Salvage Union: Blackwell Part One

"Lieutenant Wrench. 3202133."

"Yep. You sure are, bud."

The two of them sat in a plain, empty apartment, right on the floor. Wrench held his knees tight against his enormous frame, back to the wall, posted up in the corner. His eyes were locked on his roommate, a man who called himself Broil.

Broil clearly wasn't TEF anymore, if he ever was one.

Bald head, slim build, curious eyes, small hands. A comfortable set of robes and slippers. And here, wherever this was, Broil had let himself in, sat across from Wrench, plucked a bowler hat and a deck of playing cards from thin air, and set to trying to flick the cards into the up-turned hat.

"How'd you do that." he'd asked.

"We're in a virtual space. I'm pretty good at maneuvering it." was the response. "How's the TEF been treating you?"

"Lieutenant Wrench. 3202133." was his response.

There wasn't a lot of talking between them. Broil made overtures and Wrench would respond with name and number. Wrench asked questions and Broil would answer them as if it was self-evident and not follow-up unless prodded.

In short: he was on the Diamond of Mankind. He was in the hands of the great traitors. His physical body was gone. He was an uploaded consciousness; he'd been seized in the confusion on the drop on Miller by those alien pilots. He was wholly at the mercy of Sparky and Sixty-Nine and all those fucking Steward cultists.

And all Broil focused on was trying to flick cards into a hat.

He tried a variety of different techniques, angles. The closest he got was holding the card vertically and sort of chopping down with the flick of the wrist. Driving the momentum like that gave it power, precision, but was prone to wobble and coming up short.

Wrench was about to say something else when, suddenly, the Eight of Diamonds sailed right into the hat. Broil let out a sharp, short, self-satisfied laugh, a "ha!", and smiled to himself.

Then he picked up the cards, shuffled the deck, and kept going with the remaining cards.

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