’s a patch on his arm.” She peered closely at it. “There’s two patches. A sew-on and a heat transfer. The arm one is hand-sewn with a chain stitch. It’s good work, but it clearly wasn’t made on a schiffli like the nameplate on the breast.”
“What?” I said, looking down at the two patches. “What are you talking about? What the hell is a schiffli?”
“Huh,” Donut said. “I don’t know how I know. A schiffli is a type of embroidery machine. I must’ve watched a show about it or something.”
The patch on the shoulder was in the shape of a shield, and it held a crossed lightning bolt and a magic wand being grasped by a talon with a tree in the background. It looked very much like a typical US military unit patch, but with the text in Syndicate Standard. It read 201st Security Group – Magical Ops. The second patch was a nameplate. It read Vicente. That was it. There was no grade insignia or anything else on the shirt, including any sort of indicator of what army this 201st Security Group was a part of. That particular missed detail made the shirt look fake, like it was more of a movie prop than a real uniform.
I pulled the entire black shirt off the headless elf and tossed it into my inventory. I’d show Mordecai when we got back.
We moved to examine the corpse of GumGum the orc. We’d seen her just a few hours before, piling the bodies of the prostitutes out of town. Her eyes stared straight up, almost accusing. I’d told her we’d help, but I hadn’t meant it.
Lootable Corpse. GumGum. Orc. Level 5.
It didn’t say what had killed her, but based on the injuries—a ripped open chest, and no blood—I suspected she’d been killed by those three Krasue things. I shuddered.
“Why did that weird guy say he’d been training his whole life to fight us? We’ve only been on this floor for a couple days,” Donut asked, mirroring my own thoughts.
“It’s obviously a clue in that quest. All of this is some sort of ham-fisted setup to get us to investigate further.”
Sure enough, GumGum’s inventory held four gold coins and two pieces of paper. One was entitled Gate Pass and the other was Mysterious Letter. I sighed and took them both.
“She was a nice lady, for an orc,” Donut said. “She was doing the right thing. We have to finish the quest now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because they killed her. And they probably killed her because we got that quest,” Donut said. “If we hadn’t, she’d probably be in the bar right now waiting to ask someone else to help her.”
Goddamnit, Donut. She was right. Of course, she was right. The orc’s lifeless eyes shone in the reflection of Donut’s Torch spell. She’s not real, I thought. She’s a prop, an extra in a high-stakes game show.
But that wasn’t true, was it? She was a real, biological creature. What she believed to be real was fake, an illusion. But she was still flesh and blood, an innocent. And she was dead simply because it was part of the story. Just like with all those prostitutes.
You’re not going to break me. Fuck you all.
“I think I liked you better when you didn’t make so much sense,” I said.
“I’ve always made sense, Carl,” Donut said.
We made our way back to the inn. I didn’t want to spend any more time in the alley. We’d missed the end of the show, and the announcement boomed over the city loudspeaker as we walked. It wasn’t anything new or interesting. Another day, another few bugs. Some druid spell was causing the supposedly indestructible wooden floorboards to evaporate, creating sinkholes and sucking people away, causing them to fall off the map and disappear.
The inn was the same as the previous night. Where GumGum had sat the previous evening was now occupied by a pair of human NPCs, an older couple who quietly ate and talked amongst themselves. Fitz the barkeep grinned at us. “Returning customers!” he exclaimed. “Your majesty. It’s always an honor.”
Mordecai was plastered by the time he teleported to the inn. He drunkenly instructed me in creating the Hair of the Dog potion. It involved a gooey weed that smelled like okra mixed with a vial of rubbing alcohol. My first attempt failed, but it worked the second time, garnering me a level three in alchemy.
“I went too far the wrong way,” Mordecai said, shaking his head after he drank the potion. “But I was only expecting to be there for a few minutes. Did you see that centauress by the bar? She offered to buy me a few shots. Why’d you two take so long?”
I told him what had happened as I made a few additional Hair of the Dog potions. Fitz offered us free room and board for the night in exchange for three of them. I had plenty of supplies. Since it didn’t require boiling or any higher-difficulty emulsifying, I could make the potions without a table.
“A military uniform?” Mordecai said. “That’s odd. Let me see it.”
“No,” Donut said. “We’ll show you in a minute. Carl and I have fan boxes to open. My people have spent a lot of time and effort on voting for and choosing this. I’m opening it now.”
I exchanged a look with Mordecai, who’d warned us both a dozen times now that the lower-tier fan boxes were usually crap. While the boxes wouldn’t contain anything awful or physically harmful, the system-generated list of possibilities was often filled with random and sometimes nonsensical items. Trolls oftentimes got in on the voting, and the prize was usually the most ridiculous or useless item on the list. Mordecai said he’d received a skyfowl sex toy in his first box. Later, the fan boxes would be more significant with better items. This was a gold box, which meant fans had to have us on their favorites list in order to vote. But even these boxes were often corrupted. Fans had to pay actual credits to vote for the contents of anything higher. That fee to vote was next to nothing, but it was enough to keep people from casually gaming the system.
“Here I go,” Donut said. I braced myself. The box opened, and Donut gasped. “Oh my gosh, Carl, Carl, look!” she said excitedly.
I felt my stomach drop. You assholes, I thought.
It was a small, framed picture. Of Bea. The square photo had been taken directly from her Instagram. It was the same photo that caused me to break up with her. In the picture, Bea wore a bikini. She was laughing. And she was sitting on her ex-boyfriend’s lap, her arm draped around his shoulder while she took the selfie. Brad was the guy’s name. He worked construction part time and modeled part time. I knew that because that was the only line of information on his profile. His Instagram handle was Brad_the_Chad69, possibly the douchiest name in the history of the world. He always did the male version of a duck face in his photos, and since I’d never met the dude in real life, every picture I’d ever seen of him made him look like he was taking a shit.
“It’s great!” Donut said. “Oh my gosh. I love it so much! Zev was saying she wanted to see a picture of her. Look, Mordecai! It’s Miss Beatrice and her friend! Look, Mongo! It’s your grandmother! Fitz, come here and look at Miss Beatrice. Isn’t she pretty?”
Mordecai didn’t look at the picture. He stared directly at me, a worried expression upon his face.
I was expecting it to bother me. It didn’t, I realized. That felt important, almost monumental. At the time, I’d been upset. I told myself I didn’t like drama, and I dumped her. Which was the right thing to do. But I was still upset. Of course I’d been upset, and I lied to myself about how upset I was. But that was gone now. Really gone. After all that had happened, how could it possibly not be gone? And the realization was like a weight that I didn’t even know was there lifting off my shoulders.