See the man. He is blue and stout, he wears a fine set of clothes.

  “The fuck is that?” Cutter growled, reaching for his axe.

  “Heck if I know, bruh,” Lita rumbled.

  Not for the first time Cutter lamented that his only companion in this world seemed to have spent his entire existence below the ground and thus had no more understanding of this wider world than he did. Neither of them could know that this was none other than blue leprechaun neighbor of Pod, Mister Ganderson, and bore no more threat than a house cat.

  Cutter tilted his eye to the sky. “You sure about that?”

  Lita said, “Sure about what, bruh?”

  “Hush you. Not talking to you.”

  “Oh, well, I’m not talking to you either, dude.”

  Cutter waited for the sky to say something.

  “Yup. Come on.”

  Nnnnnn… The figure in blue was running towards them, hands flapping wildly, a harmless older man, truly and definitively of no danger to them…

  “Cool.”

  …though the same could not be said for the raptor that was soon to burst from the vegetation behind him.

  “A WHAT?”

  In the next instant an honest-to-god raptor had exploded from the grassy verge of the little earthen island, tearing after the little blue man.

  Cutter reared up. “Oh shit! What the fuck are we gonna do? He’s gonna get eaten!”

  Lita, unprompted, adjusted course, rocketing right towards Mister Ganderson and the pursuing raptor.

  Cutter cried, “Hey! Is this a good idea?”

  Lita said, “Gonna git some!”

  Cutter mumbled, “Hey… we really need to talk about that…”

  But the moment of action was upon them, the chance to talk passed. Cutter drew his axe and leapt from Lita’s back; he swept around the little blue man.

  Mister Ganderson kept running, breathless, streaming, “Bless us and save us! Bless us and save us! Bless and save us!”

  Lita pulled his segments together, his tomahawks never having left his hands.

  The raptor skidded to a halt, snarling and snapping. Its tail whipped, it dug at the ground with the terrible hooked claw of one foot. It was startled by their sudden intervention, but not necessarily dissuaded.

  “That’s a fucking dinosaur,” Cutter mused, circling, axe held firmly. He couldn’t say why a dinosaur was so amazing when he’d already grown accustomed to anthropomorphized lizards, talking stone robots, and wagons pulled by teams of minotaurs. Maybe it was the genre mixing?

  The creature snarled and darted forward. Cutter had already seen the clay band on the creature, but that was poor assurance when confronted by primordial savageness, flashing claws and gnashing teeth.

  It dashed at him, rearing and lashing out with that terrible leg. Cutter parried the strike with his axe, sigils glowing, but was still jarred by the force of the impact.

  Buzzsaw Lita spun in, tomahawks flashing, and the creature had to jump aside. Cutter seized the opportunity, spinning his whole body to bring his axe swinging in an arch entirely counter to the raptor’s momentum. Stone thunked in meat, blood geysered into the sky, and it crumpled.

  Cutter stood for a moment, panting. “That… that’s it? Kind of anticlimactic.”

  An instant later, Lita was buzzing into the corpse, shredding it to slivers of meat and tattered scales. “Gonna git some, gonna git some, gonna git some!”

  “Jesus! Lita! Stop! It’s fucking dead! You gotta get a grip on this shit, man!”

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  Lita stopped abruptly, eyes wide and staring. “Whatchu say, bruh?”

  “I said, you gotta get a grip, man!”

  The eyes melted into sad half-moons and Lita shook his head slowly.

  Cutter looked at him for a moment, then, “Oh… shit, sorry. Stone Robot. That’s what I meant. Stone Robot. Don’t know what I was saying there.”

  “Yee wrecked it!” Mister Ganderson was suddenly between them. “Oh, bless us and save us, yee wrecked it! Weren’t no need to do that when the varmint was kilt.”

  The blue man stopped shy of the blood pooling on the ground and leaned over the mangled corpse. “Done wrecked it…”

  He straightened up suddenly and turned to Cutter. “‘Pologies, ‘pologies. Bless us, that’s sounded most ungrateful. I do ‘pologize. There weren’t no need to go cuttin’ him all up like that, but still, I’m mighty glad you did. Ganderson’s the name, and I believe I am in your debt!”

  Cutter shook the small offered hand and said, “No worries. It was nothing.”

  “Nothing it certainly wasn’t. That beastie would have had me, bless us and save us, if it weren’t for you.”

  Cutter stalked over to the corpse and saw a sigil floating in the tangle of gore and protruding bones. He picked it up. “Strength, again. Ash. Oh well, I need something for trading, I guess.”

