Hard Luck Hermit

“I’d almost rather do the billionaire parties,” Tooley spat. “Lobie Lopeck or whoever didn’t make us complicit in a planetary scale lie.”

“Only because he didn’t think of it,” Kamak said.

“And if he’d done it, it wouldn’t be a good lie either,” Corey said. “Honestly, they kind of do have a point about the peace of mind thing.”

“Perhaps, but they should not have dragged us into endorsing it,” Farsus said.

“Let’s just hope they’re right, and the defenses never get tested,” Doprel said. “And let’s also hope we get a real job next time.”

“Oh for- now you’re on my case too?” Kamak said. “You’re practically a pacifist!”

“I don’t like hurting ordinary people,” Doprel said. “I love squishing bad guys. Do you know how satisfying it is to pick up someone objectively terrible like a slaver or a murderer and squish their head into paste?”

Doprel mimicked the motion of squishing a skull, and deeply unsettled everyone near him.

“Alright, now we definitely need a real job,” Kamak said. “Doprel’s going stir-crazy.”

“You’re the guy who gets jobs,” Tooley said. “Get us a job.”

Kamak tabbed through his datapad and found his communiques clogged with everything except real jobs. Everyone who wanted to contact him nowadays wanted assassinations, special appearances, or sponsorships. Kamak hated the sponsorships most of all. He had done exactly one advertisement, for the tailor who made their armor, reasoning the amount of bullets the armor had stopped deserved endorsement, but he regretted it. Now everybody wanted him and the crew to sell everything from sandwiches to sex toys.

“Well this is useless, unless anyone feels like endorsing a vibrator.”

“Is it a good vibrator?”

“I’d have no way of knowing, Tooley, I don’t do that whole ‘sex’ thing,” Kamak said.

“You don’t do the whole ‘thinking’ thing either, doesn’t stop you from having an opinion on everyone else’s ideas.”

“Shut the fuck up, Tooley.”

“Find me a job, Kamak.”

“I’m working on it,” Kamak said, as he tabbed through dozens more useless requests. He managed to keep up the scrolling for about a drop before giving up. “Fuck this. Tooley, take us to Centerpoint, I want to talk to Quid personally.”

The demand for the crew’s services had become so large that they had their own personal Bounty Hunter’s Guild liaison, who was apparently not doing a very good job of it. Kamak had yelled at him about it over comms more than once -now it was time for a good old-fashioned face to face thrashing.

“Fine by me,” Tooley said. “All my fav- Gah! All my favorite bars are on Centerpoint!”

Tooley took her hands off the controls long enough to plant her face firmly in them and let out a loud groan.

“You’re not even going sober, dipshit, you’re just drinking less,” Kamak said.

“It still sucks,” Tooley moaned.

“And you’re not helping anything,” Corey scolded. “Frankly, you should consider cutting back too.”

“Nah. I don’t have anything to worry about.”

“You’re not even a little worried you might be an alcoholic?”

“No, I can’t be.”

“The first step is admitting you have a problem, Kamak,” Corey said.

“I believe you misunderstood,” Farsus said. “He literally cannot be an alcoholic. Gentanians do not have the necessary brain chemistry to form addictive behaviors.”

Corey did not believe that claim at first glance, but considering how smug Kamak looked, it had to be true.

“That’s just not fair,” Corey said.

“Sorry about your shitty brains, kids,” Kamak said. He cracked open a bottle of shiiv and took a swig of a drink he had no chance of getting addicted to.

“This is bullshit. Gentanians are bullshit,” Corey said. “You live for four-hundred years and you can’t get addicted to anything? You have any other superpowers I should know about?”

“I don’t know, all this stuff is just normal to me,” Kamak said. “I don’t know all the frailties of your inferior biology.”

“Those are all the major differences that I am aware of,” Farsus said. “If it helps, the Gentanian people do also have their inadequacies. They are entirely incapable of processing lactose, even with dietary aids.”

“That’s not a problem,” Kamak said. “You people are the freaks for drinking another animal’s milk.”

“I’d still kind of prefer to live for four centuries, but I’ll take it,” Corey said. “Tooley, you want to grab some ice cream when we get to Centerpoint?”

“Sounds good,” Tooley said. She didn’t usually go for sweets, but the fact that it’d spite Kamak would make everything that much more delicious.