A Lughead
The music pounds like the heart of the earth. Flashing light pulses with it, slightly off-time, snapping bright pictures of the otherwise shadowy club. It smells of humanity. It's sweat and cheap alcohol and sickness and hormones. It's fun and desperation and anger and energy. It's rage in the scream of guitars and the screeching of the singer.
Under the stage, there's a mass of bodies. They jump and ram each other and the whole almost breathes. It's a fetid, furious breath. It's honest.
They call it mosh pit. Rover calls it freedom.
He snarls at nothing as he slowly presses toward the bar. His heart beats in time with the drummer, his powerful arms dig through the clientele of the club, pushing aside earth- and griffin-aspects.
The bar is made of cheap plastic and metal corners. It had been smooth once. Maybe. Now there's only scratches and chipped borders. A map of human impulses and bad decisions spanning three generations.
In places with a better kind of customers, or with even a speck of class at all, it would be historical. Rover knows that. He sometimes carries historical stuff.
Here it's just another check-mark on the list identifying shit-holes.
Rover leans on the bar and points at a bottle behind the barman. The label is half hidden, but what can be seen has characters completely unfamiliar to him.
Again, in other places that would be a sign of class. Here…
The barman grabs a glass, then turns around. Words aren't needed. They are overrated anyway.
Something is on Rover’s arm. He looks down. Blood. He checks himself over. It's not his. He idly wonders if somebody got his nose bashed in, got decked, or if they simply bit their tongue. Not as if it changes anything.
A glass half filled with a transparent liquid and some ice that had clearly different aspirations in its life is put in front of him. Rover puts his hand in the inside pocket of his vest and grabs a banknote. Wallets are overrated too. They are only good to lose all the money together. And then one has to do heavy work with a grumbling stomach.
The liquid is almost oily. It reminds Rover of some of the thinners he uses. Same consistency, same color. Same smell too, at least what he can identify in the mess of the club. Humanity has a smell that overpowers everything.
That was something that told something about something else. Rover tries for a few seconds to remember what it was. They had told him in high-school. They had told him many things there. He had paid attention to it all only occasionally, and even those notions had slipped his mind in the years after. His father had always told him that for people like them it wouldn't make a lick of difference in the end anyway.
The old bastard had been right. At least about that one thing.
Rover drinks half of the glass in one go. The liquid is weirdly rough. It burns, then kicks him in the stomach. Or in the liver. Probably the liver. That’s one of the things he remembers from high-school. They had explained something about booze and the liver. He had then told his father. The old bastard had laughed and opened another beer.
That had not been one of the things he had been right about.
Rover wonders if the magic popping up could have saved him. Probably not.
He looks down at his hand holding the glass. The freakish hand. The massive hand. The thing covered in thick skin more akin to leather than anything else. The almost-claws on his fingers, dirt still clinging to them. For a while, he had tried to clean them. It never worked. He had stopped years ago.
Magic hadn't made a lick of difference for him. Made things a bit worse, even.
The old bastard is laughing from beyond the grave, from whatever circle of Tartarus they had put him in.
The world changed. It was still changing. Rocks got rights. People fly, move stuff with their minds, breathe fire, invent things, talk to plants. God is a redhead, has a vlog, and dates Magic. And they both went to his same high-school.
Rover digs. Rover carries heavy stuff. Rover gets yelled at by a boss his age and with a glowing rock embedded in his front.
Rover can't get another job because nobody is quite clear about what he can do. Can he build amazing stuff? Well, can he talk to rocks? Maybe he can manipulate fine stuff despite his big pa–hands.
Rover can dig. And carry heavy stuff. And is not very brilliant. And he can get yelled at.
He drinks the rest of the vicious stuff. Bottom-up. Down it goes.
He can also drink paint-thinner, apparently. But his father could do that too, long before there was magic.
The music has stopped. It will start again soon. Rover snarls and turns around. Time again for the pit.
As he pushes back through the mass of humanity his eyes fall on something glowing in the flickering illumination. A different kind of light. A familiar hue. Something he doesn't want to see. Something he has the right to not see for another couple of days.
At the far edge of the stage, Rover's boss, Floor Plan, staggers through the club with a cup of something held in his magic. His steps are uncertain, his drink floats sure and stable. Rover had heard him often brag about how his field was rock solid even in the worst of conditions. Seems that little detail was true.
What in Tartarus was he doing here? Then Rovers remembers hearing him saying something about going club-diving in the weekend. Doing something adventurous. Tickling the underbelly of the city.
