Chapter IV - Earthly Delights
Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2017 9:12 pm
The kid looked a bit fidgety, a bit ragged around the edges. His hair had probably not been washed for a day or two, and he'd apparently stopped at the Chipotle a block south of here, before coming in. Bertram could smell quesadilla grease on the boy's breath. A slightly distressed GameStop shirt adorned his chest, complete with the nametag of Chet.
"Um, hey," he began, "Do you guys pack the Mists of Madness expansion for Pathfinder?"
Bertram checked his list of pre-orders, hidden as it was behind the counter. Some of it had Dave's handwriting, some of it was his. "It's coming out next month, actually," he precised. "We might be a little tight on the supplies, your own joint's moved into board games and RPG supplements, now that the used games market dried up. I might try and check with your supervisor if I were you, see if you can't place a pre-order there.
- Oh, right," the teen said, more mumbling the words than pronouncing them. He trundled away and deeper within the store, stopping in front of a large and Plexiglas-encased display of Star Wars figurines. Bertram warily eyed the youth for a few moments, sensing his tentacles twitch nervously behind his stem-cell Flesh Mask.
"Er, the X-wing set from Fantasy Flight's twenty percent off!" he called out, more to try and coax a more predictable pattern of behavior out of the teen than to prod for a purchase. Chet only issued a grunt, the fingers of one hand nervously toying with his lower lip. He seemed to be looking at Darth Vader's own TIE Fighter - complete with unique stats - as if it held some deeper meaning.
The Wizard's Nook didn't usually pack that kind of late-day awkwardness and tension. Bertram had spent some fifteen years on the surface now, and he'd gotten used to every nerd, geek and dweeb in town clumsily landing compliments or lifting sexist lines off of Warhammer 40K in the presence of female gamers. Plenty of his customers were perfectly adjusted for everyday life and wore their interest in Pop Culture and plastic minifigures like a cheerful afterthought shucked on after a day's work. Others, especially the kids, reminded him of how things used to be in the early days, before he met David. Back when daily tedium should've been realistically called the Daily Gauntlet, mastering the flimsiest of social cues had left him feeling like he could've gone straight back to Dalarath and schooled that fool Speaker and his Chamberlain.
Not that he had any chance of going back, of course. He'd been weak, the last of an egg clutch to mature, and had offered his mate an equally weak slurry of unfertilized eggs. His first husband, if you could've called him that, had long since caught on to his mate's more delicate persona. The Void Weavers liked to believe that exquisite forms of wickedness could be coaxed out of the reluctant ones, but Bertram had only ever been a bookseller at heart. Hating a world he'd never seen before required mental gymnastics he couldn't keep up with. It hadn't been a perfect love, but it had been something close - until their neighbor slit Karad's throat in a fit of ecstatic rage. They'd been making better sales than him for months, so Karad had prayed to Dar-Larath and been imbued with a shred of His cosmic wrath.
Bertram remembered picking Karad's congealed blood off of the floors and ceiling, even as primal fear crept in. He'd had no other choice but to leave - and leave he did.
Dave had been a stroke of luck the likes of which the Others had always warned against. George had pressured him about finding a hobby for weeks, and to see about finding something other than the stipend offered by his keeping the Order's books as a form of sustenance. Add a year spent floundering and 2007's ChtulhuCon here in Hope, and he'd found not only his new hook, but also someone to enjoy it with. As it turned out, David Ingram enjoyed long games of Call of Chtulhu, he participated in a few local LARP campaigns as a Paladin, thought Firefly deserved a remake long after all hopes of a reboot had faded away - and happened to be the kind of man Bertram didn't know he'd always dreamed of. As for Bertram Miles, he happened to be the exact kind of man Dave fell for: a little awkward, occasionally possessed of strokes of genius and of an acceptable level of aesthetic arrogance; baby-faced despite his advancing forties, a body just south of being roly-poly... A dorky cherub in beige plaid and brown slacks, too afraid to stand out even if he was the one rocking the Doctor Who mug on the apartment floor, upstairs and the discrete Triforce tattoo on his right bicep...
