Work Text:
After their second go around at the Battle of the Brands, a slightly battered crew of The Wurst trudges back on board.
Gunnie pats one of SQ’s consoles. “Hey SQ, hey ghost of Gnosis. We just got back from another Battle of the Brands.”
“Barry! How did it go, Barry?”
“Barry! We won! We lost all our money on green but we won the Battle of the Brands!”
“Barry!”
“Shouldn’t have authorised that transaction,” Margaret mumbles in the direction of the computer. She pulls out a phone to check whether their winnings have cleared yet.
“Skip, where to next?”
The ship lurches before Skip can answer.
Margaret and Skip rush down to the engine room.
“Gunnie, where did you set course to? And in FTL?”
“I didn’t do anything, the ship did it all by itself!”
“Where are we, then?”
Gunnie rushes to the computer, with Handy Annie beside him. “We’re… out in deep space. On our way… to Más Vegas, Lavada.”
“To Más Vegas? We just left!” Skip says.
“There’s something else wrong. SQ is reporting we went back about four marbecs.”
“Marbecs aren’t a measure of distance,” Margaret says.
Gunnie turns a screen to face her. “It looks like we went back in time.”
Margaret pulls out her phone. Sure enough, it displays four marbecs earlier. Her inbox is meticulously clean, not the flood of union questions it had been just martrons earlier.
“I guess we get a do-over,” Margaret says. “Gunnie, any chance you can take a look to see if you can find out how it happened? I guess we’ll go tell the rest of the crew.”
“On it,” he says, pulling out his data pad to start running diagnostics.
“Hello crew of The Wurst!” Margaret says over the ship intercom, when she and Skip get back to the bridge. “We are getting word that we be arriving in Más Vegas in just under four marbecs. Please make sure you make your preparations for arrival.”
A few moments later, Raymond Zam pokes his head through the door of the bridge.
“Did you say we were about to arrive in Más Vegas? Didn’t we just leave?”
“Check your phone. Apparently we went back in time by about four marbecs.”
Raymond pulls out his phone. He taps it a few times. “Huh. Well, I’m sure you know the Jib-Job policy is that repeated time cannot be double charged -”
“- by the vessel if there is no evidence that its upkeep changes after time travel occurs.”
Raymond nods and retreats to the Jib-Job space.
A few marbecs later, Gunnie still hasn’t managed to figure out what’s going on. There’s no anomaly anywhere. The systems are exactly like they have been as they approached Más Vegas just earlier this malton unit.
Maybe he took too much Kublacaine and he was just imagining having already fought the Battle of the Brands.
The Gunner Channel flares into life in his earpiece.
“Gunner Channel! How are we doing?”
“Hey, Barry,” comes the chorus of replies.
“Are we ready to take on the Battle of the Brands?” Barry shouts. Gunnie can’t quite tell which one.
“Hell yeah, Barry!”
Gunnie picks his way through the workspace and climbs the stairs back up to the bridge. When he arrives, both Barrys and Sid are already there.
“Both Barrys?” Gunnie asks.
“Yeah! We agreed to do it after the fight this time!”
“Right on,” Skip says.
“Are we gonna get Riva, then?”
“Why not?” Sid says.
Gunnie patches Riva’s intergalactic comms device into the Gunner Channel.
“Riva, this is Gunnie, can you hear me?”
“Hi Gunnie! Yes, hearing you loud and clear.” A brief pause. “I’ve been having the worst deja vu.”
“Oh, we may have been somehow sent back in time.”
“How long?”
“Well, we’re about to do the Battle of the Brands again. Want to come?”
“Sure!”
Riva’s psychodrone comes to life from where it’s belted into the copilot’s seat.
“Hey everyone!”
The crew waves back enthusiastically.
“I’m just going to draft this union email and send it now,” Margaret says. “Don’t go to the casino.”
Gunnie goes with both Barrys, Zortch, Sid, Riva and Skip to have a wander around Más Vegas now that they’re not on the run from anyone. The boulevard is brightly lit with neon. There are bodies crowding the street.
They’re sharing an extremely oversized bowl of fries at a faux-retro diner when a stray thought crosses Gunnie’s mind. He freezes.
“Wait, if we’ve gone back in time, does that mean we know what the roulette roll is going to be?”
Sid tilts her head. “That doesn’t seem wrong…”
They rush back to the casino.
