//------------------------------//
// 17. Game of Thrones 
// Story: Crystal Apocalypse 
// by leeroy_gIBZ 
//------------------------------//

Triple Sec didn’t know much. In fact, if he was ever questioned, you’d be quick to admit that nothing at all. However, being huddled against the front door of a toll gate bathroom, trying not to breathe too loudly in case any of Sombra’s Legion spotted him didn’t really give a good opportunity to admit anything. At least, not anything that would have resulted in him not being executed and, as he was led to believe, eaten. Hopefully in that order too.

“Seriously. This is the most bullshit job ever. Who the fuck does Sombra think he is ordering us around?” Said one a soldier, slamming open the door, walking into the bathroom, gun in hand. Triple Sec stifled a scream as the old wood whacked against his bandaged shoulder.

The soldier was built like a brick shithouse, two thirds as wide as he was tall, and an equal combination of muscle and bad attitude. He stalked the room with hungry eyes, his angry glare slowly fading to boredom when he found nothing. Triple Sec shuffled up against the door, pressing himself against the wall, clutching the handle and hoping that only he thought his heartbeat’s pounding sounded louder than gunfire.

“Yeah. Total waste of our time. You think we should just turn around and head back, Score?” Asked another soldier, entering behind him, kicking the door, hitting the boy again, who bit through his collar trying not to shout.

The third soldier, a higher ranked if the chevrons spray-painting onto his jacket were accurate, shrugged as he walked in, “He said we better bring back proof that we checked this place out before getting back. Either that or he’d flog us again.”

The other two soldiers winced at the thought. Despite their size, strength and general renown as the best fighters of Sombra’s Legion, neither Dumb-Bell, nor Hoops particularly wanted another meeting with a cat-o-nine-tails for disobeying a direct order from their King.

“Maybe we take that bottle of hand soap over there, Score? I heard they drink it like vodka in Haysinki.” Hoops suggested, walking over to it.

“Yeah but we should totally drink it first. That way we don’t gotta share with the rest of the crew.” Score said, scanning the room.

Apart from one extremely terrified teenager cowering behind the door, the depilated bathroom of the Moojave Toll Plaza contained nothing of interest to the three raiders. Cracked mirrors and tiles lined the room, leading into sinks long since emptied of water and toilets long since clogged with filth. The place stank. It stank as though it once reeked of an open sewer, until it had been muffled by years of choking ash and general neglect. 

Hoops wrenched the bottle of sanitizer out from the wall, kicking up a new cloud of dust as he did so. Cracking the glass case open, he sniffed it before raising it to his lips. He had drunk worse. 

“Hey! Leave some of the rest of us, Hoops. I haven’t had a real drink in weeks.” Dumb-Bell protested.

“Blow me, dickhead. I found it, I drink it.”

“Thought you’d said you share.” Score said, walking over to the other raider.

“Yeah. I did.” Hoops said, wiping the last of the watery gel off his chapped lips. “But that was before I figured out it tasted pretty good. So, what are you gonna do about it?”

“Put your face through that mirror, for starters.”

“Oh yeah?” Hoops asked, drawing his knife. He had picked nasty length of rusted serration out of another raider’s skull two nights before, after a certain “Dread Assailant” had thrown it in there.

“Yeah, dickhead. We can tell Sombra that the girl got you. Isn’t that right, Dumb-Bell?”

The other soldier nodded, shoving a magazine into his pistol, aiming it at Hoops.

Hoops took a step towards Score, a look somewhere between fury and shock on his face, a grimace that bulged the veins in his neck and showed of a set of teeth in remarkably bad condition. Score smirked, and grabbed his hand, twisting the bowie knife out of it.

Meanwhile, Triple Sec stayed hidden, just like he had been for the last two days. The bleeding had mostly stopped now, but his throat felt like he’d gargled with broken glass and his stomach was rumbling nearly loud enough to hear over the upcoming scuffle. He eyed the door. Standing between him and a long hike back to Appleloosa was a particularly solid soldier, with a particularly unpleasant looking pistol pointed at one of his comrades.

