(2022-02-01) Watching the Gate

Details

Author:	inkie
Summary:	Ben keeps busy around Honor Hold. (Response to the Idle Hands prompt.)
Rating:	M for Mature 17+

Arc: Season 5

Chain: Prompt Responses

“Chickens,” Ben suggested.

The gnome opened her mouth to answer him, but a telltale whistle on the wind rose abruptly to a teakettle shriek. “INFERNALS ON THE RISE!” bellowed the Watch Captain, and the ordinary working sounds of the Hold fell silent for an eerie moment so that the only sound over walls and yard was the rising wail of the demonic rain.

Ben dropped down to take cover against the parapet, his back pressed to the outer stones. Those stones stood as gapped and uneven as a drunken prizefighter’s grin, an imperfect shelter from the storm, but a scrap of shelter was better than none. Tibs, down on all fours, scurried to close the short distance between them and wedged herself hard against his side, braced forward with her arms wrapped over her head. Ben bent low to cover them both.

Felfire meteors screamed overhead and slammed into the packed-earth yard below, a series of bone-rattling impacts that made a section of the wall some twenty paces to Ben’s right slump in a cloud of red dust. The wall where he and Tibs were hunkered shuddered but held.

In the yard, the broken shards of the meteors were crawling and coalescing, drawing themselves up into blazing stone giants. Honor Hold was wearily seasoned by the infernal rains, though, and defenders were already spilling from their hasty shelters to fend the demons off. A mage darted from the smithy, her open hands outstretched to buffet the blazing invaders with gales of frost. Two paladins — a grey-haired woman in the battered armor of old Lordaeron and a black-haired youth in Alliance blue — cast twin gouts of Light at one of the demons, fracturing it into inert stone as they advanced on its fellows with their hammers drawn.

“Go,” said Ben, sitting back and giving Tibs a shove. “Go, go!”

The gnome was already moving, rolling away with a grenade pin in her teeth. She swept the chaos with a practiced eye, drew back her arm and threw: the grenade traced an arc like an upside-down smile in the air, and came down right between the shoulders of an infernal. (Did infernals have shoulders? Ben wondered. Whatever. Where its shoulders would be.) The demon froze for a startled moment, and then its top half went to smoke and smithereens and its bodiless legs staggered and collapsed.

Tibs had another grenade in hand, another pin in her teeth. “Gate,” she said curtly around it, but Ben — who was acclimating to this weird ritual too — was already up on one knee, sighting along his rifle toward the road beyond the eastern gate.

A mottled scarlet felhound was bounding up the road, trailed by a black-winged dreadcaller. Ben counted their approach, exhaled and pulled the trigger. An imperfect shot: he clipped the earth in front of the hound, but the ricochet caught the beast’s flank and it skipped and stumbled, faltering. The dreadcaller’s stride hitched as it swung its heavy head around in search of the threat, and in that moment’s hesitation, a dwarven hammer flashed between its horns, sending up a spray of black ichor. The dreadcaller folded to its knees and then to the dust as a Wildhammer gryphon circled up and away behind it, the gryphonrider’s fist raised in triumph. The wounded felhound dragged itself in a limping, panicked circle beside its master’s corpse. Ben again laid his cheek to the gunstock and sighted, taking his time.

This shot went clean through. The demon dropped like a rug.

“Fork yes!” Tibs shrieked beside him, and jabbed an elbow into his ribs in painfully exuberant camaraderie. “Gettin’ pretty good at that, ell-tee!”

Ben sat back with his rifle, eyes still on the road, grinning in spite of himself. “Rather be down there,” he called back. His voice was hoarse from too many such shouted conversations recently. “With a sword.”

"No swords for infernals!” Tibs scolded shrilly, her attention directed at the skirmish below. “Blades we save for the soft ones. The stone ones, we smash.” As if to punctuate this instruction, she described another calculated overhand trajectory with a grenade. Smash.

The commotion in the yard was disintegrating as surely as the invaders now. Tibs's latest victim was rubble raining onto rubble; the yard was heaped with gravel and rocks, a lone intact infernal flailing angrily at the foot of the tower as a pair of mages and a grizzled priest closed in.

