Chapter 8: Wile E. Coyote Ugly

Chapter 8 - Wile E. Coyote Ugly

Thick layers of wood and stone all but blocked out the sounds of revelry coming from The Knight's Secret above. The tavern's cellar had been hastily repurposed into a secure dungeon. Casks of ale were moved aside to make room for a cot of soiled straw and a sturdy table with two chairs facing one another. Wisps of pungent smoke streamed from a pair of incense burners on the table, and multiple others throughout the chamber.

Heavy links of an enchanted chain snaked from a ring in the wall to the lone forearm of a prisoner occupying one of the chairs.

Victor sat opposite of him. Not so long ago he was the very exemplar of a knight and a proud member of the Kingsguard. Shining armor, not a hair out of place, and valor above all.

After the Outworlders murked the king, that armor had to be exchanged for a hooded leather number. And Vic's previously clean-shaven face now sported a shadow that treated 5 PM as the crack of dawn. The bulk of that stubble was obscured by a piece of gossamer cloth.

Bookending Victor on both sides stood a blonde elf maiden smuggling a pair of coconuts under her dangerously short dress, and a burly toadman who hunched over a club fashioned from a long chair leg. The elf, too, had her face obscured by a semi-translucent veil.

"I hope the accommodations are to your liking, Lance," Victor said, studying his guest's gaunt features.

The shackled youngish man had a harried look to him. His hair was patchy and unkempt. And despite his powerful frame, he looked small in that chair.

"Release me, you assholes. Just let me get my gear back and then we dance." Lance's eyes darted to the remodeled cellar's corner housing a pile of armor dominated by bright reds and unnecessary spikes. "Or just you wait until Ben hears about what you're doing. Then you'll be real fucked."

"You're all talk, sugarplum," the elf purred. "Yet I remain as unmolested as on the day we first met."

Lance threw the woman a look full of hate. "They warned me. Around elves watch yourselves. But did I listen? Noo. Dumb idiot," he went on to mutter to himself.

"I feel the elvenfolk are being unfairly maligned here," Victor said, standing up. His chair scraped on the hard stone floor.

He moved closer to the elf and for a moment it appeared Victor was about to kiss her. Instead, his arm shot up and traced the outline of her sharpened ear.

With no further warning, Victor's hand wrapped around the ear and yanked, tearing the entire thing off. The elf, well half-elf now, reacted to such dismemberment with a throaty chuckle. Victor then repeated the process with her other ear and sat back down.

The woman took a step back and used a frilly sleeve that stopped just shy of her elbow to wipe her face. She ran her fingers through her hair next. As she did, her blondness came off as a wig she tossed away, revealing the tightly packed sensible hairdo of a mercenary rogue.

"Welcome back, Rose," Victor greeted his unmasked ally.

She blew him a kiss and jostled her dress. Two actual coconuts clanked on the stone floor, returning her proportions to the realm of reason.

"How do you like them Twin Moons?" Rose asked Lance as she adjusted the dress to fit her better.

"Twin Moons? What is this trick?" Lance asked, oblivious to the raunchy joke at the heart of Rose's old gang name. Exposed to the steady stream of fumes from all the burners, the words came out slurred and uncertain.

"You don't go far in my line of work without picking up at least a few tricks, honey."

Rose incanted a simple spell and her form became more slender. Her features briefly sharpened into those of elfin beauty, making it clear her previous look wasn't the result of a mere disguise.

"You can thank my disarming personality for the rest," Rose said, giving a mischievous side eye to Victor.

The shabby knight huffed and slid his right arm from his tunic's sleeve. He placed it palm-down on the table, revealing a weave of chromatic runes covering the skin.

"You bastard!" Lance lunged at Victor, but his left arm was safely secured by the unforgiving chain. His right was an empty stump. Magic may have cauterized the wound and helped with the pain, but regrowing a limb was beyond most healers' abilities.

That arm was Victor's only consolation prize for losing his liege and his men. The runes hidden within it had since transferred themselves to his.

Lance's outburst overturned one of the burners on the table, and got him to inhale a faceful of the stuff.

"What is this stinking shit?" Lance coughed.

"Just a little cocktail to give your Outworlder magic a case of impotence," Rose said as she went to right the overturned burner. "You'll forgive us if it makes you a little groggy."

Lance used whatever give his chain had to knock the burner from under Rose's hand.