Hoops swung his spare fist into Score’s jaw, cracking it into the mirror. Glass rained all around as Dumb-Bell fired off a shot, not entirely sure of who he was supposed to be aiming at. Unless he was aiming at the towel rack, he missed. Score spat the blood in Hoops’ face, brushed a shard of glass off his charcoal-coloured fatigues, hopped down from the counter, his own knife in hand.

“Stupid move, asshole. Now I’m gonna enjoy killing you!” He said, lunging forward.
Drunk on ego and off-brand hand sanitizer, Hoops failed to dodge, and six inches of razor-sharp dagger tore into his shoulder. He screamed, and lashed out a kick at Score. It caught the other raider in the crotch. Hoops followed it up with a knee to the face and smashed his combat boot down again after that.

“Stop killing each-other, you idiots!” Dumb-Bell yelled, firing his pistol for effect.

Both idiots obliged, looking up from throttling the other. Triple Sec dashed out from behind the door, diving for Dumb-Bell, elbowing him in the gut and grabbing his gun.

“Aight!” He said, pointing it between the three soldiers, “Hands in the air!”

Hoops let go of Score, stretching his arms up until his fingers brushed the ceiling. Dumb-Bell shuffled back, doing the same. Score gasped and spasmed like a bloodied trout on the tiles, his face slowly faded from bright blue to its usual brown.

“Now, youse dickheads are gonna let me go. Backs up against the wall, and count to fifty.”
“Fuck you.” Hoops said, reaching for his own pistol. Triple Sec shot it out of his hand, blasting it and a few fingers into mangled disrepair. Hoops screeched, clasping the wounded limb. Triple Sec then shot him again, splattering the row of sinks with blood, brain and bits of bone. The dead soldier slumped to the ground, inches away from his comrade. Score sat back, wide-eyed and mouth hanging open.

A few seconds passed in still silence as the remaining three men stared each-other down. Then, steadying his arm on the counter, Score pulled himself to his feet, slipping in the pool of blood, and limped over to the closest wall, standing against it and attempting to count as high as he could. He wasn’t very good at it. 

“That’s right. One. Two. Three.” Triple Sec said, before the roar of a dirt bike interrupted him. He spotted Dumb-Bell speeding off into the desert, kicking up a cloud of grey sand as he fled. Then a fist whacked him upside the skull.

Blinding pain burst through his head, the boy collapsing to the floor as Score dived for the pistol. Triple Sec lunged for it too, knocking it under Hoops’ corpse. Score knocked the breath out of him with an elbow to the ribs, following it up with a few frantic punches and jabs.

A hand on his ankle tugged him back, reflexively he kicked at it, his trainers crunching into Triple Sec’s nose. The boy screamed briefly, clutching his face, falling back as more blood splashed onto the tiles. Score grabbed the gun, and ripped his knife out the dead man’s shoulder for good measure. Pointing both at Triple Sec, he climbed back to his feet and breathed a sigh of relief before speaking, “Any last words, shitstain?”

“Yeah, actually. Catch!” Triple Sec shouted, tossing something at Score before jumping for the exit.

That thing was a grenade. It went off with a deafening bang and a cloud of smoke seconds later, blinding Score before he had a chance to click the empty gun after him. Coughing and choking, he tripped over Hoops’ leg and fell to the floor, slick with blood. The ringing in his ears soon faded to darkness after his head cracked the tiles.

Triple Sec leaned back against the stucco wall of the bathroom, panting, almost hyperventilating as he watched the clouds of grey dust swirl and blacken the pastel rays of the morning sunlight. His face burned with pain. He coughed out a few globs of reddish snot before picking himself up, and limping towards the pair of dirt bikes, blurry and fuzzy from the broken bones and lost blood and rusted and weathered from years of violence.

He fumbled his aching body onto one of them, reaching for the key. His hand found nothing. Wiping the gore off his face with the sleeve of his tracksuit, he glanced back at the bathroom. The abandoned facility had thick white smoke streaming out of the windows, and coughing and cursing could be heard from within. He groaned, looking back at the bike before dismounting it.
He almost walked into Dumb-Bell’s machete. The pommel snapped something when it bashed his kneecap, and neither man was sure if the wood or the bone gave first. Either way, Triple Sec crumbled down to the dirt, screaming and clutching his leg with both arms. The soldier stood over him and sneered before delivering another kick to his knee.

