Today's Earth date: January 31, 1992

The Governess didn't tell us that this was a sewer quest.

Well, Iomallach doesn't have proper sewers like in a video game. No massive labyrinth of round brick tunnels. The shit just pipes out of the city at various places, and the pipe that dumps into the Cuts is the source of this mystery monster.

That's what it seems like, at least. We haven't spotted it yet, but it doesn't leave tracks. Rathain thinks it might be a giant snake or a manaconda (which is kind of a snake but they have human heads).

We're calling it the poop snake until we learn otherwise, and "we" is just our core group of Chosen Heroes. The pretty squires didn't have the stomach to splash around in this kind of swamp.

Honestly, neither do I.

-The Journal of Laszlo the Paladin

At what Wayne believed to be roughly five o'clock in the morning, the front porch of the Blackwell estate was thick with cigar smoke.

One dot on his HUD was green and another was blue. Sure enough, Wayne and Fergus found Margo sitting on a step, puffing away. Vanilli sat in a lawn chair nearby, doing the same.

"Surprised you guys are up," Margo said.

"I am surprised as well," Fergus grumbled.

"I need to go be childish. Want to come?"

"Sure," Vanilli answered.

Margo nodded and gently snubbed her cigar. "What are we doing first?"

"We'll figure it out on the way."

Random.

Song: Tortured and Abused

Artist: Antisect

Album: In Darkness, There is No Choice

Genre: Crust Punk

The song that played had the unproduced raw anger of early punk artists with a slant toward heavy metal. Wayne liked punk but didn't recognize the band. On any other day, he would have happily enjoyed the discovery. Unfortunately, the energy of the track did not match the energy of an early-dawn walk to town.

Random.

Song: Washboard Blues

Artist: Jimmy O'Bryant

Album: Jimmy O' Bryant: Mystery Man of Jazz

Genre: Skiffle

A scratchy, whiny track played, featuring a wind instrument Wayne couldn't immediately identify and what might have been a washboard accompaniment. He didn't mind the music, but it too did not fit the mood.

Wayne gave up and closed BGM Switch completely.

"I have the vague goals of experimenting with Let's Draw and Jury Rig and then eating food, but beyond that, if it's good for a laugh, I'm open. Agreed?"

His relatively sleepy party nodded.

Wayne paused outside the west gate and activated Let's Draw. By now, the party knew to hold their guesses until Wayne's drawing was complete.

"Another penis, really?" Fergus asked.

Using the placement selector, Wayne chose a location and left the system to print a one-person tall plaster erection just off of the main road.

"There's a method to this," Wayne assured his friend and returned to drawing again.

"That is also a penis, but larger."

The plaster member that began to print this time was two-people tall, the rest of the drawing's proportions scaling accordingly. Wayne repeated the exercise with a three-person tall print and a four-person tall print. The system would not print anything larger than that no matter how Wayne presented the drawing. For example, he could not print a penis that was four-people and one cat tall.

He did learn, however, that he could use other items as size references, not just people. If he wanted to print a plaster penis that was one-cat tall, he could do that just fine. One cup of tea? Yep. One kangaroo? Well, Wayne assumed the answer was yes, but he wasn't capable of drawing a recognizable kangaroo nor did his party know what a kangaroo was.

The sun was starting to rise by the time the largest phallus neared completion. It cast long, stiff shadows across the open road and fields just outside of Iomallach's walls.

"This was productive," Wayne said, happily. "We know a lot more about how Let's Draw works now."

"What do we do with the sculptures?" Vanilli asked.

"Leave them. They'll dissolve on their own."

Vanilli looked up at the four-person print, which was still in progress, and shrugged. "The human condition is difficult to understand."

"We are complicated creatures," Fergus agreed, wrapping an arm around the demon. "I propose we find breakfast next."

"Proposal accepted!" Wayne answered.

Over bacon, eggs, and pancakes, Wayne read the description of Jury Rig to his present party:

Jury Rig – Is the very valuable skill to patch together damaged equipment. This skill can be a real lifesaver during space combat.

He explained that he wanted to find this world's equivalent of a junkyard to test the limits of the skill. Presumably, such a place would have no shortage of objects with varying degrees of damage, but manufacturing in this world was nowhere near the scale of what humans on Earth produced. Junkyards as he knew them didn't exist here.

"A local smith would be your best bet," Margo said. "We only ever visit the weaponsmiths, but most smiths make their livings on tools and hardware. Shops like that usually have a good bit of scrap. If we can't find one of those, an old farm might have enough junk lying around."

"You were a smith, correct?" Vanilli asked.

