On the way out of the sheriff’s office, Roy and Bastion stopped by a vending machine for a few candy bars. They’d both woken up late that morning, uncharacteristically so for Roy, and he hadn’t wanted to waste any more time eating in the saloon.

  Roy was the first to speak as they opened their wrappers. “Did the deal sound good to you?”

  “He was more straight up than Bigtime, that’s for sure,” said Bastion. “Makes you wonder how many other people got screwed over on his fetch quests that he didn’t tell us about. I thought we were unlucky back there in the swamps, but at least we’ve still got all our limbs.”

  “Yeah. I feel really bad for him. All Ryan and his friends wanted to do was be treasure hunters, and now they’re stuck here, or at least he is. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to know what you want to do with your life and then just be stopped from doing it ever again.”

  “If you got your limbs bitten off, you’d probably work out how to get mechanical spider legs or learn how to fly or something. He seems a little bit like you, you know. Maybe not quite enough, though, if he gave up.”

  “So you wouldn’t give up either?” Roy asked.

  “Oh no. If I got my limbs bitten off, I’d sit around feeling sorry for myself until you solved the problem for me. I just know you’d be questing after that Elixir that regrows them, even if it almost certainly doesn’t exist. That’s why I find it odd that his friends mostly stay here in town, too. There’s the scout, Nate, and one other guy, Tex, who still goes treasure hunting, but the whole team still hangs around here and never moves on.”

  “Maybe that’s just how loyal they are to their friend,” said Roy.

  “Or maybe their leader was the only thing keeping them going. We’d better watch out in case he’s sending us out to work with a group of folks who can’t think for themselves. It’s gonna be frustrating as hell if we have to babysit them the whole time.”

  “We’ll find out now, I guess. First up is Sam, who runs the jail.”

  They ducked into the jailhouse quickly, avoiding the riderless carriage as it careened through the street on its regular schedule.

  The interior held only a single cell, empty except for a motionless automaton and some cardboard cut-outs with missing faces, where kids had once posed as outlaws and bounty hunters.

  “There’s no one here,” said Bastion. “We need to do this quickly if we want to stay on the thief’s trail. Come on, let’s try somewhere else.”

  “Waaargh!”

  A skeleton jumped out from behind a cut-out, making Bastion flinch and hit his head against the wall. Roy reflexively drew his sword, but the skeleton held its hand up in surrender and started giggling.

  “Whoa,” came a high-pitched voice from the skull mask. “You can put the sword away—I’m just being humerus! Get it?”

  “Yeah,” said Roy. “Are you Sam?”

  The skeleton pulled off the fabric mask, revealing a bob of auburn hair, cut to exactly the right length to fit inside it. Dark makeup ringed her eyes, presumably so the mask’s eyeholes would blend in better.

  At that point, Roy also noticed that this skeleton girl was wearing lifts in her boots. She took theming seriously. A skeleton had to be tall enough to be scary, and that took a real transformation for the petite, pretty girl behind the mask.

  She held out her hand for Roy to shake. “Samantha Prowers. AKA Spooky Sam. AKA The Bone Warden. That last one’s more of a self-styled thing though. I’ve been trying to get the word out, but so far I haven’t been able to make it stick.”

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Roy, and this is Bastion. We don’t have cool nicknames yet, but I’m working on it. We’re treasure hunters, so we should get some sooner or later.”

  “Sounds fun. I’m not really working on anything here right now. No prisoners to watch, like usual. Sometimes people drink too much and start fights, so they end up here overnight. Sometimes thieves try to rob the stores and get a few days in here. I think Ryan’s expecting more of a need for this place, though, so he pays me to hang around this place, and it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

  “That’s great, actually,” said Roy. “Ryan thought you might come with us on a mission.”

  Roy laid out the plan. Sam paid rapt attention until she got hung up on where the intel had come from.

  “Nate and Ryan actually spoke to each other? This must be serious.”

  “Is there some kind of problem there?” asked Bastion. “You’re all from the same place, right?”

  “There was this whole thing between them, back home. Ryan liked the Star Republic at first. Nate didn’t. Even now they haven’t really patched it up. I wasn’t really involved in all that. I just found the place where we got all our costumes when we left Clear Falls.”

  “How’d you decide on skeleton?” asked Roy.

  “Seems kinda specific, right? I always loved spooky stuff, old horror movies, if I could get them working, monster comics too. Halloween was always my favorite holiday. I’d dress up in a different costume every day for the whole of October, so I tried out pretty much everything spooky. Funny how one of the most basic ones ends up having the best magic. I can’t wait to get to use it again.”

  “So you’re in?” asked Bastion. “Easy as that?”

  “Yeah. I’m totally in. I’ve been bored out of my mind here. Oh, but we have to wait for it to be dark to go in the wizard tower. My theme works better that way.”

  “Makes sense,” said Bastion. “If we’re using stealth, better pick the time when it’s easier to be stealthy.”

