Ess’s Pies, Wands Fixed Also
“Ess’s Pies, Wands Fixed Also.” Gruff read the words scrawled on an unvarnished plank of wood that hung haphazardly over the entrance to the tiny shed. A faint breeze thudded the sign rhythmically against the door. That was good. The more ambient noise the better.
You wouldn’t know it from the half mile stretch of dirt surrounding the little shop that they were in a major metropolitan area. Not a particularly fashionable district, to be fair, but Gruff’s employer was looking to fix that.
Gruff sniffed the air. He mentally tuned out the complex bouquet of aromas that drifted in from the street, they were downwind from a unicorn rendering factory, which tended to dampen all on its own the melange of rotting fruits, tobacco smoke, and multispecies urine. But Gruff definitely got a good whiff of brimstone and especially of chemical reagents coming from the seemingly innocuous dilapidated pie stand. He tightened his grip on his Quennor .57.
Gruff toggled his goggles to scan for magical auras. He could feel his hackles rising in the presence of magic as the Spelljammers got to work dismantling the various enchantments and traps. Gruff watched the crackle and fizz of their spellwork through his magically attuned goggles. Some of the Spelljammers were decent enough, as their lot went, but they seemed to be tearing through the defenses a little too quickly.
Gruff thumbed his comm. “I don’t like it.”
“Gruff, you know what I love about you darling? You’re just so articulate. I feel like you really spared no expense in communicating your discomfort in such a way as to leave no doubt whatsoever as to the exact locus of your displeasure. Honestly,...”
Gruff muted the comm. Nestor does this thing where every time he talks to you he’s got to remind you that his principle hobbies include reading the dictionary and volunteering to teach elocution lessons, and you’ve got to more or less let him tire himself out, because interrupting him will earn you a one way ticket to a forty five minute diatribe about how six hundred and eighty years ago, people had this thing called manners.
Gruff popped the comm back on. “And another thing, please explain to me why you could possibly find even the teensiest smidgen of evidence to indicate - “
Forty-five minute lecture on manners be damned, Gruff thought. “It’s too easy.”
“There’s that marvelous word ‘it’ again. I do say, my good - “
“The Spelljammers are tearing through the defenses like a minotaur through the ice cream aisle.”
“I should expect nothing less. Our Spelljammers are the best of the best.”
“Connoway’s decent,” Gruff said, “I’ll give you that, but Guerreiro and Li Xi are idiots. They’re basically doing the magical hacking equivalent of a belly flop and they’re sailing through. I’m telling you, it’s too easy.”
“Well, what do you expect?” Nestor said, annoyed into brevity. “It’s a tiny shack. You’re not expecting them to have a seventh order Galarum’s Pentacle, are you? What would it even be guarding?”
“Exactly,” Gruff said. “Either this is just some dinky little pie stand, in which case, you don’t need any fancy magical protections. I mean look at it. If a bum off the street broke into this place, he’d scoop into his tin and give to the less fortunate. Or, none of this is as it seems and we’re in for a much bigger operation.”
“I tell you what,” Nestor said, his tone going subarctic, “let’s leave the large scale strategy to the millennia old vampire, and if the scared wittle puppy is too afraid to face the big bad gnome in her big bad pie stand, then you can stay and guard the perimeter like a good little doggy.
Gruff deactivated the comm and took a big deep sniff. He flexed his calf muscle against the fire hardened ash wood stake he always slipped into his boot whenever he got assigned to work with Nestor. Killing him was not so much career suicide as literal suicide but a werewolf can dream.
Gruff couldn’t shake the feeling that this was all going to go sideways very quickly. It just made no sense. If they were really here to knock over some apple crate and deep six some gnome baker, then why send a whole squad? And if the guys upstairs thought they needed a whole squad with tactical gear and Spelljammers and the rest, then why were they getting through so easily?
Gruff cocked his ears forward and listened for each scrape of boot through the loose dirt. His lupine ears could detect minute variations in the crunch of gravel underfoot. Thus, he was perhaps the first to hear the telltale tick of an activated landmine. Well, the poor sod who stepped on it might have noticed it first, but then again, perhaps not. These lads weren’t the brightest. Definitely not as bright as the expanding column of flame and concussive waves from the exploding landmine.
Gruff spun and dropped to one knee, tugging his hood up over his head. He braced himself against the shockwave and nearly got bowled over. This gnome wasn’t mucking about with her explosives. He felt that one in his teeth.
His Comms had blocked out enough of the explosion to prevent permanent hearing loss, but his ears had been in that liminal state between human and wolf so he still heard a faint ringing. Also, the fire resistant spells in his gear must have been overtaxed as well because he had to beat out a few flames that had lodged onto one of his sleeves.
The Comms burst into static as a dozen panicked voices tried either asking for or giving orders. Gruff wasn’t sure if he didn’t prefer the ringing. He stalked over to a prostrate form and hauled it up by the lapels. He flipped up the goggles and looked into the goblin’s eyes. No sign of concussion, but not much sign of clarity of purpose either. Gruff found that a sharp yank on the ears startled most species into lucidity, but goblins got particularly tetchy about it.
The goblin’s eyes snapped into clarity and Gruff had to let go of the guy fairly quickly because the goblin was able to redirect a lot of confusion and anger very quickly into a newly realized goal of introducing Gruff’s head to the butt of his rifle.
“Go check on Jenkins,” Gruff said, shouting a little too loudly and pointing over at another prone form. The goblin, Harbol was his name, looked like he wanted to do a bit more postured violence at the werewolf who dared tug on his ears, but his sense of duty prevailed. Duty, or the sudden realization that Gruff outweighed him by at least thirty kilos and fifteen or twenty centimeters of reach.
Gruff crouch walked over to what he soon found out to be Pythagoras. Pythagoras was the sphinx who stepped onto the land mine and she was a mess. What was she even doing out in the field? You do not bring a sphinx into a potential warzone. Part bird, part cat, part human - they’re like the queens of ADHD. Her hind legs were charcoal, her wings were in tatters, her nose was surprisingly still intact.
Gruff wolfed out a bit to give himself some extra strength and then scooped her up, more or less round the middle, best he could tell, and hauled her off to the van. He flopped her onto a gurney and popped a cleric capsule. He was briefly illuminated by rays of divine light before he kicked the door of the van closed and walked back towards Ess’s Pies, Wands Fixed Also.
