Book 2 - Chapter 9: Sticky Hand

The thing that I eventually realized about Sean was that, despite whatever failings he might have, he was from the era that the Apocalypse System grew up on. In a way, they were the same generation. They had watched the same TV. They had read the same books. They even knew the same references. Not just knew them. They both liked them. Knew which ones to like.

I get that the Apocalypse System isn’t a person. I even know why you don’t want to think of it that way. But, still, it was a kind of in-tune-ness that Sean had which none of the rest of us had.

Sean wasn’t that strong. He wasn’t really all that brave, especially after he got hurt bad the first time. He wasn’t a great natural fighter. But he had an edge that none of the rest of us had. That none of the rest of us could have had. We were born decades and generations too late. These things have been trying to kill us since we were born. There was no sense in which any of us liked them, or thought they were funny.

Sean did.

You will sometimes hear people say the Apocalypse System liked him. I was as close to him as anybody, at least anyone who he knew early on. I’m here to tell you the Apocalypse System tried to kill him just as much as it tried to kill anyone. It didn’t like him, in the same way it doesn’t like anybody.

But they liked the same kinds of things, and that mattered. More than you’d expect it to, really.

The Big Book of Brett, Page 4

—

“This is enormously stupid. It’s incredibly dumb. Making it is absolutely moronic.”

Brett had asked Sean why he thought this item was a good idea. But whatever he was expecting to hear, Sean’s explanation didn’t cut it. This was a guy who was good enough to do mental calculations on the toughness of leather, the kind of stitching he’d need to hold it together, and a dozen other considerations that all went into a well-planned armor that saved people’s lives.

Even the garbage-shield was that way, for all the silliness of the materials involved. Trying to explain something he was trying to make a nineties-and-aughts trope-appropriate item was just something that didn’t compute with Brett.

Luckily, the Apocalypse System was willing to help.

Sticky Hand

It’s 1996. In a stunning display of grit and determination, Kerri Strug has just triumphed against a grievous joint injury to take home the gold medal for the US Olympic Women’s Gymnastics team at Atlanta.

As she was carried off the mats by her coach, wreathed both in agony and victory, your mother came to an equally shocking realization. There weren’t enough hot dog buns for hot dog Tuesday. In just as clinch of a moment, she makes the heroic decision to run to the grocery store. You go along.

At the store, you are enormously well-behaved, and it doesn’t go unnoticed. Your mother, a twinkle in her eye, gives you an entire quarter to spend, nodding towards the vending machines at the front of the store. A lesser man would buy a gumball, or a pack of Hootie and the Blowfish novelty stickers. They’d squander the riches without a thought, living in eternal regret forever after.

Not you. You are a man of distinction. A man of action. A man who by many standards is not actually a man yet, but someone armed with twenty-five cents and the determination of four Winston Churchhills.

There’s really one choice if you think about it.

The Sticky Hand is a weapon, but doesn’t deal damage. Instead, it’s an adhesive-reinforced, damage-resistant, whip-like object that sticks to things just as closely as Kerri stuck to her team’s game plan to prevent an arguably stronger Russian gymnastics team from beating the Americans on their own turf. It’s long, it’s supple, and it’s as sticky as the situations you get into.

Like Shannon Miller, how useful this object’s natural talents are when you really need them is broadly up to the determination and grit of the person entirely. That’s you, even if the metaphor has gotten a little twisted.

Effects: +10 to SAV when wielded with no other weapons, but cannot deal damage. Exceptional stickiness that scales with Adhesive Mastery and, when held in hand, responds to user will to release from objects to which it is adhered.

Ten whole points to SAV was absolutely massive, especially after Sean confirmed that the +5 to VIT from the shield could be active at the same time. The fact that he couldn’t do damage while he was holding it tempered that upside a little, but not much. For the kinds of things he’d use it for in combat, it was just fine.

“That is, without question, the longest, weirdest item description I’ve ever seen. What in the hell is a sticky hand?”

“It’s hard to explain. A kid’s toy, basically, Made of goop and glue, you’d stick it to things.”

“And this was… important?”

Sean shrugged. “As important as anything, to a ten-year-old boy in 1996.”

—

Three Tells was a lot, but within the margin where Sean thought he could probably take even if the Sticky Hand didn’t work out. Holding his shield up high to protect his vitals, Sean took the most direct route towards the first Tell he could.

With two Tells, Sean’s tactic had been to do as much damage as he could before grounding one, using it as cover until he could quickly finish it off before grounding the next. Taking on three would be harder, since he couldn’t work the angles well enough to guarantee that momentary cover if more than one enemy’s attack angles had to be considered.

