Roy didn’t get why the saloon’s patrons found these “raiders” so intimidating.

  Their costumes didn’t look like anything special to him: football helmets and padding, with a few modifications. Lazy. He knew he was being kind of hypocritical, that the same basic description applied to his own costume, but the modifications to his own armor had been imaginative, transformative. Theirs were ad-hoc, derivative, basic.

  There were chains for belts, bandoliers with no ammo, and random spikes on everything. If Roy had to guess at a theme, it was what W. had called post-apocalypse junkyard, but it wasn’t even the good version of that. Even when inconsistency is the central idea, you still needed things that clashed in interesting ways, or at least one really cool element to make up for how lackluster the rest of it was. Metal boots and shoulder pads which left the rest of the body exposed. Pre-Warp high fashion clothing mixed with gas masks and capes. Mohawks. You could get away with going into battle naked if you had a high enough mohawk.

  Even the weapons seemed haphazard. Roy was hoping for something better here, something weird. A musical instrument turned into a flamethrower, say. The reality was extremely disappointing.

  Two bore kitchen knives taped to hockey sticks, another pair had just the knives without even the stick. They’d be relying on the ordinary cutting force instead of theme magic. The last one has a baseball bat with knives driven through it all along its length. At least that one has some inventiveness.

  It was the man with the knife-bat who spoke first.

  “Hey,” he said to Casey. “Word is, you can mix any kind of drink here. You got any of the good stuff for me and the boys?”

  “Plenty of good stuff here. Not sure what in particular you’re talking about, though.”

  “You know what we want, and we get what we want. We have ever since we made it over here, out of the swamps, and Skeeter, in particular, always gets what he wants.”

  It was then that Roy noticed the four who weren’t speaking looked off somehow, jittery.

  “Yeah,” said Casey. “I know what you’re asking for, and I know what that stuff does to people. You made a mistake coming here.”

  “No. It’s you who’s made the mistake. ‘Cause I know your crippled sheriff won’t do shit about it. He can’t even walk in here to face us. So we’ll stand here as long as it takes for you to make us some Krazee-8.”

  Casey placed both her hands on the counter. “I’m not brewing it. Ever.”

  “If you won’t make it here, we can drag you back to our base with us, and you can make it there.” He gestured to the people sitting around the room and let out a derisive snort. “They won’t stop us.”

  Roy looked around at the prospectors, at their cheap cowboy costumes, and their holsters without any guns in them. They were all looking away, suddenly finding the walls, the video games, or the bottoms of their own glasses extremely interesting.

  Even with just melee weapons, there were enough people in here to overpower these five if they all attacked at once, but they’d be trading blows with blades, and no one wanted to be the first to put himself at risk.

  Kyle was still at the bar, and he’d clenched his fists, but wasn’t moving. Roy started to get to his feet when Casey pulled out two water pistols from behind the bar. One orange, one bright pink.

  All five raiders froze. Their weapons were in hand, but none could make it over the bar before Casey could fire at them.

  “A Sodaster’s good for more than just mixing tasty drinks, y’know. I can brew up magical effects that most people wouldn’t believe.”

  She brandished the orange pistol back and forth. “I call this one Sharp Citrus: orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit, all the citrus fruits combined, really, plus some synthetic additives they used to clean tanks with. This stuff’ll melt your damn faces off.”’

  Next, she shook the pink one at the knife-bat-wielding raider. “This one, I call Cherry Miss Bliss. This one’s for you, since you like making threats so much. See, this soda’s meant for women, you can tell 'cause it’s pink. One spritz of this and that between your legs won’t work right ever again. Sure, you could maybe find another drink, some kind of ‘testosterone boost, just for the boys’ brew to counteract it, but there ain’t anyone around here but me who knows how to mix something like that. So you’ll be walking out of here, minus your melted-face friends, clutching your broken member, if I don’t you melt that too. That’d be simpler, y’know? But I know there’s ways to fix that out there. I’ve been looking into it, and I really think the pink one would cause more damage, psychologically speaking. Y’see where I’m going with this?”

  For a moment, everyone stood very still, then one of the knife-stick wielders twitched, and Casey sprayed his arm with the orange squirt gun.

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  “Aaaaaaargh!”

  Even from his booth, Roy was hit with the sharp, tangy smell. The yellow-orange liquid bubbled aggressively, melting through flesh and bone within half a second. The knife-stick dropped to the floor, still gripped by the raider’s severed hand, landing next to a small hole that formed as the soda melted through the floorboards.

  The raider fell backwards, clutching his foaming stump. The others advanced, swiping over the counter with their own weapons. The knife-bat came in for an overhead swing, but Casey ducked, and its blades got stuck in the countertop.

  Casey’s spray hit its wielder in a vertical line starting from the groin up, bisecting him anywhere his armor wasn’t.

  The remaining three ducked low, avoiding the blast of orange liquid. Roy was on his feet now, while others were backing up to avoid getting caught in the spray themselves. The second knife-stick swiped low, knocking the orange squirt gun out of Casey’s hand.