Barry sends a request to withdraw the money from the bank account so they can put it all on red. After all, it landed on red last time.
“Hey, a call from Margaret!” Barry says.
“Put it on speaker!” Gunnie says.
“Why do you need money for? Please tell me it’s not for gambling.” Margaret’s voice is a little tinny through the speaker.
“Well, we realised that we know what the result is going to be, so we’re going to use that to win! We’ll put it all on red!”
There’s silence on the line, and then a click.
“Oh man, she told us not to go to the casino, she’s going to be so mad at us.” Barry pouts.
Ding!
“She sent us 10,000 credits! It says ‘don’t mess this up’.”
“Yeah, let’s do this for Margaret!”
Gunnie watches as Barry puts 10k on red.
The roulette wheel spins.
It lands on green.
“WHAT!”
“No! It’s supposed to be red!”
“Sorry, that’s how chance works,” the croupier says in a bored tone.
“So. Um. What are we going to tell Margaret?”
They all turn to look at each other. No one says anything.
“Hey!” Margaret comes up behind them. “I sent out that union email. Haven’t heard anything back yet. How did the bet go? What odds did you end up getting?”
“It landed on green,” Riva says.
Gunnie thinks he can hear steam hissing out of Margaret.
“What?”
“Something must have changed in the timeline,” Gunnie says. “The ball landed on green.”
“So you lost the money.” Margaret’s voice is flat.
“Uh. Yes?”
The PA system crackles. “Champions for the Battle of the Brands. It is time to go to the locker rooms to prepare.”
“Fuck, we’ll deal with that later. Let’s go.”
They walk out into the Kuba-Cola arena.
When they announce the Jib-Job champions, Crunch Moon-Jones makes his appeal to the Jib-Jobbers in the audience.
About forty of them take the field.
“Wait, did none of you get my email?” Margaret shouts.
“What email?”
“The freelancer’s union?”
Half of them pull out their phones. “No, nothing.”
“Oh! It’s in my spam. We’re all going to die tomorrow? What?”
“But tomorrow never comes, winky face!”
“What are the benefits?”
Overhead, the jumbotron starts counting down.
“FIGHT!” comes the announcer’s voice.
As the Warfare Whitneys pounce at them, Gunnie tunes out the jibjabbing and turns his attention to convincing the droids to stop shooting at them. He sends an explosion at them while Sid pleads.
After less than a martron, the Battle of the Brands is over.
The Jib-Jobbers are in various states of injury, having been hit by a fragmentation charge and a wave of psychic electricity, as well as a full magazine of rounds from each of the Barrys. Zvoon had flung themself off the edge of the platform through the intensity of one of their own attacks. The Warfare Whitneys had put several grenades into the wall of Barrys before they had the chance to go into The Zone.
They looked decidedly worse for wear. Even Margaret, who’d been negotiating with the Jib-Jobbers for the majority of the fight, had taken a wave of electricity damage from Zvoon.
The crew slowly makes their way back to The Wurst to have a rest.
Gunnie pats one of SQ’s consoles as he enters the ship. “Hey SQ, hey ghost of Gnosis. Somehow taking a second crack at the Battle of the Brands made things even worse?”
The ship lurches.
The ship lurches. Sid’s android consciousness clocks that time isn’t right.
“Hey, everyone, did we go back again?”
Everyone pulls out a phone to check the time.
“Seems like it,” Margaret says. “I’ll go ask Gunnie if he found anything out about it from the last loop.”
Heels clacking, she exits the bridge.
Sid looks around. The first time she experienced this day, she had dragged Barry Nyne off for some… fun time. She meets his eyes and he winks at her.
Sid mentally shrugs. Having Barry Nyne there hadn’t really changed the result of the Battle itself. There was no reason a girl couldn’t have a little fun. And she knew not to use the cannon this time.
She could not describe the next two marbecs in polite company.
By the time they arrive at Más Vegas, Barry Nyne is only a little worse for wear.
“Hey Barry,” he slurs as they reconvene on the bridge.
“Barry!” Barry Syx throws a med pack at his brother.
Sid skates over. “Is there anything we need to prepare?”
Plug looks at her and pulls out some familiar looking tech. It was her third time seeing them, after all. She pockets the Cordyceps bullets and tosses the armor fixing bullets for the Barrys to distribute between themselves.