“Come on, did you really think you could win?” Dumb-Bell said, before wrenching one of Triple Sec’s arms into the air, dragging him towards his own bike, parked a few yards away behind the bullet-riddled counting office.

“Choke on shit, you medieval motherfucker!” Triple Sec said, weakly struggling against the warrior’s iron grip.

Pulling a roll of duct tape from his pack, Dumb-Bell taped both Triple Sec’s hands to the bike’s fenders. He revved the bike, chilling what blood the boy still had left to his.

“Don’t you Manehattan bitches like riding?” He said, with a predatory grin.

“No! Hell no! Do not start that thing, it’ll tear my legs off!”

“That was the plan, idiot.” Dumb-Bell said, climbing onto his bike. It sagged beneath his weight.
“Shit, please! I can be useful! I promise!” Triple Sec said, kicking against the wheel with his good leg, tugging against the tape.

“Oh yeah? We’re going to kill and eat you anyway, what difference does it make if you die here or back home?”

“I… uh… I’m from Appleloosa! Yeah. The redneck town right in those hills over there. I know how their defences work, like their patrols and stuff. If you don’t kill me or anything, I could tell your boss all that. Wouldn’t that get you a bigger reward, if you brought me back okay and I had info too? I mean, maybe he’d let you have another go with that blonde slave you was talking about?” 

Dumb-Bell generally thought about three things, namely food and fighting and fucking attractive women. He’d already had his fill of the second for the day, but the third was hard to come by in the Equestrian Wasteland. Perhaps, the city kid actually had a point.

“I don’t know, man. What’s in it for me?”

Triple Sec wasn’t exactly an intelligent person by any interpretation of the word, but he thought his captor was in a class all of his own right about then. “Hey, I said that already. Sombra’d be real pleased if you bring me back and I bet he’d give you, like, access to his stash of champagne or something. How about that?”

“Yeah. Okay.” Dumb-Bell said, slicing off the tape around Triple Sec’s wrists. “Hop on and if you try anything stupid, I’ll fuck you with a cactus.”

Triple Sec smiled nervously, and half-dragged and half-hopped onto the bike behind the gigantic soldiers. Everything hurt and the suspension, which hadn’t been oiled, ever, didn’t help with that. He passed out repeatedly during the ride back to Sombra’s fortress, Dumb-Bell having to tape him onto the bike’s panelling to prevent him bashing his skull open on the rough tarmac.

Four hours later, his barely-alive body was deposited with a wet thump on a cot in the fort’s infirmary. To Dumb-Bell’s infinite disappointment, the curvy slave with the big hair had escaped the night before. Sombra presented him with an entire can of hot dogs and a case of beer for his efforts instead. The soldier demolished both with a gusto rarely seen outside of a starving dog.






After leaving his sole remaining Lieutenant to his dinner and finishing up the afternoon’s drills, King Sombra left the mess hall, walking through the grey dust of the campground across to the infirmary. The guards outside bowed and saluted as he approached, stepping aside and allowing the monarch inside.

He made straight for what had once been an office, now a private room-cum-surgery. The latter function was all but complete, albeit in the clumsy triage manner typical to his Legionnaires. 
Filth splattered the walls an unclean rust brown, and trays of discarded surgery implements and or cutlery lay scattered about every available surface. Other surfaces weren’t available due to being coated with blood, dirt, and rags made into bandages. Triple Sec lay in the centre of the mess, sprawled out on a fold-out camp bed, his leg and face wrapped in the tatters of an old uniform. He moaned weakly in his shallow sleep. Sombra thought that he looked almost pitiful, like a battle-scarred tangerine puppy.

“Forsooth, mine wretched assailant awakens once more. Speak, Orange one, and state your case.”

Triple Sec blinked awake in the dim light of the former pump station of the reservoir. “What?” He said, spotting the man standing above him.

Sombra stood at six feet, though a far narrower six feet than any of his minions. A ragtag assortment of armour and cooking implements scattered around and lashed to his person, with spots of his bleached grey uniform visible underneath the suit. There was a crown clumsily cut from a paint can balanced on top of his black mullet, and his ashen pallor was twisted into a prideful sneer beneath his beard. He wore a blanket painted like ermine as a cape, and he kept a pair of sharpened fencing sabres sheathed by his side. He looked regal. Though only if regal had been squatting in the garbage dump behind the Renaissance Fair for the last month.

