After the sheriff left, Sam and Mags were forced to wait in their holding cell for a nerve-wracking amount of time. Though some person poked her head into the room every so often, she ignored all of Sam's increasingly urgent requests to speak with her friends.
Mags was no more helpful, treating the situation like it was all one big joke. Sam was not one to worry unnecessarily, but being on trial for murder was no small thing, and she still had no assurances at all that Mags was even any good at fighting. The other woman just kept telling Sam to 'relax' and 'trust her', which did not make her feel any better at all.
Around midday, as evidenced not only by the sunlight coming through the window but also the strength of the nervous growling in Sam's stomach, Sheriff Tawney returned with a pair of strong Builders. Sam and Mags were ushered out of their cell and escorted through a large building before being taken outside. Though Sam's hangover had pretty much faded away at this point, Mags hissed and threw a hand over her eyes at the sudden influx of sunshine, Builders holding her up as she swayed on the spot.
Sam watched the other woman with a worried frown. Nothing about her exaggeratedly curvaceous and distractingly sloppy appearance suggested any real fighting prowess. The curly mess of black and white hair, the badly done-up and barely covering clothes, the clicking jewelry, all made her look more like a… washed-up rockstar, or something. Which sort of checked out, given the woman's branch specialization into Entertainer.
Sam did not see herself as a particularly judgmental person, but if she got to choose from a lineup, 'hungover, past-her-prime musician' was not exactly her first pick for someone to fight on her behalf.
But the decision had been made, and Sam had to admit that she was not particularly confident in her own ability to beat a Level 17 opponent, so all she could do now was pray that at least some of Mags's confidence was more than delusional bravado.
As they exited the building where they had been held, Mags had her shoes, a pair of ugly, lacquered, floral-patterned clogs returned to her. They entered out onto the large central platform that appeared to serve as Talltop's town square. The hanged criminals had been removed, presumably to tidy the place up a bit for the occasion. Folk were gathered all around on surrounding platforms, crowded along rope bridges, some daring acrobats even hanging from the branches of the grandfather trees overhead.
There were hundreds of spectators. Maybe even over the thousand mark. Apparently, a good portion of the town's population found duels to the death a delightful source of entertainment. Sam was not surprised.
Sheriff Tawney walked up to the edge of the middle platform to address the crowd, ushering silence by raising his hands. He read out the charges brought against Sam and Mags, as well as the method by which justice would be done.
Then came the rule set the duel would be fought under. Pistols. Skill use permitted. Semblance use permitted. To the death.
It appeared this information was already general knowledge, but the sheriff's announcement brought a renewed wave of cheering and yelling regardless. Folk were fired up, ready to see some blood.
One of the Builders let Mags out of her collar and handed her a belt with a revolver holstered to it, as well as a pouch of loose bullets to reload with. A temporary platform floated up to the edge of the town square, which Sam gathered would serve as the fighting ring. Roughly circular, about twenty feet across, and with a surface that was all one piece, it appeared to be a horizontal slice of a grandfather tree log. It was suspended in the air entirely through skill use, a small group of intently focused Scholars dotted around the square appearing to be responsible for its miraculous flight.
Sheriff Tawney stepped onto the platform, and Mags followed after. The platform then drifted gently away from the main square like a boat casting off shore, coming to a stop in the empty air between all the surrounding platforms. This gave everyone a good view of the spectacle and ensured the fighters had no opportunity to bail out.
Joining in with the Scholars, a larger group of Builders manifested a great bubble Barrier running in a huge sphere around the fighting circle, so large as to nearly touch the edges of surrounding platforms and giving the fighters two dozen feet of empty space beyond their platform on all sides to work with, whatever they might need that for.
Sam, for her part, was stuck wearing her collar, closely supervised by the Builders who had brought her out. She spotted her friends lined up at the edge of a platform opposite—the chimps were all back, she noticed—but she received a hard cuff to the back of the head when she tried to wave at them.
Not long after, Sam felt something prodding at the back of her mind, like a spider skittering across her scalp. It scared her at first, had her patting her head until her captors started giving her strange looks, but after a few moments she realized that the sensation was quite familiar, and hesitantly opened herself to it.
It's just Sam, remember? she thought, keeping her face neutral to avoid revealing any hint of the fact that she was having a conversation inside her head.
All right, shoot.
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That's very thoughtful of you, Gug.
What else did he say?