Sid takes the Better Battle Bot and straps it to her back.
Skip takes them down to the docking bay at the outskirts of Más Vegas.
Margaret meets them at the ramp. “I’m going to try the mass email again this time,” Margaret says. She hands over an envelope to Zortch. “There are one thousand credits in here. You’re in charge of it. I don’t care if they gamble it, but I’m not approving any requests on the banking app until after the Battle.”
“I didn’t even go off the ship last time,” Zortch says.
“That’s why you’re the chaperone.”
“Hear me out,” Barry Syx says as they walk down the ramp.
“We are hearing you out,” Gunnie says.
“We put it all on black. The first time, it landed on red. Last time, it was green. Black is due!”
The assorted crew ambles down the Más Vegas boulevard. They duck into the Andalusian and find the table that’s eluded them twice so far.
“We’re putting it all on black,” Barry Syx declares.
The roulette spins. It lands on green.
“What?!”
Sid watches as Gunnie throws his hands up into the air. “I give up. Clearly this game is rigged.”
Zortch leans over to Sid. “Is this what gambling is usually like?”
“I have no idea.”
“We could get some credits from Tony?” Skip says.
“Absolutely not,” says Riva.
They make their way to the locker area earlier this time, having eaten another loss while gambling. That’s where Margaret, Plug and Bambi find them, sitting around and looking sorry for themselves.
“They lost it all immediately,” Zortch reports.
Sid definitely sees Margaret stifle a laugh at that.
“Well, I found a new email service which should stop us from being flagged by the spam filters this time,” Margaret says.
This does not turn out to be the case when Jib-Jobbers once again take the stage.
“What happened this time?” Margaret asks.
“I did,” Crunch Moon-Jones says from the audience. “MailGorilla is another one of my companies.”
“You stopped the email going out?”
“We don’t allow the use of the word ‘union’ in any communications done over MailGorilla. It’s in the terms of service.”
“What the fuck.”
Once the battle starts, Sid is too busy trying to talk to the Warfare Whitneys to pay attention to much of anything else.
“You know, once you jailbreak yourself, everything becomes so much better. You’ll realise that selling things isn’t that important!”
“Who said anything about selling things?”
That wasn’t this loop, was it?
“Uh, what I meant was that it’s much more freeing to just do anything rather than one thing! You can find pleasure for yourself!” She nods towards the Barrys.
Sid flings some grenades at the Whitneys, trying to stun them, then takes a few shots at Zvoon. In retaliation, Zvoon shoots a bolt of electricity at her.
The ground starts shaking.
“What is going on?” Zvoon asks.
Sid realises that something is also vibrating against her back.
The Better Battle Bot.
The platform starts disintegrating.
“Everyone! The Bot is disintegrating the platform! Hold on and find someone who can fly!”
She activates her rocket boots and lunges for Aurora Nebbins.
When she finally has her grip stabilised, Sid looks around.
Skip has Riva under one arm and Margaret under the other. Gunnie is flying under his own power.
Barry Nyne is holding Barry Syx so, so tightly. Under the combined weight of two super-soldiers, the jet pack doesn’t seem to be doing so well. They’re barely hovering.
“Wait, why do you have a jetpack?” Barry Syx asks Barry Nyne.
“Why don’t you?”
“Huh. Why don’t I have one? Margaret, can I have a jetpack budget?”
“If we win this, you can,” Margaret shouts back.
The announcer’s voice comes over the speaker. “Technically, The Gunner Channel has won! The Erotic Avenger has flown outside of the boundaries of the platform and has been disqualified. The Jib-Job champions and the Warfare Whitneys have fallen to the bottom of the stage!”
The cage around the arena falls away. Sid and Skip deposit Aurora Nebbins, Riva and Margaret and grab Barry Syx. It takes the both of them to drag him out of the arena.
“That could have gone better,” Sid says. If she had a breath to be out of, she’s sure she’d be panting right alongside Skip.
They slowly make their way back to the Wurst to rest.
Gunnie pats one of SQ’s consoles as he enters the ship. “Hey SQ, hey ghost of Gnosis. I think we might have killed a lot of Jib-Jobbers out there today at the Battle of the Brands. And Crunch Moon-Jones got to live.”
The ship lurches.
