Work Text:
No one else would have had the guts to do it.
That was Magnus’s logic, anyway.
No one else had the resources, the motivation, and most importantly, the utter lack of fear it would take to defy the Director. If the rumors were true, then the goods could only be housed in one location, the one defiant rectangular prism on a moonscape of domes.
If there was a dog on the goddamn moon, it could only be inside of the Fantasy Costco.
Somewhere. In there. Probably.
“Your confidence does not inspire me,” Carey critiqued off-hand, tapping her foot and subsequently chipping the wooden floor of the Regulator’s dojo with her claws as she gazed toward the imposing walls of the Fantasy Costco. “Lesson Twelve of rogue training, dude, you’ve gotta gather intel before you go running off into situations and circumstances.”
From their vantage point in the dojo, Magnus thought that the superstore looked rather ready for ransacking at a moment’s notice. He raised a hand and closed one eye, pinching the store down into non-existence a few times experimentally. When he moved his pinchers in front of Carey’s eye, eager to prove this point, she struck his hand away with the expertise of someone who had both seen the move coming and had, in fact, seen it done better.
“C’mon, Carey! I’ve got some intel,” Magnus wheedled. He was growing into a stellar wheedler – he had even taken a couple of points in persuasion and puppy dog eyes during his training, with the thought that if one approach didn’t work, there was always the other. “I heard it from a solid source, and I saw Garfield take a mysterious shipment into the back of the Fantasy Costco with my own two eyes last week!”
“Okay, okay…” Carey poked her fingers at Magnus’s puppy dog eyes and grinned with a sharp mouthful of dragon teeth when he managed to block her at the last second. “Who is your solid source?”
“A very reputable and reliable source.”
“That’s great, but what’s the name, Maggie.”
“He’s just a real knowledgeable and cool guy, maybe about this tall…”
“Why are you gesturing to your crotch.”
“I would never! I’m gesturing to the height of my source, who is as tall as he is untrustworthy. This simile is getting away from me, to be honest.”
Carey’s neck frill flared sharply for a moment. “OKAY!” she said in an exhale that was more lightning than breath. “So we’re taking hot tips from Robbie now, and that’s just fine, bud, but you can leave me out of it.” She turned to stalk toward the dojo doors and lashed Magnus in the back of the knees with her tail on the way. An accident, she would defend if pressed, after which she began to empty the pockets of her training robes.
“Nooooo!” Magnus wailed, abandoning wheedling in favor of begging as he doggedly stumbled after her. “You’re my top choice for heist partner!” He wrapped his arms around her waist and hefted her over his shoulder in an impressive triumph of strength over dexterity.
Carey rolled her eyes and finished pulling smoke bombs out of her pockets, tucking several of the small hissing spheres into the gaps between Magnus’s undershirt and his new featherweight cuirass. It was something she had been dying to do ever since he got the dang thing from the fantasy gachapon and proceeded to never shut up about his improved acrobatics skill.
Well, she allowed within her own thoughts as Magnus instantly dropped her to her feet and began batting at his own armpits, maybe his flailing about was a little more dexterous now.
Carey crossed her arms. “You have until I can’t see you anymore to convince me.”
Multi-colored smoke began to emit from the chinks in Magnus’s armor. “Okay, well, first of all, there are no good heist movies with only one heister. There are always multiple. Ideally, I’d get Taako and Merle in on this and have a nice round four person team, but Merle is off-base right now – keeping the director distracted, I might add – and Taako said he’d murder me for real if I interrupt his magic lessons with Ango. So…” With a grunt, he managed to unbuckle one side of the cuirass and extracted two smoke bombs which he flung out the nearest window with zeal. “I need you. Can’t do it alone.”
“Lesson Thirteen, Mags, don’t try to appeal to your opponent’s better nature when you’re losing. It’s a lame look.”
“Second of all, we would not just be doing this on Robbie’s word. Sure, I got news from him that there was a,” and here his voice dropped to a level almost imperceptibly discreet, “secret dog on the moon.” At a normal volume, he continued, “But I personally witnessed Garfield the Deals Warlock take in a small delivery of crates, by himself, looking verrry secretive about it. And the crates were full of little holes! For breathing!” he concluded with a cough as he inhaled smoke.
The cough jostled another bomb out of his armor and it rolled cheerfully under a pile of crossbow bolts that someone routinely failed to collect after a practice session. Carey would let that be a nice surprise for her later.
