Chapter 8: Chapter 7: Tales from the Cantina

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> “When the war broke out, we didn’t want to get involved. The Guild had played both sides for so long, why take a risk now?”

After the third subway transfer, I was beginning to suspect that letting Steve pick the bar had not been a good idea. When we finally walked down from the train platform at Ditmars Boulevard in Astoria, it had taken the better part of the evening and despite the long trip, Steve had barely said a word to me.

“Where exactly are we going?” I said, finally breaking the silence. Steve ignored me and we continued weaving through the crowded sidewalk, passing one bar after the other. He abruptly turned off the main drag onto a side street, where he quickened his pace. I followed, but my danger radar was about to reach its boiling point.

Thankfully, we had finally reached our destination: a three-story brick building with a boarded up storefront. Someone had tagged the boards with black spray paint and the second floor windows were all dark. So much for a night out at a trendy cocktail lounge.

“Look, I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea, but there’s no way I’m stepping foot in your apartment. Why don’t we just go back to one of the 15 bars we already walked by?”

Steve ignored me and hit a buzzer next to the door, which after a few seconds swung open on its own accord.

“You coming or not?” he asked.

Not waiting for my response, he walked into the building.

I could have walked away then. It would only have cost me a wasted evening. But, against my better judgment, I ran to the door before it swung shut. The interior opened almost immediately into a set of stairs dimly lit by rusty light fixtures that lined the walls and Steve was already close to the top landing. I caught up to him and saw that there was someone else there, a woman who looked to be in her seventies, sitting on a metal folding chair.

She would not have looked out of place at the Questaholics Anonymous meeting, her grey hair bushy and unwashed, a pair of reading glasses dangling from a chain around her neck. If she and Steve knew each other, they didn’t acknowledge it. Steve pressed onward through a red door at the end of a short hallway and I followed, the woman paying no mind to me either. I hoped they weren’t paying her a lot to be the bouncer because she was doing a terrible job.

The red door swung backward after Steve went through and I paused to let it rebound before pushing it back. If what waited for me on the other side was some sort of torture dungeon, at least I would be able to quickly escape.

But all of my trepidation vanished, as I stepped foot into a crowded, noisy bar. I blinked, waiting for the illusion to vanish, but it didn’t.

In contrast to the woman outside, all of the people here looked, dare I say, normal. The bar itself was in the center of the room, a huge square manned by four bartenders who were efficiently serving up drinks to the dozens of patrons on all sides. A balcony ringed the room above, with tables spaced around a metal railing. If I hadn’t just spent the last 90 minutes trekking across the city to a random, abandoned-looking building, I would have thought it was indistinguishable from the bars I frequented in my post-college, finally-on-her-own-in-the-big-city days.

Steve walked past the bar to a small spiral staircase that led up to the balcony. The upper level was quieter, the crowd from downstairs evidently not preferring the intimate tables. We sat down at one of them and the long journey finally was over.

I waved over a waitress so I could fulfill my promise to buy the first round, only to realize that I had no idea if I even had enough tokens to cover one drink.

“Umm, Steve, I know I said I would get the first round, but uhh, how many tokens does a drink usually cost?”

Steve snickered.

“Where do you think we are? Some secret Quester bar?” He shook his head. “This is just a regular bar pretending to be a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Only difference is the extra $2 a drink for the ‘ambiance.’”

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The waitress arrived and we gave her our order. Now that I knew we were no place special, I held my Quest talk until she had dropped off the drinks a few minutes later.

“Oh. But, if this is just some random bar, then why did you make me trek all the way out here?”

“Been meaning to try this place and wasn’t sure they would let me in without a pretty face.”

He grinned and I shuddered internally. Did he think that was a compliment?

“So, Jade, why were you at the meeting? I thought I was the only one who liked to feel better about myself by listening to those sob stories.”

“Wait, so you didn’t break your clavicle trying to get some moss?”

“Of course not. It just sounds so pathetic and, to be honest, most people don’t know what a clavicle is, which means I don’t have to show up to the meeting in a fake cast.”

“Oh.”

This guy was turning into a real scumbag, but I tried not to let my disgust show.

“Got it. So you just Quest as a hobby, or...?”