  As he slipped the sigil into his satchel, the little blue man was half talking to him, half talking to himself. “Not regular at all. Raptors are critters of habit, count on one thing in life, raptors are critters o’ habit. This un came at the wrong time o’ day. Somethin’ must’ve happened to ol’ Ripper for this un to be moving into his territory like this. Ol’ Ripper comes past in the mornin’, regular as clockwork. Not the evenin’, never the evenin’… Bless us AND save us, most distressin’…”

  Cutter said, “Right… well, I guess we’ll be moving on then…” He considered waiting to see if there might be a reward coming his way, but the sun was dipping away and he hoped to find this town before nightfall.

  Mister Ganderson turned to him. “Whassat? Oh, no doubt, no doubt, but I am in your debt. A Ganderson always pays his dues, sir. I am but a humble smith, but if there’s a service I can offer you just come this way and I would be most relieved to discharge the debt I certainly owe you.”

  “Can you make swords?”

  Ganderson looked at him, then started laughing. “Oh, that’s a good un. If I could make swords I wouldn’t be so humble. Bless us and save us. Could probably fix one up if it needed fixin’, but it’s not really weapons I do. Tools, yessir. Weapons, not so much.”

  “Right… okay, well, if I need a pair of scissors or something I’ll be sure to head this way. Stay safe.”

  Lita was able to adopt the scooter shape himself as Cutter approached and he mounted up. “Oooh, shit, your back is fucking hard, man. It’s like… well, it’s like mounting a stone fucking bike, I guess.”

  “Could always walk, bruh.”

  Cutter turned from his seated position to Mister Ganderson. “Don’t suppose you make saddles?”

  The blue man just shook his head slowly.

  “Right, well, like I said, stay safe.”

  And again, they were whizzing forward.

  Cutter said, “You know, man, I thought we were dino-chow there.”

  Lita said, “Why’d you think that, bruh? He was only clay-banded, and you totally slay clay bands.”

  Cutter shrugged. “King Kobold was only stone-banded but it took the two of us together and everything we had to bring him down. Like, if we met a T-Rex and it was clay-banded, would being stone-banded make up the difference?”

  “What’s a T-Rex?”

  “Oh, alright. A dragon then!”

  “Aw, heck no, bruh, dragon would eat you if he was clay and you were iron, bruh. Think so anyway.”

  Cutter nodded. “There you go then. That thing might have been the end of us.”

  “Of you, anyway, bruh, it couldn’t kill me.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s reassuring. Listen, Lit- I mean, listen Stone Robot, you need to chill a little. It’s well and good to want to git some, but you know, you gotta choose your moments. And please, when they’re fucking dead, stop with the chopping. That old blue fella was pretty upset about that, which means I’ll bet the leather, maybe the meat, was worth something. I gotta make a lot of coin as fast as I can.”

  “Why’s that, bruh?”

  “Weren’t you listening to the creepy shopkeeper guy?”

  “Uh, no, bruh, I was busy fallin’ off ladders.”

  “Right… Well, he said if I want to go home, he can send me, but it’s gonna cost me ten mil. Don’t get me wrong, this is a dream. I know this is a fucking dream. Wanna know how I know this is a fucking dream? ’Cause I just saved a little blue man from being eaten by a dinosaur by killing it with an axe and now I’m zipping across the loading room from the Matrix on the back of a stone robot. That’s how I know. But, like… just in case, and ’cause I’m going to need to do something anyway, I was thinking about seein’ about making some cash…”

  “Bruh… you trying to convince me or you?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Ten mil, bruh? I dunno much about much out here, and I totally don’t know how much ten mil is, but it kinda sounds like a lot…”

  Cutter sighed, sinking lower in his seat. “Yeah… It really does…

  “Bruh, hear me out here, kay? What if, it’s just an idea, but, what if you didn’t go back? You know, just went around saving little blue dudes from dinosaurs or whatever? You and your trusty sidekick Stone Robot? That sounds pretty cool too, bruh.”

  Cutter looked down at the back of Lita’s head and smiled. “Hey, listen, man. It doesn’t matter either way. It’s a dream, remember? None of this is real. Not the dinosaurs, not kobolds, not even you, buddy. But, if it wasn’t a dream, in that hypothetical, I’d be getting the feeling that we’ll be rolling around for a long while together anyway…

  His face grew still after he said that and his eyes fixed on the horizon for a time as they zipped on. His eyes carried a sheen as he dwelled on thoughts he had no desire to put into words.

  After a while, “Bruh! What’s that!”

  “What?”

  Lita said, “Up there, bruh, see it?”

  Cutter turned and focused, shaking off the melancholy webs that clung to his mind. There, silhouetted against the burning half-circle of the setting sun, was the unmistakable shape of buildings, walls, towers. Cutter squinted for any sign of life, but the corona of the sun was too bright to keep staring.

  “I guess that’s the town, pal. Time to see what’s what.”