When Bertram had first removed his Flesh Mask in front of David and George, the anthro Labrador had responded by hugging him. He'd first cried his eyes out, and then finally discovered what it was the surface-dwellers meant when they talked about making love. Awakening to the true nature of his abuse in Dalarath had been painful, but the effortless acceptance of his prior suffering by David was a game-changer. From that one night in 2008, Bertram Miles had gone from a functional man-child to a ruthless entrepreneur in his own field, as he now helmed the one geek and gamer-oriented store in Hope that stubbornly refused to cave in to the pressure placed on it by Big Retail. Some people already likened it to Gammell's Toybox, if the elusive Mister Gammell had been the type to keep up with video game-related trade shows and comic book movie plot dumps at the San Diego Comic-Con.
Sure, you could've gone to Wal-Mart in Pickman's Sound to buy Destiny 4, but then you would've missed on the ambiance, on the feeling of the Nook serving as a gathering space, as something more than just a store where you stopped by to pick-up pre-orders.
Besides, Wal-Mart didn't pack a root beer fountain next to the games that had won last year's Spiel der Jähres, and GameStop didn't include tables inlaid with flashy little runes designed to visually augment your average Gwent tournament, your Magic: The Gathering face-off or whatever else involved anything between Pokémon cards and Upper Deck's 2025 NHL and NBA rosters...
That same impression was reflected in the rest of the store, from the supposedly "expensively commissioned" fiberglass dragon hanging from the ceiling, spitting a giant Mylar balloon of a fake plume of fire at the wizard's tower inlaid in the right-hand-facing wall from the entrance. The tower's door was always locked during business hours, and showed the same sign as the store proper, during closing time: Fighting Dragons, Please do not Disturb. Past the door waited the spiral staircase leading up to the couple's living space.
False stone appliqués on the walls otherwise coexisted with life-size cutouts of everything between Batman, the Penguin, Spider-Man and Bigby Wolf, and a number of 1080p displays along the walls displayed snippets from the DC Animated Universe's cartoons, the nineties' Spider-Man run on Fox Kids, episode rundowns for Game of Thrones or the latest Star Trek series. One corner of the store was slightly more Steampunk in its tone, brass plaques on the walls framing glass cases that displayed the Naughton Memorial line of action figures. Even Clanks could have geek-like penchants, evidently, the nearby walls showing minor body modifications that would allow more modern Automatons to temporarily display a bit of the old "hand-bolted rivets" charm.
Bertram sighed, turned to watch the store's single 4K screen as it aggressively hawked some new "extreme combat" board game based on "tactical polyhedrals" - or TACTICAL POLYHEDRALS!!! if you went by the sales pitch - as well as "spheroid war frames". He sniffed as the demo footage showed falsely-excited kids tossing LED-covered plastic dreidels into a rectangular arena. As far as he could tell, the tops' integrated accelerometer would make them stop on specific patterns of light for a few seconds, long enough to roll corresponding dice and determine the number of damage points incurred. Of course, that involved collectible spinning tops and a USB charging dongle that served as a means to improve your "war frame"'s overall statistics. The included NFC chip allowed children to import their oh-so-edgy spinning tops to a fighting game scheduled to come out for the Xbox Gemini, as a means to further improve their statistics before returning to their little plastic arenas.
"Tamagotchi for bored Elementary School kids jumping onto the fad long after their Millennial parents, I see," he muttered.
From the back, David groaned. "I know... Anki looked about poised to stick actual, genuine AI into our board games, and then they scrap their lead engineer's project and go for this shit. Betcha we'll still have to restock the frames like crazy over Christmas. Remember the Hatchimals?"
Bertram snickered. "I felt like ripping my tent - I mean, my goatee off by the time the 24th rolled around!"
The Labrador sent his husband a wary look. The day wasn't over until the last customer would've left and they'd have locked the doors and drawn the blinds. Then, they'd be ready for the evening's scheduled events. With that in mind, Dave started turning off a few screens, briefly jostling Chet in the process.
"Hey," he weakly said, "I was watching that!
- Sorry man," replied Dave. "Store's closing. You've got five more minutes to make up your mind, then it's out the door. We're open all week, anyway."
