Omnitopia Dawn (16 page)

Rik did some quick sums in his head as to how much spell energy it was going to cost him to reknit the tendon and regrow the muscle.
There’s so much of it, that’s the problem.
But it was
his
problem, not the client’s. Other medical mages might go around requiring payment in advance, but that wasn’t how the MediMages Without Frontiers guilds operated.
I get to forgo those fancy new robes until this guy pays me off,
Rik thought.
Whatever.

He okayed the payment for the spell, heard that soft
ka-ching!
again
,
and held out his hands. Under them the magefire bloomed. The muscle began reinflating itself: the tendon rewove its core, then its sheath. Arnulf glanced up only briefly during this, noting that there suddenly seemed to be lot of movement around them, big dark forms blowing past across the plaza.

“Don’t worry,” the ogre said. “Looks like the citizenry and the tourists’re getting rid of the trolls. I’ll make sure you don’t get trampled.”

Arnulf saw one massive black form rushing toward them gather itself and leap right over him, the ogre, and the battle mammoth. It was one of those giant flesh-eating doomsteeds from Palomino, followed by several others of its kind.
That’s gonna be fun,
Arnulf thought, as the huge angry creature and its fellows went plunging past and headed for a group of trolls running out of the plaza on the south side.
Be interesting to see one of them eat a troll. Probably crunch the thing right up like hard candy. Maybe later.
He kept his eye on the mammoth’s muscle: it would be a shame to spend all this energy on a crooked heal.

But it was coming along nicely. After a few more minutes of making sure that both ends of the muscle knit out equally, it was just a matter of sealing the torn underskin fascia membrane and regrowing the red-brown fur over the healed injury. “Would you try to move that leg for me now, please?” Arnulf said.

The mammoth moved the leg jerkily: moved it again. “Feels better,” it said.

Arnulf stood up, dusted himself off. “Okay,” he said. “I mean, all right. Try to stand up now.”

Shakily the mammoth stood. It swayed a little, but didn’t fall again. “You feel all right otherwise?” Arnulf said. “How is your head?”

“Head’s all right,” said the mammoth. It turned its head, felt the leg with its trunk.

“Good,” Arnulf said. “Is everything else all right?”

The mammoth turned back toward Arnulf, patted his face with its trunk: a clumsy but friendly gesture. “All, all right. Thanks, thanks many.”

“Great.” Arnulf went over to it, patted the mammoth’s shoulder. “My card.”

Instantly the mammoth was painlessly branded there with the mark of Arnulf’s guild, his own set of ID sigils, and the Omnitopian date and time. When the player handling this character was ready, or could afford it, he’d credit Arnulf’s game account with the basic healing payment, or more if the player could afford it—healing was always assumed to run on a sliding scale, so that those who could afford it paid a little more and subsidized those who might have more trouble paying. Once the healing was paid for, the brand would vanish; in the meantime it served as a free ad for Arnulf’s services and for his guild.

The mammoth felt the brand curiously with its trunk as the ogre got up to have a look at it as well. “We’re all done,” Arnulf said. “Go on, better get out of here till they clean this up. And keep your head down, guy.”

The mammoth nodded and lumbered off toward the Ring. “Hey, thanks for helping him,” said the ogre, heading that way too.

“It’s what we do,” Arnulf said. “Thanks for making sure he got help. That was the important part.”

Arnulf packed himself up, dusted himself off, and looked around to see what seemed to be the safest direction in which to make his escape.

He found that four or five other practitioners had hit the field of battle while he was busy with the battle mammoth. There wasn’t really anything much for him to do: “complete” casualties, character deaths, had already vanished from the field of battle. Others, not so badly hurt or just shaken up, were getting to their feet, checking themselves out. There was no more fighting going on in the plaza. The trolls had all been chased out of it, and even as he watched the doomsteeds and various others pursuing them, Arnulf could see some of the trolls vanishing into thin air, as if simply plucked out of play. “Looks like the cavalry’s come over the hill,” he said under his breath.

He watched the plaza for a few more minutes. The Ring was still closed off.
Got a few minutes to kill here, I guess,
Arnulf thought, and glanced around. Off to one side was a group of Elves and humans and other creatures, leaning against one of the buildings that surrounded the plaza and surveying the former battlefield.

Arnulf made his way over to them. “Everybody okay over here?”

There was a general chorus of agreement. “Thought we’d stay out of the way while the management tidies things up,” said one of the smaller creatures sitting by the wall, a black witch’s cat with a British accent. “No point in getting stepped on.”

“No,” Arnulf said, leaning against the wall as well, watching idly as the plaza started to clear out. “But I got here in the middle of the brouhaha. When did it start?”

“About half an hour ago,” said the cat. “Big charge of trolls came out of the Ring from about twelve different portals over a few seconds. Trashed anyone who got in their way.” Its tail lashed. “There were a lot of people waiting for access—it turned into a real mob scene. Then the word got out on the City nets and half the town came pouring in here, all indignant and looking for a fight.” The cat smiled. “Transient population’s bigger than usual, what with the rollout coming. Whoever those trolls were representing, they didn’t have it as easy as they thought they were going to.”

Rik shook his head. “Well, ‘indignant’ I can understand,” he said. “I thought there couldn’t be wars in Omnitopia City anymore. The City outlawed that kind of thing years back!”

The next player over along the wall from the cat, an Elf leaning wearily on a bow with a broken string, got a bemused look. “Well, yeah, it did,” he said. “But have you been hiding under a rock or something? The mayor got killed last night.”

“What?”
It came as a shock. The charismatic Dwarven politician Margon k’Pellish had held the Omnitopia City mayoralty, it seemed to Arnulf, for the guts of forever. Everybody had gotten used to him as a likable, laissez-faire kind of character with brains enough to run the city and also to stay out of its way. Then again, that long a time spent in office was probably reason enough for whoever was playing old M.K.P. to have gotten a little careless.

