Chapter Text
Tartarus Saloon stood sandwiched between a bootleg of a Pedanian asteroid buster and a sleepy Skydon who had half a space pirate ship sticking out of its mouth like a bizarre blunt. A charging cable was plugged into the space bar's chimney, humming away. The refueling station had certainly seen better days and the cable looked a bit like someone had just given caesarean birth to it, but there wasn't much to complain about regarding the quality of the energy itself, so Tartarus could live with that.
Outside, the storm screeched the screech of a trillion rusty doors swinging in their frames, and assaulted the hangar's wall with a hellish sideways cocktail of acid rain and broken glass (planet Vantus V had recently found out about its impending demotion to the status of a large boulder the size of a small boulder, and it wasn’t taking the news well). Thankfully, this particular kind of space port tends to attract people that are either too worn out or too chaos-poisoned to give a shit about something as ordinary as a planetary temper tantrum, so the general atmosphere was quite peaceful.
Somewhere in the back, the soft sound of an Icarusian bozonic guitar drifted into the air. The rows of charging spacecraft hummed gently, their lights turned down to minimum intensity and most of their crews soundly asleep. Occasionally, someone would mistake the sleepy ships for an invitation to rob them, and the ambience of the hangar would be perturbed by muffled sounds of asskicking, but such incidents were few and far between.
...And then, there was a knock.
“For crying out loud!” snapped Mura, stomping her foot so hard that a Babalou heart she had been about to transplant flooped off the operating table. It hit the floor, bounced twice, made a quite unflattering “pbbbbbbbt” noise and finally slithered under a medicine cabinet.
Mura stormed out of the medbay, swearing profusely.
“Murrra, dearrrrr, you’rrre trrracking bloody footprrrrints everrrywherrre!” fretted Ryaba as the fuming Borg clanged her way across the bar area, the footfalls of her armored boots heavy enough to make a Galactic Sumo Federation champion cry tears of white-knuckled envy.
Mura opened one of Tartarus Saloon’s doors, stuck her head out, and began to scream. It started out as an unintelligible wail of rage and went on for a good minute before it morphed into something vaguely resembling words.
Ever since they left the Bob-1 star cluster for the Aspasia system (which, in Terran terminology, was over a week ago) a lackey of the local Belial Wannabe had been crash-testing the Tartarus staff's nerves with their dodgy door-to-door marketing attempts. Rain or shine, space or land, these unrelenting attacks would come exactly every three hours. Refusals, bribes, threats and requests to go fuck oneself had all proven equally ineffective. Even the tried and true “Your boss is an asshole and you’re being conned, so how about you come ride with us instead?” trick had failed - the dutiful employee had been brainwashed far more thoroughly than they anticipated. And, while brutalizing the weak was generally considered a big no-no in Tartarus, there are only so many times one can tolerate having “galactic conquest performance enhancers”, “ž̸̢̢҉͡ģ̛v̷̵̨͢͝ё̧͘в҉̶̵҉̡a̡̕͠ģ̶̵̡͟l̸̕y̸̢š̸ ̸̕͜enlargement shots” and “pills that make you go HMMMMMM” shoved in their face before they go stone-cold apeshit.
In other words, the tirade that spewed forth from Mura’s vocal organs was a perfectly natural and understandable reaction to a week of unimaginable stress and cringe.
“You obnoxious fucking puddle of piss!!!” she yelled, decibels climbing with every word, “How many FUCKING times have I told you to stop trying to shill this heinous shit?! WHY THE HELL WOULD WE NEED YOUR FUCKING PLANET-CONQUERING SUPPLEMENTS?! GO PESTER SOMEONE ELSE, LEST I PERSONALLY SUTURE ALL YOUR ORIFICES INTO ONE NEVERENDING TUBE OF MISERY!”
The visitor stared up at her with three pairs of very wide and frightened eyes. They were clad in glittering robes and a pointy hat that looked like a slightly longer, fancier version of a dunce cap. The slime-covered floor of the spacecraft hangar had painted their pointy-nosed white shoes a mildly nauseating shade of yellow.
“Uh…I think you’ve got the wrong person here” they squeaked nervously. “P-please don’t suture my orifices…”
“Convince me why I shouldn't.” Mura hissed with enough venom to poison an army.
“Ahem.” they cleared their throat nervously. That didn't seem to have the desired effect, so they cleared it again. Finally, they regurgitated an iridescent egg sack and gently stuck it to a nearby wall. For this particular species, stress served as a trigger for immediate parthenogenetic reproduction.
"Get on with it!" growled Mura, poking at the wristwatch she had installed into her armor specifically for intimidation purposes.
The creature sweated profusely for another moment before finally gathering their bearings.
“Ma’am...Do you have a moment to talk about swords?”
A FEW HOURS LATER...
Leg's bowl of porridge with jam clattered to the floor and was immediately preyed upon by a herd of Pigmons.