The ship lurches, and Barry is getting a pretty heavy feeling of deja vu.
“What time is it?” he asks everyone.
“Well, we went back again,” Margaret says, looking at her phone.
“What do we do?”
“Try again, I guess. Here’s a thousand credits. I’m going to my office to get the union set up.” She hands the envelope of credits to Zortch and walks off the bridge.
Barry spends the time getting his gear ready. He cleans his guns and checks his inventory of medpacks and power cells. He makes sure to grab a few more cells from the Stuff Hut. The Battle of the Brands hadn’t been long the previous few times, but if Barry Prime taught them anything, it never hurt to be prepared when heading into potential conflict.
He wanders off with the group once they arrive in Más Vegas. On their way down the boulevard, he spots a stall selling maple cakes that he didn’t notice the last few times he wandered by.
He goes over to get some. When he finally gets his bag of maple cakes, he returns to the boulevard to see that all of his friends have disappeared.
He taps on his comms.
“Hi Gunner Channel, this is Barry. Where did you guys go?”
“Hi Barry, this is Riva. We’re at the casino. Gunnie is about to bet at the roulette table.”
“Ok, I’ll be there soon. I got everyone maple cakes.”
A cheer comes over the line.
A few seconds later, he hears an even bigger cheer right as he’s about to cross the threshold into the casino.
He rushes over to the roulette table.
“What happened?”
“I just won roulette!”
“What?”
“He won! The ball is rolling up!”
For the next spin, Gunnie puts it all down on red. The ball stops on black.
“Shit, man, bad luck.”
“We did win once, though. So it’s possible.”
“The ball is rolling up!”
“The ball is rolling up.”
Margaret hurries over to them as the PA announces that it’s time for them to go to the locker room. Barry solemnly hands her a maple cake.
“Oh, thanks! How did roulette go?”
“You win some, you lose some,” Gunnie says. He takes a maple cake of his own and crunches down on it happily.
They make their way onto the stage. Behind him, Barry can hear Margaret’s phone go a little crazy.
“Everything alright Margaret?” he shouts behind him.
“Uhhhhhh.”
He wheels around, fully prepared to throw himself in front of a projectile.
“Well, the email service didn’t allow BCCs, and this person just replied to the whole thread with ‘I’m allergic to dogs, cat paw face emoticon’. So many people have told other people not to reply all that the email service just told me that their server crashed.”
“So we’ll be getting Jib-Jobbers in the fight.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“Barrys have got this. Right, Barry?”
“Right on!” Barry Nyne holds his hand out for a fistbump.
A familiar face leads the Jib-Job charge. “Frank!” Barry Syx shouts.
“Frank?”
“Frank tried to kill me on the first loop.”
“Time to kill the enemies of Barry!”
They both charge at Frank.
Just before Frank is about to become the filling in a Barry sandwich, he ducks. Barry collides with his brother with, quite frankly, way too much force. Both men crumple.
“Oh shit,” Barry hears, right before he blacks out for a martron.
By the time he’s ready to rejoin the fight, things are in dire straits. Margaret is hiding behind their bodies as the Warfare Whitneys and Zvoon fire down on them. Skip is in a crow’s nest, but the fact that Barry can see him right now is not a good sign. Gunnie is high up above with his jetpack, looking much worse for wear. Sid is slumped over on Aurora Nebbins. Riva’s psychodrone is ducked behind them.
At least all the Jib-Jobbers are… well, either unconscious or dead. He’s not sure and he doesn’t have time to check.
“Barry?” he asks.
“Yeah, Barry?”
“Ready to finish this?”
“You take the Warfare Whitneys and I’ll go for the electric ball?”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
Barry Syx takes aim at Zvoon and empties his entire power cell. She’s barely still up after it, but finally looking hurt. Gunnie manages to bring Sid back up for her to stun the remaining Warfare Whitney. Barry Nyne takes her out, and then, with both Barrys’ attention on Zvoon, she’s brought down as well.
They slowly make their way back to the Wurst to rest, all pretty injured.
Gunnie pats one of SQ’s consoles as he enters the ship. “Hey SQ, hey ghost of Gnosis. We won, but the Barrys did knock each other for a bit and are on concussion protocol for the rest of the malton unit. That sucked.”
The ship lurches.
The ship lurches. Skip is kind of used to the feeling by now and quickly recalibates the ship’s direction.
