Apocalypse: Fairy System by Macronomicon (fox in socks read aloud txt) 📕

and took his revolver, pegleg and shoe. Aww come on, why the shoes, man!? Jeb tried to protest through the gag, but it came out as a surly groan.

Jeb tensed up when the inquisitive fingers seized on his ring.

Oh, shit, I forgot about that. Goddamnit!

Plan, meet First Contact.

A moment later, they pried it off his finger before muttering to each other in hushed tones. Jeb could picture them using their fancy-schmancy System to identify his magical ring and wonder why an informant was wearing bling that could likely be traded for a mansion.

“Enough. Svek will decide what to do with him.” A rumbling voice cut the other off, and Jeb felt himself being slung over someone’s shoulder before they began moving across the mountainside at roller-coaster speeds, making his stomach distinctly uneasy.

They must have been going somewhere around forty miles an hour, judging by the feel in his gut when they made a turn, and generally the movement was more upward than downward.

Ten minutes later, Jeb heard other voices, and they set him down on some kind of rug made of coarse fur.

Ten minutes at forty miles an hour, so somewhere between five and seven miles away from the meeting point, generally uphill.

That described a fairly large swath of the mountainside.

Oh, god, the walk back is going to be murder on my feet—foot—if I don’t get my shoe back. Maybe the girl can carry me.

Without warning, Jeb’s hood and gag were ripped from his face, nearly taking his lips with them. He was kneeling with his hands tied behind his back in some kind of yurt made of animal hide. Dim firelight peeked through the seams of the door flap, and Jeb could hear raucous laughter coming from beyond.

More concerning, however, was the melas man sitting on a hide-covered throne, contemplatively turning Jeb’s ring over in his hand. He was a foot taller than any melas he’d seen so far, and those people were big.

The titanic melas’s horns were huge and shiny, curving up and around in a way that made Jeb think of Tim Curry in Legend. Slightly oranger, but still.

He dominated the yurt, making the large leather construction appear small and confined. There was nowhere in the room Jeb could go that the pirate captain couldn’t reach by leaning a bit.

“Jebediah Trapper, I presume?” he rumbled, glancing up from the ring.

Oh, goddamnit, it’s got my name on it. That son of a bitch god is gonna get me killed!

Chapter 5: Finishing the Job

Jeb opened his mouth to speak.

“Before you say anything,” Svek said, motioning to his rather large gold earring, “I have ways of knowing if you’re telling the truth. If you lie to me, I will kill you and toss your body down the mountainside. Understood?”

Jeb tried and failed to choke down a giggle.

“What’s funny?”

“I never had any intention of lying to you from the start,” Jeb said, chuckling.

“Interesting. What are you doing here?”

“Mark asked me to deliver a message for him. Said it paid well,” Jeb said. This statement was completely true, although Mark had said those words at gunpoint. Mark had said a lot of things at gunpoint to make Jeb’s infiltration easier.

“And your name?”

“It’s Jebediah Trapper.”

“Do you know what this is?” Svek asked, showing Jeb the ring.

“Can’t say that I do.”

“That’s odd, considering it has your name on it.”

Svek’s eyes unfocused for an instant as he looked at the ring with the whirling mist.

“Bestowed upon Jebediah Trapper by Nixus as a reward for outstanding performance during the Impossible Tutorial,” the melas said, eyes darting as he read something in front of his eyes.

“I knew the humans had completed the Impossible Tutorial, but I never expected to meet one. I certainly never expected one to be as weak as you. Shouldn’t you be hunting reapers for the emperor or sipping C’lackcha on a beach somewhere? By all accounts, the people who made it out of the Impossible Tutorial are forces to be reckoned with.

“How did you wind up powerless on my doorstep?” Svek grinned, looming over Jeb.

“Well, there was a whole…thing where some of the gods thought I had cheated, but they didn’t have provisions in place, so they just voted to take away my access to The System as punishment.”

“Cheated?” Svek interrupted. “How?”

“By being underhanded. I exploited a weakness in the treasure reward system to go back in time and finish the Tutorial within the unfair time limit, creating a paradox that the gods had to clean up. They didn’t seem pleased about that.”

“You met them personally?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say ‘met’. More like I sat there while they talked over my head.”

“What happened next?”

“After that, I didn’t have access to The System, so I slummed around in Kalfath for a couple months, trying to live like a civvie until my PTSD started acting up. Then Mark told me I could make a couple silver if I ran a message for him.”

Jeb left some parts out, but none of it was a lie.

“A couple silver!?” Svek asked with a chortle, slapping his knee in amusement.

“Do you know how much this is worth!?” he asked, holding the ring out.

“I do not,” Jeb grumbled. “But I imagine it’s probably worth a lot more than that.”

“This is an Appraiser. By itself, it’s probably worth five hundred bulbs. To a collector, it’s likely worth far more than that, since it’s a unique relic that has literally been touched by a deity.”

“Appraiser?” Jeb asked.

Svek inhaled deeply and pursed his lips, bringing the ring to his face. He blew hard into the center of the ring, causing a billowing cloud of grey Myst to shoot out, roiling across Jeb’s body.

Wherever it landed, his flesh glowed and pulsed from the inside,