“The fuck?” Triple Sec mumbled, “Where am I and who the shit are you?”

“Such a brutish tongue, lout. Ye ought to know that your betters deserve far more.” Sombra said, taking a seat on the office chair beside Triple Sec’s cot. Triple Sec inched back.

“If you’re my better, all you deserve is a kick in the pants. Your asshole goons roughed me up something bad.”

Sombra’s sneer faded into a passive line of mild disappointment and heavy tiredness, “And for that, the Legion apologises, Master Orange.”

“Yeah sorry isn’t going to put my nose back on straight. You fucked up a real Roaman profile there, dude. I ain’t ever getting that back.”

“Sacrifices must be made. Now, mine servitors inform me that ye possess vital stratagems. Praytell of their contents, shall ye?”

“Ponish motherbucker, do you speak it? I got no idea what you’re talking about right now. Can you cool it with the theatrics please?”

Sombra stood up, and looked around the room until he caught the eye of his bodyguards. Both men he ordered out the room, before sitting back down, and pulling a bottle out from the cabinet beside the cot. He unscrewed it open, taking a swig of the cognac, before offering it to his prisoner.

“What? You’re offering me a drink? Thought you were going to interrogate me.”

“Truth be told, boy, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Drink up, you look like you need it.” Sombra said, any trace of the mangled Middle Ponish long gone from his voice. Triple Sec eyed the bottle for a few seconds, before shrugging and taking a swig. The VS cognac was rough and strong, more suited for cooking than for drinking. Triple Sec coughed half of it back up.

“The heck is that stuff, paint thinner?” He said, wiping the last of the alcohol of his face.

“Perhaps it should’ve been. Now, tell me about this Appleloosa place. It sounds rather promising, from what my subordinates have claimed.”

Triple Sec narrowed his eyes, “What do you want to know?”

Sombra shrugged, “Anything, really. If it’s a town, it means that they can feed themselves. How can they do that when nothing grows in this Wasteland?”
“I’m not sure of any details but as far as I known, they got a special kind of tree that didn’t die with the rest of their crops. They use that to feed everyone.”

“Ah, I see. And how much is this everyone then?”

Triple Sec scratched the back of his head in thought, and then stopped when his fingers brushed the bruise Score had given him. “About fifty people, I guess.”

Sombra’s eyes grew to the size of dinner plates, “Fifty people. Does that include civilians, women and children?”

“Yeah. It does. Everyone’s got a gun though so I wouldn’t exactly call them civilians.”

“Then I must commend you, boy. I thought my Legion here was the only civilization still around in this hellhole. Well done indeed.” He said, offering his hand.

Triple Sec didn’t shake it. “What’re you congratulating me for? I did nothing.”

“I am congratulating you for successfully fending off the horrors of this wasteland, for participating in a surviving society, for actually outmanoeuvring my army. I am impressed.”

“Hey, I didn’t do it alone. But thanks anyway. That mean you ain’t going to kill me though?”

“Of course not. Why would I execute such a valuable asset?”

What little colour there still was in Triple Sec’s drained right out of it. “What do you mean? I am like your slave now?”

“That could be arranged, yes. But I was thinking more on the lines of advisor. Somebody to bounce ideas off of, somebody with enough brain cells to bang together and make a spark, somebody who hasn’t yet been brainwashed by this cult of mine and still has an original idea floating around in their head.”

“Shit, really? But I killed like ten of your guys! And you’re just going to forgive me? What makes you think I’ll even join you?”

Sombra scratched his beard, and took another gulp of cognac before answering, “You are useful to me dead or alive. If you refuse to cooperate, I will cut your throat open right now and feed you to my men.” He gestured to one of his swords.

“Aight. To be honest, I always hated those redneck Apples with their stupid ideas of family and stuff anyway. It ain’t who you’re born with, it’s who you find. If you promise you ain’t stabbing me in the back or nothing I guess I can work with you.” Triple Sec said, shaking the general’s hand.

“Excellent. Welcome aboard, Sir…?”

“Triple Sec Orange III. But you call me your new ideas guy.”