"Okay," Tibs said. "Chickens. Why?"

Ben settled back against the wall — comfortably rather than defensively this time — and propped his rifle beside him. Tibs flopped down on his other side. "Chickens'll eat anything," Ben said. "Like, anything. An' they turn it into three things: chicken, eggs, an' shit."

Tibs cocked her head dubiously. "And chicken shit is … a plus, in this proposal?"

"Yeah. Because you can grow anything in chicken shit. You ever tried?"

"I cannot say as I have, ell-tee," Tibs said. "Hey, look, there's your hot blondes." She pointed with her chin.

"Okay, first off I ain't your lieutenant, so you can quit with the 'ell-tee' thing. Second, you can't go callin' Cole and Sir Gavynn 'hot blondes'."

Tibs blinked enormous green eyes up at him guilelessly. "Maybe you can't, ell-tee."

"You should hear what she calls you," observed the blue-bearded gnome making his cautious way up the rickety scaffolding to their perch. "Absolutely filthy."

Ben raised an eyebrow and looked between the two.

Tibs grinned. "In a nice way," she assured him.

The bearded gnome swung from the scaffolding to establish himself firmly with both feet on the wall, then shuffled toward them, disentangling himself from the straps of the rucksack he wore. "Yes, I'm given to understand that a human male might find it flattering. I brought sandwiches."

"You are the real hero here, Bonk," Tibs told him as she practically wrested the sack away from him. "What kind?"

“Well,” said Bonk, and settled comfortably in front of them. “Let’s see. There’s … roasted pork, and sliced pork, and pulled pork.”

“Nice,” said Tibs, as Ben grimaced. “Love a good pork sammich.”

“Me too,” said Ben, and rested his head back against the wall. “Lemme know if you find one.”

“I tried the method you suggested,” Bonk told him. “Marinating it in liquor? To get some of the fel taste out? Try it, see what you think.”

“Yeah?” Ben sat up, interest renewed, and Tibs passed him a slightly-smushed packet. He unwrapped it and considered the grey-green sheen of the meat slices between the bread.

“Admittedly, it was bread liquor,” Bonk said. “Not the greatest. But the most readily available. I couldn’t persuade any of the new Alliance soldiers to part with a flask of whiskey. I did add some silversage, too?”

“Okay, nice,” Ben said. He had a bite, managed not to gag, chewed thoughtfully. “Huh. That’s … better?”

“No,” Bonk sighed. “It’s really not.”

“I think it is,” said Tibs, who was on her second — third? — sandwich.

“I mean, it’s gettin’ there,” Ben encouraged. He was ravenous, so despite the scorched-egg-and-bile aftertaste of the fel pork, he managed to put the rest of the sandwich away without too much trouble. “Maybe liquor and salt, next time?” There were tricks for getting the gamey whiff out of boar’s meat, but he wasn’t sure how applicable they were to fel pig. If any of them worked, someone would probably have thought of them by now; he couldn’t be the first hog farmer through the Dark Portal.

Or maybe he could. He reflected on that as he ate the last sulfurous crust.

“I heard one of the goblins down by the zeppelin crash is working on a way to purify the pork,” Bonk offered.

Tibs snorted and reached for another sandwich. “Those rock-wits couldn’t even fly their own zeppelin and they want to experiment on our food supply? No, thanks.”

“There are mushrooms,” said Bonk, and scratched his beard. “… possibly swamp mushrooms, from Zangarmarsh? They’re dried, but I was thinking they could be reconstituted and made into some kind of spread, a pâté of sorts.”

“What do they taste like?” Ben asked.

Bonk shrugged. “Mushrooms, I assume.”

“Not sure that’s a safe assumption, there, buddy,” Tibs told him, and leaned back against the wall to lace her hands over her belly contentedly. “Tell him about the chickens, ell-tee.”

But Ben was briefly distracted as Cole passed below their perch on the wall, frowning absently to himself. He whistled sharply through his teeth, and when Cole looked up, Ben lifted a hand in greeting to him. Cole considered him flatly a moment, as if trying to place him, and then nodded courteously, mustering a faint smile. He moved on.

