“Suzie no. No. NO. Suzie NO!”

Tom and Suzie made eye contact. The frog familiar’s tongue began to slowly reach toward the fat-pan, as if he wouldn’t be able to see it if she moved slowly enough. Like he was a T-rex or something.

The familiar darted away when Tom stomped the dirt between her and the sizzling lizard.

Mean. Cruel. Suzie radiated her disapproval straight into his mind as she glared at him from the shade of the truck.

“Okay, I know you helped me catch it, and that was very good of you, but for the millionth time…This is emergency fat, not eating fat.”

Tom pointed to the crude metal pan he’d shaped out of the knight’s pauldron.

Plip. A single drop of heated fat hit the pan.

Directly above it, a lizard was being cooked on a metal skewer in midair by reflected sunlight. The three rear-view mirrors were arranged in such a way that a single point above them would receive four times the normal amount of sunlight.

Since the sun was already blazing hot, it actually cooked meals quite well. Tom had even been able to use it to start a fire without using magic, rendering the thickest branches of the nearby withered shrubs into tiny coals.

Tiny coals that Tom was hoarding like gold in the bottom of his toolbox. With enough of it, he could dial up the Outsiders and request assistance. As long as he could stop Suzie from licking up all the fat. These lizards only had a couple teaspoons of fat each, and Tom needed every drop.

Hungry.

“I know you’re hungry. I’m hungry too. And we can eat as soon as we get all the fat out.” Tom explained patiently, as if he were addressing a child. He was talking to himself, too, because all Tom really wanted to do was snatch the lizard up and tear off a hunk of meat before swallowing it whole.

Tom wrenched his thoughts away from food before his aching belly started calling the shots. He had more important things to think about: Like numbers.

God, I wish I still had the gauge.

Tom estimated that he was able to naturally create half a soul point every four hours. It seemed to be the smallest amount that he could feel unaided,

Tom spend approximately sixteen hours awake every day. Assuming he bled off any soul pulses out of his body and into the empty shield crypt, he was producing about two soul pulses per day on his own.

Which amounted to sixty per month, which was exactly the price of his loan from the Outsiders.

Sadly, tiny lizards did not have souls, otherwise he’d be doing pretty good at the moment.

Make a note: find out what determines if a creature has a soul or not.

What disturbed Tom about the sixty per month number was the fact that it was exactly his loan repayment schedule, with no room for error. He needed more than the ability to make minimum payments. The water wasn’t free, after all. Although, seeing as the first charge of approximately three soul pulses was still filling the cupholder three days later, Tom figured he didn’t need to accumulate much more than that. Maybe a modest ten percent increase to sixty-six soul pulses per month, in order to pay for unlimited water and not getting his soul repossessed.

That was the equivalent of eight dead guys, so Tom was actually pretty proud of his output. He needed to improve it, though. If he could work whatever muscle was creating soul-pulses in his chest and raise it to four soul pulses a day, he could very well pull ahead of the game and get out of this godforsaken desert rather easily.

Tom knew it was possible, because Grant had been producing an estimated…

Tom did a little math in the cracked dirt with his screwdriver.

Thirty soul-pulses per prophecy, from the way the gauge had bounced around while the alien nobleman went full-on Sybill.

And the guy did several prophecies in a row, too.

As a matter of fact, I’m fairly sure his family probably kept him in a cage doing nothing but prophecies for a large portion of his life.

So it was possible through practice. Tom just had to find the muscle.

It was like learning to whistle or raise one eyebrow and not the other, or wiggle your ears. Normally you aren’t conscious of the muscle, and even if you are, it’s a bitch to isolate and practice with it.

In the beginning, Tom fumbled around for days trying to squeeze some intangible thing inside himself with no particular success. He couldn’t figure out what was going on for the longest time until he came up with the somewhat misguided idea of pulling soul pulses inside his chest and swishing them around like mouthwash.

The fluttery, stinging sensation inside himself allowed Tom to feel the outline of..something.

Between lizard hunts, Tom would sit crosslegged, alternating between drawing the soul pulses in a crypt in, then spitting them back out, trying to stimulate that ball of…something.

Thump.

Tom’s heart gave a single, hard thud in his chest, and he felt a little bit more soul pulse come out of him than had gone in.

Was that…my heart?

Tom tried again and again to replicate the sensation, but didn’t manage that day. It took another two days before he figured it out.

It wasn’t his heart doing the thumping, that made the magic, exactly. It was that intangible something moving past his heart that produced the extra soul pulses and startled the organ into thumping in his chest a little harder.

It’s be really nice to have someone who knew what this was, Tom thought sourly as he stitched together lizard skins with upholstry thread.

Suzie was incredibly helpful at catching the little buggers, seeing as she had a sticky tongue that could be measured in feet, and could disguise herself as a rock. The only problem was they were limited to hunting a few hours after sundown, because she was not sunproof.

Which was how Tom found himself sewing a lizardskin pet cozy while trying to move that thing inside himself past his heart without causing his heart to stutter.

It was a totally new sensation, working muscles that he hadn’t even been aware of.

Come to think of it, they might not be muscles at all…that would explain why it’s so hard to get the hang of it.

Tom paused and draped the lizardskin over his model. Suzie gave an irritated wiggle, but she – mostly – obeyed his order to hold still. Just need an extra skin to act as a buckle there by the back, maybe cut a hole for her horns to slip through, then we’ll be good to go.