The squad was a lot more cautious now. A noted improvement, thought Gruff. Gruff hugged his rifle to his shoulder and swept the field back and forth, mentally commanding his goggles to cycle through the visible spectrum so he could scan for other hidden surprises.
“Maffi, freeze,” Gruff shouted. He spotted another mine while scanning with X-rays.
Maffi either didn’t hear or didn’t think Gruff was worth listening to because he barrelled on ahead and promptly got his head blown off.
This was too much for Nestor. “Light. It. Up,” Nestor almost whispered into the comm, his voice a boiling frigidity.
Gruff kept his finger on the trigger but didn’t join in on the reckless waste of ammunition. Bullets tore through the rough sawn planks, wood chips and spatters of fruit preserves leapt into the air. In seconds, the small wooden structure started to collapse, but the strafing bullets continued, so that the structure collapsed into shorter and shorter segments.
Everyone eventually ceased firing so that a great silence billowed up, punctuated only by the shifting of splintered wood and the sizzling of hot lead. Some idiot tossed a can of Divine Smite into the rubble and Gruff closed his eyes just in time. He did not have time to get his hands to shade his eyes however or even turn his head very much.
A column of pure light ten meters in diameter rocketed into the stratosphere with the thunderous wrath of, well, a vengeful god. Gruff could feel his optic nerve cooking even through his closed eyelids.
The spell only lasted for half a second but the afterimages would be screwing with his depth perception for a good five minutes. Gruff was so angry he could feel himself slipping more and more into his wolf form. He was about to start bawling out the idiot who threw the Divine Smite but he was having trouble forcing his facial features back into a form capable of speech. Their mission was to bring in the principal alive or dead but there weren’t enough atoms hanging out together even in basic molecules to confirm whether the target was even at home.
Gruff blinked away the purplish green after images and as he expected everything in a ten meter circle was just gone apart from some brittle bits of blackened glass. Well, almost everything.
Gruff rubbed at his eyes furiously. He looked back at the epicenter of the destruction. No, it was still there. That was not possible
In the middle of the scorched field there was a gnome. Like most gnomes, her skin was a dull yellow color. Unlike most gnomes, her hair, which frizzled about every which way, was a shockingly bright blue. She was seated in some kind of hover chair, and she appeared to be sipping from a mug of tea.
She took a long, noisy slurp of her tea. “Evening, Fellassss,” she said, drawing out her ess sounds in a long, sibilant hiss.
There was a flurry of metallic clinks and clanks as empty magazines were jettisoned and fresh ones jacked in. Another, smaller hail of bullets ripped through the gnome... and passed straight through without meeting any resistance, until, of course, a few of them found friendly targets on the far side. Gruff rolled his eyes.
Gruff hadn’t fired his weapon. Not that he had any qualms about offing a tiny, tea-slurping geriatric gnome, but beneath the crackling ozone scent of recently sublimated matter, Gruff hadn’t smelled gnome or even tea for that matter. And as he suspected the image of the gnome fuzzed slightly as each bullet passed through. They were firing at an illusion.
When the firing had mostly subsided, the gnome spoke up again. “Y’all finished shootin’ at nothin’, yet? Mind you, I loooove shootin’ at nothin’, but I think some of y’all’s hittin’ y’all’s friends. Course, what do I know, maybe you hate each other. I can’t say I’ve seen anything to recommend you, myself.”
Nestor stalked up to the hologram. As he neared the gnome, Gruff noticed that his boots were thunking metallically. Gruff looked at the ground near the gnome and noticed that the entire ten meter circle that had been carved out by the Divine Might was actually a dull grey metal. And the thing was, at the edge of the circle, the dirt above the metal was only an inch or two thick at the most. There were only a few materials that could take such a big hit and not look more than barely scratched.
Gruff hustled toward the edge of the circle, yanking off one of his gloves. He willed one of his fingernails to lengthen and harden into a claw. He scraped it against the metal. He could feel his claw abrading. There wasn’t even a scratch in the metal. He bent down and sniffed. It reeked with magic, but he definitely detected the slight tang of restabilized chronium.
Gruff let out a low whistle. Restabilized chronium went for 5000 a gram. It was also virtually impossible to cut through. Maybe you could cut through it with a drill powered by, like, a black hole, but that was about it. And they were supposedly after a quaint, pottering little pie maker. Gruff shook his head.
Gruff glanced up at the gnome, who was on the receiving end of a painfully precisely enunciated full on Nestor meltdown. The gnome glanced over at Gruff and gave him a long, appraising look. Then she winked at him. Gruff felt a chill run through him. Whatever they were dealing with, they did not bring enough men, enough firepower, enough divine intervention.
Gruff grit his teeth. He felt a certain amount of admiration for the gnome, and more than a little healthy paranoia bordering on abject terror at the prospect of going toe to toe with whatever sadistic hells she was currently cooking up for them, but Gruff had been given a job and Gruff was going to do the job. Sometimes Gruff really hated the fact that deep down he just wanted to be a good dog.
“And if for some reason you believe, even for the most infinitesimally small instant that there is any reality in which the likes of you could possibly...” Nestor was now screaming nose to nose with the little gnome, well, Nestor’s version of screaming, and it looked absolutely ridiculous since the tiny little gnome resembled nothing so much as a toddler sitting in a bassinet, but the gnome blew on her tea and a cloud of something wafted over Nestor’s face.
He burst into laughter. Gruff had never in all the years he had known Nestor ever heard him laugh. Gruff dearly wished he could be back in that happier time before he had heard Nestor laugh. It was gnolls rewatching a city bus getting t-boned on a loop bad. Gruff caught the faintest whiff of nitrous oxide and hurriedly clamped a hand over his mouth and nose. He hoped he hadn’t inhaled enough to be affected by it, but he was finding it very difficult to not laugh at the panicked look in Nestor’s eyes as he slowly slumped to the ground, overcome by narcotically induced hysterics.
When Nestor had subsided into a low giggle, the gnome spoke again. “Some folks say laughter is the best medicine, but I’ve always found that the right kind of medicine can get the best laughter.”
She paused. Gruff could only speculate but possibly she was thinking that was some kind of a joke, but it was a testament to how much of a joke it was not since her audience was more than half hopped up on nitrous oxide and still didn’t find it very funny.
“I can’t say I have any idea as to what I owe the honor of this here visit, but if y’all would like to join me below, I’d be more than happy to discuss why y’all felt it necessary to obliterate my lovely little Pie and wand repair shop. I had an eldestberry starter that I’ve kept for nigh on six hundred years now. I’m not best pleased that this is a thing that no longer exists.”
