Chapter 10 of 78 · Book 5, The Butcher's Masquerade

Chapter 10 — No dinosaurs of any kind

Book: The Butcher's Masquerade · Part: The Hunt · Previous: Chapter 9 — Just Wait Until Your Daddy Gets Home · Next: Chapter 11 — The Recital · Floor: Floor 6 — The Hunting Grounds · Series: the series

Opening

“Okay, do you understand? Don’t touch it until it’s time to leave.

Summary

Bomo is briefed not to touch the bomb; the Sledge sulks because Bomo has banned him from Frogger while he is gone. Carl has hooked a PlayStation 2 to a dwarven battery and means to make cretin-sized controllers. In daylight the bugbear town is all rubble; Goiter, a council member hammering a roof, says crawlers are not welcome until Carl says they are here to kill the hunters — 'This means we are friends. I shall buy you a drink.' The bugbears' card: goblin cousins, involuntary explosions, engineers of automatons and vehicles, not bears, which their Ursine rivals never let them forget. South on the chariot with Donut on Mongo under Twinkle Toes, Carl plants hunter-triggered claymores and Donut sings a transparent single Carl. A notification: 'Your god, Emberus, has made an appearance in this realm', and a minute later, 'Emberus has returned to the Halls of the Ascendency.' The river is 250 feet wide and slow, with white dots in it; a covered wooden bridge, its approach burnt by a spent trap; ten bridges down so far. Across it, a large Ursine settlement — manicured, flowering, clean-linen-smelling, a Club Vanquisher, elites and star-marked quest NPCs, and on the map's edge a red diamond: a Temple of Hellik, whose worshippers Carl's god-quest pays him to kill. The funeral bells bar Mongo and point at the town rules on the bridge wall: no fighting, alcohol, drugs, street magic, dancing, singing outside a temple, gambling, swearing, sex outside marriage, macaques without a dryad, naiads or naiad mongrels; high elves and bathed bugbears must register; 'absolutely, positively no dinosaurs of any kind. No exceptions.' Every breach means decapitation. Donut demands the person in charge, and to Carl's astonishment a guard waddles off to fetch one.

The mayor comes to the bridge: Elmer, level 40, Ursine, pudgy, bespectacled, grey-muzzled — the AI's card hates the Ursine as 'smug fucksticks' whose piety is a veneer, notes that only their clerics survived Scolopendra so the whole society became the town from Footloose, and carries a stray line about 'other new, shiny AI iterations with their clean lines and error-replacement nets. Fuck you all' that vanishes when Carl pastes the card into his scratchpad. Elmer takes Donut for a monkey and offers to have both animals executed for 150 gold. 'Yankee Doodle. Into the river' — Katia's move without Katia: Donut's Astral Paw shoves the mayor off the town's edge and he finds every rock on the slope and dies at the water, where a horned, fanged, blue-tinged naiad takes the body in under a second. Donut gets the credit. They run in past the guards, branded troublemakers, into a Spanish restaurant and the personal space. Minutes before the release, Bomo opens the door for the clockwork plan and finds a note knifed to it: all hunters are now protected from further explosions; the town guards have been ordered to worship Emberus, so killing them would get Carl smote by his own god; 'The Hive is hunting you […] I will crack you open and drink your innards slowly, one organ at a time […] and place [your head] upon my sister's grave.' Vrah. 'She seems nice.' Carl writes 'Come and get it, bitch' on the back and throws it out. 'The gates are down. The hunters are loose.'

Characters

• Carl — A PlayStation on a dwarven battery; a god passing through; a town of rules.
• Princess Donut — 'They specifically called out Mongo!'; demands the person in charge.
• Mongo — Barred at the bridge; screeches in indignation.
• The Sledge — Bomo briefed; the Sledge banned from Frogger.
• Goiter — A bugbear council member rebuilding his roof; 'We'll be ready.'
• Emberus — Appears in the realm for a minute and returns to the Halls of the Ascendency.
• Elmer — Mayor of the Ursine settlement; dead on the rocks; taken by a naiad.
• Vrah — A note on a knife: the Hive is hunting Carl; the guards now worship Emberus.
• Mordecai — 'Don't touch that knife.'
• The System AI — A card that insults 'new, shiny AI iterations' — a line that disappears on pasting.

Locations

• The bugbear settlement — Rubble in daylight; Goiter on a roof.
• The river — 250 feet of slow water with white dots; a covered bridge.
• Point Mongo — Clean, flowering, ruled by a poster: no dinosaurs.
• The Temple of Hellik — A red diamond at the edge of the town.
• Point Mongo — Its mayor pushed into the river; 'Yankee Doodle' without Katia.
• The river — A naiad takes a corpse in under a second.
• The Royal Palace of Princess Donut — A note knifed to the outside of the door.

Motifs

• The gods — Emberus passes through; a Temple of Hellik; the quest's bonus for his worshippers.
• The Ursine — A town of eighteen rules and immediate decapitation.
• Explosives — Hunter-triggered claymores along the road.
• The hunters — Loose; protected from explosions; Vrah's Hive coming.
• The gods — Vrah orders the guards to worship Emberus so Carl cannot kill them.
• The naiads — A blue-tinged thing with horns that takes bodies off the bank.
• The System AI — 'Fuck you all' to the other iterations; a line the system erases.
• 'Goddamnit, Donut' — 'Mommy will get it all sorted out.'