TBOS Round 5.2: Of All the Gin Joints

"You were pretty easy to spot, after a fashion," said the Thresher. "The only one in that alley who could think for herself. Well done, you. Take this."

Flume accepted the flask and drank. Whatever it was, it was hot and sweet, and that was all she cared about. The rain had chilled her to the bone.

"That, and they tried to pull the same trick on me," the Thresher added after a moment. "Almost got caught, too. Shouldn't have stopped and tried to perform an autopsy."

His teeth gleamed briefly in a smile, and Flume, suddenly struck with the absurd normalcy of his words, managed to smile back as they made their way across the dangerously slippery rooftop. The hatred had receded somewhat in the face of a living, breathing Kokoparvest, made of flesh and bone instead of paper and ink. Kokoparvests banded together. That was how it worked.

"I'm 3.4.4.1.5., by the way," he called back. "Call me Tau. Was in the middle of a routine experiment when I picked up my lab journal and found it wasn't my lab journal after all. What about you, sister?"

She paused for a moment as they navigated around some rusted exhaust pipes. "2.4.6.1.4.," she said. "Flume. You got here by touching some kind of book?"

"Sounds strange, doesn't it? I'm still trying to figure out how that one happened. Landed in this city about a week ago, been here ever since."

"It's not that strange. That's how I got here." But-- "A week? You've been here a week?"

"That's right. Found an abandoned apartment about a block from here and moved right in. I've been trying to get my bearings ever since." He shook his head. "It's a funny thing."

"What is?"

"I haven't been hungry since I got here. Haven't needed much sleep, either." One side of his mouth quirked upward. "That's a legend, isn't it? Eating the food of another world."

Flume's own mouth thinned into a line for a moment. "People don't get hungry much in stories. That's how it works."

Tau looked surprised for a moment. "You've figured that out too, huh? What else have you got?"

By now they had reached a ladder, and Flume elaborated as they descended to the street proper. The Monsters. The Kokoparvests who hadn't actually been Kokoparvests. The Geezles. The Book, and how it was trying to get her to fix everything. She left Smarmadine out. It didn't seem right to bring him up. Not to a complete stranger, even if he was a Kokoparvest.

"Stories," said Tau thoughtfully. "That's about as much as I've gotten. I avoided the people on the streets as much as I could the first few days, but that was more a desire to observe the locals than anything else. Then the Champions started arriving."

"You mentioned Champions once before, back there," she said.

"Yeah. That's what they're calling themselves now. People like us, brought in to repair the damage." He huffed out, once. "Every single one of them trying to figure out who the killer was. Poor bastards."

Flume frowned. That was a little harsh. As far as she was concerned, most of the people she'd met had been helpful enough, even if they'd been more interested in fixing the Book than she had. Just because they weren't Kokoparvests wasn't any particular reason to look down upon them--no more than usual, at at any rate. "Why do you say that?"

Tau turned to face her, his eyes glowing softly in the darkness. "Because it's a trap."

---

Hazel wasn't in the Red Herring.

She--or he, considering her new body--would have stuck out like a sore thumb if she'd been here. Reinald was reasonably certain he was the only human in the entire bar. The other patrons took no particular notice of him, but he'd always been good at acting like he belonged. He doubted the other Champion would have done so well.

It was unlikely she had left of her own free will. Not if she knew he was only a short hop away. But even now, the lights flickered on and off, and now and then a stiff wind smelling of dry heat blew through the doors. The air still tasted a little of rice wine, where it didn't taste of smoke. It was possible she had decided to go outside for a breath of fresh air and simply stepped into the wrong story.

Regardless of what had happened, the fact was it left him in a crowded bar with nothing to go on. Nothing even resembling a lead. And if the state of this place was any indication, he didn't have much time left. Nobody did.

(He'd made the right decision. So why didn't the right decision make any sense in hindsight?)

There were a few open seats at the bar. He slid onto a stool beside a hulking alien that must have been two heads taller than he was and twice as wide, ordered a glass of wine, and considered his options. Given he had closed the doors on most of them, his options mostly boiled down to one: remain here, let the story come to him, and do what could be done.

The door swung open.

At the first too-familiar footstep, the Kalevala came rushing back to meet him. And then came the second, and the third, then the fourth, then the fifth, and then she dropped into the free seat at the end of the bar nearest the door.

No hesitation. She hadn't seen him yet. The alien in the way helped things. But he knew: it was far too late to run.

"Whiskey," she said. At the bartender's sound of noncommittal acknowledgment she added, "Have you seen someone around here? Human. Male. No idea what he looks like, but he'd have a necklace. Not a flashy one. About this big." A pause as she ostensibly demonstrated. "Looks like a moon."

"Yeah," said the bartender. "Black hair, blue eyes. Tallish, for a human. Left about half an hour ago, though."