"King's slipped disks!" He exclaimed. Of course, what he really wanted to say was "fuck!", but a baby Pigmon had already been deposited in his lap, and Leg was pretty sure that the act of swearing in front of such an adorable creature counted as a war crime.
Getting caught in turbulence was in no way out of the ordinary for the patrons of Tartarus Saloon. Getting caught in turbulence hours after making landfall, however...was an entirely different story.
Still, to Leg's surprise, nobody else in the bar's scarce morning crowd seemed to give much of a damn about it. They simply improvised, adapted and overcame.
"What a splendid ability to roll with the punches of life!" thought Leg, watching a Metron superglue their cup of coffee to their face. They weren't much of an engineer and the next jolt of turbulence splattered coffee in their eyes, but it was the gumption that counted. "Shame I don't have it."
So he did the next best thing. He flung himself out of the window to try and make sense of whatever the hell was going on.
Tartarus had not taken flight, but calling it "grounded" would be a stretch. The entire space bar currently rested on the shoulders of Brotein, who was doing squats like an Ultraman possessed.
"With all due respect, Brotein, what the fuck are you doing??"
"Warming up."
Leg wished his mouth was full of coffee so he could spit it out. There was simply no other way to properly convey how he felt right now.
"What in the hell for?!"
"The sword!" smirked Brotein, lowering himself down for another repetition.
"A...sword?" Leg raised a brow ridge, "What, have you grown bored with punching people's heads off?"
"I'm not gonna fight with it, Legdweeb!" Brotein said as he pushed himself back up, "I'm gonna pull it out!"
"Pull it out? " Leg asked, growing more confused by the second.
"Yeah."
"So let me get this straight...While I was eating breakfast, you've managed to get yourself fucking shanked...AGAIN... and now you're trying to cure yourself with physical exercise?" inquired Leg. After a night spent tossing and turning in his capsule (apparently, he still wasn't tired or chaos-poisoned enough to sleep through catastrophic wailstorms...which, in his opinion, was absolute bullshit), his mind could only arrive at the wildest conclusions.
"I have no fucking clue what you're talking about." said Brotein, who had hoisted Tartarus up over his head and was now doing shoulder presses with it.
Leg would've rolled his eyes if an Ultra's eyes were rollable, but they weren't, so instead he opted to give Brotein a quick look-over and see how close to death he was this time.
"Huh, weird. I don't see any swords..." he harrumphed, his face scrunched up with a mix of concentration and exponentially growing confusion. "Or stab wounds, for that matter."
Then, he was struck by an idea so utterly cursed that it made him turn several shades paler and may or may not have shaved a millennium off his lifespan. "U-unless...D-don't tell me…"
"I'M NOT GONNA PULL A SWORD OUT OF MY ASS, DUMBASS!' Brotein slapped his forehead with mountain-shattering force. Since this particular planet at this particular time of day still obeyed the laws of physics, this also meant that he dropped Tartarus onto his head, but he didn't seem to care in the slightest. "I'M GONNA PULL IT OUT OF THE ROCK!"
"Rock? What rock?"
"Have you been living under one?" Brotein grunted, yanking his head out of the hole in Tartarus Saloon's floor.
"Oh for Noa's sake, I woke up an hour ago!"
"Fine!" snapped Brotein. He set Tartarus down, grabbed Leg by the ankle, slung him over his shoulder as one does with a lumberjack's axe, and shot up into the air over acid-eaten meadows, setting course for the main building of Vantus V's spaceport.
"Whoa, that's a lot of people...no wonder Tartarus looked kind of empty this morning…"
"Ah, shit." scowled Brotein. He had snatched one of the fluffier clouds out of the sky and was now wiping off a perfectly accurate anatomical diagram of a Magma dong that some uncrowned maestro had managed to spraypaint on his cheek during the instant he'd spent with his head stuck in the floor. "Can't this fucking thing go any slower?"
A sizable crowd had arranged itself into a queue outside one of the port's entrances. Looking closely, Leg could see that the people were surrounding a grey, roundish ship that would've been wholly unremarkable if it weren't for what looked like a small mountain growing out of the top. One by one, they would climb onto its hull, scale the rocks and grasp the hilt of a great zweihander that jutted out of the top of the ship like an antenna. They would give the sword a firm and determined yank, and it would hiss out purple sparks and stubbornly stay in place.
"You've failed! Next!" announced a small creature that stood perched on the ship's round and non-threatening rostrum. The challengers withdrew in various states of disappointment that ranged from grumpy grumbling to full-blown breakdowns and heart attacks. A couple of ambulance ships were parked nearby for such occasions.
"I thought those fuckers would be done by the time I'd finished warming up, but now there's even more of them. How stupid! Should've known better than to hope!" grumbled Brotein.
"Wait. Dude. Are you seriously just gonna follow the rules and wait in line?" gaped Leg, hovering bewilderedly in the air. "You, who has, like," he listed off the biggest number he could think off, " ...dead cops to his name?"
"What, do you want me to just kill everyone? I can do that, easy!"