“I know dog yearning has rotted your brain, bud, but other animals that like to breathe are allowed to be imported. He could have been getting a secret shipment of any old thing. I seem to recall a certain goldfish staring at me every day of my life since I made the mistake of becoming your friend.”
“Ah! You said you were my friend, no take-backsies!” Magnus started in on the last buckle of the cuirass. “And finally, point the third, you want to do this heist with me (your friend). You want to, because I know that Garfield has air vents that only the smallest dragonborns can fit into, and state-of-the-art locks that only the most skilled thieves could pick, and sneaky magical traps that only the stealthiest and most observant can avoid.” The buckle gave way with a satisfying click.
“You want to help me because Garfield has made a Carey Fangbattle honeypot.” The front and back halves of the cuirass hit the ground with a discordant clang and the six remaining bombs cracked, flooding the room with thick roiling clouds of smoke. “Carey?”
There was a brusque thwip before the room suddenly cleared out in a disorienting cyclone of wind. It pushed the smoke out of the windows and most equipment flat to the walls before dissipating as quickly as it formed. Magnus and Carey were left in the center of the dojo, the former standing amidst abandoned bits of his armor, the latter tapping her pointy chin thoughtfully with a folding fan.
“Hey, isn’t that Taako’s fan?” Magnus idly finger-combed his windswept sideburns, which stubbornly persisted in standing on end. “The Gustwhatever?”
“That dingdong knows Gust of Wind as a second level spell, and he hasn’t noticed the fan going missing in weeks. I’ve figured out a way around his pocket pudding now, too.”
“How do you get around his -”
“That’s a secret technique. Anyway, describe this Carey Fangbattle honeypot. I’m just curious, though. You’re not getting me embroiled in your heist.”
“How did I end up embroiled in your heist?” Carey bemoaned. Her left wrist, always a little quicker to tire out after her last adventure in Neverwinter, began to twinge.
“My charm and good wit,” Magnus suggested from his relatively safer position, crouched underneath a desk by the entrance to the room, lock picks at the ready.
“Try again.” She curled herself up just in time to avoid the magical gaze of the guard statue that scanned the room at eye level every 20 seconds.
“Curiosity.”
Carey began to swing her weight like a trapeze artist where she dangled from a loose light fixture even as she sighed, sounding disappointed in herself. “Yeah, that would do it.” With one last heave of exertion, she executed a midair flip to touch down in a precise handstand on top of a terminal covered in glowing jewel tone buttons. She tapped six of them in sequence and then three more simultaneously, ending up in an improbable crouch that utilized the very tip of her tail to press the last button. “Now!”
In front of Magnus, a panel under the desk popped open to reveal a small safe. “I’m concerned that this is looking a little too small to hold a dog, Carey!” he called out.
“Pick the fucking lock, Magnus!” Carey replied charitably from her held position.
“On it!”
The seconds ticked by to a quiet backdrop of delicate scraping noises as Magnus tried his best to pick the fucking lock.
16 seconds.
17 seconds.
18 seconds. The stone guard’s stone eyes began to glow orange.
19 seconds. The orange gaze began to sweep the room, rapidly approaching Carey, who felt rather more like a sitting duck than a dragonborn.
20 sec-
“Got it!” The cheer came from below the desk as Magnus tried to jump up with elation and instead bashed his head, jolting the desk itself about a foot and a half to the right in the process. More pained: “Still got it.”
The statue’s eyes closed just before the orange gaze could sweep over Carey. She collapsed out of her crouched position with relief and weariness, though of course she would only admit to the former if asked. She liquefied into a grateful puddle of scales and rogue’s tools at the base of the terminal, staring up at the faint reflection of jewel tones on the ceiling and shaking out her wrists. “What do you got?”
Magnus extricated himself from the desk and made his way gingerly over to her. He avoided, to his credit, most of the pressure-sensitive floor tiles that would have caused a lockdown if pressed before they managed to deactivate the alarm system. “A key,” he announced, somewhat unnecessarily since he brandished said key the entire time it took to cross the room.
“Well that’s just insulting,” Carey sniped as she levered herself back up into sitting position. “I don’t use keys, as a rule.”
“This one seems cool and special, though. It’s vibrating?” Magnus laid the key flat on his hand and as advertised, the key jittered faintly in place in his palm. “And the vibrations got stronger as I walked over.”
That was enough to raise Carey’s hand so that Magnus could grab it and give her an enthusiastic pull that lifted her two feet off the ground. She found her balance with an extra bounce and made grabby hands in his direction. “Let me see it?”
