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

Smartass cackled. “I got you to raise your offer by a full twenty-five percent, you gullible fool! Two and a half percent is worth hundreds of times more than a pound of candy! Ahahahaha!”

Now to test it.

“Here, help me out and cross off the candy factories,” Jeb said, holding out the pen.

“Oh, sure,” the fairy said, grabbing the pen and crossing out the candy factory locations, easily shaving a couple hundred miles off the trip.

The oil refineries should be first. Even if they don’t have a gasoline lens, they should at least have fifty-five gallon drums of gas I can load into the back of the car.

“I’m getting thirsty. Snag me one of those root beers?” Jeb said, taking the pen back.

“Of course.” Smartass fluttered away toward the back of the Jeep.

“And run some river water over it until it’s nice and cold,” Jeb called after her.

“Sure—Hey, WAIT A MINUTE!” Smartass glared at him the entire time she rummaged through the supplies for the soda and river stone.

Jeb returned his attention to the map, plotting out the best route. A few minutes later, a can of soda was thrust under his nose, condensation beading down the aluminum sides.

“Here,” Smartass growled at him, holding it out with both hands, her cheeks twitching madly.

Jeb glanced down at the soda.

“Set it down over there.” He pointed to the edge of the hood of the car they were using as a table.

“Okay.”

“Open it.”

Smartass’s eyes went wide even as her fingers went for the tab. “You know, I really don’t think that’s necessary. You can jus—”

PSSHHHH!

Smartass gasped as ice-cold soda exploded all over her front. Thankfully the fairy was wearing a plastic Snickers-wrapper tunic, which was mostly waterproof. She stood there in shock, eyes wide and shivering, dripping root beer from head to toe.

“Smartass, I’m going to make you a promise right here,” Jeb said, picking up the can and taking a sip. “I promise from this point on, I will not intentionally give abusive commands. This promise will last until our arrangement with each other has run its course or such a time as you try to sabotage or monkey-paw me. If something I’m asking you to do is abusive, simply let me know. With words. Does that sound good?”

Smartass nodded, staring into space.

“Excellent. Root beer?”

“I don’t like root beer anymore,” Smartass whispered.

“Alright then,” Jeb said, marking the new route down.

Jeb was wavering on the decision to go solo for a while, and the deciding factor was the time value. If he could get to Solmnath two weeks earlier, then he could catch the bad guy two weeks earlier, and that meant one or two not-dead children.

Plus, with Smartass now obligated to follow orders and invested in his survival, he wasn’t completely alone, and that made a big difference in his survivability out there.

Jeb heaved a breath, looking down at the map one last time before rolling it up and shoving it in the back of the Jeep.

“I’ll go say goodbye.”

******

The next week was a long string of nervous tension punctuated with butt-clenching moments here and there, when they had to speed away from desert monsters and pirates.

Smartass’s new job was scout and lookout. She muttered a bit about menial jobs, but it wasn’t abusive, and they both knew it. She would scout out a place and see if anything was living there, and Jeb would loot it.

While Jeb was looting, the fairy would then watch the outside for any signs of monsters or bandits, informing him as soon as she saw something.

Three times, this stopped Jeb from walking out the door loaded up with loot while a horde of monsters wandered by.

Once, she found a school bus-sized lizard Jeb had no desire to tangle with sleeping inside, and they avoided the location entirely.

Jeb shamelessly appropriated gold bars and coins from safety deposit boxes in banks across the west coast, tossing them in the small trailer he’d snagged for loot.

Rummaging through the safety deposit boxes didn’t just yield gold bars and expensive jewelry. Jeb found all sorts of things that people found valuable, from letters from grandma, baby teeth, and even a snarl of gunk and hair that looked like it’d been thrown up by an owl. He even found some old blackmail material of various kinds, photos taken by P.I.s, a disc with ‘Night with Tim’ printed on the front, old Nazi paraphernalia…

Some truly weird stuff that Jeb shoved back in the boxes without hesitation. One would hope the Tutorial cleaned that kind of person off the face of the earth, but things usually didn’t work out that way.

A few things, Jeb didn’t have the heart to steal. There was a gold necklace from a dead grandmother along with a heartwarming note that Jeb put back in the box and left for someone else. Anything that looked like it belonged on a rapper was fair game, though.

As it turned out, gasoline lenses did exist. Jeb found one in the second refinery he visited. The place was torn in half by the Stitching, and one of the massive steel vats they used to refine oil was cut in half, its contents long since spilled out into the dead brush and dried up until only sticky tar remained.

At the bottom of the apartment complex-sized tank was a white painted chunk of steel covered in thick sludge, its paint and markings suspiciously like those of the holding tanks.

Jeb funneled a drop of Myst through the fist-sized lens, and spent the rest of the day smelling like gasoline, much to Smartass’s amusement.

After that, he made sure to use a net and telekinesis to probe around the inside of all the sludge-filled tanks, scoring several more types of oil lenses, namely kerosene, jet fuel, diesel, lubricant and tar.