"NO!!!"
"Okay." said Brotein, and continued waiting in line like an upstanding citizen.
"Are you…" suddenly, Leg was overcome with a crawling unease and wrongness, "...procrastinating?"
"Shut up." Brotein bit off, "Shut the fuck up."
"Uh, are you oka-"
"Greetings, esteemed challenger!" interrupted a taller and scalier robed creature, who had seemingly teleported into the middle of the queue and was now offering Leg a glossy little booklet, "Please acquaint yourself with the rules of the trial as you await your turn!"
"Thanks, but I'll pass!" Leg told the gangly alien, every cell of his body aching for caffeine, "This whole sword-yanking thing isn't my cup of tea."
"Then why are you taking up space in this line?" the alien replied, her one great compound eye squinting in confusion and all four of her hands inching towards four mean-looking scimitars.
"Uhhh...emotional support?"
"Understandable, have a nice day!" said the alien, and, with one confident movement, shoved the booklet into Leg's mouth.
"You trying to start shit?" Leg inquired intelligently. It came out as "Fffffffhhhghgg".
But she had already teleported away, only rustling grass and jimmies left in her wake.
They sat atop a tall stump that used to be two conjoined trees growing together in peace and harmony before last night's storm came and screwed everything up. Below them, people stepped forward one by one to yank at the sword (which, as per the convenient exposition booklet, went by "Riscalibur" and had been forged untold aeons ago by things one better not even try imagining) and failed miserably.
It had been a bit over half an hour in Terran time, and the line was shrinking at a surprisingly quick pace. The shiny dunce cap folks with the variable number of arms, who Leg now knew as the Wizard-Knight Order of Riscalibur, had the whole "pull, fail, cope, leave" thing down to a science. They worked in shifts so that nobody would lose their voice and/or head from quoting The Scroll of Prophecy over and over, and the three of them would pause every ten minutes for a Scroll-mandated tea break. The current supervisor of the sword-yanking process was a six-eyed (and -armed), plump alien who went by the name of Mir. Compared to their comrades Vig and Dicer, who were as dry and procedural as a living creature possibly could be (see Section 4, Subsection 7 of The Scroll for rules and regulations governing the insertion of instructional booklets into orifices), Mir was of a livelier disposition, and took great pleasure in bonking unlucky challengers on the head with a very big and very squeaky rubber mallet.
“Yeesh." Leg cringed as he watched another courageous challenger collapse into a sobbing, herniated heap. A sobbing, herniated heap that Mir then dutifully hammered. "I don't get it, Brotein. Why would you even want to do this? All that misery and public humiliation for an infinitely tiny chance of being the chosen one, and for what? You don't even like swords!”
"For what?! I can't believe I'm hearing this! You half-asleep or something, scrub?" came the very exasperated and caffeinated shout of the previous person in the line, a Chibull in a red exosuit with the words "ANDROMEDA GAMING" emblazoned on its chestplate. "Like, get a load of this guy! The power to rule the universe is on the line, but his dumb ass can't even bother to read the damn instructions properly!"
He then laughed the laugh of a person who was totally not feigning self-confidence.
"The power to rule the universe? That's what this is all about? Sounds like an absolute nuisance, just like people who butt into conversations when nobody fucking asked." grumbled Leg, shuddering at the sour caffeine-breath hissing out of the exosuit's vents "Also yes, I am in fact half-asleep and I threw the instructions in the trash because I couldn't be arsed to finish reading them. If you have a problem with it, give me that energy drink you're guzzling and fuck right off!"
"I'll give you something to guzzle alright!" screeched the Chibull, unholstering a blaster.
Unfortunately, no matter how much one hones their FPS skills in the great arcade halls of Fragulus Gamma, they just don't translate that well into real life. The 360 noscope death ray blew a branch off the tree stump, and in the same instant the exosuit slumped bonelessly to the ground, its power core evaporated by Leg's beam. Inside, the Chibull cursed in ways that had the potential to offend at least ten different civilizations, but none of that mattered; the damage had already converted his life support system into a lifen't support system, dooming the disgraced gamer to perish mid-slur.
Before any inhibitions could intervene, Leg pounced upon the corpse and looted its bountiful energy drink supplies. Thankfully, none of the Wizard-Knights seemed to care (the Scroll of Prophecy preceded the technological and evolutionary developments that made quickdraw duels a possibility), and business went on pretty much as usual. With their eyes full of exquisitely irrational hope, people still climbed atop the ship (which, as per the convenient exposition booklet, went by "The Argonaute" and had been forged untold aeons ago by things one better not even try imagining), people still yanked the sword, and people still failed miserably.
As he cracked open one of his battle trophies, Leg was suddenly overcome by a burning urge to brag about it.
"Hey Brotein! Check this shit out!" he wanted to say, but choked on his words as his gaze fell upon the Ultra, who stood statue-like on the top of the stump and seemed to be staring off into somewhere far, far, far away.
TO BE CONTINUED...