Steve took a sip of his drink, put the glass back down, and then began stirring the tiny little straw in a clockwise rotation.

“Something like that. Let’s just say that my father, also a Steve if you hadn’t figured that out from my handle, was so wildly successful in certain pursuits that we wouldn’t have to Quest for several generations even if we spent our tokens like a bunch of drunken sailors in a whorehouse.”

This conversation was leaving me more and more confused by the minute. Unless there was a whole underground economy run on tokens, what was the point of stockpiling these things when we were living in the real world and needed real money to pay for our real world needs, like food and shelter for instance?

“Right, right,” I said, as if I knew what I was talking about. “I wish I didn’t have to Quest, but my parents wanted nothing to do with me after high school, so now I’m starting from square one.”

The lie was believable, or so I thought. I had already given away too much, I realized, when I asked Steve for help, but I thought that he might tell me more if he thought I was one of them, a member of the Questing fraternity, rather than some random person who opened an email one night.

“That’s a shame,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine if my kid had to work her way up from the bottom. Not that a little hard work wouldn’t do her some good, mind you, but I’ll bet it’s been tough out there since they opened the floodgates.”

“What do you mean?”

“You must have noticed, or maybe you hadn’t, because you’re so new, but it didn’t used to be like this.”

“Like what?”

“Quests done for a couple of wood. Not to sound like an old man, but when I was a kid, there weren’t any wood tokens. They started at iron, and a Quester wouldn’t walk out the door for less than 20 iron. And that was for something basic. Now that the Council has brought in so much riff-raff, the bottom fell out, and you can source pretty much anything for a few wood.”

Steve paused to finish his drink in one long sip and then flagged down the waitress for a second Old Fashioned, which she brought over quickly. It was always a good sign when someone got so agitated that they felt like drinking more; it meant that I was on the right track and just needed to keep needling.

“But people aren’t just going to keep Questing for wood, right? I mean, what good are they if they’re not even worth so much experience?”

“Experience. Ha! Another recent invention by the Council. They thought that making the whole thing like a game, peeling things back level by level, would help them find what they are looking for. But no, all it’s gotten them is that motley crew in the church basement. A bunch of people who couldn’t find the Philosopher’s Stone if it was lying on the ground in front of them.”

So I wasn’t so far off in thinking this whole thing was a huge manipulation of everyone’s dopamine triggers. I would have found the whole thing diabolical if I wasn’t so impressed with the execution.

“So what is the Council looking for?” I asked. I didn’t know who or what the Council was, but it seemed like the next logical question.

Steve took a big swig of his second drink and then perused the drink specials placard on our table until the waitress walked by.

“Two grogs, please,” he told her, which, according to the menu, was a drink that contained one or more of the following: rum, cider, beer head, pineapple whiskey, lemon juice, water, cinnamon, and red dye #2. It sounded disgustingly sweet, the kind of drink that would give you a hangover before the night was over.

“What are they looking for? That’s easy. New blood.”

The grogs arrived in big glass mugs with intricately decorated handles. I had barely touched my scotch, as I wanted to maintain my facilities during this conversation, so I hoped that the grog wasn’t too strong. The bartender must have put in copious amounts of red dye #2 (which I thought was a joke) because the liquid was a shimmering red.

“Cheers,” said Steve as he raised his mug towards me. I clinked mine in response and we both took a sip of the grog.

Imagine the most foul concoction of spirits, beer, and wine and then multiply that by 30 and you still wouldn’t be halfway to how bad this tasted. For all the simpleness of the ingredients, it felt like the liquid was going to burn a hole in my esophagus, if it didn’t eat through the glass first.

“New blood for what though? To go on epic Quests?”

“Epic Quests, ha. Just the Council trying to be creative. You know how many lifetimes it would take to get 185 gold tokens? I’ve never even met someone who had one. No, the Council’s goal is much simpler.”

Somehow Steve had already drunk the entire mug of grog and was eyeing mine lustily. I wanted to pour the whole thing into his glass, but we weren’t close enough for that yet. I also wanted him to get to the point of this conversation before I lost it. It was like he was taking long sips on purpose to avoid getting to the climax.

“What?” I asked.

“To find more magic.”

Next: Jen learns the truth about magic and her life will never be the same again.