"Locksmith. We could fabricate something from scratch, but mostly we did lock installs and repairs."

Wayne appreciated the tip and bothered the tavernkeeper about where such smiths might be found. When they finished breakfast, they walked a few blocks to a small family-run smith shop. The lot next door was surrounded by a tall wooden fence. A quick glimpse of the other side revealed an assortment of scrap, junk, and broken items piled here and there.

The smith was hesitant to let a group of strangers onto his property, but his concerns evaporated when silver hit his palm.

"If you find a broken item that's still recognizable, let me know," Wayne said, starting to sift through the scrap.

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"Such as this?" Vanilli held up a broken wagon wheel. Nearly half of the wheel was missing and most of the remaining spokes were cracked.

Wayne accepted the wheel and then looked around the scrapyard with the intention of fixing the item in his hands.

In a few minutes, Wayne found a chair with three legs, a few bent metal rods, and the tongue of a wagon. Selecting those materials came with an innate understanding of what he needed to accomplish in order to make the wheel functional again, calling upon knowledge that Wayne knew to be driven by the skill.

"Want me to see about borrowing some tools?" Margo asked.

"Actually, I don't think so…" Wayne said.

He easily detached the legs from the chair, accomplishing with a yank what should have required a saw blade, and resized the metal rods the same way, popping off an inch or so to get the dimensions he wanted.

"That's some bullshit," Margo said, shaking her head. "Doing all that without tools? It's just not fair."

For what it was worth, Wayne agreed that what the Jury Rig skill enabled was indeed bullshit. Accomplishing as much as he did with only his bare hands seemed like an affront to the natural order of reality.

But he continued using it anyway. He used the rods and the chair legs to replace the missing spokes, and then he cut the wagon tongue into small chunks, attaching a small foot to the end of each improvised spoke. He needed neither nails nor glue to secure a piece in place. It just held.

When he ran his hands over the broken spokes, any that were simply cracked became whole again. If a piece was missing, he had to replace the spoke entirely or reinforce it by attaching a secondary object like a splint.

The resulting wheel was functional. Only half of the object was truly round, the replacement feet approximating the roundness of a wheel while still being very much flat surfaces, and it looked entirely untrustworthy, but it worked. Wayne wasn't sure what to expect the outcome of Jury Rig to be, but the extreme jankiness he saw before him now felt perfectly appropriate.

"Congratulations," Fergus said. "Now what?"

"Do you suppose it has a time limit?" Wayne asked, pondering the wheel. "Like will it suddenly come apart after a certain a while or is this more or less permanent?"

"It's definitely held together with magic," Margo added.

"Then we bring it with us and see how long it lasts."

"I'm not carrying the wheel," Fergus said immediately.

Wayne looked around for more items to work with and smiled. "A true test would be using it."

A few minutes later, Wayne and his party left the smith pushing a broken broom handle with a wheel attached to the end. The wheel spun in place like a wheel should, but that's all it was, a wheel at the end of a stick.

"Do you intend to spend the rest of the day with that wheel in tow?" Fergus asked.

"No," Wayne answered. "Just until it comes apart."

"Ah, yes, that's much better."

"Who wants to decide what we do next?" Wayne asked the party.

No one replied.

"No ideas at all?"

"I saw a flier for 'amateur goblin roping' a short while ago," Vanilli said.

"Everyone follow Vanilli," Wayne commanded. Along the way, Wayne applied the Jury Rig skill to anything that looked vaguely broken, from cracks in windows to loose doorknobs.

With the Salt of the Earth Festival completed, spectators for an early afternoon amateur goblin-roping competition were few. This particular arena reminded Wayne of a rural rodeo venue on Earth. An oval-shaped fence wrapped around a flat riding area and had a few wooden bleachers on either side. The seating was limited, and every board was gray and warped from years of being exposed to weather. When Wayne felt that his end was wobbly, he reached underneath and tightened the fastener with Jury Rig.

Wayne's party settled in behind an elderly couple. They each wore white cowboy hats and had books in their hands. The man looked up at Wayne curiously.

"Whatcha got there?" he asked, indicating the weird wheel Wayne pushed all the way to his seat.

"This is my pet wheel."

"Pet wheel?"

"Yeah. Just out for a walk."

Fergus leaned between them to hijack the conversation. "Have you attended these events before?" he asked the couple. "We aren't familiar with the rules."

"You've never seen goblin ropin'?"

"We have not, sir."

"It's simple really." The man pointed to the far end of the arena where a network of pens and chutes attached to the fence. "The goblin and the rider come out of there. Goblin gets a head start, and the rider has to lasso and hogtie the bastard as quick as he can."

