Bobby and Michaela left the pillar after heaving an old door over and leaning it against the damaged section. They wanted to make sure no one else would come along and discover someone had the ability to make a dent in that which was meant to be indestructible.
After a bit more meandering in the direction TODD had sent them along before he died, they ended up stumbling across the great clearing which the Algamoon bastion proudly stood within, its pyramid shape a welcoming sight to sore eyes.
“I guess the satnav was almost right,” Bobby said.
“Yeah lets not tell Gary the satnav impacted our journey at all, it's funnier the more he thinks it's completely reliable,” replied Michaela wisely.
Bobby sauntered up to the heavy metal door and knocked on it a few times with a magically reinforced fist. As far as he could tell the magic seemed to reinforce his presence in the world slightly, giving him a bit more authority over matter that wasn’t a part of him rather than actually making him stronger so as to say. Although the effects were basically equivalent to a buff when you were looking at them relatively. He suspected the miraculous energy could also override physics slightly, as the orb spell he knew seemed to be able to delete the quantum effect that allowed Bitanium to exist before it annihilated the matter it consisted of.
The door was soon answered by a serious looking Lucinda, who looked quite relieved to see them. “Where have you been the last two days and where’re the others?”
“Haha, sorry we got ambushed, we are all right, but it’s a bit of a long story,” Bobby’s stomach grumbled slightly and he winced with embarrassment. “Do you have any food leftover right now?”
Lucinda let them in and soon he had a big bowl of questionable looking stew in front of him. He was just about to dig in when there was a quiet clearing of someone's voice and he looked round to see some rats on the table.
“Ah yes, some visitors came for you while you were away,” said Lucinda, pointing to the small group with a lumpy ladle.
There was some excitable squeaking and Rho Dent hopped out of his blazer pocket to meet them. Bobby recognised one as the pickled rat he’d resurrected earlier, Wat-haf Wedon, and another as one of the old rats who’d originally been with Rho Dent, and probably a relative due to her excitement. But the last rat was quite unfamiliar to him.
“What can I do for you?” he asked the small group of rats inquisitively.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Wat-haf spoke up in clean english, “Well it’s not so much what you can do for us, but more what we can do for you.”
Bobby raised an eyebrow as he put a spoon of stew into his mouth and resisted the urge to spit it out as it burned his tongue unpleasantly.
“Well you see we recently found out about your new gang takeover.” Wat-haf said, looking like he was going to speak again until Lucinda cut him off.
“You took over a gang?? Which one? Why?” She rapid-fired at him.
“The Jameson Jockey Jedi, that gang that was harassing you, we went and took them over after they ambushed us. We’re planning to use them to start a gang war and take over more, so we can eventually control them all.”
Lucinda blinked in confusion. “Huhh?”
“That’s what we suspected your goal was.” Wat-haf matter-of-factly stated. “In fact we wanted to offer our assistance for surveillance and reconnaissance activities.”
Bobby blew on another spoonful of stew and frowned, “Well you’ve already proved your competence with your intel, but what’s in it for you?”
“We want to break into Cubecorp and make sure they’ve stopped experimenting on my kind.”
“Deal, I have something against the megacorps myself.”
Lucinda finally broke out of her mental blank. “What did you do with the Jameson brothers? They wouldn’t have just handed control over to you.”
Bobby felt like he’d entered a difficult area suddenly. Do I tell her that I mentally enslaved them? How would she react to that kind of information? It’s kind of a fate worse than death taking away someone's free will and changing them into something inhuman. Part of him wanted to lie in case the truth changed the way she saw him, but he knew how much of a slippery slope lying could be.
“We locked Derek in the basement, as for his brothers, they’d been mutilating people, so I shattered their minds and enslaved them. They won’t ever be able to do it again.”
Lucinda didn’t reply for a bit, and Bobby was about to think he should have lied when she finally responded. “I’m okay with that, I think, can we change the subject.”
Bobby sighed with relief internally, “Sure, anyway the gang is now under our control, I left Gary and Mcgunkin in charge, they should be able to handle it fine for a few days. I came back to tell you we were okay and focus on practicing some magic.”
“Thanks, I was worried for a while,” Lucinda nodded, and turned to Wat-haf Wedon, “Before you got here Wat-haf was telling me about the whole rat city they have in the storm drains of old New York.”
“I’ve heard bits from Rho Dent, it’s quite impressive, apparently they have a lot of culture too, you actually endowed Rho Dent’s brothers with names when you were half asleep and they came to free us.”
Lucinda paused, “Wait, that's how they get their names?”
“How did you think we got our names?” the pickled rat asked with confusion.
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