Wasteland Warlords Episode 4: Chapter 6 - Sagely Insight

When they’d agreed to do all this training, Clay hadn’t thought to ask which path he would wind up on. Apparently Abbot Rakshas hadn’t really known what to do with him, either, so they’d had to consult their Great Sage for advice. That had resulted in a hurry up and wait situation, because according to the hyena, “Only the Great Sage can know which path you must follow, Fateslinger, and we haven’t booted up the Great Sage in many years.”

Clay spent the intervening time wandering through the sewers, from Alex’s training sessions to Joe’s… well, whatever the hell Joe was doing. He still wasn’t exactly sure. Clay was just trying to figure out how to get through this seemingly tedious side quest so they could get to the Temple that much faster. Unfortunately, he couldn’t see much of a throughline.

Under the tutelage of the duck, Alex’s Dao of the Dew training was comprised mainly of long, complex kata that reminded Clay of tai chi. A lot of slow, flowing, arcing motions and standing in poses that focused on maintaining balance and breathing. Just watching her practice made him anxious to get moving again. The Brothers of the Dew had to know there were folks suffering under Cassidy’s domineering rule, but no amount of pointing that out seemed to hurry them.

Joe’s path was the polar opposite to Alex’s martial training; it was called Body Purification. What it amounted to was that all day, every day, Joe drank various kinds of Mountain Dew, popping the top on a new one as soon as the last one ran out. It was like watching a chain smoker, except with more gas.

Joe was declared an instant prodigy.

Clay couldn’t decide whether the name Body Purification was supposed to be ironic or the brothers sincerely believed that chugging obscene amounts of Mountain Dew would somehow cleanse your physical form. He seesawed back and forth between being sure the brothers were messing with them and being sure they actually had no idea how bad it was for a human to drink that much sugar, caffeine, and unnatural chemicals. Maybe it wasn’t deadly for wasteland creatures to chug the stuff around the clock; maybe they were made of the same kind of nuclear fallout all this Mountain Dew was. Whatever the truth of the matter was, Clay couldn’t convince Joe to pick a different path.

“I’m killing this, bro.” Joe let loose an eye-watering burp, then crushed a can of MD Classic on his forehead and let it fall to the floor. “I’ve never excelled in any sort of formal training, but it’s like I was born to Dew this.”

Chonk snatched the smashed empty and tried to drink from it, but the mechacoon couldn’t shake loose more than a drop. A silent Brother of the Dew swept in and retrieved the can to be straightened out, refilled with their brew, and returned to Joe. Since their operation down in the sewers didn’t have access to the recycling machinery they’d had back in the Temple that would allow them to melt and pour fresh cans, Joe’s habit of crushing the empties led to a lot of crumpled cans coming back through the line.

“I know you’re worried because of all the diabetes in our family history, but right hand to the good Lord, I’ve never felt better.” Joe flexed his bicep and kneaded the muscle with his fingers. “Check that out. Does that look bigger?”

“Not really,” Clay said. “You don’t grow muscles by drinking soda.”

“Maybe it’s from all the curls I’m doing, then.” Joe grabbed another can and lifted it like a dumbbell. “Twelve ounces at a time.” He chugged it down. “Ah!” he sighed, smacking his lips contentedly. “It’s thirsty work, but somebody’s got to do it. I just wish they had the occasional moonshine mixer—now that would be a party.” He shrugged. “But nobody said Body Purification was gonna be easy.”

“Probably especially hard work for your kidneys.”

“Those lazy bums?” Joe snagged a fresh Code Red from the incoming platter of refilled cans. “They needed a workout.”

The abbot poked his head into the tunnel. “Clay Jaeger, the Great Sage is ready to see you.”

Clay cast one last glance back at his brother—Joe was bouncing around on the balls of his feet and humming the theme song from some old boxing flick—then followed the abbot along the raised walkways that had been built along the sides of the tunnels for the sanitation crew.

At least the wait was over, and he could finally get to doing something. He hated sitting around while Alex and Joe were working. Even if said work consisted of guzzling soda. At least they were moving toward getting at Cassidy and Rhett, even if their tasks were asinine.

Abbot Rakshas led Clay into a wide conjunction of tunnels beneath the water treatment plant, where the Brothers of the Dew gathered for their daily Dew meditations. Massive kegs of the stuff lined the walls, marked with their specific flavor—Classic, Code Red, Lightning Fury, Baja Blast… The list was as long as Clay’s arm.

Today, a new feature had been added to the room. Near a power main stood an ancient arcade machine—one of those coin-operated behemoths. The paint on its cabinet had darkened over time to dull greens, purples, and golds, and the glass was scratched and cloudy with age, but Clay could still make out the animatronic upper body of a fortune teller inside, plastic hands poised over a crystal ball. He got the feeling he knew where this was headed.

A brother stood to either side of the machine.

“Stand here, supplicant.” The abbot directed Clay to face the fortune teller, then raised his furry arms and boomed, “Turn on the Great Sage!”

One of the brothers flanking the machine lifted the ancient plug, heavily wrapped in electrical tape, and plugged it into the main.

