Big Time’s crew had worked fast to fix the elevator overnight. It had new doors, and the ceiling was patched in the place where Roy had star-blasted it. The walls were still damp when he leaned against them though, and the carriage had a musty smell that made Roy think of the swamp they were preparing for.

  He was looking forward to it. As much as he loved the attractions of Bay Town, he hadn’t come to Florida just to browse through stores and eat in restaurants. Now that they had a destination in mind, he felt the desire to move on building within him.

  It felt like that with a lot of things. When he hit a new PR in the gym. When he finished watching a film series or explored a new abandoned building. That pressure to move on. Whatever he’d just done was quickly forgotten while the next thing consumed his thoughts.

  The Mayor’s office had seen its share of quick repairs, too. The lower parts of the missing wall were replaced with panels of tightly lashed bamboo, bordered by wooden supply crates sprayed with stenciled labels like “RATIONS: SPICE FLAVOUR” and “SNAKE REPELLENT: DO NOT INHALE.” Above them were mosquito net curtains and an outward-facing awning of dried palm fonds, which were rustled every so often by a few displaced geckos.

  Jungle theming. Repurposed from Big Time’s planned outer defences. It would help the building resist another storm like last night’s, but in here the damage was already done.

  Ruined books were heaped in a corner, the scorched mixed with the soaked, dripping into a puddle of wet charcoal. The more intact books were sorted into crooked stacks beside them.

  The desk was the most intact thing in the room. When Roy and Bastion entered, there were sketchpads strewn across it, and Mayor Big Time was looking between them and his model town.

  “Hi,” said Roy. “You wanted to see us?”

  Big Time looked up. His hair was dishevelled, and he was still wearing the same clothes as the night before. Still, he smiled. “I wanted to thank you for saving my life. Whatever reward you want, just ask.”

  “Tokens,” said Bastion.

  “Supplies,” said Roy.

  “Here,” he threw a plastic bag at Bastion, which he snapped from the air with one hand. “And supplies are already included for the next job.”

  “Hey,” said Bastion. “Did you find out what the hell happened last night yet?”

  “Not to my satisfaction, but their goal seems clear enough. They took out the stairwells and the elevator, distracted the town guards with the trident, then sent heavily armed men to storm this office. They also fled as soon as I appeared outside. It looks like their only objective was killing me.”

  “Is it because of your theme?” asked Roy. Going to all that trouble to kill a town mayor didn’t make a lot of sense to him, but going after someone with a great deal of magical power was more understandable.

  “What is your theme, anyway?” asked Bastion. “Big Boss, you said. Do people listen to what you say more the larger your physical size is?”

  “Ooh,” said Roy, pointing at Big Time. “Are you literally large and in charge? Is that how it works?”

  “That’s just the costume side of things. For alignment, I have to actually go around telling people what to do, in person. The environment that boosts my resonance should be obvious.” Big Time spread his arms wide. “It’s this town. Here, anyone I give instructions to gets a resonance boost to their own theme. Anywhere else, I’d be much less effective.”

  “OK,” said Bastion. “But what about the time-stopping clock. I think you're burying the lede here.”

  “That’s something separate. It started working once I’d got Bay Town’s first shops up and running. It’s not as useful as it sounds. Beyond the cooldown, it’s pretty unreliable. So far, it’s only worked when the town’s in real danger. The first time, it was a fire in the cold storage building. The second was when a hurricane flooded the entire street. The third time was last night.”

  That sounded familiar. So far, Roy had only been able to make his sword glow at crucial moments. He hadn’t mentioned seeing a mascot though, and it didn’t sound like he had any ideas about how to get it working more reliably.

  Bastion was already moving on to more immediately practical matters. “Who do you know around here that has it out for you?

  “The key pirates want me dead for certain, but everything about their theming is stolen. Custom Sci-fi weapons are far beyond their capability.” Big Time scratched his chin. “I’ll tell you who does have the motive and the means, our own homeland.”

  Roy was shocked. “You think the Star Republic did this? Didn’t you say they were sending diplomats here to ask you to join up with them?”

  “Do you really think they wouldn’t do it?” said Bastion.

  “But…there was a helicopter. The Star Republic doesn’t have aircraft, only recon balloons.”

  “Not so long ago, they didn’t have trucks either, and now they're fixing up the roads all around Star City for them. They could get a helicopter working for this.”

  “But why?” Roy asked.

  “Maybe they figured whoever rose to replace Big Time could be bribed into joining up. I used to overhear my father talking about the shady tactics they’d use to annex outlying settlements. They usually weren’t as blatant as this, but maybe they're getting bolder.”

  “Sci-fi weapons aren’t their theme.” Roy knew that didn’t fit, though. The Republic had themed special forces. It was what he’d been thinking of doing before he’d committed to skipping out entirely. Could this have been one of those groups?