Rover considers his options. He doesn't want to meet him. He doesn't want to talk to him. This is his own time. If Floor Plan yells at him before Monday then Rover is sure he's gonna punch out his teeth. Maybe break the jaw, possibly do worse. His hands are big. He digs. He carries heavy stuff. He needs the job.
Going away sounds wrong. This place is his. It stinks, it's shitty, it's full of jerks, but it's his.
Rover glares and clenches his fists. And then he sees Floor Plan stumble towards the pit. The singer on the stage is chugging down a bottle of beer. Soon he will scream again in the microphone, and the human mass will jump and shove and scream.
And his boss will be there. Rover grins as he pushes towards the pit. He needs a good place for this. He often dreamed of punching his boss. Maybe today one of his dreams will come through. It would be a nice change.
The singer puts down the bottle. He yells something in the microphone. Rover has no idea what, nor does he care. The drummer ticks together his sticks and then goes south on his drums.
The mass of bodies in the pit begins to move. Floor Plan is pulled in. And Rover becomes frantic.
The club is shitty. It had always been. Nowadays it catered to very specific clientele. It was all earthies and griffins. He once had asked if it had anything to do with the owner and how she had changed after magic. It wasn't that, they told him.
It was the pit.
The singer screeched. The mass jumped.
It was the pit and the dwellers there. It was Rover, and people who could fight off pumas, or lift a semi.
It was that no sane person moshed with people who could occasionally bench-press cars. Well, no sane and sober person.
Rover breaks through the last line of bystanders. He sees the cup fall, the field flickering out.
He races forwards.
The mass in front of him is made of flesh and blood, but it moves like mountains.
Tectonic plates were another thing he remembered from high-school. Where they grind against each other volcanoes explode and earthquakes lay waste to cities.
In front of him, it's the same.
Rover digs.
His hands slid in and he pushes bodies to the side.
An elbow falls down on Rover's head. It's like a brick falling from the second floor. It makes him a bit dizzy, but it doesn't stop him. Never did on the job, either.
Rover carries heavy stuff.
He can see a glimpse of his boss. He has fallen down, arms covering his head, legs pulled against his body. Glass shards all around him. Nobody else knows he's there.
Rover grabs somebody. A mountain of a man, green skin, old clothes smelling of beer. There's magic running through him. Rover can feel it. It makes him impossible to move.
Something hard hits Rover in the kidneys. Pain runs up through his body. He screams. Not that it makes a difference in the mayhem.
His grip on the man gets stronger. His muscles bulge. Magic runs through him.
Rover picks up heavy stuff that nobody else of his coworkers can move.
The flow of magic through the man in front of him breaks, and Rovers lifts him aside.
He goes down. It's dangerous, forces press against him from all the sides. There's no malice there. No hate. And yet the hits rain on him. He reaches out, he grabs Floor Plan, he pulls him up. His back shields his boss, and then he digs out.
When he breaks free it feels like being in an open field. He breathes in and feels the pain of the kicks and punches. All par for the course for a Friday night.
Floor Plan is yammering something and holding his left arm. It hangs limp. He's bleeding from the nose but seems alive when Rover gives him over to his worried friends. They fuss over his boss and one screams into a phone.
It's a hilarious scene. Nobody will hear anything on the other side.
Rover wipes away the blood from his face and checks his teeth with his tongue. One is maybe wiggling a bit. He will check it later.
The music pounds, Rover's ears whistle. A girl, cute, small frame, seems to have some feathers on her neck, is trying to tell him something. She has tears in her eyes, grabs his hands and holds it. He has no idea what she is saying. He has seen her before. A picture. A photo Floor Plan was showing around. Right, his boss's girlfriend.
Rover nods. Seems the right thing to do as she pulls him to Floor Plan.
He really doesn't want to talk to his boss, but there seems to be no choice. He needs his job.
Rover digs. Rover carries heavy stuff. And now Rover saves people from something akin to a collapsing building. But it's not like he could get paid for that.
The music pounds, the light flashes. A glass filled with an oily, transparent liquid is on the bar, Rover's hand closed around it.
Rescuing people takes more than digging and lifting heavy stuff. And others can do that. Other can also talk to machines, or to lightning, or they can fly.
Nobody is really sure what Rover can do. Nobody except Rover himself. He knows fairly well what he is capable of. His dad knew too.
Today the yelling started again. It hadn't surprised him. It had been a nice couple of months, but it was bound to happen.
He drinks down the last remnants in the glass and snarls at the world.
Behind him the singer is taking a pause, chugging down something. Soon the mosh-pit will take again a life of its own. Rover will be there. In his place.