  “Go see Tex next, and make sure to tell him we’re doing my spooky night raid version of it.”

  They met Tex right outside the jailhouse, on his way back from a treasure hunting run.

  He was the kind of guy that was hard to miss.

  A boulder of a man, big and bulky beneath his armor. Plates of sun-scorched scrap metal overlapped in a rough imitation of a samurai’s dō. Pieces had clearly been scavenged from road signs, oil drums, and flattened soda cans.

  Hanging over the metal, a beach towel cloak flapped in the non-existent wind.

  A kabuto-style helmet sat low over his brow, its crest cut from the hood ornament of an old muscle car. Beneath it, his face was round and friendly, with a thick mustache that looked more Mexican than Japanese.

  Every slow movement made his patchwork armor clink and groan, and as he approached, Roy noticed it had taken some significant damage.

  “Hey,” said Roy. “Tex, right? Sheriff Ryan said we should come talk to you about hitting the wizard tower.”

  “Hell yeah,” said Tex. “He’s finally going ahead with that, then? Full assault with the whole town?”

  “No,” said Bastion. “We’re stealing tokens from the wizards and buying weapons with them at the raider’s arcade.”

  “Then we use those weapons in an all-out assault?” Tex said hopefully.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  “Maybe at some point,” said Bastion. “Right now, he was more focused on protecting the town.”

  “Aww, man,” said Tex, looking like a kid whose ice cream had just fallen on the floor. “I prefer to just get stuck in with my sword.”

  Bastion chuckled. “I think you and my friend Roy here will get along great.”

  Tex looked to him, then. “You a sword guy too? I just got mine recently, last piece of this getup, and it’s been life-changing. No offense to you gunslingers,” he nodded at Bastion. “The things I’ve seen Ryan do with his magnum are incredible, but there’s something about swinging your arm that feels like electricity running through your body. Something only another sword guy can really understand.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” said Roy, unsheathing his blade.

  “Oh, damn. Plastic. You’ve had that a long time then, to push enough resonance through it.”

  “Yep.”

  “I might have to ask you for some pointers on the way to the wizard tower. I’ve not been using a sword that long. To be honest, most of my fighting style is just taking hits well.”

  “So you’re in?” asked Bastion.

  “Hell yeah, I’m in. Just let me get in some quick armor repairs first. I was out all night treasure hunting, and I took a few nasty hits. I have to swap out some pieces.”

  “Where did you explore?” asked Roy. He wanted to get a better lay of the land around here.

  “East along the highway. That’s the way the raider base is, but we’ll be heading the other way first to get to the wizards. I found this place there called the Light Bytes Cyber Cafe.”

  Tex took off a backpack, which had been wedged behind his endlessly flapping towel cape. Then he unzipped it and started showing off its contents.

  “I got some really good stuff this time. Computer mice and trackballs, lots of CD-ROMs, one’s a game about building your own city. In my saddlebags, I have two PC towers. They’ll fetch a good price from the traders that run the Bay Town route to the Star Republic. The Great Mall has plenty of this stuff already, but if any of the CD-ROMs are rare, they might still want them.”

  Roy doubted any would be as rare as their lost copy of Virtua World Championship.

  “The monsters in there did that to your armor?” asked Bastion. “Or did that happen on the road?”

  “It happened in the Cyber Cafe,” said Tex. “The road’s more or less clear if you don’t count raiders, and it was robots, so not exactly monsters.”

  Still animated by theme magic, thought Roy. Though he wasn’t that much of a stickler for definitions. Monsters were things the Warp spawned out of nothing but collective imagination; robots and automatons were there already, and just had their behavior altered, usually in a way that made them go haywire and attack people on sight.

  “See this here.” Tex pointed to a segmented section of crushed soda cans over his bulging belly, where the aluminum had been melted together. “Coffee robot got me with super-heated steam. Looked like a demonic little espresso machine.”

  He moved on to a dent in his road-sign shoulder plates. “This was from one I call Monitor-Head.”

  “Wait,” said Roy excitedly. “His head was a computer monitor? Did the screen show a face on it?”

  “Yeah, a pixelated frown, with downward-pointing angry eyebrows. It had wooden shelving for a body and CD racks for legs, and worst of all—big ol’ laser printers for hands. It smashed my shoulder with one of those before I could get my sword through its screen.”

  “Damn,” said Bastion. “What else is out that way?”

  “Stores and restaurants. Less themed gift shops than in the west. More food places. All the kiosks are shaped like what they’re selling. An ice cream cone, a slice of cake. There’s the biggest Burger Quest you’ve ever seen. Shaped like a burger, fries, and a drink.”

  Listening to this, Roy wished he’d eaten more than a candy bar this morning.

  “Oh, and a helicopter rental place. None of them work, of course. We thought maybe we could get the radios from them working, but they weren’t themed enough, so we sent them to Bay Town.”

  “We saw a working helicopter in Bay Town, actually,” Roy said.

  “Who managed that?” Tex asked.