She breathed out once, explosively. There was a clink as she knocked her drink back. The alien next to Reinald grunted.

"Lose your boyfriend?"

"Mind your own fucking business," she returned placidly.

The bar went silent. It appeared the story had found them sooner than intended. Or rather it had found Anna Smith, which was very nearly the same thing.

"You want to say that again?" said the alien, balling its four hands into fists the size of grapefruits.

"Not really," said Anna, "but I can if you want. Mind--"

The alien's first punch broke the whiskey glass next to her. The second came perilously close to clipping the side of her head. She ducked smoothly, delivering a sharp uppercut to its chin, then sidestepped the next punch, very nearly blurring as she did.

No. He blinked, shook his head slightly, and concentrated. She was blurring. Blurring, and warping, and reacting faster than she had any right to react. He'd seen this once before, and recently--

Distantly, he noticed she was favoring her right arm.

Something was wrong here.

The alien brought two of its fists down toward Anna's head with brutal force, but she had very abruptly ceased to be where she had been a moment ago. In another moment she had materialized in front of it again, driving a large grey fist into its stomach. It stumbled, arms flailing, straight back into Reinald.

It was, he would tell himself later, pure instinct that drove him to summon the gun into his hand and put two rounds in the back of the alien's head. After all, his personal safety had been endangered. It was, of course, further endangered after the alien turned around, more enraged than injured, and punched him through the adjoining wall, but it had been worth a try.

Naturally, the three of them were thrown out after that.

---

"A trap," said Flume, bewildered. "What do you mean?"

They were seated on rickety chairs in Tau's dilapidated apartment, sharing his flask of stuff. Evidently it had been all he'd had on him when he was transported into the Book; it was just as well he claimed he wasn't hungry. Flume thought of the penny pig, and any residual hunger she'd had quickly fled, too.

Still, it wasn't a bad place to stay for a week. Already it was taking on signs of having been lived in; there were stacks of notes around the place, and a few carefully dissected specimens had been arranged on the only table. Evidently Tau was having no problems keeping himself busy.

"I mean exactly what I said," said Tau, taking a sip from the flask. "You've already noticed the Book has been trying to get people from other worlds to fix it, usually by making them the heroes of its stories."

Flume nodded.

The Thresher spread his arms wide. "That's the thing. Why does it need heroes? What happened to the original heroes? Where have they gone?"

It was an interesting thought--one she hadn't considered before--but Flume had always liked a good puzzle. "Whatever caused the Book's deterioration," she said, "must have damaged it somehow. Removed characters and settings and gods know what else. So it knew it had to bring other people in. When stories are acted out, the Book repairs itself a little more."

Tau nodded sharply. "But that's not all, isn't it? That's too simple. What do you think would happen if it just let all those Champions go?"

"It can't," she said slowly. Was that important? It was. How was that important? "That...would just undo everything again. It needs heroes for its stories."

Tau capped his flask and stared out the taped-up window at the street below. He was silent for a long while.

"You know, sister," he finally said, "when I got here, the angry mob consisted of just two aliens."

Two aliens. It was a moment before what Tau was saying began to make sense, and a moment more before the first icy tendrils of dread began to make their way up her spine.

"You ran," she said.

He nodded. In the dim light of the apartment, his sharp face looked haunted. "They wanted me to figure out who the murderer was. I said no. But I stuck around. Watched from a distance. Wanted to see what would happen. The next Champion to find the body decided to help. I figure it was about an hour before he stopped fighting what was happening and he became his character entirely."

"The Book doesn't want catalysts," Flume said quietly. It fit. It made sense. Why hadn't she seen it before? "It wants reagents."

"It didn't take everyone who stopped to help," said Tau. "Just one or two a day. But after a while, that adds up. Then you came, and you didn't stop to help."

There was a question in his eyes. Flume decided she could answer it. If she could trust anyone, she could trust another Kokoparvest. "I...had something that belonged to someone else. I had it with me when I entered the Book. It was my responsibility, and the Book destroyed it before I could see it returned."

And there it was. There was that moment of clarity as things fell into place. She only wished she didn't understand it all so well.

"I wasn't cooperating," Flume said after a moment. "There was that trick with the Cutting Monster...I've been trying to get home. The Book hasn't mattered much to me. So it killed h--it. It must have wanted me to see it meant business."

The Thresher nodded. "Did it work?" he said.

Flume only looked at him, a steady hope rising.

"I've been waiting for someone like you, sister," he said. "I need your help."

The little ball in her chest expanded into a joyous flame. "To do what?" she said.

Tau smiled wide. "To break out of the Book."

---

The alien, being the largest of the three brawlers, hit the ground outside the bar hardest. It attempted to clamber back to its feet, but the two guns very nearly shoved up its nose prevented that.