Chet looked like he lacked the mental capacity to figure out what to do with himself, now that he couldn't look at Paul Dini's angular version of Wonder Woman. He floundered in the back aisles for a while, could be heard groaning dejectedly, and then came into view clutching one of the usual suspects for someone who hadn't had a clear goal in coming here: a full set of cheap dice. Baby's First D&D Necessaries, Bertram thought.
Chet paid for his dice by debit, mumbled weak thanks, and made for the door. He stopped in front of its glass pane for an instant, frowned, and then looked back to Miles and Ingram.
"They're coming," he said, and pushed the door open, slipping into the early November night. Dave followed behind, locked the door, turned the red Closed neon strip on and then walked back to Bert.
"I didn't see anything," Dave said, frowning. "George and the others might need a few extra minutes to drop by, they need to use the back door."
Bertram retreated to a corner of the store that couldn't be seen from out front, and removed his Flesh Mask, sighing in obvious relief once he'd done so. His now almost shellfish-white skin reflected the LED strips above rather harshly. He unlocked the door to their apartment, his mask under one arm, and gave his mate a wary look.
"I don't think he was talking about George, Dave.
- Well, I sure as shit didn't see Drake or the Shieldies; they can't teleport either."
Bertram tsked. "Just one of these old bad feelings, I guess. That kid - I know I haven't seen anyone who's been touched in years, but I know it when I see it.
- Oh, come on - Chet? Kid's probably high off of hospital-strength pot he fleeced from his grandpa or something. Besides, he didn't do the shaky-eyes thing you told me to watch out for. Y'know, like they've got zero depth perception after getting their brains scrambled?"
Miles seemed uncertain. "We didn't all hit our slaves upside the head with a sledgehammer, sweetheart," he said. "Some of us were much more dangerous - used trepanning chisels instead. Really careful Words. It meant you were playing fast-and-loose with Her teachings, but it also meant you'd go neck-and-neck against Lulroth for the slaver business. There was money to be made with slaves who could string a sentence together."
Dave latched onto that last name. "Lulroth... You mean Lucian Rothchild, right?
- Yes. He's coming tonight. Him and a whole bunch of other people. I wouldn't be here if he hadn't loaned me ten thousand bucks, in the beginning."
Bertram gave the outside world one last wary look. "Anyway. I've gotta go hang my face, make sure it's hydrated. Give me five minutes - just answer the back door if anyone uses the service doorbell for deliveries."
"Um, hey," he began, "Do you guys pack the Mists of Madness expansion for Pathfinder?"
Bertram checked his list of pre-orders, hidden as it was behind the counter. Some of it had Dave's handwriting, some of it was his. "It's coming out next month, actually," he precised. "We might be a little tight on the supplies, your own joint's moved into board games and RPG supplements, now that the used games market dried up. I might try and check with your supervisor if I were you, see if you can't place a pre-order there.
- Oh, right," the teen said, more mumbling the words than pronouncing them. He trundled away and deeper within the store, stopping in front of a large and Plexiglas-encased display of Star Wars figurines. Bertram warily eyed the youth for a few moments, sensing his tentacles twitch nervously behind his stem-cell Flesh Mask.
"Er, the X-wing set from Fantasy Flight's twenty percent off!" he called out, more to try and coax a more predictable pattern of behavior out of the teen than to prod for a purchase. Chet only issued a grunt, the fingers of one hand nervously toying with his lower lip. He seemed to be looking at Darth Vader's own TIE Fighter - complete with unique stats - as if it held some deeper meaning.
The Wizard's Nook didn't usually pack that kind of late-day awkwardness and tension. Bertram had spent some fifteen years on the surface now, and he'd gotten used to every nerd, geek and dweeb in town clumsily landing compliments or lifting sexist lines off of Warhammer 40K in the presence of female gamers. Plenty of his customers were perfectly adjusted for everyday life and wore their interest in Pop Culture and plastic minifigures like a cheerful afterthought shucked on after a day's work. Others, especially the kids, reminded him of how things used to be in the early days, before he met David. Back when daily tedium should've been realistically called the Daily Gauntlet, mastering the flimsiest of social cues had left him feeling like he could've gone straight back to Dalarath and schooled that fool Speaker and his Chamberlain.
