Geekomancy (11 page)

“But with more control, you can use more power, longer, and with better effect. I knew a Geekomancer who channeled
Star Wars
so well she called herself a Jedi and no one questioned her.”

Ree raised an eyebrow, thinking,
Now, that would be cool.
She imagined herself in Jedi robes, wielding a real lightsaber, “Duel of the Fates” playing in the background as she faced down Darth Maul.

Ree shook off the daydream and saw Eastwood smile at her. “Cool, right? Channeling genres takes a lot out of you, and you’ll get better with practice. It’ll also be easier to switch when you need to. For now, you should stick to watching a whole movie or episode, preferably things you already know and love. Your emotional attachment to the material determines how much you can get out of it.”

“So
Die Hard
is a better choice for action-fu than
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.
”

Eastwood snarled at the mention of the second film. “I hated that movie so much, I got my ninety-one minutes back.”

“Huh?”

“Not relevant.” Eastwood waved his hand, dismissing the thought. He turned to his wall of screens, typing a few things in on one of a half-dozen keyboards. “I’ll handle the witness investigations, but to do that, we need to pick up some things. Ready for a field trip?”

Ree pulled out her pockets. “I forgot my permission slip. Does this mean we get to raid the stacks?” she asked, eager to dig into his Willy Wonka–level stash. In the short time she’d spent in the Dorkcave, she’d already decided that she could spend a solid month rummaging through all of his loot.
You could run practically run Gen Con out of this place,
she mused.

“Are you still channeling anything?”

Ree shook her head. “Not unless Drunkomancy is a thing.”

Without missing a beat, Eastwood said, “Dipsomancy is very real, but it takes more than just getting hammered to do anything useful.”

“I was joking,” Ree said, half apologetic and half amused.

Eastwood shrugged. “Get yourself some water.” He indicated a watercooler off to one side of his mega-desk. “Then find something useful to watch on my computer while I sort out our supplies for the trip. It won’t be particularly safe, but it should be hella instructive.”

Ree raised an eyebrow. “Hella?”

“I spent about a decade in NorCal. Deal with it.”

Ree sat down at Eastwood’s computer and found the Media folder. It popped up to full screen, and she saw what must have been thousands of files. “What were you doing in NorCal?”

Eastwood had disappeared down an aisle that was mostly boxes marked with D&D module titles, but he’d apparently heard her. “Saving the world.”

She looked away from the screen and shouted, “Can you expand that a little, Captain Cryptic?”

Eastwood harrumphed. “My nickname comes from my time there, fighting over the Wild Wild Web, when W-W-W was new. A bunch of techie practitioners discovered how to astrally project into the Internet. Poof: digital cowboys, spiritual boom towns, and then turf wars to decide the Web’s ontological disposition.”

Ree blinked and stopped for a second. “Are you shitting me?” She looked back at the computers, with several screens open to various webpages. She remembered early Internet browsing, BBSes, Usenet, and the Didn’t Seem So Bad at the Time horror that was AOL.

“Not in the least. This monster-hunting stuff is my retirement plan, young padawan.”

Ree followed Eastwood down the row, intrigued. “Forget movies, I want to hear that story right now.”

“No time. You can borrow my friend’s memoir, though—it covers most of the good stuff. Now pick a movie—we don’t have time for you to watch something through, but I refuse to take you to the market without something awesome kicking around your mind.”

“Market?” Ree asked.

“We need stuff. I said that already.” There was impatience in his voice.

Someone’s grumpy,
Ree thought. She let it go and returned to the Media Database from Heaven. He had
Six-String Samurai, Trolls 2,
the Remastered (but not Special Edition)
Star Wars,
and the complete works of Roger Corman—all on just one column of one page. What kind of organization structure that was, Ree couldn’t say, but it was impressive. She browsed for five minutes until Eastwood emerged from the stacks and told her to hurry up and pick something.