"Get moving," said Anna, and there was something about the glint of her eyes and the sharpness of the teeth in her smile that was not entirely human.

It did.

There was silence in the street after that. Most of the earlier crowd had found somewhere else to be by that point. The rain had let up, and there was a fresh scent to the air that was not normally associated with the area immediately surrounding a bar.

Anna was still standing there, watching Reinald with an unreadable expression, as if waiting for him to acknowledge her presence. But he hadn't gotten to his position in life without learning when to cut his losses and run. Some might have called it cowardice. He wouldn't have, until now.

He turned to leave.

"You know," she said from behind him, her voice deceptively casual, "you're sending some pretty mixed signals."

He didn't look at her. "Am I."

"Yeah," she said. " Turning on me one minute, and taking my side in a bar fight the next. We'll skip the bullshit with the Archetype." There was a faint click as she lit a cigarette. "But I want you to know I pushed that guy into you on purpose."

"You saw me." It wasn't a question.

"I saw you the moment I walked into that dive." She sounded almost amused, and Reinald, who had instinctively tensed for some sort of physical attack the instant she had opened her mouth, didn't know how to react.

He finally turned to face her. She focused on her cigarette and avoided his gaze.

"It was a test," he said, and this wasn't a question either.

"Yeah."

"How did I do?"

She exhaled. "I don't fucking know."

He wanted to leave. At that precise moment he wanted it more than anything in the world. But his mind conjured up an image of Anna in the bar, her fists blurring, and it rooted his feet to the ground. He said, with none of his usual grace, "You were asking after Hazel."

"Sam came back for me," she said. "I mean the kid who got away. Said he'd met someone with her necklace here. Figured if she's gotten a new body, she'll have no interest in trying to borrow mine again. It's a start."

"What else did Sam say?"

"Not much. He died. I'm trying to find out why."

There was something here--something he was missing. Something he wasn't certain he'd comprehend, if ever. "I never marked you as an amateur detective."

She gave him a flat look. "He saved my life. Chaos probably killed him because of it. If I figure out how, it's one step closer to stopping him from doing it again."

"That's terribly altruistic of you." The words escaped before he could stop them.

Anna stubbed the cigarette out on the pavement. Then she said, in that same casual tone of voice, "I'm dying."

He remembered: teeth tearing into exposed skin. He  thought: I could have prevented it. The thought mattered, somehow, and he didn't understand why. Not yet.

"Fixing the Book might cure it," she said. "Saving the world--all the worlds--might cure it. Destroying Chaos might cure it. Or it might not, and I'll devolve into a mindless husk like Englehart. But I figure it's worth a shot. And if it doesn't work, I won't be me long enough to know the difference."

Reinald didn't say anything. There was nothing he could have said. And she pressed relentlessly on:

"What I want to know is what you were thinking. Don't get me wrong. It doesn't make much difference in the end. But you're a man who considers all the angles. So you should have seen what could have gone wrong. Say Chaos double-crossed you. Say the other Champions failed while you were sitting in whatever sanctuary he promised you, and it all came crumbling down around your ears."

She lit another cigarette. "The man I knew in Keis would've decided it wasn't worth the risk. So what gives?"

For the second time in as many minutes he found himself with nothing to say. He had never known her to be this open and, as far as he could tell, sober at the same time, and it tore at some long-forgotten part of him.  It would have been straightforward enough to tell her that Chaos had a way with words, that there were certain powers in his employ that had warped his thinking until abandoning her had made sense. It would have resolved nothing, but it would have been something resembling a response. Perhaps even something resembling the truth.

He wasn't sure what he would have said if he had permitted himself to do so. He was reasonably certain he had not become so cynical that regret was beyond him. He wasn't sure about anything else.

It was a funny thing how two tired, embittered people who dealt in as many lies as they did were somehow incapable of being properly dishonest with each other.

Aloud he said,  "I surmised that removing Chaos from the story would return James to normal. It was a chance I had to take. You know we need as many Champions as we can get." She opened her mouth, a response already on her lips, and he forged ahead while he still trusted his own judgment. "You are correct: I didn't know if it would work. In that moment, under those circumstances, I believed I was doing the right thing. I admit now that I may have been short-sighted."

She stared at him for a long moment, as if she could sense how awkwardly the words had stumbled out of his mouth. Then she laughed mirthlessly and turned away.

"That's your answer," she said. "Fine. I'll take it. I don't believe it, but I'll take it."

The lighter and the pack of cigarettes vanished with a slight twist of her fingers. She took a few steps away from him before she paused and turned back.

"I'm going to save the world, Reinald Todorov," she said, and he wasn't sure if the mocking note in her voice was directed at herself, or him, or both, and it struck a blow he hadn't expected. "You can help, if you're so hellbent on fighting Chaos, or you can hide and wait for dawn. I don't give a damn.  Just don't get in my way."