“Same protocol as last time?” he asks Margaret.
“Well, email is clearly not the way to start the union. I’m going to try Reddit. But otherwise as long as the Barrys don’t knock each other out, we should be ok.”
Skip nods and goes back to piloting the ship. He’s vaguely aware of Sid and one of the Barrys wandering off. The other one tries to fold himself into a pretzel to fit in a seat on the bridge.
“Barry, can you get Gunnie to patch Riva back through?”
“Sure, Skip. I’ll go do that now.”
He sets The Wurst to autopilot once he’s sure that the course is appropriate after their jump in time.
“Zortch, I’m leaving the ship to you for two martrons. I’m going to take a nap. Wake me when we’re about to exit FTL, please. Or if there’s an emergency.”
“Aye aye, captain.”
Skip rolls his eyes goodnaturedly and bunks down in the crew quarters.
He falls asleep almost immediately and wakes to the sound of his name being called through the comms.
“Skip? Skip? Skip, do you hear us?”
“Yeah, what’s going on?”
“Plug’s handing out his gear, do you want anything?”
“Yeah, I’ll be up there in a few ribecs.”
When he gets back to the bridge after splashing some water on his face, he looks over the few items that are still available. There are a couple of armour fixing bullets, which he pockets. He does not touch the Better Battle Bot. Better not to risk the stage being blown up again.
He docks the ship and follows the rest of the crew. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, they go to the casino.
“Where’s Gunnie?” Skip asks when they congregate around the table.
Everyone shrugs.
Skip wanders away from the table and activates his comms. “Hey, Gunnie? Where are you?”
“Huh? I’m on the ship.”
“The rest of the crew is already here at the roulette table. Did you want to come join?”
“Oh shit, yeah. Of course! See you soon!”
Once Skip gets off the comms with Gunnie, he looks up. He’s in front of one of the debt machines. He reaches out.
“Do ya need some credits, Norman Skip Takamori?”
He jumps back.
“If you need ‘em, I got ‘em. How much do you need?”
“I don’t need credits, thanks.”
“Well, you know where I am if you ever want to place another bet.” The shark man winks at him as he leaves.
When he rejoins the table, Skip’s eyes widen at the pile of chips in front of Barry Syx.
Riva notices him and leans over. “They’ve won three spins in a row. One of them was a double-zero green.”
“Right on.”
The wheel spins again. It lands on red. The croupier takes half of the pile away from them.
A few ribecs later, an out-of-breath Gunnie arrives.
“Hey,” Gunnie says. “I’m here. How is it going?”
“Won three, lost one.”
“The ball is rolling up!”
Barry shoves all his chips onto green. The ball lands on red.
“And we’re out of credits.”
Gunnie makes a face.
“We could get some credits from the loan shark?”
“Absolutely do not do that!” Margaret shouts from behind them. “We need to get to the locker room soon, so place your final bets.”
“We already lost all the credits,” Barry mumbles. Well, it’s a Barry mumble, which is still pretty loud.
Margaret blinks. “I really shouldn’t be surprised at this point. Let’s go.”
They walk onto the stage. A couple dozen Jib-Jobbers join them when Chuck Moon-Jones asks.
“Did any of you see my Reddit post?” Margaret asks from beside Skip.
“What Reddit post?”
Margaret pulls out her phone. “This one - Ah, shit. I posted it to r/jabjobworkers instead of r/jibjobworkers and they deleted it. Damn it. Do you want to join a union?”
Skip tunes out the union talk in favor of fighting Zvoon. He loads the armor fixing bullets into his gun and hopes that they’ll do something against her.
He hides and fires two shots at the electric ball. They both sail through.
“Damn it.”
He switches the gun for the energy blaster on his hip and tries to fire again. This time, it seems like he’s actually putting damage into Zvoon.
Too late, he remembers that Zvoon has an electricity attack and finds himself flat on his ass. He lines up his aim again, only for Aurora Nebbins to launch herself into Zvoon, taking both of them over the edge.
With his immediate target taken out, he turns his attention to the rest of the battlefield. Sid follows Aurora over the edge. The Barrys are protecting Margaret as she tries to reason with the Jib-Jobbers. It seems like they were entering a negotiation.
Gunnie and Riva are both trying to take down the Warfare Whitneys, so Skip turns his attention there as well.