The lights of the fortune teller machine flickered to life. At one time, Clay guessed they were supposed to have chased one another around the cabinet, but a handful of bulbs had burnt out, giving the blinking a more chaotic feeling. Carnival music cranked out of the machine, weird and atonal in a way that reminded Clay uncomfortably of Smilerfax’s haunted Fun House.

Inside the scratched glass, the Great Sage remained motionless. Clay looked around. He got the feeling he was supposed to be doing something, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

The brothers shifted awkwardly.

Abbot Rakshas cleared his throat and nodded significantly to the coin slot.

“We do not believe in earthly possessions,” he said, “so if you could just spot us a coin…”

Clay snorted and dug a gold coin out of his ruck. It just barely fit.

“The coin offering has been offered. Pour forth the drink offering!”

A brother stepped forward and poured a healthy dose of Mountain Dew Classic into the slot after the coin.

As the gold piece clunked through the mechanisms inside, the machine whirled to life. The crystal ball between the fortune teller’s outstretched hands glowed toxic waste green. Her curly nylon tresses shook as her upper body jerked mechanically.

“She is communing with the Dew,” Rakshas explained quietly, eyes still fixed on the Sage.

Clay made a noncommittal sound, thinking what she was really doing was getting her gears gummed up with sugary green liquid. Joe would’ve had a fit at the travesty of it all.

Then the music suddenly stopped, and the high, sharp ding of a bell cut through the air.

A card started to pop out of the fortune slot, but got stuck halfway. The music ground to a halt and the lights went dark.

One of the brothers gave it a discreet kick. The bulbs flashed and the carnival music blared for a second, then both shut off again.

“Oh well, good enough,” Abbot Rakshas said. “Go ahead and take it. Learn what the Great Sage has foreseen as your path.”

The card was sticky and a little damp. Clay had to grasp it with both hands and pull carefully to get it out without ripping it, but finally it lurched free of the slot.

Rakshas and several of the brothers leaned over his shoulder to read along with him. When they saw the words, they oohed and aahed with appreciation.

Oracle of the Deep Mysteries

“What does that mean?” Clay asked, wiping one sticky hand on his pants.

“Unto you has been given the greatest enigma of our path,” said the abbot. “It is your job to meditate and understand the mystery of the Divine Elixir.”

“Right.” Clay snapped the card with his finger a couple times. “That’s kind of vague.”

“Indeed it is!” Rakshas clapped him cheerfully on the shoulder. “Well, we will let you get to it!”

Within a few seconds, the brothers had all found somewhere else to not answer his questions.

***

Clay hung out with the darkened fortune teller cabinet for a little while longer, hoping some kind of divine inspiration would strike. Nothing happened. He was still just a guy standing in an empty sewer main with an old arcade machine while a bunch of people were being forced to slave their lives away for a pair of asshole Incants.

Out of nowhere, the electrical cord sparked, filling the air with the stench of burning plastic. Clay grabbed a wooden mixing paddle from a nearby keg and knocked the melted cord out of the outlet.

Closer inspection revealed that the cord was as old and broken down as the machine itself—the insulation flaking off and chewed by rats or some other wasteland pest in a couple places. What it needed was a brand-new cord, but he wasn’t sure where they’d find something like that out there.

Well, he might not be able to figure out the Mysteries of the Divine Elixir, but he could at least fix the damn Great Sage so they didn’t burn this place down the next time they used it. He wasn’t the sit around navel-gazing type anyway. He needed movement to get real thinking done. Needed something to do with his hands. Clay wasn’t as good at random tinkering as Joe was, but he’d spent plenty of time getting old construction up to code and fixing cat-chewed lamp cords for Alex’s meemaw.

Clay borrowed Joe’s Everyman Tool and got to work. He couldn’t make the tool change from one thing to another like Joe could, but convincing his brother to move his Body Purification operation into the room with the Great Sage wasn’t hard.

“I’m a social drinker,” Joe said. “The Lightning Fury especially goes down easier with a buddy. Wanna help me out here?”

Clay took the proffered can and set it down without drinking. That was apparently enough to get Joe back on his Body Purification wagon, however. He dumped a full can down the hatch and let out a rolling burp that echoed through the tunnels.

“So how’s the Oracle of the Deep Mysteries path going?” Joe asked.

Clay shrugged as he cut out the damaged sections of the cord. “I’m kind of hoping that if I plaster a meditative look on my face for long enough, they’ll think I’ve reached enlightenment.”

Obviously the Divine Elixir was Mountain Dew. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out; they never talked about anything else down here. The only real mystery Clay could see surrounding Mountain Dew was why anybody would worship it in the first place. Clay could almost convince himself that there was some kind of mind-altering poison in the soda. Except even Joe, who was currently drinking enough of it to give a team of oxen terminal dysentery, wasn’t changing his religion to Dewology. He was just doing what he did best—going overboard on something he liked.

Joe eyed what remained of the “good” sections of the cord. “They’re gonna have to park the Great Sage a lot closer to the wall,” he grumbled.

“Maybe we can find an extension cord at an abandoned hardware store,” Clay said, getting to work on what they did have.