  “No one knows,” said Bastion.

  Tex nodded, contemplating. “There are so many mysteries out there. That’s why I refuse to stay in town all the time. Even if our first time in the swamps went badly, we need to get back out there.”

  “Good to have you aboard,” said Roy.

  With Tex recruited, the last place to look for recruits was back in the saloon.

  Young Kyle was already in, and gave them a thumbs up while sipping on one of Casey’s Orange Surge drinks.

  Old Kyle, however, was a long shot. The bottle of whiskey on his table was almost empty, and he looked to be in a foul mood.

  “Can you make us some explosives, at least?” asked Bastion.

  “No,” he scowled. “You need to know what you’re doing with those, and the two of you look like you don’t know a damn thing. Do you have a days military service between you?”

  “We were in the cadets,” said Roy.

  “Yeah right, and you booked it right before you could technically be hanged for desertion, I’ll bet. Same story all around here, no loyalty to their country.”

  “If the raiders or wizards wreck this town, you’ll have nowhere to spend all day drinking whiskey,” Bastion pointed out.

  He spat on the floor in front of him, an extremely small amount of fluid projected from his dried-out face. “I’ll drink what I damn well want to, and I’d rig up something to keep those scum out, something green boys like you’ve never even seen before, but you gotta get the materials first, see. That’s the whole plan, right?”

  “Right,” sighed Bastion.

  “Then ask me again when you’ve done that. I was blowing things up since before you were squirted out of the General’s ballsack.”

  Bastion froze. “You know my father…”

  “Yep. And you’re just about the most disappointing apple that could ever fall from that tree. Don’t talk to me again until you’ve done something to prove you’re worth a damn.”

  Bastion left the saloon, fists clenched, with a cold rage in his eyes.

  Roy thought he might as well see if Rancid Jimmy would come along. It wasn’t as if it could go worse than that.

  “Hey Jimmy.”

  “Ahem.”

  “Oh, right. Rancid Jimmy.”

  He nodded, slowly.

  “I wanted to ask you about your theme. It’s very unique. Where did you get an idea for a costume like that?”

  “Have you been acquainted with a fellow by the name of Tex?” his voice came out nasal and pompous, not at all the guttural gravel Roy had expected based on his appearance. He was taken aback for a second, but then again, few people were what they appeared to be while they were in costume.

  “Tex. Yeah. I just talked to him outside. The samurai.”

  “The junk samurai, yes. I saw that man’s refuse-constructed garb, fashioned from beverage receptacles and automobile ornamentations, and was struck with inspiration. I was new in town, you see, and the walk from Bay Town had left me in quite the disheveled state. I was about to enquire with Miss Casey about accommodations with running water when I realized very dishevelment could be a source of thematic power.”

  He rubbed his fingers together and sent a wisp of green smoke rising toward the ceiling. Roy had to step back to keep from gagging on the stench.

  “So, uh—cough—will you help us sneak into the wizard’s tower and steal their—cough—tokens?”

  “Sneaking? That’s not really fitting for Rancid Jimmy.”

  “OK. What is fitting for Rancid Jimmy? Uh, I mean, for you.”

  “Since you’ve done me the courtesy of using my correct form of address, I’ll tell you. Rancid Jimmy is all about spectacle, raw power, and grand purpose. I don’t want to steal from the wizards. I want to write my name in the history books with one glorious act.”

  “Any plans on when that will be?”

  “Every day that I refuse the wash, I’m building power, cultivating layers of my theme. I’m filling up my resonance to the brim, and when I find the right opportunity, I’ll unleash a miasma of pestilence so overpowering that none shall escape it.”

  “Not today then. Got it.” Roy stepped away, relieved to be done talking to him.

  Roy took three deep breaths before moving on to his last prospect, hoping the stench hadn’t moved onto him just by standing there.

  Cate didn’t seem repelled, at least. Instead, she smiled as soon as Roy approached.

  “Hey, Cate. I’m putting a team together for a heist on the wizard’s tower. Want to come?

  “Sure, just let me go get my batons from my room, and I’ll meet you out front.”

  If only everyone could be that easy to persuade.

  Outside, the crew was already gathering. Tex had brought horses from the stables, and Bastion had seemingly calmed down enough from the mention of his father to start going over the plan with those assembled.

  Sam, Tex, Kyle, Cate.

  Skeleton. Samurai. Action hero. Cheerleader.

  Exactly the kind of eclectic group he liked to see. Possibly it was too heavy on melee fighters, considering they were going up against wizards with a lot of projectile wands.

  At least the last member of their group would help with that. Nate emerged from the gunsmith’s wearing camo fatigues with a layer of leaves glued to every part of them. Even the barrel of his absurdly large rifle had a sapling strapped to it.

  Rather than speaking, he simply nodded, shaking the plastic night vision goggles on his forehead.

  Time to set off then.

  Roy mounted his horse, assuming that theme magic would help him learn how to ride it.