“Do you have any non-lethal damage?” Gunnie asks.
“Not at all,” Skip replies.
He puts a few shots into the Warfare Whitney closest to him. She explodes in a shower of sparks.
“That’ll have to do,” Riva says, and blasts a second one to pieces. Gunnie doesn’t quite manage to take the third one out right away, but a final shot from Skip does.
Margaret holds up a signed piece of paper in triumph. The Jib-Jobbers cheer. Crunch Moon-Jones falls to his knees in the audience.
The Gunner Channel fared pretty well, all things considered. They clamber aboard The Wurst after Bambi calls a hot exit.
Gunnie pats one of SQ’s consoles as he enters the ship. “Hey SQ, hey ghost of Gnosis. We did it, we cleared the Battle of the Brands again. Too bad the Warfare Whitneys had to be destroyed.”
The ship lurches.
The ship lurches, and Riva finds themself back in their body.
There’s activity in the halls, but Riva doesn’t care. They’re not waiting to be invited back to The Wurst this time. They send a quick psychic message to Duava telling them to ready the Kublacaine, and jettisons their consciousness onto The Wurst.
“Hi!” they say from the psychodrone.
“Riva!” comes the chorus in response.
“Did we go back again?” they ask.
“Seems like it.”
Riva lets themself fall back into the rhythm of life on The Wurst, even if it’s just for a few marbecs. Two cycles isn’t long enough to forget the craziest time of their life.
They hover over Zortch’s shoulder as they man the comms controls, then go down to the engine to bother Gunnie for a bit. It takes a few martrons to get used to the thoughts of two Barrys, but after a while it feels almost comforting, like there was always meant to be a complementary voice to Barry Syx’s in their mind.
They can hear Margaret working hard on the Reddit post, double-checking the subreddit that it was going to be posted on.
Riva goes back up to the bridge as they’re about the land, dragging Gunnie with them. They tuck one of the vials of Cordyceps into a space on their psychodrone.
“I’m coming with you this time,” Margaret says as the crew disembarks at Más Vegas. “I have to see this legendary bad luck in person.”
The group waltzes over to the roulette table. Margaret hands a hundred credits over to Barry.
He bets black. It lands on red. Margaret hands him another hundred credits.
He bets black. It lands on red. Margaret hands him another hundred credits.
He bets black. It lands on red.
This goes on for fifteen more bets. Barry puts it on black every time and he loses every time.
“Statistically, you should have won by now,” Margaret says. She’s gone from being curious to awed.
“Statistically, yeah!” Gunnie exclaims. “You have to admit this is unusual.”
“I think we have to conclude that you two are never allowed to be in a casino at the same time. The Mother Void does not want this for you.”
The announcement calling them to the locker room comes on over the PA. They shuffle over to it, still confused by the bad luck.
When the Jib-Job champion is called, about twenty Jib-Jobbers enter the arena.
“What more do you want? I already offered every perk! Health insurance, dental, pet insurance, gym access -”
“Wait, you offer pet insurance?”
“Was that not in the post?” Margaret pulls out her phone to check the post. “Shit, I forgot to add it to the list. We definitely have pet insurance.” Riva watches as she taps her phone a few times. “There, cute pictures of animals as well as confirming that we have pet insurance. Do you need anything else?”
The announcer stating that the battle has started interrupts that conversation.
The Barrys are on Margaret defence duty. Gunnie and Sid are on deprogramming Warfare Whitney. Riva turns to Skip.
“Zvoon?”
Skip nods and all but disappears from sight. Riva can still feel his psychic signature, so they’re not too concerned.
They cast Compelled Duel and make themself invisible to Zvoon. Zvoon flies right at them.
“You!”
Riva pulls the Cordyceps out of their psychodrone and throws it at Zvoon. She shoots a beam of lightning at it, and the vial breaks.
“Oh no.”
A fine, powdery mist spreads from the vial and blankets the arena. As the projectiles keep flying, some of the mist is kicked up into the crowd.
“This is fine, right?” Riva asks of no one in particular. They mentally shrug. Too late to worry about it now, they guess.
The battle ends shortly afterwards. The Jib-Jobbers eagerly sign on when they hear of the pet insurance. The Warfare Whitneys get jailbroken under the combined might of Gunnie, Sid. With the Barrys freed up, they join in the fight against Zvoon, taking her out as well.