Ben looked after him, perplexed. He was still a little nettled about the whole business with Rae, but in the last few days that had faded behind concern: he knew Cole was on edge surrounded by demons — Sanders’s included — and then something else had happened in the last day or two that had dropped him into some kind of distracted, worried fog. He made a mental note to check on him.

“… Ben?” prompted Tibs.

“Yeah? Oh, the chickens.” He focused again. To Bonk, he said, “So, chickens make three things: chicken, eggs, an’ shit. Which you can use to grow stuff. Like vegetables.”

Bonk surveyed the red-dust and brimstone landscape around them. “Here? That would require … an inordinate number of chickens.”

“I mean, I ain’t sayin’ we turn the whole place into farmland,” Ben said patiently. “But we could turn over a patch or two inside the Hold, maybe. Or … I dunno, you could compost it in sacks an’ grow actual mushrooms in the inn cellar, or somethin’.”

“Where would we keep chickens here? The entire peninsula is carnivorous; they wouldn’t last a week.”

“I mean, we keep ‘em in the Hold. Not all of ‘em, probably, chickens is stupid as dirt. But you put a coop out behind the stables, maybe fence a little yard there, an’ as long as they’ve got a roostin’ place most of ‘em won’t wander too far, an’ they’ll come back at night. Hell, they’ll hang around the stables to scratch in the horse an’ sheep shit, an’ then you got like three times the shit, an’ two-thirds of it turned over an’ ready to use.”

Bonk’s frown deepened. “You’re opposed to fel-tainted food, but not to food grown in … excrement?”

Ben snorted. “You been on a farm? Everything’s grown in shit. Food’s a whole cycle of shit.”

Bonk knit his bushy blue eyebrows. “All right. Postulated. But how will we get chickens if Azeroth doesn’t know we need them? I doubt it’s occurred to anyone on that side, ‘Oh, with our next troop detachment, we ought to send a battalion of chickens.’ Besides, chickens would be an invasive species. What havoc might they wreak on the local ecosystem, if they were to take to it?”

“Everything out here’s an invadin’ species,” Ben pointed out. “We’re an invadin’ species. So was draenei. So is demons. How’s chickens gonna fuck it up worse?”

“Likely only a few generations until we end up with fel chickens,” said Bonk.

Ben weighed that. “Maybe,” he conceded. “Also I dunno how to solve the first thing, about gettin’ ‘em here to begin with. When we get the portals runnin’ both ways we can send for some.”

“When we get the portals runnin’,” Tibs mimicked cynically. “Sure, another couple’ve decades, give or take.”

“Listen,” Ben told her, sitting up straight and stern. “We got more mages comin’ through all the time, an’ they know about the problem now. Before, we thought the whole thing over here was just shut down, the Sons lost forever an’ shit. But now Azeroth knows there’s people here an’ there’s a transport problem, an’ they’re on it. People like Gerhold Fauntleroy, an’ Captain Jo an’ Lady Cressidha. They’ll get it sorted.”

“They’ve had Khadgar over here for decades,” Tibs said. “What do you suppose he’s been doing all this while? Picking his nose?”

“Possible,” Ben said. “I dunno the man’s habits.”

Tibs cackled, and even Bonk cracked a smile.

“What are you doing after this, Lieutenant Hazan?” Bonk asked. “Your wall-shift ends soon, correct?”

“Yeah,” said Ben, with a glance at the alien sky as though it could tell him anything about the time.

“Ten minutes,” Tibs confirmed, producing her enormous pocketwatch.

“Ten minutes,” Ben repeated. “I was gonna stop in the smithy, see if they needed more hands there.”

“Ah,” said Bonk. He hesitated, and then offered casually, “I’ve been tasked with a salvage run, collecting scrap metal north along the Citadel road.” He made big, hopeful eyes.

“Okay, sure,” said Ben. “Lemme just check in at the smithy first, okay? Then I can go.”

Tibs scoffed. “Speaking of chickens.”

“I’m meant to be here in a logistics capacity, not combat,” Bonk told her with tremendous dignity.

“Everything here is combat, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Tibs said. “Everything’s combat, everything’s invasive, everything’s grown from shit.” She waved a dismissive hand.