The off-white key, only about one inch in length and all the more mystical-looking for it, was covered in tiny etched runes. “Dude, it’s not just a key, it’s a scrying bone skeleton key! Can’t find the keyhole if you’re not in possession of it.”
“Kickass!”
“Right?” She tossed it straight up in the air to watch it re-orient itself mid-arc. “Carey Fangbattle will make an exception to her “no keys” rule.”
Following the key’s intensifying vibrations until it about jumped out of her claws was the easy part. Fitting the jittering key into a tiny and nondescript keyhole hidden in plain sight within a shadowed stretch of wall was a little trickier. Eventually, Carey whispered something a little too quiet for Magnus to hear but which sounded like a threat, and the key immobilized itself instantly.
“You have got to teach me that trick.”
“State secret, bro.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
Carey did the honors of swinging the door open to reveal a very dark and mysterious room. She could appreciate the theatricality of it, and Magnus even more so, if the gasp he let out at the sight was anything to go by. It was so dark that one couldn’t even see the edges of the room, only made starker by the single spotlight in the middle of the space, illuminating a dog carrier.
Magnus let out an actual squeal of delight and ran into the room with no further scouting for traps – Carey mentally deducted a few points from his thief school grade – and spun the hard-sided crate around so he could get to the door. The noise he made after that was closer to the sound of steam escaping a kettle. Indignation? Heartbreak?
Carey didn’t need to see the empty carrier to know there was no dog.
“I’m sorry, bud. We did our best, and if you think about it” –
“There’s a letter in here. For you.”
“A what now.”
Magnus, downcast and staring into an empty dog crate like prolonged eye contact would summon something to inhabit it, blindly lifted a sealed letter into the air.
Well, if Magnus didn’t set off a trap on his way in, Carey probably wasn’t going to. Just in case Garfield had other tricks up his metaphorical sleeve, though, she mustered up just a little lightning to dance over her scales and provide illumination should the light go out. She crossed over to stand at Magnus’s stooped shoulder and took the envelope.
It did indeed have her name written across the front and an elegant wax seal stamped with the Fantasy Costco logo. Bracing herself, she broke the seal with a claw and extracted a single folded page, while her free hand patted Magnus’s despondent head soothingly.
“Dear Carey Fangbattle,” the dragonborn in question read out loud. “I hope you enjoyed your specially tailored honeypot! The grand finale button sequence took me ages to program but I think I’ve really outdone myself. I hope that you chose Magnus as your sidekick on the heist, or else this dog carrier wasn’t much of a prestige move. Anyway, happy early Candlenights! Love, Garfield.”
It was probably too soon to rag on Magnus about falling for this. Besides, Lesson Twelve, she didn’t exactly get enough intel before running off into this situation or circumstance herself. Oh shit, post-scripts.
“P.S. Magnus, if you’re there, don’t give up hope. There was supposed to be a dog, but one of my business partners planet-side messed up my order. If you ever see a fellow who goes by the name of O.D. down there, you know who to blame.”
As if waiting for her to finish reading the letter – and all things considered, maybe that was the case – the single light illuminating the dog crate flickered and died. By the spark of the blue electricity thrumming through her scales in time with her heartbeat, Carey read the final line.
“P.P.S. Back to Carey. I hope you saved your energy, because getting out is not going to be as easy as getting in. Have fun!”
Magnus stood up as if struggling under the weight of the world, reminding Carey of fantasy Atlas standing on the moon and holding Faerun on his back. This metaphor was getting away from her. She gripped the back of his neck and made him look her in the eyes, watching her own glowing reflection float within his dilated human pupils.
“Do you wanna scheme about how we’re going to spin this story so that we sound especially heroic while we bust down the walls of this here Fantasy Costco?”
Magnus sniffed and gripped Steven the goldfish for strength. “Yeah, that sounds really nice.”
“Atta boy.”
Carey broke off to scout exit strategies and behind her, she heard shuffling steps as Magnus slowly came back to life. He then froze. From the darkness came a bit of a strangled tone: “Wait, why would Garfield get you a Candlenights gift?”
“Lesson fourteen.” Carey turned and grinned, teeth enormous and white in the shadows. “Observation. You’ve gotta not only notice Garfield taking a suspicious shipment, but also notice the dragonborn who made the delivery. They were crates of various psychoactive plants special-ordered by Robbie himself, by the way.”
“I’m going to be such a dick to you the next time we do duck-carving lessons.”
“That’s only fair. Happy Candlenights!”