With that, the little gnome vanished. There was a ponderous vibration that Gruff could feel through his boots and a circular hatch ratcheted up. A warm yellow light emanated from the hole below and Gruff could just make out the top rungs of a ladder from where he stood.
Nestor staggered to his feet, still fighting his uncontrollable laughter, and wheezed his way over to Amethyst, one of their more reliable healers. “He-he-he-heal me,” Nestor said, seizing Amethyst by her snaky coils. Under normal circumstances, touching a Medusa’s hair earned you a swift, one-way ticket to statuehood, but Amethyst must have seen the look of pure murder in her boss’s eyes and decided that the hill of interspecies microagressions was not one that she wished to literally die on.
She took Nestor’s hands, as much to channel the healing energy as to get them off her hair, which began to writhe and gesticulate in a suitably impressive fashion. A faint glow thrummed through Amethyst and then Nestor, and Nestor’s laughing fit vanished.
Nestor straightened up, adjusted the lapels of his bespoke suit - Nestor was the only one in the group not fitted out in tac gear - and marched over to Gruff.
“This is a disaster, Captain.”
Gruff gave him a long, flat stare. “Yes, sir,” Gruff said, which was infuriatingly subordinate enough to not give Nestor much purchase in the fight he was spoiling to pick.
“Any recommendations, Captain?”
Gruff knew what he was doing. Nestor emphasizing Gruff’s rank, a thing that Nestor bitterly refused to acknowledge even in the direst of circumstances, meant that the mission had gone sideways enough that Nestor was not only willing but eager to abdicate all authority - and thus responsibility - over the shape of this mission. Seeing as how Gruff had been repeatedly rebuffed from all quarters in trying to urge caution and, you know, sense, Gruff was disinclined to throw Nestor a bone.
Gruff stomped his boot against the metal surface, “I’m almost certain that this metal is restabilized chronium, and judging by that hatch, it’s a good six inches solid, which means, among other things, that even if this subterranean building extends only as far as we can see, which I find incredibly unlikely, and if it’s only used for this top layer, which I also doubt, then the restabilized chronium alone is worth not only more than this parcel of land that Mr. Bowright sent us to eminently domain, but it’s worth more than the entire planned community and all of the suckers he will eventually con into moving here.”
“It’s funny,” Nestor said, and for a guy who spent the last five minutes laughing his face off he looked anything but amused, “but I asked for recommendations and got a lecture on the comparative values of real estate holdings and refined metals. I also deem it unwise to mention the names of even our most minor shareholders where prying ears might overhear.”
As far as attempts to obfuscate their employer’s identity went, this was pretty weak, but then again, Gruff should have never mentioned their employer’s name. Gruff was finding it increasingly unlikely that they were going to bring this gnome in dead or alive, and in fact, the conditional state of being alive or dead seemed at this point to be more applicable to Gruff and his men rather than the other way around. Even so, it was amateur hour to name drop the boss in the middle of an Op and Gruff knew it. Every doggy instinct screamed at him to lower his head in shame, but Gruff had long ago inured himself to chastisement from Nestor in particular and wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Nestor narrowed his eyes, somehow knowing that he had struck a chord but Gruff was too stubborn to be properly cowed. “Again, Captain, I ask you for your recommendations.”
“My recommendations are to cut our losses and go back to the drawing board. We did not come prepared for this.”
“Cut our...” Nestor was momentarily speechless, which Gruff might have found amusing if not for the fact that Nestor’s eyes were starting to bleed red. Pompous, supercilious Nestor was impossible to work with, but hangry Nestor was impossible to live with, i.e. he would literally suck all the blood out of you and you would die. Now, vampires wouldn’t drink a werewolf’s blood if they were starving to death, but that’s the thing about vengeful, psychopathic living undead blood sucking demon spawn. They don’t need to drink blood to survive. They drink blood to show you how much more worthless your life is than theirs.
“We do not lose, Captain,” Nestor said, his words shaking with fury. “Our employer does not pay us to lose.”
“Can’t pay us at all if we’re dead,” Gruff said mulishly.
“Need I remind you,” and Nestor was no longer half whispering now, but half shouting, “That your contract includes a rider that if I deem your conduct unsatisfactory, then I get to treat you like my own personal juice box. That goes for the rest of you,” Nestor full on shouting now at everyone for two blocks. He no longer had that pale, sexy rockstar look but looked a lot more like the thing that hunts down other sentient life forms for sport.
Gruff waited for a moment to let the foaming at the mouth simmer down a bit. He probably should have just taken his lumps and headed for the hatch with tail tucked between his legs, but Gruff would take an honest to goodness bath before he let this raving lunatic bring down his whole squad to satisfy his ego without saying his piece first. Granted, Gruff fully expected this lunatic to bring down his whole squad to satisfy his ego, but he would have his say first.
“Here’s what I know. This gnome has been playing with us since we rolled up. Playing with us quite gently, I might add, Maffi and Pythagoras notwithstanding. But if we go and try to hit her where she lives, then the gloves come off. I don’t think we’ve seen nothing yet. And even if she’s just a sweet old lady who wants us to have tea, we go down there and she decides to lock the hatch behind us, then not even Luna herself and all her ten thousand fiery legions of stars is cracking us out of that bunker.”
“If you and your squad are not down that hole in ten seconds, then you and I are going to break the world record for how quickly a werewolf’s blood can leave its body. Have I made myself clear.”
Gruff slapped his hand to his forehead in mock salute. He walked over to Amethyst and gave her instructions to patch everyone up that got hit with friendly fire and send ‘em on down and then take up position at the entrance to get ready for the inevitable stream of casualties that would trickle up to her.
Then Gruff hopped into the hole. As he fell he kicked his right toe to his left heel and activated a weightless enchantment so he didn’t land too hard. He needn’t have bothered. The corridor he landed in was barely six feet tall. He set his goggles to cycle through various spectra in the material and astral planes.
Nothing obviously lethal jumped out at him, but Gruff’s hackles were still fully raised. He took four steps and put his back to the wall and peeked into what looked like a cozy little sitting room. Everything was scaled down to gnome proportions but there was a musty rocking chair and matching sofa, a basket of yarn, a small coffee table with a heaping plate of chocolate chip cookies. Gruff felt his salivary glands kick into gear. Those cookies smelt like they had just been pulled out of the oven. They also were probably made with love and just a hint of strychnine. This little domestic scene was not what Gruff was expecting and that made him worried.