“What would I get from
Hellboy II
?” she asked.

“Invincible Hand, probably.”

Meh
.

Seeing an old favorite, she asked, “Do you have a rapier I can use?”

“Sure.”

The Princess Bride
it is
. She double-clicked and sat back as the film started to play on Eastwood’s 3x3 cluster of monitors. Her reverie was occasionally interrupted by a clunk or thud as Eastwood stomped through the stacks. By the time Buttercup went out on her ride, Eastwood had finished assembling his bag and taken a seat beside her, sorting a bag and half-watching the film. He handed her a disturbingly familiar prop rapier that she couldn’t place, which she balanced on her lap while watching.
The Princess Bride
was, by many rubrics, a near-perfect film. Adventure, romance, fencing, monsters, miracles, pirates, torture, everything. She must have watched it a hundred times as a kid, sitting on her mom’s lap.

As soon as the duel at the Cliffs of Insanity was done, Eastwood stood up. “Okay, that’s enough. We need to go.”

“But . . . Fezzik! The poison!” She felt approximately five years old, complaining like that, but when Eastwood narrowed his eyes, she merely sighed, standing up. “Do you have a belt for this?” she asked, holding up the rapier.

Eastwood fished something else out of the bag and presented her with a slim black belt, complete with a black-leather-and-crushed-red-velvet sword hanger.

“Schweet,” Ree said in her Cartman voice as she pushed the sheathed rapier through the loops of the hanger, then put on the belt, tightening it a few notches past its most worn point.

“Yes, so don’t lose it. Now follow me, and don’t talk unless I’m talking.” Eastwood punched a code into a keypad on the wall, which produced the “secret door opens” sound from Zelda. A door swung open where Ree was sure there hadn’t been a door before. It revealed a dingy, dimly lit hall that reminded her of far too many slasher flicks.

Eastwood gestured to the hall. “First stop, Grognard’s.”

•   •   •

The tunnel was dank, moist, and dim. It was lit only by dust-covered incandescent bulbs in cages spaced every fifty feet. Eastwood and Ree each had a flashlight, but Eastwood had told her they’d save them for if the lightbulbs went out, which wasn’t at all ominous.

The weight of the rapier tugged at her waist, but she felt comforted when she put her hands on the cool, oiled handle.It just felt . . . right. Like she was doing what she was meant to do. A fantastic mélange of genres and wit rolled around in her mind, and she kept herself entertained by choreographing fight scenes as they walked.

Eastwood broke the uneasy silence. “There are more critters down here than bedbugs in a Queens apartment, and most of them are attracted to light. They’re used to the lightbulbs, but if we give them more to go by . . .”

“Got it. Just how much time do you spend tromping through tunnels?”

Eastwood quirked an eyebrow. “I never really thought about it. This is the safest way to get to Grognard’s.”

“Through the tunnels that are infested with monsters?” Ree asked.

“Monsters I can handle. The gangbangers who pretty much run the neighborhood above us, not so much. I have a handful of things that can stop a bullet, but they’re damned hard to come by.” Eastwood held up his lightsaber. “Weapons like these things have a nostalgia battery, and when it’s used up, you have to wait until the people’s investment in the object recharges the psychic energy. It has a daily limit, more or less, like the Furrymancers. Lightsabers would recharge almost instantly, except there are so many of them around, the energy gets divided up.”

“And then I woke up and went back to having a normal life.” Ree pinched herself, shrugging when nothing changed. She let her mind slip back to
The Princess Bride,
keeping the energy moving, hoping it would stay with her longer if she kept excited.

“You’re going all the way down the rabbit hole,
chica
. It’s time to get over the shock and start following the Eat Me and Drink Me labels.”

Ree tapped Eastwood on the shoulder with her flashlight. He stopped and turned to face her. She said, “Call me
chica
again, and I will beat you into a bloody pulp and sell your blood on the Internet as mana potions. Got it?”

