Chapter 111: Glue, Time, and Turtles

“So it’s vermin, then? In the basement?” Sean asked. “And you want me to kill them?”

“Yes, they are vermin. No, I don’t want you to kill them. These things are a delicacy. I need them alive.”

The restaurant manager whose work request Sean had answered was not a skilled communicator. Sean had been working the details of the job with him for minutes now, and still wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. As near as he could tell, there was some kind of animal in the basement, something the manager seemed to want to cook for customers.

Sean mentally decided, right then and there, not to ask why the manager needed them alive. There were some things he just didn’t feel ready to know.

“Okay, so catch them alive. Out of curiosity, why not keep them in cages? Or something like that. You know.”

“They don’t like it. And if they don’t like it, they lose weight. If they lose weight, they get stringy,” the restaurant manager said, unlocking the door to the basement, cracking it small enough to make sure nothing was going to run out, and then motioned Sean through. “Just catch them, okay? I need as many as you can get. I’ll pay for each, so do your best.”

Sean nodded and stepped down the stairs, startling a bit as the manager slammed the door behind him. As much as he was a superhuman now, there was still something unsettling about being sealed in a dim, unfamiliar basement. He walked lightly down the wooden stairs until his feet hit the soil floor of the room, then began exploring the surprisingly large space below the eatery.

All confusion about where the animals would be vanished as he approached the back wall of the space. Where the other walls had been bricked, this one was mostly open to the soil, the weight of the house resting on a few central pillars. And that earth wall was like swiss cheese with holes that looked suspiciously like burrows.

Sean set up shop on a crate and waited, trying his best not to make much noise. After a few minutes, a scratching sound from one of the burrows caught his attention. He watched as a small, bullet-shaped animal fell out, covered everywhere but the head, tail, and limbs with a bony shell.

Some kind of burrowing turtle? Sean thought, pushing himself off the crate and towards the unaware animal. Or at least it looked unaware. As soon as he moved, so did the turtle, flying back into the same hole it had exited like an arrow and disappearing into the darkness.

Sean suddenly understood why the restaurant needed a combat class to catch these things. They were fast as hell.

The good news was that they came out of the wall fairly regularly, apparently to get at food the restaurateur had left out for them. But after three attempts to catch them, Sean had nothing to show for his efforts. He could almost see how smug the turtles were to keep escaping.

With his current speed, there was no way to catch them. Even Hard Time didn’t make enough of a difference to let him grab one, although it got him pretty close. But what the turtles weren’t counting on, and couldn’t, was that Sean had another advantage in this fight. He had glue.

All the turtles seemed to come out of the holes at fairly consistent velocities, speeds that put them within a certain well-defined line when they landed regardless of what their intent was. Sean decided to take advantage of that, smearing a thick layer of Plug Mud on the ground in front of a few of the holes.

A few minutes later, one of the bullet-turtles hit the glue, which messed up its movements just enough for Sean to get a hand on it. It bit him. The bite didn’t hurt, but it was pretty clear that this was an animal that was going to struggle the whole time, and his pay revolved around getting a ton of these things.

Sean wandered through the basement until he found a mostly empty crate, took the few remaining items out of it, and tossed the turtle in, closing the lid behind it. By the time he had finished, another turtle had hit his glue. He shoved it in the box, then went back to waiting.

The only problem with Sean’s gambit was that Plug Mud was pretty fast-curing stuff, as glue went. His Adhesives Mastery let him hold that off a bit, but it wasn’t good enough. He was catching turtles, sure, but sooner or later, he’d run out of glue and that would be that.

Sean glanced back at the crate, decided that the animals in it were enough if he didn’t catch anything else, and decided to take a risk. Pulling a bucket from his bag of holding, he tossed the remainder of his supply of Plug Mud in, then put his hand on the surface of the glue. Focusing hard, he managed to pull in a little bit of the surrounding time energy in the basement, pushing it into the glue in the same way he had coated his weapons.

He didn’t expect it to work, but what he expected even less was for it to work immediately.

Plug Mud (Time Linked, Enhanced)

Ah, finally. You’ve tried magical alchemy. Did you know, Sean, that you can only get so far mixing random ingredients together? In the same way a source of heat enables cooking that would otherwise be impossible, introducing various kinds of energy to an alchemical process opens a potentially infinite number of doors into the deeper recesses of the arcane brewing arts.