  “For now, they’re my number one suspects,” said Big Time. “With that helicopter though…” He glanced at the sky, “There’s a chance it's a group from so far away I haven’t heard of them before. People we know nothing about, which would be even more concerning.”

  “It really sucks that they got away with the trident,” said Roy. “I was hoping Tim could use it to help the town. You know, dredge up treasure, find more underwater attractions, summon a crab army to help defend the place. What happened with Tim, by the way? Is he alright?”

  Roy really hoped he wasn’t dead. He also hoped he hadn’t betrayed them all by handing over the trident to the men in gray.

  “The attacker's opening move was shooting through his store’s windows,” said Big Time. “Tim hid in the basement and only realized the trident was gone when we found him down there this morning. I’ll need to help him restock. Though from what I’ve heard, his inventory wasn’t great even before it got blasted into goo.” Big Time grimaced. “That’s two empty stores to deal with.”

  “Two?” asked Bastion.

  “My men found Tech Trove abandoned. The entire store was a front for their assassination attempt.”

  “I knew that Mr. Pepper was a bad guy,” said Roy, pointing at Bastion. “He mistreated animals. Classic psychopath behaviour.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “You met him?” Big Time leaned forward. “Tell me everything. It could be important.”

  “It was nothing,” said Bastion.

  “I’d like to hear it anyway.”

  “It was really nothing,” Bastion insisted. “We were shopping around to get the best price for the trident—this was before we knew Tim worked for you, by the way—and Pepper wanted a live demo.”

  “He kept these lobsters trapped in a tiny little tank, without a castle or anything else to play with. It looked like they’d been there for weeks,” said Roy.

  “See, that is relevant,” said Big Time. “The trident was part of their plan for a long time. They needed it, which means their resources are limited—which means we still have time to prepare.” He looked down at his model and sighed. “I really wish my plans to fortify the town were further along. You two need to head for the swamps urgently. I need those new themes to defend this place.”

  “That’s actually what we wanted to talk to you about,” said Bastion.

  “Yeah,” said Roy. “W’s going to make us some really great armor and a steampunk hovercraft, but we need to know what you can tell us about the swamp monsters. It'll help with her designs.”

  “Steampunk, you say?” Big Time scratched his chin, intrigued.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Bastion. “It’ll turn your whole town into a stinking, soot-stained hellhole, and it doesn’t even work most of the time. Trust me, I’ve seen it.”

  “Still,” mused Big Time, glancing around. “This is a Gilded Age hotel…there’d be plenty of materials.”

  “That’s what W. thought,” said Roy. “She was hoping we could use some things from around here for the hovercraft.”

  “By all means. This mission is high priority. Anyway, you wanted to know about the swamp monsters. I’m sorry to tell you there’s a fair amount of unknowns. The other treasure hunters I hired didn’t get very far.

  “Gator-men are the ones I know the most about. They were conjured by an old folktale, and they’re everywhere in the swamps. There’s a lot more man than gator about them. Picture an alligator head on a humanoid body and you’re in the right ballpark, though they’ve still got claws to match their jaws, and every part of their body regenerates incredibly fast.”

  “Wait,” said Bastion. “You mean if we slice a limb off, it’ll grow it back in real time?”

  “Exactly. There are real alligators living in the swamps too, and they can’t regrow limbs at all. It seems the idea behind the gator-men came from lizards in general, and we’d all be much better off if those pre-Warp people hadn’t had that misconception, because it makes them damned near impossible to kill.”

  “Huh,” said Roy. “Magical regeneration. Kind of reminds me of fantasy trolls.”

  “How do you kill those?” asked Bastion.

  “Fire, acid, and blunt force,” Roy replied.

  “Well, fire won’t work in the swamp. Even acid would get washed away,” said Bastion. “But W. can make us maces or something.”

  “Not just maces, there’s a whole range of crushing weapons we could make,” said Roy.

  “I’ll leave that to the experts,” said Bastion. “What’s next?”

  “Slimes,” said Big Time. “But if you're thinking of fantasy slimes, you should know that this type is different. It’s a mass of neon green goo that splits off pieces of itself and spreads through pools of water. No one knows where it comes from, but there’s a lot of it, and if you get any of it on you, it’ll try to crawl up to your face and suffocate you.”

  “So no sleeping in the hovercraft then,” said Bastion.

  “We’ll stay alert any time we’re near water,” added Roy.

  “Anything else?” asked Bastion.

  “A few miscellaneous monsters, the kind you’d find anywhere. Giant carnivorous fish, the odd desiccated zombie. Only one other major threat, and that one can be avoided entirely if you follow a few procedures.”

  “Procedures?” Bastion scoffed. “That’s not what we came here for. We had enough of that back in the cadets. We’re here to live free, right, Roy?”