She shrugged. "Plenty more of them out of your reach, darling."

"Is this what you mean by not wanting to get him too steamed, Victor?" asked Ornik, the toadman by the table.

"Precisely, ambassador," Victor said. Piercing Lance with his gaze, Victor added, "Let's not get too excited here. We have no problem letting you cool off here for another day or two, Lance."

What started as the opening note of a growl died down before reaching Lance's lips. He leaned back in his chair.

Making a show out of spitting on the floor, he asked, "What the fuck do you, assholes, want from me?"

"We simply want you to answer a few questions, Lance," Victor stated calmly.

"Why me? Haven't you pieces of shit done enough?" Lance looked down at his missing arm.

"Not by a long shot," Victor said.

***

"I am a learned man of diplomacy." Ornik's normally booming voice came out in his closest approximation of a whisper. The burly toadman looked out of place skulking over a burlap sack inside a tenebrous warehouse. "Your proposition is insulting, Victor. In fact, had you still had a kingdom, I would be filing an official complaint at the mere suggestion of using my secretions in such a crude way. Ages have passed since my people used to lick each other's backs to boogie-woogie. It's just not done."

Victor, with a hood hiding his face, sighed. "Pulling swords out of thin air and using them to cut steel like it's wet paper is also not done." They've had this discussion many times prior, yet the ambassador was still being stubborn. "Killing kings right in front of their kid daughters isn't done either," Victor went for the knockout punch.

"You are right, of course," Ornik relented. "It still feels indecent to use my fluids in such an underhanded way."

"That's what they're there for. We can't fight Outworlders straight up. That means we need to evolve." Victor examined the hesitating toadman in the faint light of the taper he was cradling under his cloak. "Or in your case, ambassador, regress."

Ornik inhaled a lungful of air, his throat expanding into a mighty balloon. He croaked a deep trill as he pushed the air out slowly through his nose.

"Give it to me," the ambassador demanded when he was back to his normal size.

Victor handed him a cotton rag. The toadman carefully wiped his back with it, coloring the previously white cotton with the sickly hue of the swamp.

Holding the dripping rag over the sack, Ornik paused.

"And are you certain this will work, Victor?"

"It's our best shot. The only confirmed case of an Outworlder croaking, pardon the phrasing, is through poison. And yours is deadly to any outside your ancient kind."

"I was talking more about how imprecise this method is." Ornik opened the sack filled with hard dark beans and started squeezing the rag over it. His poison streamed, then dripped over the beans.

***

When morning came to Lorada, a settlement to the west of Lisarel, a long line of people – humans, elves, halfings, and gnomes – gathered by the doors of a newly-built cottage.

The plaque beside its doors pronounced it StarBecca's.

A nearby alley shielded from the sun hid two figures. One hooded and the other broad.

"I don't like this, Victor. How do we contain collateral damage?" Ornik asked.

"According to Rose's intel, Becca, our Outworlder target, is an absolute fiend for the drink produced from those beans. She'll definitely be drinking at least several cups first thing in the morning. Hopefully, she'll do it before opening her doors. But either way, that initial batch will be the only contaminated one."

"According to the intel of my eyes, Becca's establishment is a popular one. Are you willing to risk the lives of these people," Ornik pointed at the line, "just for a chance to get Becca?"

"After what they did, I'd sack this town myself, and a hundred others like it, if it meant ridding my world of the Outworlder scum," the once-proud knight said through his teeth.

"Hey, why isn't the line moving?" One of the women across the street shouted.

The wave of murmurs and shoving prompted the halfling who was first in line to knock on StarBecca's door. When that produced no response, the furry-footed scamp slid a piece of wire between the shutters on the window by the door.

The window opened to a series of shocked gasps. Becca was inside, slumped over her counter with a thick layer of foam covering her lips. An overturned cup of coffee was spilling its contents into a dark pool on the floor.

Victor and Ornik passed by the window with the urgency of those with somewhere to be. When the crowd was out of earshot, Victor said, "One down, who knows how many to go."

***

"You heartless bastards!" Lance yelled after Victor finished regaling him with the story. "Becca was a sweet girl. She never hurt no one. She just wanted to brew her coffee in peace."

Victor simply shrugged at that. "An admirable ambition. And she had a perfectly good world to realize it in. Yet she chose to bring chaos into mine instead."