He barked out terse orders and his men started to file in. Aside from the corridor that led from the hatch, there were two points of egress from the sitting room. The sitting room half opened into a small kitchen. There were a couple of doors that might lead into other rooms and might just be pantries. And opposite of the kitchen there was a set of stairs leading down.
“Test every step, don’t touch anything you don’t have to, and...” Gruff was cut off by a muffled bellow, a thunk, thunk, thunk against metal, and the squelchy sound of too much matter trying to squeeze through an unbreakable, metal tube.
Gruff cursed. “Larry, what are you doing? In what universe did you possibly think...” Gruff walked back to look at a pair of legs and the lower portion of a very tightly compressed abdomen. Gruff did not spend long on the idea of shoving Larry back up out of the entrance. Larry weighed eight or nine hundred kilos and he was really wedged in there. Gruff wasn’t sure they could force him out with a hydraulic lift.
“Connoway, get over here,” Gruff shouted, forgetting in his anger that they were all within five feet of each other and connected via comms to boot. The sprite flitted over. “Can you cut him down to size?” Gruff asked.
The sprite eyed the flailing legs, thick as tree trunks. “I guess so...” he said slowly, “It’s gonna take a while,” he said, reaching over his shoulder and drawing out what in Gruff’s hands might be a tactical knife but in the Sprite’s diminutive grip seemed as big as a Claymore.
Gruff stuck out a hand to block the Sprite’s flight path. “No, not literally cut him down to size. I meant, can you, you know,” Gruff wiggled his fingers, “shrink him down magically.”
Connoway stroked his moss-green beard. “I can cast a boson transposition ward on him. It’ll get him through the hole but a BTW isn’t really going to get rid of his mass, just mask it a bit.”
Gruff gave him a flat stare. “Right, Captain speak,” Connoway said, and then hastened on because Gruff’s stare got if anything, even flatter, “he’ll fit down here, sort of, but he’s going to be bumping into things. He’ll be like - well, like a bull in a tea shop,” Connoway let out a chuckle. Gruff’s stare remained resolutely flat.
“Nobody appreciates humor anymore,” Connoway muttered, and then somewhat reluctantly, sheathed his knife. He flew over to Larry’s lower half and started to glow faintly as he uttered a long sequence of gibberish and flew in a complicated pattern.
Larry was suddenly reduced to the size of a ten year old human and eight month old calf, respectively. He fell through the whole, arms and legs flailing but when he hit the ground Gruff staggered slightly under the impact. Now Gruff understood what Connoway meant about Larry fitting, sort of. He seemed smaller but he still weighed as much as ever. As Larry walked past, Gruff felt and didn’t feel as if the minotaur was trying to squeeze past him. It was like getting shouldered aside by an almost alive ghost.
And of course, Larry hadn’t but entered the sitting room when he knocked over an armoire filled with porcelain tea sets. Gruff very studiously did not make eye contact with Connoway but he could feel his grin anyway.
Once everyone was in position, Gruff had two commandos kick in the door at the bottom of the stairs. The rest of his men filed down in twos after them, sweeping out in opposite directions with fingers on triggers. Gruff left Larry at the top of the stairs since every time he tried to descend, he made a sound not unlike what you would get if you tried to squeeze a balloon through a drinking straw.
The door opened into one of those clean room airlock setups they have in fancy labs, where you gotta get all decontaminated and put on the hazmat suits before entering the lab proper. It was a brightly lit room with all kinds of wash stations and lots of windows looking out into the main lab. It was a tight fit but he got most of his men into the room.
Beyond the windows, Gruff could see a strange assortment of ultra modern and super old school. Gleaming work surfaces gave way to natural rock formations. There was the standard assortment of weirdly shaped glassware, but also a cast iron cauldron bubbling over an open fire pit. It was a surprisingly roomy complex of workspaces and laboratories. Half of it looked like a clean room manufacturing silicon chips, the other half like some kind of subterranean alchemical dungeon. There were an awful lot of nooks and crannies for the gnome to hide in, if the gnome was even on site.
Gruff cracked open the door into the lab from the clean room and breathed in deeply. Werewolves have thousands of years of evolution sharpening their olfactory nerves to detect even the tracest amounts of odors that might indicate danger. He could smell a dragon’s pyreneal glands kicking in at a hundred yards. He could call a man’s punch based on his cortisol levels alone. Which is all to say that when Gruff smelled danger coming from a thousand different sources, that little inner doggy voice inside his head was whimpering frantically and demanding that Gruff tuck his tail between his legs and not stop running until his paws fell off.
Gruff turned back to face his men and The gnome in her hoverchair materialized suddenly at eye level right in front of him. Had Gruff at that moment not already been experiencing such sheer terror, the gnome might have startled Gruff into doing something rash, like riddling her full of bullets, or, even more lethally for him, shouting at his men to open fire. Gruff could smell that this was still an illusion. Not wanting his trigger happy commandos to get any ideas, Gruff grabbed for the empty air approximately where the gnome's neck would be and shouted, “I’ve got the gnome and we’re bringing her in alive. I repeat, we’re taking her in alive, do not shoot.”
The gnome clapped her little hands together. “Oh good show, Mr. Gruff. I was hoping to destabilize this expedition by chopping off the head with a little more friendly fire, but I can see I’ve got a real opponent to face off against. Almost makes up for you blowing up my pie stand. Have I mentioned my eldestberry starter? You can’t just go out and buy more because eldestberries no longer exist!”
Gruff eyed the gnome warily and kept his gun trained on her even though it was merely an illusion. Up close, he could see she had some of the world’s biggest goggles he’d ever seen, with all kinds of lenses and other odd attachments on them. She was also wearing a labcoat and rubber gloves that were the same violent shade of blue as her hair. He could also see that her little hoverchair had various waldos and robotic appendages soldered on every which way.
Gruff wished he could see her eyes behind those giant goggles. What he really wished for was to see the gnome in person so he could smell the emotions, and, Gruff strongly suspected, the crazy coming off of her.
“I don’t suppose you would like to come in quietly?” Gruff asked, but with not much hope.
“Seein’ as how your definition of quietly is so quiet you can’t even hear me breathin’ no more, then no, I don’t suppose I would.
“Fair enough,” Gruff said. “Just know, I’d like to bring you in alive.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Gruff, you and I both know that you don’t send a murder squad like this just to bring little old me in alive.”
