“Just look at this stuff,” said Bastion.

  Zombies, robots, and dragons covered the disc cases, along with a variety of cryptids.

  “Why the hell did pre-Warp people have to have the worst imaginations possible?” Bastion sighed, taking more movies from the shelves. “They could have dreamed up a barge that makes ice cream or something. Instead, they give us zombie plagues, killer robots, Gator-men, and dragons. Not even the cool kind of dragons you can ride, just the ones that want to burn everything to a crisp.”

  “Life was too easy for them,” said Roy. “They had to imagine problems to keep things interesting.”

  Most of those problems weren’t much of an issue now. The zombies were slow, and after the initial wave of destruction, they’d burned themselves out. The robots broke down after years without maintenance. Both were mostly found in big cities, and dragons were only a threat if you lived near the mountains.

  “Look on the bright side,” said Roy. “Their exciting fantasy is our reality.”

  Bastion held up a case titled “Swole in the Swamp,” featuring a friendly Gator-man in swim shorts and sunglasses. “Sometimes their fantasy version looks way better than what we got. This is so different from the real Gator-men, I doubt it will be useful.”

  “We need movies that show us how to be action protagonists instead of ones focused on monsters,” said Roy. “I’m surprised we’re not finding more good stuff here. Do you think people looted this place when the Warp happened?”

  “I doubt it. They’d have been running from `Gator-men. Not many would risk death for movies.”

  “Like we just did, you mean?” Roy grinned. “I still think it was worth it.”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t even know they’d be useful for anything. Nobody knew how theme magic worked back then; they had to figure it out through trial and error,” Bastion pointed to the back of the room. “I’ll try the computer. It’s a long shot, but maybe I can look through some kind of directory.”

  He pressed a few buttons on the beige box sitting on the counter. “Nope. No power at all in here.”

  Roy wiped the dust from a poster for “The Pirates of Pendor: Pieces of 8.” Coming Soon. He’d never seen it, and now he knew he never would. He felt a vague sense of loss at that. The franchise had gotten worse with each sequel, but the seventh had ended on a cliffhanger. It stung to know it would never be resolved.

  Sometimes, real life was like that, too; people would disappear with no send-off off and you’d just never see them again. Movies were supposed to be better than that.

  It only made him more determined to search harder.

  One of the still-standing shelves was full of multiple copies of the same recent release: a romcom that had too much in common with base reality to suit their purposes. Another was filled with a Great War epic that they ruled out for the same reason.

  The toppled shelves had better finds.

  “Roscoe Rabbit Saves Christmas,” said Roy, pointing out a yellow cartoon character with a round face and eyes, huge ears, and a Santa hat.

  “That one definitely goes in the bag,” said Bastion. “It could hold the secret to getting rid of the thing and opening up this whole area. Look, I found a good one too.”

  He waved another case in front of him. This one showed a cowboy dragging a gravestone through the mud. “RINGO,” spelled out in bullet-riddled red letters.

  Roy hadn’t seen many westerns, but he knew they must have been big at one point for the theme to still be around.

  “This’ll have some great gun tricks in it,” said Bastion. “They used to show these all the time back in Star City, so I know a lot of them already. I just need to get my dragoon working so I can start showing them off.”

  Next, Roy thought to check the return box near the entrance. The lock had rusted enough that Roy could easily rip the lid off. Inside, he found a movie about a wizard summer camp and another about the kind of generic apocalypse W. had described as an option for the hovercraft. Both went in his bag.

  Bastion found some of the older Pirates of Pendor movies on another upended shelf. “Big Time should pay big for these. Pirates are the main group he’s worried about right now. I also found something about car chases. ‘Fast Friends Forever.’ We should watch this ourselves, or get W. to take a look so she can get us a car working.”

  After placing everything else that looked even slightly promising into his backpack, Roy looked behind the counter.

  He’d been hoping to find a few loose discs back there, but instead he found an interesting-looking machine: a squat cylinder of yellowed plastic that had once been white. The transparent lid was scratched and foggy, and glued shut with grime.

  As Roy wiped away a thick layer of dust, letters emerged: Easy Disc Cleaner.

  His pulse quickened. If a disc had been scratched up enough to need a special cleaning, that meant it had been watched a lot. This is the good stuff.

  Wiping away more dust revealed a row of buttons labelled Power, Clean, and Deep Restore beneath a dead digital display. He tried the power button to no effect and considered calling over Bastion to ask how it worked, but he was too excited to stop.

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  He pressed a few more buttons at random, but again nothing happened. Then he fumbled along the side and found something that clicked. The lid popped open with a hiss. Nestled inside, like treasure sprung from a locked chest, was an Ultra-Disc.

  His heart soared.

  It was the greatest prize Roy could have hoped for: Future Knight: Part 2. The best one. The one with time travel to both the future and the past. The one that included multiple alternate timelines and retold the events of the first movie from a whole new perspective.

  Roy flipped it over, half dreading what he’d see on the other side, but the disc was scratch-free. Whoever had placed it in the machine just before the Warp had managed to run the cleaning cycle before the power went out.

  “Holy shit,” said Bastion, looking over his shoulder. “You found your favourite movie.”

  “Yeah, I’m keeping this one for myself.”

  He could still remember the first time he’d watched it. Back in Wiley’s outdoor theater, after everyone else was already asleep. Seeing so many interesting ideas packed into one movie had been overwhelming. He’d watched that first copy until it skipped too badly to even start. Back then, he’d had no idea something like the Easy Disc Cleaner even existed.