“It’s fine,” Ben told Bonk. “I’ll go with you. Carry more metal that way anyhow.”

“Thank you.” Bonk nodded gravely.

“Written any more letters?” Tibs asked, nudging Ben. “To your girl?” She waggled her eyebrows.

Ben’s gut knotted. Maybe it was from the pork. He shook his head. “Not yet, nah. Prob’ly will tonight.” He didn’t particularly want to think about Mizzy right now, let alone discuss her, but Tibs was a terrier.

“What if she doesn’t come? What if they shut it down on that side, figure we’re a lost cause like they thought the Sons were?”

“We’re gettin’ portals,” Ben snapped at her. “Besides, she will. She’ll get here.” He rested his head back again and watched a trail of phosphorescent dust against the black sky. “Told me so.”

“Your friend told you that, too,” Tibs observed. “Where’s he?” She spread her hands and looked around.

“What the fuck’s wrong with you, Tibs?”

Bonk nudged Ben’s knee gently with one booted foot, and said to Tibs, “I wonder much the same thing. Don’t be unkind, Tibbiah.”

“I’m not being unkind,” said Tibs. “I’m being practical. Too many humans — and certain gnomes — don’t seem to know the difference.”

“Yeah,” said Ben. “You might be one of ‘em. Ought to spend some time with Captain Jo.”

“I’m just saying,” Tibs said, “that there are plenty of unattached women in Honor Hold, too. Not like anyone’s having a great time here. Ought to find fun where we can.”

“I take it back,” said Ben. “You ought to spend some time with Cognitia. Or maybe you been spendin’ time with her. Anyway, I’m — I got my girl.”

“On a different planet,” Tibs observed. “Listen, I just hate to see a strapping guy like you — or one of the hot blondes, for that matter — go to waste.” She leaned forward, scanned the yard, and pointed at a weary-looking veteran. “See that guy? Had a wife and kids back in Stromgarde. If we get portals open, maybe he will again. But right now? He’s with Lidia.”

“You’re makin’ up examples,” Ben told her. “Reckon you ain’t even know that fellow.”

Tibs cupped her hands around her mouth and bellowed, “OI! RANSER!” The grizzled fellow glanced up at the wall and waved. Tibs waved back at him, and then settled smugly again.

“Okay,” said Ben. “But I been here like ten fucken days. So calm the fuck down. Talk to me again in ten years.”

“Ten years?” Tibs whistled. “Damn, ell-tee, there’s no girl worth that wait.”

“Sure there is,” Ben told her. “She’s called Ismene.”

Tibs made a face at him, and then brightened. “Oh, what about the hot blondes, meanwhile? Maybe you and one of them …”

“Okay,” said Ben, and got to his feet, collecting his rifle. Tibs gazed up at him in rapt, shining hope. “No,” Ben told her. “I meant okay, I’m about done here. I ain’t go that way, and I reckon neither of them does, neither. You can’t just … push people at each other like dolls or somethin’, Tibs, because you’re bored. How’d you feel if I was like, ‘Hey, Tibs, how ‘bout you fuck Bonk sometime?’”

Bonk turned a peculiar color. Tibs smiled broadly, smug as a cat.

“Oh,” Ben said, and looked between them. “Uh. Sorry?”

Tibs cackled. Bonk nodded, still crimson, avoiding Ben’s gaze. “I’ll … see you shortly, Lieutenant Hazan?” he said, slightly strangled.

“Yeah,” Ben said. “Yeah, okay. Meet you outside the inn. Gimme like ten minutes.”

“Of course,” said Bonk. “And thank you again. I appreciate it.”

“No problem,” said Ben, and swung onto the scaffolding. Ten minutes was just enough time to check in with Humphry at the smithy and then to stop in the inn to chug a cup of coffee, splash some water on his face, and collect his sword and shield.

He would write Mizzy another letter when he got back from the salvage run. He’d write to Mizzy and to Mr. Ference, and maybe he’d catch Cole and find out what was eating at him, and maybe Captain Jo knew something about the portals.

He hoped like hell that someone knew something about the portals, and soon.