“Oh no, I mean, I’d like to be alive when I bring you in. I’m sure you’ve got quite the nasty bag of tricks you’re just itching to open up on us...”
They would surely have been in for a rousing bout of traded insults and threats, but the gnome cut him off. “Hey!” the gnome shouted, zooming off towards one of the commandos. “Get your stinking paws off of that sandwich.”
While the gnome was distracted, Gruff issued a series of hand signals to his men to start searching the lab. As the men started to spread out, he beckoned Reggie over. Reggie might have been a run of the mill, vanilla human, but she was also one of the best cyber security experts in the business.
“Reggie, can you tap into one of these terminals and tell me if there’s an outside line of communication?”
Reggie scrunched up her nose. “You want me to hack into her computer, and then see if I can upload something?
“See if you can get out, yeah,” Gruff said. He watched as she cracked her knuckles, squatted down to the tiny computer terminal, and slapped a UMB onto the side of the terminal. This let her jack into the system while still using her virtual input setup.
Reggie straightened and began seemingly to dance energetically. At first her movements seemed almost playful, but they soon grew sharp and choppy. Gruff could smell the frustration and anxiety coming off of her. Her frenzied movements crescendoed, to the point that it looked like she was shadow boxing a swarm of bees.
Suddenly claxons started to blare and lights started to flash. Heavy duty metal plates sheathed out over all the workspaces and thick doors thudded shut with ominous finality. Reggie looked stricken. She also had a few choice words about the marital status of the computer system’s progenitors. “I don’t know what to tell you boss. Everything I tried the system wouldn’t go for it. It’s like it was being stupid on purpose. I’m serious. This is not cutting edge cyber security. It’s like so old school that most of my tools just bounce off it. And you can forget about getting a word out now. Once I tripped the alarms this whole place closed down tighter than a leprechauns wallet. You can’t get a signal in or out of here. Not even our comms will get out, and those are mil spec.
Gruff looked over at the hologram of the gnome. It hadn’t flickered. That solved one problem. The gnome was obviously here in person. “Don’t worry about the alarms,” Gruff said, and watched as various doors locked up or grates descended. If you trip the alarms, a lot of the hidden traps get sprung or disabled. Of course, that does pave the way for some more proactive countermeasures.
“Attention, violent thugs,” the gnome’s voice no longer came from the illusion but seemingly from every surface. It was like being spoken to by an angry and elderly god. Gruff could feel his lungs vibrate. “You blew up my pie stand, knocked over my china, ignored my certainly not laced with strychnine chocolate chip cookies, you hacked my computer system, but worst of all, you touched my mushroom and Roquefort cheese sandwich. It. Is. On.”
The claxons cut off and out of the silence there could be heard the rhythmic patter of many tiny feet. Gruff had a sinking feeling in his stomach. Gruff was all too familiar with that particular cadence. He hopped onto a metal sheathed workspace and crept towards the sound of miniscule marching feet.
Sure enough, coming out of the corridor were row after row of gremlins. Gremlins were designed, not by nature or evolution or a benevolent god but by some bloody minded psychopath who didn’t merely hate all of existence and wish to hasten its inevitable demise but who actually loathed each and every subatomic particle in the universe and wanted to personally inflict as much pain as possible in the most cruel and sadistic ways that he could come up with.
The best you could say about gremlins is that they were lethally cute. They had big floppy ears and fur soft enough to give a chinchilla a suicidal sense of inadequacy. Their eyes. Gruff was more than half dog. He knew exactly the kind of hypnotic effect that a pair of big, shining eyes drenched in love and heartbreaking longing could exert. Gremlin’s eyes are what happens when that love crosses the threshold from I can hardly breathe when you leave the room to the kind of wine bottle smashing, tooth loose knocking, fire to the bed setting jealousy that gives relationships that extra little zip and sizzle.
Now that he got a better look at them, he could see that all of the gremlins were clothed in billowing black robes and that the fur in a perfect circle had been shaved from the top of their heads. Gruff’s blood ran cold.
The thing about gremlins is they’re immortal. More than anything, they love climbing into the engines of airplanes and disassembling them at thirty thousand feet in the air. They think this is just hilarious and can’t understand why everyone else on the plane can’t see the joke. Of course, they get to walk away from the fiery wreckage and can’t wait to smuggle their way onto another plane and do it all over again. They’re firmly of the belief that the more times a joke doesn’t land, the funnier and funnier it will be when the joke eventually does land. The irony of their joke crashing and burning just as the planes crash and burn is completely lost on them.
What they don’t believe in is death. Or more precisely, they have no way of wrapping their head around it. It just doesn’t make any sense to them. They’re immortal and so they don’t understand why other beings will just fall to pieces and not even exert themselves even a little in pulling themselves back together.
Thus, the Order of the Unimmortals was born. Their rites and rituals, tenets and doctrines are largely inscrutable to all except for that small intersection of people with a history of severe mental illness and an interest in drug use that isn’t so much recreational as vocational. But as the Order of the Unimmortals is committed to a vigorous and unflagging proselytizing campaign, certain of their practices and beliefs are highly relevant to any who might cross their paths, however briefly.
It would be wrong to call them a suicide cult. A murder suicide cult is closer to the mark, but the salient detail is that they are seeking to understand death both through first hand experience, however fleeting and ineffectual, as well as through, uh, secondhand observation, which tends to be a lot more permanent but so far hasn’t yielded much in the way of enlightenment.
Most gremlins take death in stride as a necessary and unavoidable part of walking through their immortal existence. But the Unimmortals seek out death in the most horrific and gruesome ways as a means to try and glimpse what exactly it is about death that has all of these other species so committed to it.
Of course, this description is perhaps a more high minded and poetic attempt to explain something that is likely a lot more base and primal. Some speculate that the Order was established by the gremlin equivalent of intellectuals, and that once every generation or so a gremlin with something like intelligence arises and they are actually able to see the point of death and do in fact transcend the immortal wheel of death and suffering that their immortal brethren are shackled to. The working theory is basically a reframing of existentialism. You know, the I think therefore I must exist, but for the gremlins, it’s more along the lines of I don’t think therefore I can’t not exist. And you can go on and on about how this is so much stuff and nonsense, but in the time that you have explained that double negatives are all well and good in the realm of mathematics but philosophically it’s so much linguistic flimflammery a gremlin will have somehow roped you and himself into a double decapitation. Logic is for mortals. Illogic is for immortals.
