Instead of cracking J-Lo Two open like a turtle for soup and violently murdering us the river pirates (are they still pirates if they’re on land attacking boats? Are they bandits? Is there a special name for a reverse amphibious assault crew?) ran away when Martialla and Lucien moved into a firing position to start shooting them. People don’t like being shot I’ve found.
Even so they might have stuck it out if the not for the people on the boat coming ashore by way of a smaller boat and counter-attacking with rope-grabbing polehooks and fish-gutting knives and even a couple of real firearms.
And when I say they ran away, I mean that literally, the attackers ran away on their feet like losers. A couple of them jumped on their fox-horse-sheep-goat-dogs and rode away but most of them were just taking the shoe leather express. Can you even image? They don’t even have shoes!
If there’s one constant I’ve found the end of the world it’ss that if you’re not a miserable “city” person/indentured servant the most important thing in the world is your vehicle. I’ll liken it to the relationship between a cowboy and their horse. Your vehicle is your home, your heart, your soul, the be all and end all. If the chips are down you might abandon your friends, your crewmates, your lover, your kids, whatever, but you never abandon your Mad Max mobile. That’s apocalypse rule number one of one. There’s a reason they hung horse thieves in cowboy times.
When the boat people came over to thank us for rescuing them a couple of them recognized me, well not me me, but I look a lot like some person they did recognize. Said person is of somce importance here in riverland and I’m her spitting image apparently, only younger and prettier. I made sure to give Martialla a smug look while they were telling me about this since she, as per usual, was being a Dour Doubtful Debbie. What is weird is that this other person apparently also goes by the name of Ela. I admit that’s puzzling.
The boat captain (do boats have captains or are captains only for ships?) was un-mutated like the people we met yesterday although he didn’t resemble anyone that sexual harassed me in the nineties so that was different. He kind of looked like Greg Kinnear if you bashed him in the face with a chain for a couple days and dressed him like Tom Petty in that movie the Postman. I was supposed to be in that movie you know but Annie Costner said that I knocked her down at craft services. I barely touched her, what happened is she fell down because she’s clumsy. Learn how to walk kid.
In return for saving their boat, it looked pretty messed up to me but it didn’t sink so I guess that counts as a save, boat captain and his people helped us flip J-Lo Two back on her wheels and gave us some bacon. They didn’t call it bacon, they called it flapback or jackswack or something stupid like that but it was bacon. I know bacon when I smell it.
It was divine. I’ve seen no pigs here in the future so I don’t know what kind of animal it came from and I don’t want to know. I cried unabashedly when we found those sort-of nachos in junktown but this time I was too happy to even do that.
Bacon!
Besides the bacon they gave us some shitty bread and more of their yummy booze, but the bacon is the headline here people. I wanted to go aboard and check out their boat but they were guarding it like . . . uh . . . something that a person guards carefully. A prison inmate guarding their last cigarette? Or some other better metaphor. They did not want us on that boat. It was kind of a dick move if you ask me, since if we hadn’t come along there would be no boat for them to guard, but I was too full of bacon to be too upset about it.
Once it had been established that was not the Ela that they know of, since I am much younger and prettier, I told the boat captain that we needed to talk to this other person ASAP since there’s a marauding horde of marauding Invincible heading this way to maraud. Martialla insists that these river people are in cahoots Duke Eagle and they are the mysterious source of his “high-tech” weaponry that we’re looking for but I don’t buy it. What would in it for them? What would Duke be trading them in return? Any number of things according to Martialla, but what does she know about it?
Whatever the case is, going to see this Imposter Ela seems like the best thing to do. Or at least the thing I’m fixated on at the moment.
Same result.
Rocket Cat 