Finding another lizard-skin might be a problem, though.

They’d been going further and further afield every day to find food, which didn’t bode well for their future hunting prospects. There simply wasn’t enough biomass to sustain them for long periods of time. Even if Tom figured out what the lizards were eating and ate that, they would still empty the local desert out in a matter of weeks.

Gotta find a river, Tom thought, glancing up at the truck towering above him. It had been transformed into something of a crazy hermit’s house, with smears of blood from when he’d gone a little stir-crazy and decided to do some fingerpainting to pass the time.

Tom was pretty sure he’d lost a bunch of weight over the last week, and his beard that he kept shaved for work was starting to really come in. He was dressed in a poncho made from seat cushions and he was wearing a thick foam cap on his head.

He’d fit right in at a lunatic’s convention.

The math didn’t lie. He couldn’t stay here forever.

He had to fix the truck.

“Suzie, what do you think the odds are we end our adventure crushed by the truck?”

Uncomfortable.

“I know it’s uncomfortable, but you’ve gotta wear it if we’re going to travel further out for hunting,” Tom said as he lifted the lizard skin away from Suzie and set it back on the drying rack, which was the truck’s windowsill.

Tom stood, cracked his back and stared at the truck embedded into the ground. with that truck, he could get another hundred miles south in a matter of hours, rather than days. Possibly further if the trick he had in mind panned out.

Where can I get some rope? Tom thought, eyeballing the trailer hitch up above him. If he could get some rope around the back, it would be easier and safer to guide the truck into falling backwards without digging underneath it quite so much.

That’s a good question. What happens if I get the damn thing stuck in a ditch?

Tom went over to the top side of the truck and leaned down into the stink-hole. The ‘stink-hole’ was where he had dug down just a little to reach the place where the knight was peacefully minding his own business and decomposing. Tom reached in with a wince, desperately wishing for hand sanitizer as he unstrapped the knight’s other pauldron.

Ooh, leather straps! Tom thought as he pulled the piece of armor out. Nobody shows you what armor looks like from the inside, but it’s actually quite strapping.

I made a pun! Tom chuckled to himself as he used his screwdriver to pry the straps free then joined them with the other straps for about a combined three and a half feet of leather.

Damn, need about twice that, minimum.

Tom leaned back down and peered into the stink-hole. He saw more straps, but they were connected to the chest piece which was thoroughly crushed into the earth by the truck’s grill.

Hmm….Idea!

Tom could get the straps he needed and double-check his hypothesis at the same time!

Tom grabbed Suzie and placed her on his lap, sitting in the shade. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the Ghostwalk crypt, drawing the soul pulses into his chest.

He closed his eyes.

*** 15 soul pulses later***

“We are the champions! No time for losers!” Tom pranced around the camp with two leather belts in his hands. “Because we are the champions!”

Cringe. Suzie snarked at him from the shade.

“I don’t think you understand what this means.” Tom said holding the belt in his fist out at her. “I’ve got a dupe glitch. Those are so O.P. they usually get nerfed within a day or two.” The gamer terminology rolled off his tongue, despite not having touched a PC in a little over a year.

“Man, if I had this back in the real world, I could’ve…”

Tom stopped to think of it.

The grand dream of buying a single gold coin then endlessly duplicating it fell apart pretty quick when he realized what would happen as soon as someone caught wind of it.

Tom already had a really freakin’ good example of what would happen if a kid suddenly came into sudden, inexplicable wealth, Kenneth Peterson being the poster boy for that bullshit.

“Okay, so socially it has some serious pitfalls. I have to keep it a secret, and I have to use it sparingly or else someone more powerful will kidnap me and turn me into some kind of limbless dupe-slave nugget, but other than THAT, It’s pretty cool, am I right?”

Suzie harumphed and rolled her eyes.

“Don’t you get it!?” Tom asked. “I can make gasoline!”

At the low, low price of probably about forty soul-pulses per liter…Yeah, that might not be particularly efficient. Tom had literally drank an estimated sixteen gallons from the cupholder, produced by an estimated three soul pulses, and he was still going. Time-duping, by comparison, was incredibly inefficient.

He’d have to spent twenty or so just to copy the cupholder, let alone over a hundred pounds of water. Still, the lack of limitations, and the obvious cheesiness of it made the entire thing totally worth the extra soul pulses.

For example, there was unlikely to have ever been a spell phrase that could create gasoline from nothing. But Tom could make gasoline from nothing. Well, no, I can make gasoline from gasoline. Past gasoline that existed yesterday, at least.

Tom would probably have to increase his daily soul pulse production from two to eighteen before that was something he could do regularly, though.

In the meantime, he could siphon off a liter of gas into the little oil bottle, cap it, then dupe the whole bottle whenever he had the extra soul pulses to do so, earning him maybe five miles of driving, and a valuable extra plastic bottle for mixing fat and ash.

Five miles of driving would allow him to be in a place that wasn’t hunted out, giving him enough time to gather some more soul pulses before he duped the gasoline again.

Drive, hunt a week while he recharged one of the crypts, repeat.

Tom’s mind was racing with possibilities.

I could dupe the charcoal! I could dupe the fat! I could place a call to Luz in a fraction of the time!

This. Could. Work!