Gruff was about to start shouting orders but one of the gremlins rustled a miniaturized surface to air missile launcher out of his robe and fired it straight at Gruff, who, standing on the workspace as he was, was the highest and most visible target.
Gruff dove for the ground and felt the missile’s exhaust fumes singe the back of his neck. So hasty was he in abandoning the high ground that he fully ate it when he hit the floor, not having the presence of mind to duck and roll. He didn’t have time to catalog which parts of his skin were still intact when the missile exploded and the shockwave hurled him at the mass of gremlins like a bowling ball through so many pins. This is an imperfect analogy because most bowling pins aren’t in the habit of whipping out plasma saws and trying to cut the bowling ball in half on its way past.
Gruff coughed and rolled over. Something soft and fluffy was wriggling underneath his bulk. Gruff might have been content to let the thing sit there and wriggle, but one of the tiny fists had fitted itself with a set of studded brass knuckles and was displaying a surprising strength to mass ratio, to say nothing of its precise anatomical aim.
As a werewolf, Gruff maintained a delicate balance between the human and wolf halves of his nature. The wolf put up with the human because it meant more regular meals and greater access to extra cushy bedding. And the human half liked having the wolf around because when it came to fight or flight reflexes, the wolf definitely had the upper paw.
Which was why at this particular moment Gruff was on all fours and snarling. The puny human had checked out and the wolf was calling the shots. Even if this hadn’t been a coolly considered move on Gruff’s part, it was tactical brilliance. After all, gremlins were essentially walking, cackling chew toys. And Gruff tore into them with abandon.
The lack of fresh, hot blood confused and enraged the wolf. Gruff was used to sinking his teeth into juicy muscle and flesh. No one was exactly sure what gremlins were made of, but a cardiovascular system didn’t factor in. Doing anatomical studies on a species that will volunteer for vivisection and then turn the tables halfway through doesn’t yield a lot of useful information.
Gruff had been so caught up in the frustrated bloodlust that he didn’t notice until too late that a gremlin had been flailing around with, well, with a flail that had to have been about three times its body mass. The flail connected with Gruff’s shoulder and must have been packing more than the considerable inertia of a ten kilo hunk of metal swung with abandon because Gruff suddenly found himself approaching a wall at improbable speeds with a copper tang in the back of his throat and the smell of singed fur and an inability to move even a single muscle to, for example, brace for impact with one of those vent hoods made from the kind of oxidized iron that they used to moor ships.
Gruff hit hard enough that he didn’t even register the subsequent thud as he slid off the hood and onto the floor. He was back in full human mode. The great thing about being part wolf and part human is that both halves of his nature were each as likely to cut and run and leave the other to sort out the scary situation they’d landed themselves in.
Gruff had no time to wallow or even to wait for his lungs to re-inflate. A gremlin was sprinting toward him with a murderous gleam in its eye. This by itself wasn’t what caused Gruff to scramble to his feet. The fact that the gremlin was clutching a dead man’s switch and wired with enough explosives to initiate nuclear fission definitely put a little more spring in Gruff’s step.
Still wheezing, Gruff grappled with the catch on his gun strap, his fingers stiff and cold. Finally he got the strap loose with the suicidal gremlin less than a meter away. He took the gun barrel in both hands and wound up. Thwack!
Gruff would have liked to admire the arc or at least ascertain that the trajectory of the explosive little furball wasn’t taking it too close to any of his men, but he would rather put something solid and bolted down between him and the -
BOOM!
Gruff took in several welcome and well-deserved breaths. His tongue may or may not have been lolling out of his mouth. He could feel the caduceus tattoo on his upper arm burning white hot as the enchantment saw to the minor issues of replenishing lost pints of blood, unpuncturing ear drums and popping his shoulder back into place.
Gruff staggered to the nearest prone body on shaky legs. He took a tentative sniff. Alive. That was good. He hauled the person up by their shoulders and slumped them against a workspace. He peeled back eyelids and shined a light. No concussion. That made things easier.
He slapped a health patch onto his forehead. The eyes snapped back into focus as the healing magic coursed through him. Gruff started shouting orders but of course the man’s eardrums were still burst. Realizing this, Gruff switched to miming and hand gestures and still managed to get his point across.
Together they got the soldiers back on their feet one by one. A couple of the lads were going to need to get hauled back up for a more extensive healing than a quick patch could provide. They didn’t even bother with Larry the minotaur. Best Gruff could figure, Connoway’s spell had worn off, probably when the pixie had lost consciousness after a gremlin had grabbed him by the legs and started playing him like a drumstick, and Larry had sprouted back up to full size and the gremlins had gone all Matador on his ass. They were always attracted to the largest and scariest target available and it didn’t get much larger or scarier than Larry.
Gruff, to use the clinically psychological term, was pissed. This was a bad job that Mr. Bowright had sicced them on, and Nestor had made a pig’s ear of the thing from the get go, and up until the gnome had unleashed a pack of bloodthirsty gremlins on his men Gruff had been wrestling with misgivings on the morality of them knocking over this little gnome, her being a seemingly sweet old grandmotherly type. But there’s a certain clarity of purpose that comes from one of your men getting butchered and four or five others getting blown half to bits.
The exploding gremlin had caved in one of the protective metal sheathings encasing the various workspaces. Gruff saw the corner of a tattered notebook. He picked it up. It was covered in half written ideas and obscene illustrations with little to no regard to any kind of organizational schema. But more importantly, it was also covered in the gnome’s scent.
Gruff closed his eyes. He needed to concentrate. He took a great big sniff of the notebook. He had to tune out the residual effects of the explosion, to say nothing of the blood, sweat and fear of him and his men. He also discounted the bleached wood pulp and the slight tang of the ink solvent. What he was left with was a smell with a central earthy core layered with a complex array of chemical reagents, smoked chili peppers and jet fuel.
It’s difficult for Gruff to try to explain to the less nasally sensitive species how tracking a scent works. More than any of the other senses, smell has a strong temporal component. You can tell if a person just left the room a minute ago or an hour ago based on subtle distinctions in the scent they leave behind. You could compare it to infrared vision where you’re able to discern where and for how long something has been there based on the heat signature that they leave behind. But that doesn’t capture the picture at all. It doesn’t describe the effervescent quality of scents, they way they mix and commingle and spawn wholly new aromas. Nor does it account for the fact that different environmental factors - the presence or absence of light or heat or humidity or air flow can totally alter the character of the odors.