Joe stopped mid-slurp. “Now that you mention it… I don’t think I’ve seen a hardware store since we got to LA. Do you think they used to have ’em out here?”

Clay shrugged. “They had to. How else would they have fixed stuff?”

“Unions,” Joe said. “I heard some crazy stories on old directors’ commentaries about how everybody had their own specific job, and you couldn’t mess with anybody else’s. Like, there was this one guy on sound duty who almost tripped over a cord, so he was going to put a rug over it, and he got fired because he was messing with the cord guy’s job. Pretty crazy.”

“Almost as crazy as being underground with a bunch of magical creatures,” Clay said. If somebody had told him a year ago that he’d be working on an arcade machine in the sewers of Malibu trying to understand the closest thing to toxic waste that humans were legally allowed to drink, he would’ve asked them to step outside his wife’s hospital room so decking them wouldn’t distract Alex from praying that her test results would come up clear.

There was a blast from the past, that irrational anger and frustration looking for a place to vent itself. But it felt like they were back in that same position, just on a different scale. They’d saved Alex when it looked impossible. How were they going to save those settlers trapped in the Incants’ mining operation or find out what happened to Griff’s daughter? How the hell could Mountain Dew help do either of those things?

It couldn’t. It seemed as useless as all the chemo drugs the doctors had injected into Alex. It was all for show, but accomplished nothing.

There, Clay thought, I figured out the mystery, and the mystery is that it’s a soda and soda doesn’t help anybody except dentists and big pharma’s insulin manufacturers.

“Can you turn this into a wire stripper?” he asked, handing his brother the Everyman Tool.

Joe made the conversion one-handed while drinking a Lightning Fury, then tossed it back to Clay.

“So how long are you going to spend doing other stuff instead of the Oracle of Deep Mysteries?” he asked.

Clay shook his head. “Until I think of a better plan or convince them I’m enlightened. That or they decide that two out of three paths ain’t bad and show us the way in.”

“Because you think this whole thing is a lot of nonsense.”

“I believe that they know a back way into that temple,” Clay said. “I just kind of doubt I’m going to reach enlightenment by thinking about Mountain Dew. I mean, you remember Diebolt, right? The frogman collector? He was as into MD Classic as you are, and he didn’t reach enlightenment.”

Joe threw back another can, then whooped.

“Yeehaw! Man, this stuff’s got some get up and go!” He tossed the empty down and started to pace, snagging a replacement can as he walked by the platter. “Maybe your real problem is that you’re too grounded to the real world. Did you ever think of that?”

“Yeah, not even one time.” Clay got to work twisting the bare wire back together into some semblance of order.

“Remember when I was trying to bypass the meter at my place because they shut my power off and I caused that electrical fire? Now that I think of it, you might’ve still been deployed during shed fire number two. Alex probably told you about it, though.” Joe stretched out his arms to either side, one a fist, the other clutching a can of Mountain Dew. “Anyway, I’ve got the bypass in this hand and I’m tinkering with the meter, and all of a sudden, boom!” Joe’s shout echoed through the tunnels.

Clay flinched. He didn’t remember Alex telling him this story, but he knew a recipe for disaster when he heard one. People died all the time messing with power lines.

“I wake up on the grass, and the red monster, aka shed number two, was burning like the bonfire at a wiener roast.”

Clay shook his head. “How in God’s name are you still alive?”

He meant in general, because this wasn’t the first tale that his brother shouldn’t have survived to tell the tale, but Joe answered specifically for the electrical-fire escapade.

“Because”—Joe raised his Mountain Dew can and sloshed around the remaining liquid inside—“this fist was wrapped around a ground wire, and I had on my rubber mud boots, gloves, and rain poncho—even a pair of rubber undies I picked up from the Harbor Freight—I never do electrical work without ’em. The firemen said I was too grounded to fry.”

“Rubber underwear?”

“Don’t get distracted by my clever use of undergarments,” Joe admonished, jabbing a finger at Clay. “The moral of the story is, I could’ve been lit up like the Cards’ ballfield during a home game, but I didn’t because I was too grounded. I could have been this brilliant burning light visible for miles around—”

“For about two seconds, then you would’ve been a burnt strip of bacon in rubber underwear.”

“See, there you go getting caught up in the worldly details again.” Joe threw up his hands in frustration. Mountain Dew sloshed out of his half-empty can. “You’re not seeing the beauty, Clay! You’re not seeing that shining beacon that could’ve been Lumberjack Joe. And frankly, I’m beginning to think you’re not seeing how this applies to you.”

“Can’t argue with you there,” Clay said.

Joe gulped down the last of the can and tossed it over his shoulder.

“You’re too grounded to light up the night,” he said, beginning to pace some more. “You could be a shooting star of Mountain Dew brilliance, but you’re hanging onto a ground wire somewhere in that thick jarhead of yours.” He tapped Clay on the forehead twice before Clay slapped his hand away. “You gotta let it go, rip off those rubber tighty-whities. Let the Dew flow through you. Let the Lightning Fury flash and the Purple Thunder roll. Then and only then can you become the Oracle of the Deep Mysteries you were always meant to be.”