Chapter Text
Dee’s mechanical legs added an ominous buzzing undercurrent to the lively chatter of the fleech fry in his boss Aydik’s home. He passed under colorful LED signs reading “A CHUMP NO MORE: HAPPY 1000’TH” or “PAPA AYDIK’S BAR AND GRILL: WE ARE SURVIVORS!” He wove between groups of animated Glukkons accompanied by fellow Slig bodyguards or Mudokon attendants. They raised perfectly battered fried fleeches - battered with the good stuff, not the clumpy, over-greased crap from the restaurant blend - to their mouths when asked, or poured new glasses of wine or SoulStorm Brew – the most unlikely main attraction he’d ever seen. Somehow, it was made more appealing by the sight of it splashing into a glass first. Dee swallowed a mouthful of saliva, watching the swirl of pale green liquid as a Slig poured the last of a bottle for an indulgently grinning Glukkon in a red pinstripe suit.
Once, it had been just another product to sell to the masses, or this version had been. Dee had idly thought of trying it; he’d thought it wasn’t going anywhere, would always be close at hand. Hell, Aydik had even bought a trial case of the stuff, to see if there was any appeal paired with his food. To simply say there was appeal, apparently, was an understatement, because Aydik had fallen in love with the idea. He’d ordered posters, commercials, sandwich board signs for soon-to-be-sunburned Mudokons to wear on street corners. He spent himself well out of his Wannabe status in anticipation of its returns.
The problem was, Papa Aydik’s didn’t have a hunting department before all this. Aydik had cut a deal with RuptureFarms, got the meat that wasn’t leaving fast enough. It worked out wonderfully - until a sudden worker revolt of massive scale took out its main plant. Within a month, SoulStorm Brewery was completely destroyed by primary boiler sabotage, at the hands of the very Mudokon who had led the RuptureFarms revolt. Dee – and everyone on staff at Aydik’s corporate office, except Aydik himself – thought that was it for them. What remained of RuptureFarms had cut them loose and the drink they’d sunk the most advertising cost into was gone, too. Rather than assume he needed to pursue another avenue of income, Aydik had locked away his trial case of SoulStorm. It was now a finite – and therefore preciously lucrative – commodity, and would make a safety net. He’d told Dee that much, before dragging him along as his personal bodyguard to lay the groundwork for his continued business. Even as he fell down the Glukkons’ wealth-based status ladder he’d pulled some kind of strings inside the Magog Cartel – hell if Dee knew what, he and the other parties’ bodyguards had been posted outside the majority of those rooms – and found a way to reestablish himself as an independent company.
Honestly, thinking back on it, it was kind of impressive. He’d like to celebrate, too. He was part of it, sort of. But he had to patrol, making sure the Mudokons behaved themselves – recent events had taught everyone a lesson on the dangers of complacency – and ensuring drunk Glukkons didn’t get too rowdy (what could he do if they did, though?). He might get leftover fleeches. There would always be more of those - precisely why Aydik put them on the menu. He might get some of the less popular wines, too, even if it wouldn’t be as nice as that sweet sparkling stuff that actually went well with the food. But SoulStorm? Not a chance. The market iteration was rare and exclusive now, and that meant being able to say you had some was a potential status symbol.
“Hey, you hungry?” asked Slick, one of the few Sligs familiar to Dee as their patrols crossed paths in the back of the room. They were near the kitchen here, and the smell of frying fleeches wafted out, making Dee’s stomach rumble. A cook yelped at an errant oil splatter. Nobody close enough to hear it paid it any mind, and those Mudokons that did glance that way quickly returned to whatever they were doing, seeing a pair of Sligs by the door. Running to help each other is dangerous now, Dee thought.
“You think?” he answered. “We’ve been patrolling a freaking feast all night.”
“Hah! Well, guess who’s drunk himself dumb enough to share? Mr. Dun- uhh, Drunce just gave his Mudokon a fleech! Gave me one, too, when I got close enough. And a swig of brew! You should take advantage of it before someone tells him to stop.”
“You kidding? He even gave you SoulStorm?” Dee turned his head towards the Glukkon in the wine-purple suit who had so generously supplied the party’s alcohol. He was rambling on about something to his patiently-smiling Mudokon attendant. (Strange, to see a sober Mudokon smile. Laughing gas didn’t produce something that looked quite like that – he wondered now if those carefully-staged photo sets actually convinced anyone like Aydik thought they would.) “Man- I mean, I’ve seen him drunk, I was with him and the boss at their meeting, but…brew, too?” He remembered that meeting – just the two of them and some of Drunce’s wine, some talk about buying his product as an ingredient in a sauce. Aydik had used his nature against him, and he came out of it none the wiser. It had been incredibly difficult not to make knowing eye contact with Drunce’s own bodyguard, and he'd seen the other Slig hiding rude gestures at their boss behind his back, trying desperately out of sheer boredom to get him to laugh while his boss utterly outmaneuvered theirs.
“Oh, right,” said Slick. “Sometimes, when I think you’ve got it all, I remember I don’t get to be trapped in a room listening to two of these guys yammer on.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Dee. “This place has free grub, at least. Thanks for the tip!’