The upshot of all of this was that Gruff had a way of tracking down this little gnome and regardless of how little she asked for a group of jackbooted thugs to invade her home and destroy her pie shop, she was definitely asking for a complete and utter disregard for mercy or leniency after the meat grinder she had just put them through.
Naturally, this being the gnome’s lab, her scent was all over the place. It took a few false starts but Gruff finally found a trail that he thought was the most fresh. It stopped at a doorway that did not look the sort to buckle under at the tried and true shoulder shove or even the roundhouse kick to the doorknob.
Gruff activated his comm. “Gerry, you still walking around?”
Gerry merely grunted but he could pack a lot of nuance into his grunts. This one was more or less along the lines of Yes, I am walking but I’m definitely not happy about it.
“I need Big Bertha. Can you bring her over, please?” Gruff said. He got a grunt in reply but as he looked back he saw the grumbling dragon shuffling his way over. Gerry was a white dwarf dragon. Dragons had evolved a growth pattern very similar to stars, in that they grow in size and power until they eventually either wither away like a red giant, explode like a supernova or collapse into a white dwarf. These white dwarf dragons were incredibly old and fairly small for a dragon but they still packed quite a punch.
Gerry reached into his pack and pulled out a black bar maybe five or six centimeters in diameter and twenty or thirty centimeters long. The way Gerry handled it with both hands and some serious bulging in his forearms, it suggested that the little black bar was a lot heavier than it looked. Grunting, Gerry twisted it this way and that and there was a whir and clicking sound as the bar unraveled and rebuilt itself. Three sturdy legs shot out towards the floor and there was a crunch of cement as the clawed feet anchored themselves. After a matter of moments there was a bar thick as Gruff’s head and a meter and a half long.
Gruff noticed after Gerry had finished setting up Big Bertha that he was rubbing his stomach. He shot Gerry a quizzical look. Gerry was uncommunicative. But Gruff could put two and two together. “You didn’t try to eat any of those did you?”
“What?” Gerry said, and then burped out a stream of flame.
“Gerry, are you nuts. Those things are immortal. They’re going to carve you up from the inside.”
“Are not,” Jerry said with a huff. “My insides are a balmy 17,000 degrees Kelvin. I will admit,” he said, massaging his chest, “they are persistent little morsels but my internal furnace breaks everything down eventually.”
Gruff rolled his eyes. He powered up the Big Bertha and let her get to work. The big black bar rocketed forward at explosive speeds and hit the metal door with a bone shaking boom. The door took little to no notice.
Gruff paused the battering ram. He leaned in to look at the door where Big Bertha had struck it. He wasn’t even sure if he was looking at the right spot. He couldn’t see any indication that the door had been struck with 40 kilos of titanium tungsten alloy travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound. He scratched at the metal. Nothing. His claw skittered off the surface but left no mark.
It was at this point that Gruff discovered that Big Bertha had more than one setting. He’d always found that the default setting usually did the trick but as he zoomed in on the dial he saw settings for Bone Gravel, Juggernever, and all the way at the far end something called Seismic Incident. Gruff cranked it up to Seismic Incident.
There was a clanking as thicker plates of metal cascaded down the legs. The thick metal bar spiraled out until it was as big around as Gruff’s torso and somehow just as solid and dense as ever. The feet whirred as they drilled into the concrete.
Gruff felt more than a little trepidation at activating this thing. There was nothing overtly magical about it but it was nonetheless radiating enough waves of power to give off the impression that it could punch holes through time.
Swallowing hard, Gruff activated Big Bertha and then stuffed the heels of his palms into his ears. He also lowered his center of gravity which was a good thing because although Gruff had been watching Big Bertha with a kind of horrified fascination and to his eyes it hadn’t seemed to move at all, nevertheless, hugh cracks suddenly exploded through the concrete at the anchor points and Gruff felt not unlike a bead in the rattle in the hands of a toddler who had mistaken its parents triple shot espresso for its bottle.
With the grace and speed of an ocean liner, the door tipped over ever so slowly and settled down to the floor. Just beyond the door the gnome hovered in her chair. She didn’t look frightened or alarmed or even startled. She looked... thrilled, lustful even. “Hoo-hee! I’ve got to get me one of those.”
Both the wolf and human halves of Gruff were of the strong opinion that they needed a good long nap next to an open hearth with a merry, blazing fire after the shock of that Seismic Incident, to say nothing of the sheer terror and agony and general stupidity of the last hour, but the trained soldier snapped his gun up to his shoulder and the burning rage rushed back into his chest and had him firing off a few dozen rounds before he could even consciously react.
The gnome had scooted out of range of his bullets but scooted back to the edge of the busted up doors after he had emptied his clip. “You missed,” she said, and then zoomed back down the hallway, cackling.
Gruff lost all sense of control or even bipedalism as he shifted into full wolf mode and tore after the gnome down the hallway. A very small part of him knew that he was being bated and running full tilt after a psychotic gnome that reeked of explosives and had already shown a paranoid level of devotion to home security could not end very well for him. A much larger part of him exulted in the thrill of the hunt, the howl of wild incarnate ripping from his lungs, the relentless pumping of limbs in perfect unison with the thudding of his heart.
Gruff was so locked onto his target that he had traveled a good eight to ten feet before he realized that his paws were no longer thudding against solid ground and that his quarry was rapidly ascending from his point of view. Gruff tumbled head over tail for what felt like several storeys. He had a few buddies that were werecats of one stripe or another and always envied their ability to effortlessly land on their feet every time, but then again, they bathed by licking themselves so it wasn’t all good.
Plummeting dozens of feet was as good a time as any for his human side to reassert itself and he could really feel the wind tearing through his fur as it receded into his skin and his bones twisted and lengthened. He was falling very fast now. He was struggling to get his hindpaws to reform into feet and thus re-conjure up his enchanted boots. Every microsecond he became increasingly aware of the very solid floor rushing up to meet him. He was still tumbling and tumbling wildly, going faster and faster. His inner ears had shut down in protest and his stomach was promising as soon as it figured out which way his esophagus was pointed it was evacuating its contents.
Finally he could feel his boots re-formed again and just as he was absolutely sure he was going to have his brain shoved up through his toenails he managed to click toe to heel causing his boots to freeze in midair. One nanosecond later, Gruff felt both of his ankles break as his enchanted boots, now motionless, forced his legs to decelerate from fifty or sixty meters per second to zero meters per second in almost no time at all.