Eastwood gave her a predatory smile, then closed in, crowding her back against the wall. “I’ve faced down things so terrifying that if you looked at them through a TV, you’d lose all of your hair. If you heard their voices echoed down an endless hollow, you’d claw out your own ears. A single touch from some of these things can sap every ounce of youth and vitality from your skinny body, and it wouldn’t be more than a crumb of sustenance for them.”

He leaned forward into the light, which washed out his face even more. “I’ve faced down horrors older than time itself, creatures that, were they to wake fully, would drag the world down into a cold sea of tormenting ab-existence to be slowly digested, body and soul. I’ve faced these things and I’m still here. I could have retired a decade ago, but instead I’m on the front line of the war to keep this frakked-up world running so you and your friends can fritter away your lives.”

Eastwood stuck a finger in front of Ree’s face. “Understand that you are an ally at best, an amusement in practice, and cannon fodder at worst. If you raise a hand against me, I will put you down so fast, you won’t even have time to consider whether your death is more Jango Fett or Red Shirt #2. Get it?”

Daaaamn.
Ree felt the musty and rough concrete wall behind her and Eastwood inches from her face, his pupils narrowed and eyebrows hard-set. Until that moment, she’d believed he couldn’t possibly deserve the name he used. Not anymore. Ree raised her hands in surrender. “Got it.”

Eastwood stepped back and smiled, the Rar-Face gone. “Good. You’ll need to toughen up,
chica
. That was too easy.” He turned back and continued walking, the shadows shifting around him from the various light sources. “Plus, I don’t kill people. People who are people, that is. And you’re still people.”

“What kind of people aren’t people?” she asked after a second to shake out the fear.
I can’t tell if I was actually threatened or if I was just To the Pain–ed.

“The ones who’ve traded their souls to demons, or anyone who delves so deep into magic that they lose track of their humanity, go off the deep end, and become monsters themselves. Those are the things to look out for.” Eastwood shuddered. “Luckily, they’re pretty rare, since folks in the Underground are good about self-policing. Anyone gets too close to the edge, we have an intervention. And if that doesn’t work, we have to put them down.”

Wow. This guy needs to get out even more than I do.
“You’ve had to do that?”

“Sadly, yes.” Eastwood’s voice was soft, sad, far weaker than it had been a minute ago with his threat.

“Like the fur-suit guy?”

“Maybe. I picked up his scent earlier but never caught up with him. I think he figured out he had a tail aside from the rubber one and beat it.”

Ree was unsure what to say as they continued walking through the tunnel. A song popped in her head.
I am slowly going crazy, 1-2-3-4-5-6-switch. Crazy going slowly am I, 6-5-4-3-2-1-switch.

Eastwood stopped at a door Ree hadn’t noticed, and she walked up beside him. It had been red at some point but was now faded and stained, and a third of the paint had flaked off to reveal coarse wood below.

“Here we are. Don’t talk back if anyone gives you flak. Let me handle it. These are mean old bastards, and Grognard is the meanest of them all.”

Ree raised an eyebrow but nodded when Eastwood stared at her. He opened the door, and they walked up a flight of stairs to another door. Eastwood opened the second door to reveal . . .

A game store. No, wait, a bar. Somehow it was both. Someone had crossbred a pub and a game store and succeeded. It was a split-level arrangement, the bar a short flight down from the game-store section. The upper seating consisted of metal folding chairs around game tables that had undershelves loaded with terrain and figures. The lower seating was sturdy wooden chairs around cherry and walnut circular tables. Ree saw game books and miniatures packs lining the walls.

The patrons were mostly older men, complete with grizzled gamer beards and paunches. There were also men with Gamer Body Type 2: tall and lanky, trench-coat-enabled. There were ponytails and faces pocked with acne scars, ancient black T-shirts sporting the logos of obscure games from the ’60s and ’70s, only half of which Ree could identify. It was Gamer
Cheers
.