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  The look on my face was enough to get Patch to jump around for joy. “It worked! Illgott and David Bowie and I are vindicated! You’re a Hero now, too!” Patch bounded over and threw her arms around me, hugging me fiercely to her ample chest. She smelled like leftover cinnamon bun and arsenic, and I breathed her in deep. “I promise that it’s going to be so awesome,” she whispered.

  “You better be ri-” I started to say, until the ground beneath us gave way and we tumbled wildly into the void below.

  Chapter 8

  I tried to hold on to her with one hand and grab the side of the chute we were plunging through with the other.

  Desperation (Friskiness) Roll

  Friskiness Modifier: +2

  Roll: 11 + 2 = 13

  Situational Modifier (Surprise, Motherfudger!): -8

  New Aggregate: 13 – 8 = 5

  Result: Failure

  I couldn’t find purchase on the smooth wall as we rushed past, and trying only made us cartwheel crazily. Neither failing nor falling took much of the shine off of being able to see one of my stats in action in the real world.

  I got a wakeup call pretty fast when I landed on my head.

  Impact Damage Roll

  Tenacity Modifier: -1

  Damage Modifier (Fall Broken): Damage reduced by 50% due to intervening object

  Roll: 8 - 1 = 7

  Result: 10 points of Impact Damage

  Remaining Hit Points: 8

  Good thing I’d gotten all those extra hit points, since the bone crunching stop at the end of the ride wiped out more than half of them.

  “Patch?” I said groggily. The ground was soft, and it took me a couple of seconds to work out that I was basically motorboating her. At least I knew what’d broken my fall.

  An instant later she started sputtering beneath me, which let me stop wondering whether I’d killed her.

  “You okay?” I asked, rolling to one side so that she could get the wind back into her lungs. While she tried, I did my best to look around.

  Not that there was much to look at. It was blacker than I’d tried to turn my heart, the only light coming from my looming concussion throwing off sparks in front of my eyes.

  “Just peachy!” Her response was weaker than usual, but the fall had only dampened her demeanor a little. “But that’s definitely going to leave a mark. Also, you might’ve broken my eyes when you landed on me.”

  “I don’t think so. It’s just really, really dark.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  We bumped heads as both of us tried to stand up at the same time. The quarters were cramped, and when I stepped away from her something dead and overripe squelched beneath my boot.

  It smelled like it may be edible, and I heard Patch bending down to inspect it. “It was a squirrel, but it’s gone all sloppy and slipped through the grate.”

  “That’s great,” I said, “pun intended. One, it proves that we weren’t the only creatures dumb enough to tumble down here and two, it means that something was supposed to get through the thing we’re standing on, even if it was only air.”

  The lights were still dancing around in my vision. I knew they weren’t real, but that didn’t stop my scrambled brain from making me grab at the imaginary fireflies.

  When I did, I ended up scraping my hand against the cold, crumbly construction that surrounded us. It felt like rotten concrete, and my heart sank as I heard the dry skitter of pebbles and a cascade of grit spill away from the wall in front of me.

  The other races I’d Identified had all had Strength as a stat, but it looked like Gearblins replaced that with Power. I’d been given verifiable proof right before our fall that I didn’t have much in the way of that, and yet even as weak as I could still dig deep divots into the material with my nails.

  “Patch,” I moaned. “I think we’re screwed, and not in the good way.”

  “Huh?”

  “If the entire shaft’s as badly maintained as it is down here, there’s no way we’re climbing out. Not without bringing it crumbling down on us before we get halfway up.”

  She was about to respond when a coughing fit cut her short.

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “How many hit points have you got left?”

  “Enough.”

  I didn’t believe her. Maybe the protocol between us should have been that I asked permission first, but I was too worried to bother reading the Terms of Service regarding personal statistics and consent.

  I reached out, careful not to grab something erotic and finally managed to locate her forehead with the back of my hand, soft and gentle the way Mother Mayeye used to check us for the fever.

  Level 1 Mech’nic

  Vital Statistics

  Cunning: 5/10

  Ability Check Modifier: 0

  Power - 3/10

  Ability Check Modifier: -1

  Friskiness - 6/10

  Ability Check Modifier: 0

  Tenacity - 4/10

  Ability Check Modifier: 0

  Allure - 9/10

  Ability Check Modifier: +3

  Poise - 6/10

  Ability Check Modifier: 0

  Hit Point Total: (Tenacity X 3) + 10 per level = 22

  Current Hit Points: 6

  Acquired Knacks

  Bright Sider: The world can be better. In fact, there’s a cumulative 1% chance per day that it will be, even if you’re the only one that sees it.

  White Hat: All rolls required to hinder the helpless are penalized by 50%. All reputation checks are 20% more effective when made on behalf of someone less fortunate than the possessor of this Knack.

  Archetype-Specific Features

  Botnet: 15% chance to remotely manipulate any tech you’ve worked on in the past. Use of the Botnet makes the wielder vulnerable to Orbital Scrying.

  Cauterize: The liberal application of intense heat has a 20% chance per application of stopping Damage Over Time as well as fusing one metal component to another.