  “Damn right. He who is brave is free.”

  “Do you know where that quote comes from? Originally, I mean.”

  “Someone said it before Future Knight?” Roy asked.

  “I’ll lend you some books for the road. You have the right idea, but there’s bravery enough in just entering this thing’s territory without provoking it. Have you heard of resonance hot zones?”

  “You mean the way theme magic works better here in Florida?” asked Roy.

  “There are things more localised than that, where reality breaks down in specific, heightened ways. The Rabbit is one of those.”

  “Is it an actual rabbit?” Bastion asked.

  “Now it is. Before that, it was a figure of speech. The land where Lightner World sits used to be all orange groves. James Lightner bought up a massive swath of it in secret—using shell companies to keep the scale quiet, but there was still a huge area around it containing a whole lot of nothing. When he opened the world’s biggest theme park, that whole area experienced a gold rush. Everyone wanted to cash in on his coattails. There were hotels for those who wouldn’t pay Lightner’s eye-watering prices, and gift shops with bootleg made-in-Taiwan merchandise. That whole area was a set of boom towns for a while.

  “And then?” Bastion asked.

  “Then Lightner built his own budget hotels and started suing everyone for copyright infringement.”

  “What’s that?” asked Roy.

  “You used to be able to own an idea,” said Bastion. “If someone made something too similar to yours, then you’d go to a courthouse and make them pay you money.”

  “That sounds weird,” said Roy. “Like, I get it if someone copied your thing exactly, but it seems like it’d be hard to make anything new if you couldn’t copy things.”

  Big Time went on. “Most of those surrounding stores and hotels went out of business, and they blamed Lightner for it. They said that if you tried to build anything with a theme too close to Lightner World, ‘The Rabbit’ would come to shut you down.”

  “Why a rabbit?”

  “It was an early mascot of the Lightner company. It became the personification of how Lightner World consumed everything around it.”

  “Let me guess,” said Bastion. “Now there’s a literal rabbit that literally eats people.”

  “The reports I have are from the people it didn’t eat, other treasure hunters who made it back from the swamp. The first struck out on his own, a huge fan of Lightner World who wanted to see it for himself and took the most direct route possible to get there. He was so much of a fan that he even went around wearing a Lightner World t-shirt.

  “The Rabbit appeared as soon as he reached the northern edge of the swamps. He said it popped out from behind a street sign that was much too small to hide behind, then stretched its limbs twenty feet trying to grab him. He ran. It chased, but right before it reached him, it stopped dead, like it had hit an invisible wall.

  “It pulled a giant hammer from nowhere and swung it hard, but it got stuck on that same invisible boundary. That’s how we know it can’t exist outside its zone of altered resonance.”

  “You said there were others…” said Bastion, slowly.

  “Two brothers. The first treasure hunters I hired. I told them to avoid any Lightner merchandise, since I suspected that it was a trigger. They made it all the way to the video store on my map before things went wrong. They started discussing how they’d split the reward, which counted as a business transaction. That was the second trigger condition.

  “Those two saw even more of what the Rabbit can do. Cartoon physics mostly, deforming itself, detaching its body parts, pulling objects from nowhere, and even changing the backdrop behind itself. It had so many tricks they couldn’t keep up. Only one of them made it back.”

  “How?” asked Bastion. “If it’s that powerful, warping reality on the fly, how did one of them escape?”

  “He had a boat, and a theme that worked incredibly well in the water.”

  “What was his theme?” Roy asked.

  “Pirate,” the mayor scowled. “The first real pirate Florida’s had in three hundred years. He was so unhappy about that job, he convinced a group of other treasure hunters to join him, stole everything he could carry, and sailed off to Key West. That’s why I’m being more careful with who I trust this time.”

  Big Time shifted uncomfortably and quickly moved on. “That’s about it. No Lightner merch and no business deals once you get near Lightner World. As for supplies, Ben can help you get whatever you need from around the hotel.”

  Ben was waiting for them in the elevator, and Bastion stayed silent for most of the ride down.

  “We’ll need some time to think before we can tell you what we’re looking for,” was all he said to Ben.

  Once they were out of earshot, he pulled Roy aside. “I can’t be the only one who found that story extremely fucking fishy.”

  “You think Big Time was lying about something?”

  ”More like he wasn’t telling us something.”

  “I still think it’s our best shot,” said Roy.

  “I don’t have a better idea either, but the moment I find one, we’re ditching him and his plan. Who knows what else summons the damned Rabbit?”

  As they walked the grounds looking for anything they could repurpose into weaponry, Roy imagined all kinds of bludgeoning weapons cracking gator skulls. In his mind, they were so flat they looked made for it. It would be like a bigger, more thrilling game of whack-a-mole.

  He couldn’t wait.