"She didn't choose shit," Lance growled. "That's not how this works."

Victor regaled the chained man like a cat presented with a caged canary. "And this brings us to the crux of our conversation. You will tell us everything you know about how it works, Lance."

Lance spat. In Victor's direction this time. The knight casually moved his head out of the way.

"I'm not going to tell you shit," Lance growled. "Kill me or don't, I don't care. Your luck is going to run out soon anyway. You know how many of my friends have poison resist?"

"Ah," Victor grinned at him. "You're forgetting there's more than one way to skin a catgirl, Lance."

***

A cool shady forest full of cawing and chirping birds encircled a plot of fertile land staked out to become a new farm. The land has had no owner for what felt like ages on account of its distance from any civilized settlement, making it a magnet for monsters and brigands.

The ground was overgrown with weeds and had numerous rocks jutting out through the grass.

Smack-dab in the middle of the plot sat a hastily-constructed wooden shack. At the crack of dawn, a man wearing a simple peasant's garb emerged from the shack and stretched his arms wide. Underneath the unbecoming clothes, he rippled with muscle. His fingertips sparkled with excess magic.

After a few practice movements, he grabbed a hoe that's been leaning onto the shack's wall and headed for what was to become his first field.

Using nothing but that hoe, the man started to plow through the field-to-be. He hoed the ground, he hoed the weeds, he even hoed the rocks. Each of the man's movements was overflowing with mana, allowing the humble tool to deal with obstacles it was in no way designed for.

"This Jung bastard sure looks strong. He's got enough mana in him to face a full squad of knights and come out on top," Victor whispered.

The knight's face was colored different shades of green and his cape had a layer of fallen leaves attached to it. Lying the way he did at the edge of the forest, he was simply a clump of mulch to any but the most attentive of observers.

Another pile of leaves by his side shifted and a roguish face turned to Victor.

"You're the one who dragged me into this, Vic. I had no beef with your Outworlders. But you promised not to turn me in, so I promised to help with your crusade," Rose hissed. "You ask me to find you an isolated target, so I do. You ask me to get you the strongest mana-infused explosives, I do that too. So for your part, don't start doubting the plan now. It's unbecoming."

Victor's undivided attention was with the farmer. "If this works, this will be the first Outworlder we get through means other than poison. And if it doesn't, get ready to haul ass."

"How encouraging," Rose groaned.

***

After tilling more land than an average peasant did in a week, Jung decided it was time for a break.

"This is the life," he said to himself. Or perhaps he was conversing with an invisible presence inside his body.

Jung took a drink of water from a flask, wiped his mouth with a sleeve and burped.

"Much better than grinding a dent into an office chair day after day."

Jung bit from a loaf of bread and chewed thoughtfully.

"The air, the water, the food. The power. I just wish I came here sooner."

Jung put down his simple yet refreshing meal and picked up the hoe again.

"What was it they said you needed to do to get stronger through farming alone?" he asked the empty air. "Oh, yes. Break the rocks."

The hoe hit a rock indistinguishable from any other.

And it was, save for a volatile, magic-rich explosive device hidden within it.

Disturbed by the powerful strike, the bomb went off, shaking the ground and scaring every bird in the forest into a panicked flight.

Their prize for such inconvenience were the juicy bits of Outworlder scattered all over his plot of land.

***

"Congratulations. You blew up some salaryman chump. You must feel like real heroes," Lance mocked from his position of lack of power.

Victor looked to Rose, then Ornik. "We do, actually," he said for the three of them.

"You morons do know that going after harmless Outworlders will only make the others angrier?"

"That's the idea," Victor said. "And you, Lance, will help us be ready for them when the time comes. That's the only reason you're currently alive. To help us scale our operation up."

***

On the dirt road just outside the gates of Lisarel there stood an elf. Not a statuesque, slender and haughty elf, filled with the wisdom of ages, nor yet a short, pointy-shoed and overworked elf jingling all the way. It was an Outworlder-bait elf, and that means bombshell.

She stood with one of her milky-white legs out at an angle and the tips of her index fingers touching before her.

Her clothing covered the bare minimum of her impressive assets. Below the waist, it consisted of a pair of blue pants with most of their legs cut off. Whatever little fabric remained was dedicated to embroidery depicting the regal profiles of the deceased king's two brothers wearing garlands of white-and-yellow flowers.