  Galvanize: 50% chance to successfully apply a coating of zinc to either steel or iron for the purposes of preventing rust. 50% to spur a crew member into action if they are routed, stunned, confused, or further mentally incapacitated.

  MacGyver: 20% chance to hotwire, lockpick, defuse or improvise a given plot point. Each attempt takes 5 minutes of uninterrupted inspiration and tense music. Requires a Swiss Army Knife, paperclip, gum, matches, boot strings, candles, and duct tape.

  Rube Goldberg Would Be Proud: Items you create do more damage based on their complexity.

  Bugs

  Enthusiasm

  Optimism

  Voluntarily Limited Depth Perception

  Patch was hurt bad, but I was pleased to see that she had a ton of abilities that’d come in handy once we turned on the lights and worked out how dire our situation was.

  For now, I’d do my best to make sure to look out for her more than I usually did.

  If she knew that I’d just peeked at her inner workings, she didn’t let on. “Where are we?”

  “Inside the mountain,” I said, “though that was quite a fall. We may actually be underneath it.”

  “You were right about it being dark,” she said, as helpful as always.

  I knew I should have gone easy on her because of her injuries, especially since I had a feeling that she’d taken the brunt of mine as well, but old habits die hard. “You think? What was the giveaway? The pervading blackness, or the total lack of light?”

  “Wow, Raze. You’ve already managed to be a Hero and a condescending jerk at the same time. Way to give the stereotype a run for its money.” I heard her shift her weight, and I got the impression she was looking straight up through the hole. “I can’t even see any daylight up there.”

  I followed where I thought her gaze was headed and saw that she was right. Usually I didn’t much care for the sun, but if we couldn’t see so much as a speck of blue sky then we were deep.

  “Well,” she said. “You’ve always wanted to get into t
he mountain. Nailed it!”

  “This isn’t exactly what I meant. We may well be stranded…”

  Patch was slowly circling the spot we’d landed, clearly looking for something. I had the impression that we were in a cylindrical chute, and when I felt her breast brush my arm I flushed so red that I was surprised we couldn’t see by the glow of my cheeks.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She was recovered enough by now to speak with some authority, though if she noticed her effect on me she did me a favor and didn’t point it out. “I think we tumbled down a chimney or a ventilation shaft or something. There should be an intake pipe attached near where we’ve landed. If we can find it, we can use it to get out of the here and into the main part of the mountain.”

  “In theory…”

  “Well, yeah. It won’t bring us back to the surface, but it will give us a chance to do some exploring.”

  I knew that Optimism was one of her Bugs, but instead of shooting her down I decided to enjoy the moment. Once she worked out that we were probably trapped down here forever, even I’d be looking back on her spent cheerfulness with wistful sentimentality. “By ‘exploring’, I’m going to assume that you mean we’ll be able to at least see how bad off we really are. If that’s the case, lead on.”

  “Sure thing. The Lost and Foundry isn’t anywhere near as old as this is, but I’ve cleaned those pipes more times than I can count.”

  I heard her expectant pause. Patch’s accidental mastery of the sexual innuendo was one of the many reasons being around her was better than not being around her, and I forced myself to say, “That’s what she said,” for her benefit.

  She tittered happily. “There’s my boy.” Her gloved hand found mine. “Things are going to be all right, I promise. So what if we fell through a hole? Who cares if we’re stranded at the bottom of an ancient shaft, lodged in the complex and most likely rusted-through inner workings of a series of tunnels dug by machines built so long ago and so far out of our understanding th-”

  “Patch, this isn’t helping.”

  “Right. Gotcha. Now, there should be a lever or a button on the inside of the wall. They’d want to have a way out, if they were working in here and something went wrong. You’d be surprised how often we’d get stuck in the equipment at the Foundry if they didn’t have emergency releases…”

  “I don’t think I would, actually.”

  She let go of me and I heard her searching around right before the floor swung away and plunged us into even thicker darkness, though thankfully the drop was shorter than the last one had been.

  Desperation Roll

  Friskiness Modifier: +2

  Roll: 16 + 2 = 18

  Result: Success

  The trash and carcasses that’d piled up in the time between now and whenever the shaft was last emptied fell with us. Patch and I held on to each other, and I landed on my feet and steadied her.

  “Still dark,” she said. “So that’s the same.”

  Even though I knew I wasn’t carrying anything useful I still slapped my pockets just in case I had a lighter or a crystal with a weak illumination enchant on me. I didn’t. “If we can’t see what we’re doing, we’ve got next to no chance of getting out alive.”

  “But we just got here. Can’t we stay a while?”

  “We don’t have much choice.” I could tell by the way the sound carried that we were in a larger chamber. The air was still, but instead of my voice echoing straight back at me I could hear it rolling on ahead and behind us. “If I had to guess, which I do, I’d say we’re in a tunnel.”

  Patch let out a low whistle, and it did the same thing as my words had done. “Hey, we own the mountain now, right?”

  I shrugged. “If possession really is nine-tenths of the law, then yes.”

  “Great. You’re the Mountain King, and I’m Queen of the Mountain. You know what that means?

  “No.”