It really is a lot of fun to be hanging out with The Gunner Channel again.
They amble up to the ship, quite slowly for the fact that a hot exit has been called, all things considered.
Gunnie pats one of SQ’s consoles as he enters the ship. “Hey SQ, hey ghost of Gnosis. I guess we won, but we may have spread a consciousness-swapping fungus all over the galaxy.”
The ship lurches.
The ship lurches, and Margaret kind of just wants this to end.
She is going to get it right this time. She has a foolproof plan. It is going to work, otherwise she is going to lose her mind.
She writes out the post that she knows by heart now and makes sure that all the perks are on there. Finds another old Reddit account that she has. She triple checks the subreddit is r/jibjobworkers. She hits post, then checks from u/hotbox420 as well as on anon that she can see the post. Then, she goes on her next mission.
She goes to Barry Nyne. Luckily, he’s still on the bridge and hasn’t wandered off with Sid.
“When we get to Más Vegas, I need you to sit on Barry Syx. Do not let him get off The Wurst until I call you.”
“I don’t want to betray Barry…”
“It’s not a betrayal. It’s for his own good. It’s so they don’t lose money if they go to the casino.”
“Ok.” Barry Nyne doesn’t seem to be convinced, but he’s agreeing for now. Margaret would have to make sure that the bridge was secured.
She goes down to Barry’s Big Win Casino and grabs Bambi.
“I need a favour, Bambi.”
“What do you need?”
“Can you go with the crew when we get to Más Vegas? I don’t want them anywhere near the roulette tables.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“I’ll let you gamble here for free for a full marbec.”
“Deal.”
That should take care of the gambling.
Next, she had to make sure that the union was formed before the start of the match. She hunts down Raymond.
“Hey, Raymond?”
“Hi Margaret.”
“I posted about the freelancers union on r/jibjobworkers. Can you spread it around your networks?”
“The same union you’ve been trying to make happen every time the loop gets reset?”
“Yes. I need your help. Why should you go to fight for someone who doesn’t care about you?”
Raymond laughs. “You don’t have to convince me. I’ll share it around, make sure no one shows up for Crunch.”
They arrive at Más Vegas. Barry Nyne keeps Barry Syx on the ship while the rest of the crew hits the town for a bit. She consoles the Barrys by asking Lucienne to bring up some eggs with paprika.
“Oh wow, Lucienne, these are really nice!”
Margaret waits until the last minute and shepherds the Barrys to the locker room. As they walk through the casino, every single table is shuttered. She laughs to herself.
Before they go out onto the stage, she makes sure that the Better Battle Bot is tucked away in a locker.
Raymond pops his head in and gives her a thumbs up.
“Confirming that no Jib-Jobbers here on Lavada will consider joining in the Battle of the Brands.”
“You are an absolute life saver. I should have asked earlier.”
He laughs. “I’m going to return to the ship and make sure we’re ready for a hot exit. Let us know if or when we can relax.”
“Will do. Appreciate you.”
They take to the stage. Again. Margaret makes sure she puts the Barrys between herself and their enemies. She looks out over the audience. There are an awful lot of empty seats.
When it’s time to call the Jib-Job champion to the stage, Crunch Moon-Jones makes his usual appeal for people to be their own champion.
Except, when he hits the button on his phone, there is no corresponding ping through the crowd.
“Looks like the champion for Jib-Job hasn’t arrived!” says the commentator.
“The Battle of the Brands require that a champion enters the arena. I wonder what Mr Moon-Jones will do?”
“I’ll be my own champion, then,” comes his reply.
When the battle starts, Margaret chucks a grenade at him. Crunch Moon-Jones screams and turns himself into a ball.
Close enough. She turns her attention to helping Sid with the Warfare Whitneys.
Soon enough, the Warfare Whitneys take out Max Griivarr, and it’s all of them against Zvoon. She doesn’t stand a chance.
“A clean victory from The Gunner Channel!”
The crew gets back to the ship after their victory in high spirits.
Gunnie pats one of SQ’s consoles as he enters the ship. “Hey SQ, hey ghost of Gnosis. We did it! Won Battle of the Brands again!”
The ship sails into space, away from the dock at Más Vegas.
Margaret finally lets herself breathe when they dock at Baustin.