Got it. Tell him I'll be ready.
You did great, Gug. Thank you.
Anything else?
She hadn't thought about that. That would probably be best, yeah. Talk to you soon, Gug.
Huh. Maybe he'd understood after all.
Standing at one end of the floating platform, Sheriff Tawney began to address the people once again, but no sound came out even though his lips were moving and he was gesturing with his hands. It went on like that for a few seconds until the Builders on Barrier duty managed to subtly tweak the composition of their bluish glass bubble to let sound through.
"Okay, here it is!" the sheriff said, starting over, and folk quieted down to listen. "Deputy Spick, you count down from ten!"
"Righto, boss!" called a woman close to Sam—the one who had been checking on them in the cell earlier.
"On 'draw', we draw our weapons! Simple enough, Magpie?"
The woman on the opposite end of the circular arena was still struggling to buckle her pistol belt. She mumbled out something that Sam could not catch that sounded at least vaguely affirmative.
Sam received an elbow from the Builder on the right, and found him wearing a smug grin when she looked over.
"You better start saying your prayers," he said. "That lady was done for the minute she let the sheriff pick weapons." He laughed, and his friend standing on her left joined in.
"Why's that?" Sam asked, at least halfway sure she didn't really want to know the answer.
"Our sheriff is the best gunfighter in Octant Six," the second Builder said proudly.
"And his Soulbound revolver, Justice, is all kinds of special," the first one added.
"Yeup," said the second one with a nod of agreement.
"A duel with the sheriff is as good as an execution already. Funny enough, that drunk cunt is probably getting off easier than you. At least she'll die quick, bullet 'tween the eyes. But you…"
"We'll make sure your neck don't snap when we hang you," the second one said.
"You'll die slow, choking for air," the first said.
"Yeup," the second agreed.
Sam did her best to ignore them and keep her eyes on the duel about to take place. It wasn't easy.
The deputy stepped up to the edge of the town square and began counting down in a clear, loud voice.
[10…]
Mags was still fiddling with her belt buckle, repeatedly blowing stray bits of hair out of her face as she craned her neck to see past her own ballooned-out chest.
[9…]
The sheriff worked the fingers of his lead hand, which hovered a ways above the grip of his large, rugged revolver.
[8…]
[7…]
The buckle slipped again. Mags had her tongue out so it nearly touched her nose, eyes narrowed in hard concentration.
[6…]
Someone coughed.
[5…]
[4…]
[3…]
The belt slipped out of Mags's hands and fell to the worn-smooth wooden floor of the platform.
[2…]
[1…]
Mags got ahold of her belt off the ground and finally buckled it to hang loosely off her hips with a triumphant 'Aha!'. A marvelous achievement, except she was looking down at herself with seemingly no attention directed at her enemy.
[DRAW!]
But the sheriff didn't draw his revolver. It simply vanished from his holster, appearing a fraction of a second later in his waiting hand. Sam recognized the maneuver from the tournament. He thumbed the hammer back and pulled the trigger in lightning-quick succession, and the heavy revolver jumped back as a thunderclap roar echoed across the town of Talltop.
Mags finally looked up, eyebrows raised in surprise as though she had forgotten all about the duel until this very moment.
Curiously, the bloody hole Sam had expected to see somewhere on her body was nowhere in evidence. In fact, she looked completely unharmed. The fat bullet had come to a stop maybe three feet from her head, spinning angrily in place with the loud buzz of a power drill being run on full blast, then jittered violently as it spent the last of its kinetic energy and finally came to a complete stop, suspended mid-air.
The crowd was quiet. The sheriff, too, said nothing.
"Pretty good, man," Mags said, nodding appreciatively. "Really blew my hair back with that one."
Sheriff Tawney fanned the hammer of his revolver as he fired three more times in rapid sequence. Sam could feel the power in that gun, each shot instinctively making her flinch even though she was nowhere near the line of fire, the sound hitting her like a punch in the gut.
These bullets ended up just like the first, caught in a rough array of useless spent metal that drifted in a lazy orbit about each other, not one ever getting close to actually hitting their target.
Mags stuck a hand under her tunic to scratch at her sweaty underboob. "Do you take notes?" she asked, no particular urgency in her voice. "Because you might need to try a little harder than that. I don't mean to backseat you, I just…" She made a vaguely apologetic gesture with her free hand. "Sorry, sorry. I'll let you do your thing."