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

I had…information and experience stitched to my head? Jeb thought. The information was the book, the experience was the memories of the Mevar kid.

Why am I the only one who can read it? Why was it a snake-thing?

Why should I care?

Jeb picked up the book, sat down on the bed, and started reading.

 

Chapter 15: Knock Knock

“Boss!”

“Ngeh!” Jeb grunted, peeling his eyes open to stare at the ceiling. Principles of Myst Sensors and Behavior Programming 101 lay open on his chest where he’d simply dozed off somewhere halfway through the night.

“There’s some kid at the door!” Mr. Everett said, jutting his head through Jeb’s door. “You wanna check it out?”

“I thought I locked that thing,” Jeb muttered, eyeing the door.

“Given your mental state, we thought it best if you didn’t have a locking door, so Pedro swapped it out while you slept.” Mr. Everett gave him a big grin.

“Anyway, everyone else is busy, so hop to it, boss.”

The teacher ducked back out of his room and clomped through the hall, his footsteps swallowed by the sound of carpentry in progress. Jeb got a waft of wood-scent from the doorway.

“When did I lose control here?” Jeb muttered, sitting up and putting on his pants, shirt and leg.

“He’s just trying to make you feel needed,” Mrs. Everett said, barging in the door.

Jeb yelped and covered himself, glaring at the matronly old lady setting the platter down on his desk.

“That’s how my Harv shows he cares,” she said. “Hands up.”

“Wha?”

Without warning, the old lady brusquely yanked the shirt over his head, and then bent down to grab his pants.

“Whoa there, that’s far enough,” he said, grabbing his waistband.

“Please,” she said, rolling her eyes before yanking his pants and underwear off. “You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen a thousand times.”

Jeb probably could have stopped her, but that would involve getting into a wrestling match with an old lady, and that wasn’t really high on his bucket list, so he let her get away with it.

“What’s your waist and leg size?” she asked, folding the clothes over her shoulder.

“Thirty-six, thirty-four,” Jeb said, frowning.

She opened the door, revealing a cart full of clothes and food, along with a basket full of dirty clothes, where she dropped Jeb’s old pair. She went through the tags for a moment before finding what she was looking for.

“Here.” She tugged out a pair of jeans and tossed it at him, along with a new pair of underwear and a shirt. That done, she put her hands on the cart and moved to the next room.

“Looking good, boss!” one of the janitors said from where he was fixing the second-story railing, giving Jeb a thumbs-up.

Jeb slammed the door shut with telekinesis.

You get about the same level of privacy in the army, so it was nothing Jeb wasn’t used to…but still, the casual disregard for their owner’s comfort stung a little.

Jeb glanced at the steaming beef soup on the desk with a BLT beside it, then at the non-greasy pair of underwear in his hands.

On the other hand, forgiveness is divine, Jeb thought, grabbing the soup and wolfing it down before jumping into his new clothes. He still had to go answer the door.

A flat sixty seconds later, Jeb yanked the front door open, revealing Rufio, looking pissed and impatient as hell.

“What’s up?” Jeb asked, taking a bite of his BLT in front of the starving kid.

This wasn’t entirely to torment the teen for being a teen. It was also to signal that there was food on Jeb’s side of the fence. That probably wasn’t lost on the boy, as his eyes tracked the sandwich like it had begun to sing and dance.

“You said something about catching the guy who took Nancy. I’m here to talk.”

“Excellent. Let’s sit at the bar in the kitchen. Mrs. Everett can fix you up something.”

“No.” Rufio scowled at him, tearing his eyes away from the sandwich.

“No?”

“We’re not talking until you show me every room in this place.”

Jeb pursed his lips. “Sure, kid. Knock yourself out.” He opened the door the rest of the way and stood aside.

“I’m gonna stay at the bottom of the stairs, until you finish looking up there,” Jeb said. “Holler when you’re done.”

Jeb had no interest in following the kid around as he made extra-double sure Nancy wasn’t being kept here.

Why would I be keeping Nancy here if I’d already given him the address? Jeb thought, resting his chin on his palm. The boy was suspicious and untrusting, which was good, but he was plainly a teen of limited experience.

This’ll probably take a while. I’m curious as to what Eddie has gotten done.

Jeb hauled off and went around to the back of the mansion, into the storm cellar, where Eddie was working on Buddy.

Buddy was a bomb-defusing robot, with decent armor and resistance to getting blowed up. Eddie was currently attaching the fireball wand to the front of the robot’s controllable arm. He’d created a machine that twisted the rangefinder on the wand back and forth with the speed and precision only a robot was capable of. That was connected to a firing mechanism that threaded back under the robot’s armor, along with a set of shiny motors Jeb hadn’t seen before.

“How’s it going?” Jeb asked.

“Well, I replaced the entire battery power system with a pair of two-stroke motors. Two-stroke motors aren’t the most efficient, but fuel isn’t a problem, and with them offset like this, we should get a full power stroke with minimal vibration. The gas tank is fed by a lens I carved off of the big one according to your light-ray theory,” he said, pointing to what looked like a gasket attached to the top of the small fuel