  The raiders charged, cursing as she hit them one by one with the pink gun, but not stopping. Roy couldn’t run fast enough to close the distance in time. A knife arced towards Casey’s neck—when the saloon doors were blasted open.

  A whooshing, clanging, fizzing sound burst from the back of the building, and a fireball blazed through the air, lighting up the entire saloon.

  Roy staggered back from the sudden wave of heat and raised his hands to drag his visor down. When he looked back at the counter, half of it was gone. The three raiders had been reduced to heaps of melted plastic and charred bone on the soot-blackened floorboards. The soda syrup bottles on the wall behind it had been smashed, pouring out their contents and enacting their magical effects all at once.

  A deep red blast took out a chunk of the back wall. Clumps of pale green ice formed, only to drop and shatter as more of the Sharp Citrus melted through the floor.

  Casey’s skin had turned an angry red. She dragged herself backward along the remaining floorboards until she was beneath a bottle, dripping brown liquid into pools of pale foam. Within seconds, her burns had started to heal.

  The doors swung open again, and another five men stepped into the saloon. These looked different from those that came before, and not just because of the pointy hats and flowing robes. They were shorter, with slighter builds that verged on scrawny. There was that same hostile expression on their faces, although it read as arrogant instead of thuggish. The contrast was amplified by the wizard costumes they wore. There was nothing slapdash here: the robes were shiny blue silk, and their pointy hats matched them exactly, both in style and material. Even their footwear fit the theme. Powerful stuff, thought Roy, but what interested him more were the wands they carried.

  All of them held one. The first he saw was a stick of transparent plastic with a button on its side and a molded flame at its tip.

  The second was the same, except with a star instead of a flame. The star was also lit up at the center, which made Roy think of the ones stuck to his sword. Did they do the same thing?

  The third wand ended in a skull with faint green light glowing from its eye sockets.

  One held something that didn’t really resemble a wand at all. It looked to be a water gun with lights inside that rapidly flashed different colors. Finally, there was a wand with a ring on the end, which blew a constant stream of bubbles.

  Roy mentally ran through the possibilities for what that might do. The flame was obvious; the only question would be how much fire it produced. The star, he thought he’d already figured out too, though it could still have a surprise in store. The skull was intriguing. Some kind of necromancy? He drew a blank at the water gun and hoped the bubbles would be something less obvious than a literal bubble spray. Maybe a shield around its caster? Or it could be a bubble of protection from any number of more specific things than just physical damage.

  The wizards gripped their wands tightly, not brandishing them, but certainly holding them at the ready.

  “Well,” said the wizard with the fireball wand. “Looks like we just took out the trash on your behalf. I believe a thank you is in order.” He swished his wand around, pointing from table to table like a conductor cueing sections of his orchestra.

  None of them made a sound in response.

  “Damn. Nothing? I just straight up incinerated a gang of wretched vermin, and no one here has anything to say? No applause. No ‘thank you, marvelous Mr. Wizard?’ No coins in my hat?”

  At this, he actually lifted off his pointy hat and held it out to the non-existent crowd of well-wishers. Roy appreciated a bit of dramatic flair as much as anyone, but this wasn’t a good look. The humid air had stuck his hair down in greasy tufts, and no one really looked cool with hat hair, even if they tried to play it off as roguishly disheveled.

  “Well, I suppose coins are no good anyway. What I want is tokens.”

  At that point, the wands were brandished.

  “No one asked you to come here,” said Casey, now fully healed and back on her feet.

  “And yet here we are. You’d be dead if we hadn’t just protected you. There should be a reward for that. What did they use to call it? Oh right, protection money. I very intentionally didn’t hit your cash register with that fireball, so you can hand over any tokens you have in it now. You know we can think of better uses to put them to than any of the dumb hicks in this town.”

  Casey had picked up her orange water gun, which considering that fireball now seemed woefully inadequate.

  “You’d be asking for our money even if those raiders hadn’t been in here.”

  “Well, you’ve got me there, but we’ve got wands here. So it all balances out in our favor, doesn’t it?”

  Casey raised her acid pistol. Five against one didn’t seem fair.

  Unwilling to let this wildly uneven Mexican standoff play out to its logical conclusion, Roy ran forward, sword drawn. Others rose from their tables, not willing to be the first to charge in, but happy to jump on the bandwagon now that it was already rolling.

  The wizard with the bubble wand turned and saw him coming. He blew out a huge trombone-player-like breath, and a translucent film formed around him, pressing up against the back wall and enveloping Roy, Kyle, Casey, and the wizards.

  Bastion slashed at it with his blade. It bounced, but didn’t break. It seemed they’d be getting no help from him or from any of the prospectors.

  The other wizards raised their wands, but before they could fire a second, smaller bubble shot forth, bowling Roy over and pinning him against the wall.

  Well, thought Roy. At least I found out what the bubble wand does.