  “That I got dibs on the top bunk!”

  As unproductive as I knew this new crazy notion was, the very fact that she was willing to share rulership of this dark, useless place with me made me smile. “Yeah,” I said. “I think I could live with that.” Of course, reality set in a moment later, and when I opened my mouth it was to fire some sharp, bubble-bursting words. “Until we inevitably die of thirst…”

  Patch reached out and found my hand again in the dark. This time, I could feel her trembling with fear. “Just don’t wander off from me, okay?”

  I gave her hand a squeeze, completely unaccustomed to the emotions kicking around in my veins. It felt a little like pity, but didn’t have any of the sneer. For some reason I wanted what was best for her more than I wanted it for me.

  I shuddered, but I couldn’t shake the sentiment. “You got it, babe.”

  It was a beautiful moment, one that came as close to the thing that silken-panted poets and silver-tongued bards chased as I was ever going to get.

  An instant later she let rip with a burp so ribald and tremulous that the bass of it wobbled my eyeballs.

  Even though I couldn’t see her, I still glanced over in Patch’s direction with a look of sheer appreciation on my face. “Wow!”

  “Nice one,” she said, with a giggle. “You sure know how to show a girl a good time.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “That wasn’t me.” As much as I wouldn’t have minded taking credit for a gut blaster as impressive as that, if neither one of us had been the one to unleash that hell then it meant we weren’t alone.

  I heard her inhale and then call out, “Who’s there?” as loudly as she could before I could stop her.

  “Damn it, Patch. Let’s be smart about this. I keep telling you, not everybody wants to be your friend.”

  “Because I’m misunderstood, right?”

  I sighed.

  “Right?”

  “Maybe. But nobody’s ever going to get to know you if you get murdered down here because you can’t shut up. Now stick close to me. I think that burp came from up ahead.”

  “Okay. Let’s go and make some new friends then.”

  I didn’t bother to respond, since arguing with her was equal parts pointless and loud. Instead, I concentrated on making as little noise as possible as I picked my way along the passage.

  It wasn’t easy, especially since whoever or whatever called this place home had obviously done a worse job of cleaning up after themselves than a frat house full of Ettin pledges.

  Stealth Roll

  Friskiness Modifier: +2

  Roll: 7 + 2 = 9

  Situational Modifier (Obstacles and Darkness): -4

  New Aggregate: 9 – 4 = 5

  Result: Failure

  No matter how careful I was, with every step I inadvertently kicked something hollow or crunched through an unseen pile of knee-deep trash. Patch wasn’t rolling any better behind me, and between us we sounded more like the approach of a column of tanks than a couple of lonesome Gearblin attempting an ambush.

  By the time we’d trudged, climbed, and in some places practically swam through a staggering variety of debris to reach the end of the tunnel, I could stick my hand out and feel a bend in the passage. It wasn’t the terminus after all, and a sharp left-hand turn led away.

  There was no point in backtracking. Instead, I froze for a moment and tried to analyze every sound that drifted to me.

  Decipher (Auditory) Roll

  Cunning Modifier: +3

  Roll: 12 + 3 = 15

  Situational Modifier (Companion’s Noise Level): -8

  New Aggregate: 15 - 8 = 7

  Result: Failure

  Great. I couldn’t argue with the fairness of the penalty, since Patch was a constant cacophony of clamor and commotion, commenting on exciting new smells she’d discovered and noisily deciding where we’d should put the throne, once we’d built one.

  “Shhh,” I hissed at her, physically reaching back and managing to clamp my hands over her mouth once she got close so that I could get another roll.<
br />
  Decipher (Auditory) Roll

  Cunning Modifier: +3

  Roll: 15 + 3 = 18

  Result: Success

  That was better, and it let me zero in on a new sound, a low rumble that reminded me of a tired machine grinding fitfully with unknown, though no-doubt nefarious, purpose.

  Even my hand didn’t shut Patch up for long. She was talking, and I let her go so that I could hear her.

  “-and I’d be surprised,” Patch said, ignoring my attempts to triangulate the vibration, “if this shaft has been touched in a hundred years.”

  “That’s what she said,” I replied absently. “And be quiet, damn you. I’m trying to work out what that noise is, and your blather is making it next to impossible.”

  “Oh,” she said, not hurt in the least. “Do you mean the snoring, or are we listening for something else?”

  “It’s not…” I started, though I let my voice trail off into the darkness. “It is snoring, isn’t it?”

  “Yep.” Without another word and before I could grab her to slow her down, she ran off ahead along the curve we’d found. She must have been trailing her hand along the wall to go that fast, and the sheer stupidity and speed of her action took me completely by surprise. Judging by her noise, I was a couple of dozen feet behind her and losing ground fast.

  If I could tell where she was by the sound of her plowing through the refuse, so could anything with teeth and claws and anger issues.

  I hurried up, determined to get in front of her. Instead of hearing a bestial roar or the screeching howl of some hideous subterranean bat-wolf hybrid, Patch slowed down and called out in the textbook definition of an Outside Voice, “There’s another wall here, and then the floor slopes down and the passage angles to the right.”