Not that he had any chance of going back, of course. He'd been weak, the last of an egg clutch to mature, and had offered his mate an equally weak slurry of unfertilized eggs. His first husband, if you could've called him that, had long since caught on to his mate's more delicate persona. The Void Weavers liked to believe that exquisite forms of wickedness could be coaxed out of the reluctant ones, but Bertram had only ever been a bookseller at heart. Hating a world he'd never seen before required mental gymnastics he couldn't keep up with. It hadn't been a perfect love, but it had been something close - until their neighbor slit Karad's throat in a fit of ecstatic rage. They'd been making better sales than him for months, so Karad had prayed to Dar-Larath and been imbued with a shred of His cosmic wrath.
Bertram remembered picking Karad's congealed blood off of the floors and ceiling, even as primal fear crept in. He'd had no other choice but to leave - and leave he did.
Dave had been a stroke of luck the likes of which the Others had always warned against. George had pressured him about finding a hobby for weeks, and to see about finding something other than the stipend offered by his keeping the Order's books as a form of sustenance. Add a year spent floundering and 2007's ChtulhuCon here in Hope, and he'd found not only his new hook, but also someone to enjoy it with. As it turned out, David Ingram enjoyed long games of Call of Chtulhu, he participated in a few local LARP campaigns as a Paladin, thought Firefly deserved a remake long after all hopes of a reboot had faded away - and happened to be the kind of man Bertram didn't know he'd always dreamed of. As for Bertram Miles, he happened to be the exact kind of man Dave fell for: a little awkward, occasionally possessed of strokes of genius and of an acceptable level of aesthetic arrogance; baby-faced despite his advancing forties, a body just south of being roly-poly... A dorky cherub in beige plaid and brown slacks, too afraid to stand out even if he was the one rocking the Doctor Who mug on the apartment floor, upstairs and the discrete Triforce tattoo on his right bicep...
When Bertram had first removed his Flesh Mask in front of David and George, the anthro Labrador had responded by hugging him. He'd first cried his eyes out, and then finally discovered what it was the surface-dwellers meant when they talked about making love. Awakening to the true nature of his abuse in Dalarath had been painful, but the effortless acceptance of his prior suffering by David was a game-changer. From that one night in 2008, Bertram Miles had gone from a functional man-child to a ruthless entrepreneur in his own field, as he now helmed the one geek and gamer-oriented store in Hope that stubbornly refused to cave in to the pressure placed on it by Big Retail. Some people already likened it to Gammell's Toybox, if the elusive Mister Gammell had been the type to keep up with video game-related trade shows and comic book movie plot dumps at the San Diego Comic-Con.
Sure, you could've gone to Wal-Mart in Pickman's Sound to buy Destiny 4, but then you would've missed on the ambiance, on the feeling of the Nook serving as a gathering space, as something more than just a store where you stopped by to pick-up pre-orders.
Besides, Wal-Mart didn't pack a root beer fountain next to the games that had won last year's Spiel der Jähres, and GameStop didn't include tables inlaid with flashy little runes designed to visually augment your average Gwent tournament, your Magic: The Gathering face-off or whatever else involved anything between Pokémon cards and Upper Deck's 2025 NHL and NBA rosters...
That same impression was reflected in the rest of the store, from the supposedly "expensively commissioned" fiberglass dragon hanging from the ceiling, spitting a giant Mylar balloon of a fake plume of fire at the wizard's tower inlaid in the right-hand-facing wall from the entrance. The tower's door was always locked during business hours, and showed the same sign as the store proper, during closing time: Fighting Dragons, Please do not Disturb. Past the door waited the spiral staircase leading up to the couple's living space.
False stone appliqués on the walls otherwise coexisted with life-size cutouts of everything between Batman, the Penguin, Spider-Man and Bigby Wolf, and a number of 1080p displays along the walls displayed snippets from the DC Animated Universe's cartoons, the nineties' Spider-Man run on Fox Kids, episode rundowns for Game of Thrones or the latest Star Trek series. One corner of the store was slightly more Steampunk in its tone, brass plaques on the walls framing glass cases that displayed the Naughton Memorial line of action figures. Even Clanks could have geek-like penchants, evidently, the nearby walls showing minor body modifications that would allow more modern Automatons to temporarily display a bit of the old "hand-bolted rivets" charm.