This Plug Mud has been Time Linked. Essentially, you’ve given it an especially strong connection to time, allowing you to bend it to your will (so long as you have a convenient way to tell it what to do). It’s also just slightly better now, having benefited from exposure to a strong, pure source of energy.

Oh, yeah, by the way: the bigger deal isn’t the glue. It’s the progress. This is actually sort of a big one for you.

Rewards: Three levels to Cellblock Brewmaster, Enhanced understanding of time

“Holy shit,” Sean said. He didn’t care if he startled the turtles. He already had some ability to influence adhesives based on his Adhesives Mastery, but this let him double that up, creating a glue that both listened to his subtle influences and could be nudged to new applications. He could already speed up some glues’ drying speeds to a ridiculous point and this would make the process near-instant.

Here, though, he needed the glue not to dry. Slathering his new, slightly pink plug mud on the ground, he gave it a charge of slow-down Hard Time and waited. After catching a few turtles and spending a few more charges, he checked the mud. Not only was it not hardened, he didn’t think it had actually cured at all.

This was shaping up to be a good day. He had got out of the house, made some money, and even managed to get an idea for another project. He just needed a few more turtles, and he’d be good to go.

—

“This is too many turtles!” the manager yelled. After the glue had taken hold, Sean had caught a bunch of them. At some point, he lost count, but it was enough that he was having trouble holding the box steady as the panicked manager looked inside it. “I can’t use this many. People won’t order this many.”

“You said you’d pay by the piece. It’s not my fault you didn’t specify an upper limit.”

“Still. I’m going to have to let about half of these go. This isn’t good.” The manager sighed. “Listen, my boss is going to have a fit about this. I know you earned the money, but I don’t actually own this place and I have a budget for this kind of work that this is going to just explode.”

“Ah. I see.” Sean was down for screwing a normal day labor employer, but this sounded like something more familiar, something worse. “Can we work something out? A barter.”

“You need a meal? I’ve got stuff cooking,” the man said, hopefully, before looking downcast again. “Although that still wouldn’t be enough.”

Sean thought, too, before realizing that one of the things that made the turtle job below hard was the supreme lack of organization in the basement.

“Do you have food?” Sean asked. “I don’t mean cooked. I mean stuff that will keep a little while in a backpack or a dimensional storage. I’m going on a trip. Supplies are always good. Stuff your boss wouldn’t miss.”

“Oh, shit, yes. There are all sorts of stuff that never moves. It goes bad down there, eventually. How’s your VIT score?”

“Good.”

“Then I have some good stuff. It’s past the expiration, not too long. The VIT score will make sure you don’t get hurt by it even if it goes a little longer.”

Sean was fine with that, especially once it turned out how much food there was. There were apparently a lot of things the restaurant didn’t make from scratch.

He walked away with noodles and honest to god sauces. He had gallons of what appeared to be some kind of canned pudding. He had pickles. Not ones he recognized, since this planet had no clue what a cucumber was, but pickles nonetheless, sublime in their briny goodness. He was set on food, now, and the restaurant guy couldn’t be happier. It was a win-win for the employed and downcast.

Sean was so happy walking down the street eating pickles that he almost didn’t pick up on the fact that he was being followed. The fact that his tails were all wearing the same clothes was the first thing that clued him into a problem, actually. Clothes were weird on this planet, but five guys wearing a ninja-like uniform clearly built for stealth all at once was a little much, even for him.

Sean ducked down some side streets, hoping to lose them. It wasn’t destined to be. These guys were fast and seemed to know the area better than him. After sensing them following him around the first couple of turns, he burst into a sprint, tracing a maze of minor streets as he streaked through the city.

He heard a whoosh as he ran, and one of them came down through the air and landed on the ground front of him, holding a curved sword and blocking his way forward. The others were still in hot pursuit, and there wasn’t a way around that he trusted to pull off at the same time the ninja swung a sword at his face. He reached for his bag.

One shot. I need to get him out of the way in one shot.

The Heavy Heart was too much work to get into play in this situation, and the Mystereamer would tie him up in melee in a way that would let the others catch up in a moment. That left just one real option for him. If it worked, he’d be sitting pretty.

If it didn’t, he’d be at the bottom of a pile of ninjas.