Riotfish, Inc.: In Debt

D'khara keyed his radio.

"Oliver? I think I've found the file room. I don't know how far away you are, I'm on the second floor, west end of the house. Over."

A few long seconds passed before Oliver keyed back in, out of breath.

"D'khara you, go ahead, take it." huffed Oliver. "I'm, tied up, right now, over."

D'khara gazed quizzically at his radio for a moment, then frowned. He didn't know exactly what they were looking for, some kind of land acquisition document. He hadn't understood that part of the briefing very well. He'd just nodded along since Oliver was handling it anyway.

Except now he wasn't.

D'khara's understanding of the relationship between company stock and land was fuzzy. Before the... unpleasantness in the mines, he had been a third generation underearther-- dwarves who dug deep, refused to surface, and eschewed any news or information from the upside. Three generations of dwarves covers a lot of time; D'khara himself was 134 years old, and still considered a foolish young upstart.

Of course, that also might have had something to do with his accident. "Dakarva D'khara" they'd called him. Eventually they just called him "Dakarva". Dwarvish for "bad luck".

Pushing away ugly memories, he focused.

So in those three generations, the upside had remade itself. Governments were effectively gone, and the whole world was run by corporations, which filled in the traditional roles of government: common defense, proper justice, pointless bureaucracy, and so forth.

It had taken a couple global wars to sort out the particulars-- not terrible ones, by historical standards, but all-encompassing. Ultimately, as he understood it, a corporation's power was tied to their land. The amount of land a corporation held limited how many stocks they could issue, which limited how much money they could raise, and money is the universal language.

So more land meant more money. Corporations didn't actually have to use the land to issue stock, they just had to keep control of it, or at least be seen to control it, enough to satisfy the stockholders. That meant that a well-run media campaign could be as devastating as a bombing strike for impacting a competitor's stock issuance.

Not that a bombing strike was ever out of the question.

One side effect of the corporate territory structure was the tendency toward urban islands: hyperdense cities surrounded by massive zones of undeveloped land, sometimes used for farming, sometimes for the occasional lab or autofactory that was too dangerous to operate near population centers.

None of it made sense to D'khara. In a mine, you used every inch of space you had, because making more space was so incredibly labor-intensive. Here topside, they had land literally just laying around. Unfortunately, this meant that a lot of land was left completely unused. Vast swathes of land were given over to nature, and filled with pointless, horrible things like plants and bugs and animals and who knew what all.

It was a dangerous place, and the only people who lived out there were outcasts, bandits and crazies.

Well, and the dipsos, D'khara realized. And the orcs, probably. Not going to find many of them in a city. And, technically speaking, probably dwarves too, since their property was mostly underground, and fell under a set of treaties that recognized their sovereignty despite them never having filed proper articles of incorporation.

Anyway, the whole point of this exercise was that Datatura wanted to bring some disputed land into arbitration, but there were some issues with the land records. So they wanted to look at the original land records, or destroy them, or just have them, who knew? The records were held by the estate of one Sir Oscar Robert Byrd (deceased), which refused to turn them over.

And now D'khara had to try to find them.

He moved to the dark wooden door and wiggled the doorknob, on the off chance it was unlocked. It wasn't. He loaded a new drum mag into his weapon.

Locked doors are an optional obstacle for a dwarf with an automatic shotgun.

One brief volley, and the door swung open in a cloud of gunsmoke and debris. D'khara turned back to Roger.

"Roger, cover the door while I look for files."

Roger looked up from licking the area between his toes, picked up his rifle, and nodded.

D'khara crept in carefully, looking for any more guards. The room was musty and dim, with worn wooden floorboards and rows of bookshelves lined up throughout. Each shelf had a row of banker's boxes, each meticulously labeled.

He moved swiftly to the back of the room near the windows, moving along each row, looking for guards with the barrel of his shotgun.

Once he'd swept the room and confirmed that he had the place to himself for the time being, he examined the shelves, trying to find the order behind the filing system.

There didn't appear to be any, but at least each box had a nice clear handwritten label. He pulled down a box labeled "Bond". It had dental records for a variety of apparently unrelated people. Another box labeled "Berm" yielded an old contract and receipts for ten thousand pairs of women's sunglasses.

D'khara glared around the room. What kind of file system was this?

D'khara spotted a likely-looking box on a high shelf with the label "Prop". Maybe short for "Property"? It was worth a look, but it was at least three feet out of his reach. He glanced over to make sure that Roger wasn't watching. Roger was carefully examining one armpit, so D'khara hopped to try and grab it.

He couldn't hop quite high enough.

He briefly considered asking Roger to get it for him, but dismissed the idea-- he couldn't prove himself if he just leaned on everybody else to do his job. With grim determination, he began climbing the shelving unit like a ladder.