“Anytime, bro. Enjoy!” Slick gave him a thumbs-up as he headed towards the lonely pair. Dee wondered what kind of favor Slick was trying to curry with Aydik through him this time. Whatever it was, it was probably harmless enough to make this now-rare chance well worth it.
Drunce was visibly unsteady on his feet, wobbly on a Glukkon’s top-heavy center of gravity, bound up in their suits and shoes as they were. A bottle of wine sat mostly empty on the nearby table, a clear culprit for his current state. His attendant precariously balanced a tray overflowing with fleeches on one hand – a bottle of SoulStorm rocking dangerously on its edge – and kept Drunce upright with the other, making worried noises as he tried to keep both Glukkon and food from falling over. With Drunce’s absolute inability to stay still, he had his work cut out for him, but he was doing a commendable job of it. At least, until the noisy approach of a Slig made Drunce twist suddenly to see and the Mudokon lurched to try to keep him in reach.
The bottle of SoulStorm Brew – one of so very few left in the whole world – tipped off the tray. Time seemed to slow as Dee watched what might be his only chance to try the stuff begin its fatal descent to the hard faux-marble floor.
“Oh no!” the Mudokon gasped, raising a hand to his mouth.
“Wha- my brew!” cried Drunce in dismay, wobbling and falling over onto a couch without his attendant supporting him. The lanky being’s quiet “oops,” was the last coherent word Dee made out for the next few seconds.
“I got it, I got it, I got it!” Dee found himself repeating in a desperate mantra, a prayer to make him catch it as he hit the emergency eject on his pants and was spring-launched into empty air. He barely heard the clatter of metal behind him, focused entirely on his prize.
“I got it…” The rounded green bottle tumbled end-over-end, glinting in the light like a jewel.
“Got it!” Dee hit its smooth surface, warm from recent touch, and latched onto it with hands, tentacles, and even his tail as if his life depended on it. He tucked into a roll, and the impact sent him and the bottle spinning.
For a heart-stopping moment, he wondered if his life might actually depend on it. What if the bottle hit the floor first? Dee thought it would break under him. An image of himself impaled by a shard of glass flashed through his mind. What a stupid way to die that would be.
His back hit cold floor. The sharp sting of cut skin didn’t come. Some part of him waited still for the realization that he was dying anyway, even as he thought I’m alive.
He refocused on his surroundings to see Drunce’s attendant lean over him, his wide-eyed green face disconcertingly high above him.
“Nice catch!” said Drunce, out of view.
“You okay?” asked the Mudokon, and Dee realized he was still clutching the brew tightly against his body, tail curled around it, as if it was his to keep. No – it never had been. He was still at the mercy of that drunkard’s whims on that one. Not to mention, he certainly wouldn’t be able to move while holding it.
“Yeah, I’m good. So’s the brew,” he said. He uncurled and lifted the bottle up for the Mudokon to take. “Here, take it.”
“Okay. Thanks for saving it!” The Mudokon took the bottle and stepped back to give Dee room to flip himself over, arms shaking from residual thrill as he lifted himself up.
“Nice one!” called an unfamiliar Glukkon as he crawled back towards his abandoned pants. He heard him turn back to his conversation with a quieter, “Undignified as all hell, but whoever trained those reflexes needs a whole lotta raises.” Dee fought the urge to audibly curse at the bulk of the credit being shoved onto someone else, worst of all the trainers at SligCo. He’d thought that was a particularly nice catch. He could have died if he’d landed the wrong way up, after all. Shouldn’t he have some credit?
His potential death only mattered to him, though, didn’t it?
He’d always known, in some way, but having the explicit thought felt…strange. Like something swallowed the wrong way, that felt like it got stuck on its way down. He tried to ignore it as he crawled his way across the floor. His expendability had always been a fact of life, and maybe he was just being overdramatic at himself. He probably wasn’t even really in danger of death – could that bottle have broken into any shards long or sharp enough?
Probably not, but downplaying it didn’t make the uneasy feeling go away.
“Ben, give that Slig a hand,” said Drunce.
“Okay, sir,” said the Mudokon – Ben, he supposed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw him begin to move closer.
“Nonono, put the brew down somewhere first.”
“Oh, whoops. Sorry, sir.” Ben retreated back out of his peripheral vision.
“All right, now go give the Slig a hand.”
His legs longer than Dee’s arms, Ben outpaced him handily, reaching his pants first. Of course, he had no idea how to reset the release mechanism and prime it for use again. Most Slig pants didn’t have features like that and for those few that did, Mudokons had no need to learn such things – in fact, it could be potentially dangerous, given the times. “Uhh…here ya go?” he said, pushing the pants towards him as Dee crawled up. He gave him a bewildered shrug as he propped himself up on them with a hand.
Dee shrugged back with the arm that wasn’t holding him up. “Thanks, I guess?” He wasn’t sure what Drunce had meant for Ben to do, either, but the thought that someone wanted to help him right now, even if they didn’t know how… And Ben had been so eager to obey the order to help that he’d forgotten to put the brew down first. Had that ever happened before? He couldn’t remember ever feeling this sort of lightness in his chest. It chased down the lump in his throat, as he reset his pants and eased his tail into the control frame.
He would like to feel this way more often, he thought.