Thanks to his shapeshifting abilities and the Caduceus tattoo, simultaneous broken ankles weren’t the end of the world but they weren’t no picnic neither. Gruff shifted to look down at the ground, ignoring the pain in his still healing ankles. The floor wasn’t more than an inch or two away. He would have been a pile of goop in another millisecond.
After his ankles healed up mostly, though they still itched like some kind of flea turf war, he righted himself in midair and staggered up to the ledge he’d fallen down off of. Gruff saw the gnome peering over the edge. She looked almost regretful. Then she wound up and chucked something small and metallic and undoubtedly explosive right at Gruff’s head.
Gruff swore under his breath. He kicked his toe to his heel and deactivated the levitation enchantment. He was low enough now that when he hit the ground below he nearly had the wind knocked out of him, instead of his actual lungs getting knocked out of him. He curled up into a ball and mashed his belt buckle to activate a stasis shield, that he only just remembered he had.
Dozens of bits of shrapnel thudded into the stasis shield, their velocity getting stripped away, the shield glowing under the kinetic pressure. Then the shockwave hit and the shield fuzzed out. All of the shrapnel that had been caught before the shockwave clattered to the ground, but the pieces that had been riding a little slower than the shockwave got through unimpeded. Gruff felt a hot line slice through his cheek and another piece slam into his shin.
His stasis shield hadn’t completely blocked out the shockwave and Gruff felt like he’d been temporarily sat on by a troll with an obesity problem. He groaned for what felt like the thousandth time in the last hour and propped himself up on his elbows. He looked up and he saw the gnome leaning out over the ledge holding an honest to goodness anvil like they were in some kind of cartoon.
Gruff woke up feeling feverish. His scattered brain was trying to gather information and figure out how long he had been out, or where he was or even what he was. He was in far, far too much pain to be dead, and too royally pissed to be properly dying, although he was having trouble remembering why he was so angry.
Gruff heard Nestor’s voice crackling through his comm. Maybe he was angry at Nestor. This was a pretty safe assumption given their history. Nestor was, in his own circuitous and pompous manner, sounding the retreat. Gruff was still trying to corral his brain cells together so a lot of what Nestor was shouting didn’t really sink in, but the gist eventually trickled down to give that simmering rage a productive outlet.
Essentially, Nestor was simultaneously exculpating himself, blaming everything entirely on Gruff’s misguided and rogue leadership, and cravenly abandoning anyone who couldn’t be in the vehicle in the next five seconds while suggesting that anyone who remained behind was a laggard insubordinate and a coward to boot and could consider any contractual obligations null and void.
The anger inside Gruff punctured, sagging and deflating into a resigned numbness. Twelve years he’d been Mr. Bowright’s hired thug. And Nestor just tossed him to the curb. Actually, it was more like he tossed him into a dumpster fire.
Gruff had yet to open his eyes, but as he sat there with his eyes closed, covered in sweat and blood and soot, a great feeling of relief swept over him, and not just because his overtaxed Caduceus tattoo had built up enough magical charge to start patching up some of his more serious wounds. He was done kicking down doors and shooting up places and beating the answers out of whichever sorry son of a bitch his employer sicced him on.
Gruff felt the rap of tiny knuckles on the side of his headgear. When opening one's eyes for the first time after severe blunt force trauma to the head, it is not recommended that one's entire field of vision be occupied by the eight times magnified eyes of the perpetrator of the aforementioned severe blunt force trauma to the head, especially when said eyes are sparkling with a malicious maelstrom of malevolent megalomania. Gruff closed his eyes again and felt his eyelashes brush against the gnome's lenses.
He waited several seconds and then risked opening his eyes again. Thankfully the gnome had now motored her hoverchair back to a distance that was, if still too close for comfort, at least no longer at a conjoined twins level of intimacy. She was grinning at him in a way that was shearing years off his life expectancy.
"Mr. Werewolf, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Ess," she stuck out her hand.
Gruff eyed the hand dubiously for a moment. He wasn't sure even if he wanted to he had any strength left for a handshake or even a grudging nod of respect, but every good doggy bone in his body demanded he shake that gnome's hand. So, ignoring the screaming protests of various and sundry body parts, he levered himself up onto one elbow and shook the gnome's hand. "Gruff," he said, by way of introduction.
"Well, Gruff, I gotta hand it to you. I threw everything up to and including the kitchen sink at you, but here you are, still alive and spitting vinegar."
Gruff grunted. If he was spitting vinegar instead of teeth it was a close run thing.
"Mr. Gruff," Ess said, scooting closer again, her heavily lensed eyes still gave off an impression of lethal insanity, "I'd like to hire you."
Gruff stared, completely nonplussed. "Hire me? I just tried to kill you. I just blew up half your lab. Why would you want to hire me? And why would I want to work for you? You just tried to kill me." And damn near succeeded Gruff thought, but did not say.
Ess laughed. "Oh don't flatter yourself, Mr. Gruff. I was never in any real danger, despite your best efforts. And you didn't do any permanent damage to my lab, and most of the pyrotechnics can be blamed on my gremlin friends. The only real damage was to my door and since the device you used to knock that down got left behind by your men in their mad dash for survival, I consider us square on that account. Tell me, does that wonderful contraption have a name?"
"We call it Big Bertha."
"Oh! Big Bertha and I are going to be the very bestest of friends!"
Gruff was completely at a loss trying to figure this lady out. He didn't know if he had ever met someone as bloodthirsty as she, but at the same time she seemed to have this childlike glee that bubbled up every few seconds. She was obviously insane to a degree that would require an entirely new branch of psychology to be developed just to diagnose, and yet Gruff more than half suspected that she was the smartest person he would ever meet. It was giving him whiplash.
"Oh, and Mr. Gruff," Ess said, her voice dropping to a low, grave tone that sent shivers down Gruff's spine, "We both know that if I had actually tried to kill you, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now."
It was amazing. Gruff didn't know the specifics of the job or what compensation, if any, he might expect, but he was suddenly filled with the overwhelming desire to accept Ess's offer of employment.
"This job... What would you want me to do?"
Ess grinned. " I need you to kick down some doors and shoot up some places and beat the answers out of that sorry son of a bitch ex employer who sicced you on me. You think you can do that?"
Gruff looked inward and was surprised to find that anger had flared to life inside him once more. He felt a grin spread across his face, just as predatory and terrifying as the one that Ess bore. "With pleasure."