“Yup,” the Elf said, leaning his bow against the nearby wall and patting himself down for a moment, then coming up with a scented smokestick. He tapped it against the wall; the tapped end lit. The Elf took a long drag and blew out purple smoke that wove itself into rings, linked through one another and went floating off into the evening sky. “Manticore got him,” the Elf said. “Nasty. Someone smuggled it into his office.”

Arnulf blinked. A manticore stood six feet high at its leonine body’s shoulder, and might be four or five yards’ length between the nose on the beast’s ugly man-face and the scorpion-stinger tip of the long tail. And then there were those big sharp-edged wings to consider, spanning some eighteen or twenty feet even on a small animal. “Must have been some determined smuggler,” Rik said.

The Elf nodded, took another drag on the smokestick, then stubbed it out on the wall and dropped the butt. A mallrat scampered down out of the side street, caught the butt before it even hit the ground, and ran off down the street with it. The cat eyed it and closed its eyes, unconcerned. “Thing got around the guy’s security spells, apparently,” the Elf said. “After that, in came the trolls.”

Arnulf frowned and shook his head as he looked across at the Ring. “Anything on the feeds about who might have been running them?”

“Nothing definitive,” said the Elf. “The usual rumors. I saw some people suggesting this was something to do with one of the ‘wealth redistribution’ guilds.” He gave Arnulf an annoyed look at the name. Arnulf rolled his eyes, agreeing. The various thieves’ guilds were always trying to position themselves upmarket—at least organizationally—with poor results: a thief was still a thief, no matter how they tried to portray themselves as downtrodden blue-collar types who only needed collective bargaining powers to make the world work perfectly. “A lot of smash-and-grab action started going on just after the trolls arrived, apparently.”

“Great,” Arnulf muttered.

“Well, it won’t last,” the Elf said. “But in the meantime, no more mayor, no more government. No more rules. At least until we get a new mayor.” He smiled a grim, amused smile. “Election by combat, as usual.”

“Hoo boy,” Arnulf said, making a mental note to stay out of the City for the next few days. “Wonder what upper management’s going to make of
this
development.”

“What, you mean in terms of the rollout?” The Elf shook his head. “No idea. I suppose Dev Himself could always drop out of the sky and calm things down. Appoint a mayor or something. But that’s not usually his style, as I understand it. He seems to like to let things run.”

“Yeah, but now?” There had been so much publicity about the rollout that Arnulf found it hard to believe he’d let the centerpiece of the whole Omnitopia project turn into the epicenter of a civil war at such a sensitive time.

“No idea, man,” the Elf said. He picked up his bow, started to sling it over his shoulder, and then remembered that it wouldn’t stay slung. “I’m gonna be watching the feeds, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah,” Arnulf said. “Me too.”

As they watched, the blue fire surrounding the Ring vanished. “There we go,” said the Elf. “business as usual.”

“You think?” Arnulf said. “After something like this?”

“Gonna have to be,” said the Elf, “if upper management wants their rollout to go as planned.” And he bowed to Arnulf, the exaggerated courtesy of one denizen of the Hundred and Twenty-one Worlds to another. “Play fairly, Brother,” he said. “Play well.”

“Yeah,” Arnulf said as the Elf and some others who’d been leaning on the wall by him headed down toward the Ring. “You too.”

The crowd around the Ring was already getting pretty thick. Rik relaxed against the wall for a few minutes longer, his gaze lingering on the huge shape of the battle mammoth, which had been standing down in the plaza all this while, and now was making its way slowly toward one of the portals of the Ring. Arnulf watched him—“him”? Well, the mammoth had been male, but that didn’t guarantee anything—until he passed through the portal and vanished into what from this distance looked like a mountainous landscape.
That,
Rik thought, watching the mammoth’s gait with satisfaction,
was a nice piece of work.
It was going to be interesting to go to the next Guild meeting and talk to some of his mage buddies about what he’d discovered about the anatomy of the mammoth
. But in the meantime,
he thought,
I really should get along to Meruvelt. They’ll be waiting.

Arnulf dusted himself down again, made sure that his pouches were intact and his sword slung in a position where he could drop it to drawing level if he needed it. Then he headed down toward the Ring.

The post office box place sat in the middle of the forlorn little strip mall on Lake Mirror Road, with an orthodontist on one side and a falafel joint on the other. As far as Danny was concerned, though, the real jewel in that strip was the pizza place down at the end. He valued that maybe even more than the ATM between the pizza place and the dry cleaners. The crusts on the pizzas were pretty good in there; the guy behind the counter had a light touch. Those pizzas, and the beer from the pizza place’s cooler, kept Danny sane while he worked in the Hartfield branch of Post Boxes Unlimited. What was even better for his mental health, though, was the certain knowledge that the pizza place wouldn’t need to be part of his life’s landscape for very much longer.
Two more days,
he thought.
Three, tops. After that—

Danny pulled the car headfirst into the parking place right in front of the PB Unlimited shop, got out, and slammed the driver’s side door with what was probably unnecessary force. This was the third of these runs he’d had to make today, but when his boss Ricardo got it into his head to restock on packing supplies, his enthusiasm tended to get out of hand. At such times, no trip to the wholesale cardboard box place ever meant less than a car absolutely stuffed full of bubble wrap, flat-pack boxes, strapping tape, folder tabs, and other junk that could surely have been bought in smaller quantities, or at least bought when it was actually needed. But that wasn’t Ricardo’s way. Ricardo tended to stock as if he expected a flood or tornado or some other natural disaster to descend on Big Joe’s Office Supply and Cash and Carry and blow it into the next state.