And up top, the elf wore a simple shirt missing its lower half and ending just above her navel. The rest of the shirt was embroidered with stalks of wheat, barley, and rye.

Crop tops were said to go well together with daisy dukes.

In Rose's experience, there was a rare Outworlder capable of resisting a buxom elf wearing those two items.

True enough, not long after she took up her watch, a portly Outworlder by the name of Abdel approached her with a gulp and a clumsy, "Well, hello there, beautiful."

"Oh, hi!" Rose the elf chirped. "You look so fine and handsome today, good sir. But may I interest you in the perfect way to start your day in our fine city of Lisarel?"

"What do you have in mind, darling?" Abdel asked, his leer fixated on the overworked button holding Rose's top together.

"Why, a bath of course!"

The exclamation got Abdel shaking his head in disappointment.

"A bath? What do you stinking bumpkins know about baths?"

Rose's smile was full of warmth, and it would take a master of reading expressions to recognize the subtle tilt slowly twisting it into a sly grin. "You misunderstand, sir. This bathhouse is new. It's operated by an Outworlder like yourself, and made to his exacting specifications."

That got Abdel intrigued once again.

"And should you decide to partake of our services, I'll be your personal bath attendant."

The idle giggle that followed the statement was the final nail in Abdel's coffin. He took Rose's hand and allowed her to lead him to a nearby steam room.

When Abdel was disrobed and seated on a wooden stair, Rose told him to wait while she set everything up.

With the room all fogged up and Abdel struggling to stay upright while surrounded by greenish steam, Rose returned. Upon her face was a translucent veil. She approached Abdel and booped him on the nose.

His reaction to this was limited to a clumsy spasm of his entire body.

"He's ready, boys," Rose shouted in her normal voice to a pair of unseen observers.

***

"Abdel didn't make it," Victor stated. "Back then we still hadn't figured out the right potency of Ornik's fumes to incapacitate an Outworlder on a less than permanent basis. And what do you know, Lance. Once we've refined the formula, you were the first Outworlder to roll into town. All covered in road dirt and itching for a nice bath with a pretty attendant to rub your back."

"And front," Rose fell into her ditzy elf cadence for a second.

"Hurray for you, assholes. You got me," Lance slurred. "That don't help you one bit. Once my boy Ben finds and deals with that burned disc dude who's been going around and wiping out both outworlder and local alike, he'll come after your sorry asses."

Victor's eye twitched at the mention of the burned man, but he quickly regained his composure. "I'll be honest, I hoped you'd be more cooperative. After all, you and I are brothers in arms now." He chuckled at Lance's renewed fuming. "But that's one of the main things they teach you in the Kingsguard. You always plan for your plan to fail."

Upon saying that, Victor placed his right elbow on the table and aimed the palm of his hand at Lance.

"The fumes are not just there to render you powerless, Lance. And our chat wasn't meant to scare you into talking. It was all to put you into the right headspace. Woozy and thinking about your fellow Outworlders."

A single rune lit up on Victor's palm. It shone a turquoise hue on Lance's forehead.

"I haven't been able to figure out what everything does here. But this rune, this one I know well from the interrogation courses in the guard."

Using the rune's power on dazed Lance, Victor compelled him to speak the truth. Many questions and answers later, Victor, Rose and Ornik learned all there was to know about the act of isekai'ng, and the ultimate weapon against which no Outworlder had a defense – a semi-truck. The only question Lance had no answer for was how to summon one.

The questioning over and Lance utterly spent, Ornik and Rose headed out of the cellar to discuss their findings in the tavern proper.

"You coming, Vic?" Rose asked from the stairs. "The princess must be wondering where we'd gone off to."

"Just give me a second," Victor said, sending his allies away.

Alone with Lance, he studied the man. Once so full of vim and vigor, the Outworlder was now a battered shell.

Yet even in that sorry state, Lance had enough life in him to lift his head off the table and watch Victor amble towards the open door leading out of the cellar.

"You're never going to get away with this," Lance said with his last strength.

Without turning around, Victor smiled and pulled out a fist-sized jar from under his cloak. He threw it at the floor by Lance's table.

As caustic green smoke enveloped the Outworlder, Victor closed the door on Lance.

"Isekai-yay, mother trucker," the knight mouthed.

Somewhere up above, outside the tavern, a llama huffed.