Huffing and sweating, he was nearly to the top when the unsecured shelf wobbled, and the gravity of the situation struck him. His stomach dropped as the shelf slowly tilted backward, lifting up onto two legs. He froze, trying by force of will to maintain the thing's wisp-thin stability. It spent a long moment hovering between settling back down and falling. Finally reaching a decision, the whole structure slowly toppled over. D'khara hit the ground with a thick crunch. The shelving unit landed on top of him. Boxes and dust flew from the crash, scattering files and tumbling trash in every direction.

He lay half-stunned for a moment, trying to invent new curses for his bad luck.

After recovering, he sat up, grabbed the box he'd been after, and pulled the top off. Inside was a cheap teddy bear. He snorted and tossed the thing aside.

It was going to take some time to find the records he was looking for.

D'khara's radio squawked to life, and Oliver's breathless voice came through.

"D'khara, any luck with those files?"

Suddenly sweating, D'khara keyed back.

"Um. There's a lot here. It could take a while."

"Anything you can do to speed it up--" a rattle of gunfire over the radio, and the rest of Oliver's sentence came out in jagged rushes as he ran, "--would be great, thanks."

Frantically, D'khara started grabbing boxes. He tore each lid off, checked the contents, and threw the box and its disappointing contents in an untidy pile in the middle of the room.

Even through the rush and bustle of rapidly checking each box, one thing was becoming clear: old man Byrd had lost his mind. There was no connection D'khara could see between the labels and the box contents.

"In this day and age," D'khara muttered, yanking down another likely box from the "O"s, "who keeps data on paper?"

"Meddling kids!" piped Roger from the doorway.

"Right. Old people and dwarves, that's who." D'khara continued ranting as he tore open another box. He riffled through a file folder that contained a long list of famous mimes. "Did you know that Dwarvish history is kept strictly on paper? No digitization allowed, not even as a backup. 'It makes sure we value our history,' they said." He snorted, flinging box and paper onto his pile. "I value the data, carefully kept."

"Paper burns," said Roger, having moved into the room.

"Exactly right. One misplaced match and whoosh! And the older it is, the faster it goes up." He threw away another box and grabbed the next, ripping open the top with one practiced hand. "I mean, look, it's heavy and inconvenient to move around, it's hard to copy, there's just no point."

"Paper, paper burns," said Roger.

"Yep. And water damage! Don't even get me started on humidity control. I mean, a handwritten document can be a beautiful thing, but we're talking literally tons of books."

"Paper, burns," said Roger.

"Well you for sure got that one nailed down," D'khara said, finally looking up, box still in hand. "Why are you so obsessed with-- oh drizzt!"

Flames hungrily licked up the side of his pile of discarded boxes. They were already five feet tall.

"We have to get out of here! This place is a deathtrap!"

Roger giggled quietly.

"Paper burns," he replied.

D'khara grabbed Roger's arm and ran for the exit. They were nearly there when a steel security shutter slammed down in front of the door. Alarms sounded, and a loud hissing sound started.

D'khara remembered the big red warning signs in the document repository in his old mine, and knew what that hissing meant. He started hyperventilating.

"It's coronalon extinguishing gas!" he yelled. "To put out the fire! Don't breathe it Roger!" He started hammering fruitlessly on the steel shutter, a crumpled file still in one fist.

Roger sniffed experimentally and shrugged. He turned his gaze back to the fire, unaffected.

The flames in the room started to flicker and go out, but the hissing continued.

D'khara, covering his mouth with part of his uniform, waved Roger back, then mimicked throwing a grenade. Roger, in a rare fit of insight, caught on and nodded, grinning hugely. He enthusiastically tore a grenade from his vest and rolled it toward the door.

D'khara was trying his best not to breathe while communicating and panicking and getting double vision, so he could perhaps be forgiven for failing to articulate that yes he wanted Roger to throw one of his many grenades, but no he did not mean a thermite grenade.

Thermite burns at nearly 3,000 degrees, and has its own oxygen chemically bound, so coronalon gas is utterly ineffective against it.

The grenade flared, shining too brightly to look at as it sparked and sprayed and melted itself into a puddle of burning metal. The pool of sizzling, molten slag burned through the wooden floorboards and dropped down to the floor below.

D'khara realized how this disaster was unfolding, and ran for the window. He yanked on it fruitlessly. Decades of "not my job" while painting had glued the windows permanently shut.

Pointing at the window, he motioned for Roger to throw something through it.

Roger nodded gleefully and grabbed D'khara by the shoulders.

"ROGER DON'T YOU DAAAAAAAA--" he got out as he crashed through the glass.