  This copy was going straight into the cleanest case he could find, would be dusted down with a microfiber cloth after each use, and definitely wouldn’t be left on the floor when he couldn’t find the case again after leaving it in the player for weeks at a time.

  “Hmm.” Bastion swept away some papers on the counter, revealing a space movie next to a wad of pre-Warp cash and a scattered pile of coins. The paper money showed a white-haired man Roy didn’t recognize, and the coins were in various states of decay. Some of the smaller copper ones had turned a mottled green, while the larger ones were a dull grey beneath a layer of grime.

  Roy put Future Knight: Part 2 in his bag while Bastion collected the coins greedily.

  “You never know when these will come in handy,” he said.

  Next to the disc cleaning machine was a different appliance: a big, black box. Bastion pressed the eject button and disappointment clouded his face. “Aww. A Mega-Tape. These are useless.”

  “Why? Can’t someone rig up a player for them?”

  “It’s not that. They degrade so fast that even with theme magic working to preserve them, most are unwatchable now. They say they weren’t that great even before the Warp. You had to rewind them every time you watched one, and couldn’t go to a specific chapter with a menu.”

  “Huh. You know, I heard books used to be like that too, back when they were scrolls.”

  “Ok. Now I’m confused,” said Bastion.

  “When you read a scroll, you roll up one side and unroll the other as you gi, but at the end you have to roll it back the other way. It was kind of the same thing as this rewinding machine. Switching to Ultra-Discs must have felt like going from scrolls to books with pages.”

  Roy had liked books too. Before he’d gotten his own Ultra-Disc player, he’d read when he was too tired to sit in the movie theater, with a green plastic worm light that worked despite its corroded batteries. When Bastion saw it, he’d said it was made for video games rather than books, but Roy never found a handheld console to try it with, and the light had been lost during their expedition to Wiley’s mall.

  He took a look at the tape before setting it aside. Some sci-fi thing about rewriting reality. It sounded too philosophical to be of practical use anyway.

  Finally, they checked the partially flooded room where the first Gator-man had emerged. There was a bargain bin in there that they both spent some time rooting through. Most of it was garbage. Computer-animated movies about princesses, nature documentaries, and foreign films whose titles were vague metaphors. The nature docs all had cracked cases with covers too faded to read, and the others weren’t in much better condition.

  “Did you ever hear of someone using a princess theme?” asked Bastion.

  “No. You could probably make it work if you paired it with spellcasting or fairy stuff, though. It sounds like the kind of thing you’d need other people working for you to make work, like Big Time’s big boss thing. I doubt you could act like a princess convincingly without some kind of kingdom, even if that’s just a small group of loyal friends.”

  “I didn’t see many women among Big Time’s guards anyway. He probably won’t want the princess ones, but look, I found one of the Shades movies here.”

  “Which one?” asked Roy.

  “Four. That was before they got too ridiculous.”

  “What’s wrong with ridiculous?”

  “It just felt like the plot meant more when it wasn’t so over the top. In the first movie they're fighting ghosts in one spooky house, and in the second they're taking down a vampire cabal that controls an entire country. Now apply that level of escalation over fifteen sequels.”

  “That sounds amazing,” Roy said.

  "It’s not. It’s really dumb. There’s an invisible car, Roy.”

  “See, that sounds fun too. If we found one of those, I’d want to try it out for sure. Wait, would we be invisible too, or just the car? Like, would everyone be able to see us zooming around sitting on air as bugs get blasted by this forcefield in front of us where the windscreen is?”

  “No. Everything inside the car gets to be invisible too.”

  “See, with that you don’t even get to show off your cool car. I think flying is better. Future Knight had a flying car that he took back to medieval times.”

  Roy was lost in thought for a while after that, replaying the flying car scenes in his head while absentmindedly rooting around in the bargain bin. He snapped out of it when he felt something heavier than the rest of the Ultra-Discs right at the bottom. It turned out to be a fat video game box.

  There were two logos framed by a neon pink triangle: a flowing white L and a holographic silver V. Lightner World and Virtua. Video game characters from all genres surrounded a gold trophy in the center of the page.

  “Virtua World Championship 2006,” Roy read.

  “I haven’t heard of that one,” said Bastion. “Do you think it’s rare?”

  Roy almost felt bad about opening it. Some of the Ultra-Discs were in great condition for their age, but this was downright pristine. The box looked factory fresh, without a single dent in the cardboard that had spent a century and a half sitting at the bottom of a bargain bin in the company of Gator-men. The colors were vibrant, and not a single speck of dust had stuck to it.

  He ripped the plastic wrap, opened the box, and found a small gold disc and a paper booklet inside.

  “Gold, huh?” said Bastion. “Could be rare.”

  “Hey, check it out," said Roy. “The manual’s still in here.”

  Its cover was also gold, with foiled lettering. It too was in mint condition. Leafing through it, Roy found images of various games and a small map of Florida with several locations marked out.

  One of them was Lightner World, and that really caught Roy’s attention.

  “Good,” said Bastion. “With that, we can find out exactly what we’ve got. Otherwise, it looks like we’re done here.”

  Roy put the box in his bag and the manual in his pocket, hoping he’d get the chance to read a little more on the way back to the hovercraft.

  They walked toward the door and froze at the sound from outside.

  Footsteps.