If he could take one out of the fight completely, the entire game-plan would change, even if he didn’t hurt it in the process. As he approached the first target, he brought the whip up and around his head.

Don’t hit him with the hand. Hit him with the whip and let the hand wrap him up.

Sean was holding the Sticky Hand which, as the name implied, was a long whip with a palm open hand at the end. The hand portion could stick to stuff a little better than the twisted leather strands that made up the rope portion of the weapon. He got just close enough to the Tell to hit it with the middle of the rope, which let the hand do a little more than a full revolution around the Tell’s arms and torso. He ran until he felt the whip jerk tight, then let go.

Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a second’s worth of very confused Tell trying to break out of the firm adhesive grasp of the whip while simultaneously trying to chuck more apples, and failing miserably at both. As it moved, it got stuck to even more of the whip. For now, that Tell was harmless. The placement of the whip could have been better, but for a first try? It was just fine.

That left the other two Tells vulnerable in a more conventional way. Without stopping his stride, Sean was able to get to the second Tell quickly, braining it with the Trash Compactor before sprinting on to the third. A few short attacks later, and the third Tell was taken care of.

Then, suddenly, Sean was hit in the back by an arrow, and his legs stopped working.

That’s the funny thing about having high VIT. You can heal from a lot, but it doesn’t keep important stuff from breaking if it gets hit dead-on.

His legs felt dead and judging from the angle of the arrow, he suspected his spine had been nicked rather than completely cut through. He hiked up his shield over his head and twisted his body as well as he could to get behind it while not actually being able to control his lower body.

The sticky hand was still hanging from the Tell’s body, but the Tell ripped it free just enough to regain most of the use of its arms. Now ready to attack, it was alternating between pelting Sean’s shield with apples and following those up with arrow after arrow, and given that Sean was stationary, it was hardly missing at all.

Besides a few arrow-and-apple combinations landing in unlucky ways and leaving him with a few more holes in his legs than he liked, the shield was doing its job admirably. Occasionally, a particularly well-centered shot would hit Sean’s arm, but that was fine, in a qualified sort of way. He didn’t need his shield to do anything besides what it was doing, and none of the arrows were hurting him bad enough to make him drop his only protection.

The bigger problem was that the Tell wasn’t content to pelt him from a distance. As his legs transitioned from a numb, almost imperceptible pins-and-needles feeling to the burning fire sensations he associated with getting cut, stabbed, and otherwise damaged by horrifying monsters, the Tell plodded steadily towards him.

The arrows hit harder and more accurately as the Tell drew near, one particularly good shot shredded off its fletching as it pierced through the shield and caught Sean in the shoulder, finally collapsing his shield arm. The Tell stood over him, its lifeless eyes panning down to Sean’s injured body as it pelted him with a half dozen apples and began to draw its bow.

Before it could fire, Sean reached as far as he could with his working arm, pushing Hard Time on both the Tell and himself as he did. The Sticky Hand, which the Tell had been dragging behind it, had worked its way around one of the monster’s horrible faux-Swiss legs as it walked and had, over time, wrapped multiple times around its leg.

Putting all his limited remaining force into the motion, Sean grabbed the whip and jerked back as hard as he could, pulling the leg of the monster forward and sending it toppling backwards. At the same time, the Tell began firing its bow wildly, not caring that he was falling or no longer facing his target at all. All the arrows went wide, missing Sean on their initial pass. They’d be back, but would take a full loop through the air before they could dive back down at the tracking apples.

Sean found that while his legs still weren’t exactly at full-function, he could use them well enough to scramble over to the Tell. He knew it was just his imagination, but he felt like he could hear the arrows turning in the air and whistling back towards him. Either way, there was little time to work with.

Reaching the Tell, he somehow planted his knee on its chest and shoved the Mystereamer sideways through its ear, where it sparked with some random element that looked like a green, glowing cloud spreading through its head. Then, using the dagger as a handle on his right side and weakly gripping the Tell’s shirt on the left, he rolled as hard as he could, pulling the still-alive-Tell over his body as he did.

He felt the arrows slam into the monster, one after another. After the first four, it stopped mindlessly putting tracking apples on his chest and went limp. Sean didn’t even bother trying to get the thing off of him. For despite the fact that there was a horrifying, creepy asshole on top of him, he was as effectively hidden as he could be at the moment. He could only pray no more Tells stumbled on him while he healed up.