Bertram sighed, turned to watch the store's single 4K screen as it aggressively hawked some new "extreme combat" board game based on "tactical polyhedrals" - or TACTICAL POLYHEDRALS!!! if you went by the sales pitch - as well as "spheroid war frames". He sniffed as the demo footage showed falsely-excited kids tossing LED-covered plastic dreidels into a rectangular arena. As far as he could tell, the tops' integrated accelerometer would make them stop on specific patterns of light for a few seconds, long enough to roll corresponding dice and determine the number of damage points incurred. Of course, that involved collectible spinning tops and a USB charging dongle that served as a means to improve your "war frame"'s overall statistics. The included NFC chip allowed children to import their oh-so-edgy spinning tops to a fighting game scheduled to come out for the Xbox Gemini, as a means to further improve their statistics before returning to their little plastic arenas.
"Tamagotchi for bored Elementary School kids jumping onto the fad long after their Millennial parents, I see," he muttered.
From the back, David groaned. "I know... Anki looked about poised to stick actual, genuine AI into our board games, and then they scrap their lead engineer's project and go for this shit. Betcha we'll still have to restock the frames like crazy over Christmas. Remember the Hatchimals?"
Bertram snickered. "I felt like ripping my tent - I mean, my goatee off by the time the 24th rolled around!"
The Labrador sent his husband a wary look. The day wasn't over until the last customer would've left and they'd have locked the doors and drawn the blinds. Then, they'd be ready for the evening's scheduled events. With that in mind, Dave started turning off a few screens, briefly jostling Chet in the process.
"Hey," he weakly said, "I was watching that!
- Sorry man," replied Dave. "Store's closing. You've got five more minutes to make up your mind, then it's out the door. We're open all week, anyway."
Chet looked like he lacked the mental capacity to figure out what to do with himself, now that he couldn't look at Paul Dini's angular version of Wonder Woman. He floundered in the back aisles for a while, could be heard groaning dejectedly, and then came into view clutching one of the usual suspects for someone who hadn't had a clear goal in coming here: a full set of cheap dice. Baby's First D&D Necessaries, Bertram thought.
Chet paid for his dice by debit, mumbled weak thanks, and made for the door. He stopped in front of its glass pane for an instant, frowned, and then looked back to Miles and Ingram.
"They're coming," he said, and pushed the door open, slipping into the early November night. Dave followed behind, locked the door, turned the red Closed neon strip on and then walked back to Bert.
"I didn't see anything," Dave said, frowning. "George and the others might need a few extra minutes to drop by, they need to use the back door."
Bertram retreated to a corner of the store that couldn't be seen from out front, and removed his Flesh Mask, sighing in obvious relief once he'd done so. His now almost shellfish-white skin reflected the LED strips above rather harshly. He unlocked the door to their apartment, his mask under one arm, and gave his mate a wary look.
"I don't think he was talking about George, Dave.
- Well, I sure as shit didn't see Drake or the Shieldies; they can't teleport either."
Bertram tsked. "Just one of these old bad feelings, I guess. That kid - I know I haven't seen anyone who's been touched in years, but I know it when I see it.
- Oh, come on - Chet? Kid's probably high off of hospital-strength pot he fleeced from his grandpa or something. Besides, he didn't do the shaky-eyes thing you told me to watch out for. Y'know, like they've got zero depth perception after getting their brains scrambled?"
Miles seemed uncertain. "We didn't all hit our slaves upside the head with a sledgehammer, sweetheart," he said. "Some of us were much more dangerous - used trepanning chisels instead. Really careful Words. It meant you were playing fast-and-loose with Her teachings, but it also meant you'd go neck-and-neck against Lulroth for the slaver business. There was money to be made with slaves who could string a sentence together."
Dave latched onto that last name. "Lulroth... You mean Lucian Rothchild, right?
- Yes. He's coming tonight. Him and a whole bunch of other people. I wouldn't be here if he hadn't loaned me ten thousand bucks, in the beginning."
Bertram gave the outside world one last wary look. "Anyway. I've gotta go hang my face, make sure it's hydrated. Give me five minutes - just answer the back door if anyone uses the service doorbell for deliveries."