"So the competition is for time?"

"Aye, with penalties for leaving your line early or for missing a limb with your tie."

Fergus nodded, thoughtfully. "What constitutes a good time?"

"The pros can do it in seven or eight seconds, but these are youngins. Going to be a bit slower."

Fergus' eyes went wide. "They chase the goblin and lasso it in seven seconds?"

"And dismount to hogtie tie it too," the woman added.

"That's quite the feat," Fergus said.

An hour later, Wayne's entire party enjoyed some meat on a stick and watched as the first round of competitors made their runs.

Each attempt went as the man described it. At one end of the arena, a chute opened, and a goblin sprinted straight ahead. A few moments later, a rider on horseback sped out of an adjacent gate to pursue the goblin. They spun a lasso overhead the whole way.

Then with a toss and a cinch, the lasso wrapped around the goblin, at which point the rider jumped free of his mount while the horse dug its heels and leaned back to stop. With the lasso rope tethered to the saddle, the effect of the horse stopping abruptly was a bit like a dog hitting the end of a leash with great force. For the goblin that is.

The rider flopped the goblin face down and tied its hands and feet together into one bundle. According to the old couple commentating for the party, binding three of four limbs counted as a success. Getting bit by the goblin incurred a time penalty, so riders were careful to avoid the snapping teeth.

As soon as the knot was done, the rider popped to his feet with his arms out to show the judges the task was done.

These competitors looked like teenagers, so they didn't hit the seven second times of the professionals, but to Wayne, each run looked wickedly fast.

"I would like to try," Vanilli said.

"Let's see if we can't find someone who could teach you," Fergus said, standing. "We shall return shortly."

Seeing a loose board in the fence in front of them, Wayne stepped forward to try and use Jury Rig to repair it. He got a success notification that included a new ability unlock.

It came from Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday:

Commo Operation – Is adeptness with communications equipment, including repair and operation.

Wayne frowned. That didn't sound very useful in this world.

"Tough one yesterday?" Margo asked when Wayne returned to his seat. She referred to the summit on the ratman threat that Wayne and Fergus walked out of.

Wayne nodded. "It's wild to me how much of a pain in the ass doing the right thing can be. Somehow we went from dungeon diving to dabbling in kingdom politics."

"My husband said something similar, once upon a time," Margo said, reclining onto the bleacher bench behind her. "For all his flaws, he had a hard time being strict with customers. The moment he gave one single mother a break on a door lock, he was an asshole to anyone who didn't get the same deal, whether they needed it or not. He wanted to be liked, so we lost a lot of money because of that."

"That sounds hard."

Margo sighed and nodded slowly. "We fought about it pretty often, and that made me the asshole because I was the one saying that yes, he should ignore the sob stories and stick to paying work. Easy for me to say because I wasn't the one leaving those folks behind, but yeah, doing good caused us a lot of problems."

"What do you think I should do?"

"I have no idea. Maybe we try to attract less attention when we move on to the next town?"

"I thought about that, but anything we use to help people isn't exactly subtle."

"That's true," Margo said. "Hard to be subtle when we ride into town on Outlawson."

Wayne laughed. "I was thinking more about our abilities, but you're right, we make quite the spectacle just rolling up to the front gate."

"Could you just not care and go about your life?"

"I wish, but no," Wayne said, standing. "I'm going to go see what Fergus and Vanilli have gotten up to. Want to join? Or can I get you anything on my way back?"

Margo hopped off the bleachers and followed Wayne as he meandered about the grounds. They found Fergus and Vanilli each with lassos in their hands and goblin dummies ten feet or so in front of them. A young cowboy stood between the students, coaching them on aiming and timing the release of their ropes.

Fergus' toss came up short, but Vanilli's landed. He yanked on the rope to cinch the lasso around the dummy.

Clapping, Margo whistled and said, "Way to go Van!"

Vanilli smiled.

"You picked that up quick."

The demon-in-disguise shrugged. "I had a lot of time to practice simple diversions. This is not so different."

"He's definitely a natural," the cowboy said, stealing a confused glance at Wayne's wagon wheel. "Could be in the arena by the end of the day if he wanted."

"I do not want that."

The cowboy laughed. After a few more tosses, Vanilli bought a rope from a wagon parked near the arena and hung it from his shoulder. He wanted to practice more back at the house.

The party picked up food and drink for the others, and the wagon wheel survived the entirety of the journey to Blackwell's. Tomorrow, the party would leave for the Dead Zone.

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