Chương 52: Resale Value

Skinning a giant monster snake took longer than we anticipated. I don't know why I had an expectation of how much time we needed, seeing as I had never skinned any animal of any kind before, but I did. And we ran over. With the sun going down, and both of us very tired, we decided to stay in Uniontown overnight. Megan called two taxidermists on our way in, and one was interested in the skin.

"Curious" might be a better word for "interested." He sounded skeptical about our YouTube-taught technique and didn't make an attempt to hide it. He agreed to take a look in the morning. Uniontown itself had the rust-belt-brick aesthetic of every other town I ever visited in coal country, and that felt like straddling two different timelines.

Everywhere I looked, I saw both the surviving town as well as its corpse, what it would look like if everyone fled, leaving their old lives here to rot like every other rust belt neighborhood I had trekked through. That dual existence, the sense that I might be imagining the good version, left me in a strange mental fog. I found myself drifting off at the diner while Megan and I ate, my eyes wandering out the window to look at the simultaneous life and death of Uniontown. Okay. I was pretty tired.

The diner was an echo of the 70s. Other than the lightbulbs and napkins, I suspected nothing about this place had changed since then. The floor tile and the booths were worn like the stone steps of a monastery, the echo of thousands of footsteps over years and years smoothing and shaping each surface. They made good pancakes.

"I gotta ask," a man at the counter spun on his chair to say.

"Are you hikers or hunters? Both?" Megan held a hand up to her ear.

"I'm sorry?"

"That's a lot of mud and a lot of blood. Didn't think it was deer season yet."

"We killed a giant water moccasin and skinned it," she replied and chomped on a piece of bacon.

"What?"

"We came out here to hunt monsters. That's what we did today." I tried to shrink into the booth.

"You two do that for fun?" he asked.

"We were expecting goblins, but yes."

"You want to find goblins?" Megan grinned.

"Yes."

"You know, I got a buddy with a goblin problem. EPA won't take his calls anymore." That caught my interest too, but Megan beat me to it.

"Why's that?"

"He inherited the property. Goes out for pheasants, sees goblin tracks. EPA doesn't find anything, but he sees them again. They come back out, but nope, they don't find goblins."

"Third time?" Megan asked.

"Wasn't a third time," he answered.

"There's a proper nest growing, and they won't do anything. Told him it's harassment to keep making false reports." Megan looked at me.

"That sounds interesting." And it did. This SOC wouldn't be on the EPA satellite maps, and following an organic tip sounded like an interesting challenge, a truer sort of adventure.

"I can give you his info if you'd like," the man offered.

"I'm not responsible for what happens next, though."

"Wouldn't do that to you," Megan said. He walked a napkin across the aisle and put it on our table.

"You really killed a giant water moccasin?"

"Got the skin in the car."

"Oh hoowow," he chortled.

"I'll take your word for it." The bells over the door jangled when he left.

"Are you as excited about this as I am?" she asked.

"I wish we could go right now, but it's probably better that we can't."

"Why is that?"

"We should take some wilderness survival courses. Or watch some videos. Or read books. Something. On that walk today, it occurred to me that if I lost the trail, I wouldn't know what to do." Megan frowned.

"Relying on GPS is probably dumb, huh?"

"Might not always have it."

"We keep finding out how much we don't know," Megan said.

"It feels like the opposite of getting good at something."

"So you agree." She poked at the remnants of her eggs.

"Yeah, and relying on YouTube for this part is probably not smart either."

"Probably not."

"I'm glad we're doing this," she added after a while.

"I think I learn more from one of these than I do from four crawls."

"What'd you learn today?"

"What snake shit smelled like." We both laughed. Megan smiled when the waitress refilled her coffee.

"It's true, though. I'm liking it more and more each hunt. I really wish the XP wasn't so abysmal. It'd be perfect otherwise."

"Another mystery of the system."

"My dad wasn't very religious, but he believed the system was a punishment, an object lesson so simple that humans could figure it out," she mused.

"Fight back the monsters, the world is better. Don't fight back the monsters, and the world is worse."

"I've heard that one a few times, or something similar," I replied.

"Direct punishment for the Holocaust or, more broadly, for World War II in general." Megan nodded.

"What made you think of that?"

"You mentioned mysteries. No XP from wild monsters was part of the design, according to him. It made the rewards for closing gates even more appealing."

"The church taught us that the system was God's gift in the war for humanity. In a war, we expect weapons, and that's what the system is, a weapon against Satan." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"I expected you to say it rewarded those who did good in the world," Megan said.

"The reward is the heaven that comes after. All your deeds 'store up riches' for you to enjoy there."

"I'm sorry if I dragged you into something you didn't want to talk about." I shook my head.

"Nathan and I knew this guy in college, and he told me my absolute favorite explanation for the 'why' behind the system."

"No need to be suspenseful. Go on."

"The universe is infinite. Therefore, there are an infinite number of planets. Because all of this is infinite, probability breaks. No matter how unlikely something is, it occurs naturally somewhere, so the system is just a product of infinite possibilities. We're either the first to see it, or maybe it appeared on another world somewhere and spread. Either way, it's just random. He got it from some science fiction author he liked." Her brow furrowed, Megan said, "It feels too 'designed' to be random." I grinned.

"Nathan and I said the same thing. He shot back that people made the same argument before the system with all sorts of variations of 'intelligent design,' from God making the world in seven days to chariots pulling the sun across the sky. Ancient people believed the pieces of reality fit together so well that it had to be crafted. Couldn't have been random. In reality, it's the result of purely organic chance. We just didn't understand it yet, so we tried to tack on something we do understand to explain it.

System could be the same, and we're in the 500 B. C. era of understanding what it is."

"That's true," Megan admitted.

"That is an interesting take. I hope it's aliens." Chuckling, I asked, "Why?"

"I don't know. It would be interesting. Suddenly aliens? Sounds more fun than the end times or pure chance."

"I can't argue with you there." I turned off my phone screen. When Megan lifted hers, I caught her arm and lowered it. We sat in a strip mall parking lot in front of a storefront that was half taxidermist, half gun shop.

"Don't read that. Let's go talk to the guy."

"Why can't I read my texts?" she asked.

"Nathan's spewing nonsense. We should ignore him."

"I don't understand."

"It's already gotten him in trouble before."

"I understand even less." I sighed and pulled back my hand. Megan read her screen. Then she stared harder.

"Is this code?"

"What's it say?"

"He wants me to buy a stuffed dog if they have one, but 'a cat would work too if it looks cool.'" I rubbed my face.

"There's this show we watched together where the roommates had a stuffed golden retriever. He thought that was a good idea, so he went on a quest to find a stuffed dog. Well, it turns out that selling dog and cat remains is illegal, stuffed or otherwise."

"That went badly?" I nodded.

"This cop shows up at our door one day and asks him to stop posting wanted ads for stuffed pets all over the internet. Apparently, they thought Nathan was some kind of illegal trafficker. Nope, just a dumb college kid."

"That story can't be true."

"Saw it myself."

"I still don't believe you."

"That's fine," I said, "as long as you don't ask this guy about stuffed dogs or cats."

"It's really illegal to have a taxidermied dog?"

"No, it's illegal to sell a taxidermied dog."

"So the only way to get one really is to have your own dog stuffed." I nodded.

"That's weird," Megan said.

"Can we go inside?"

"My mind is blown right now." Both of our minds were blown a moment later when we opened the trunk of my car to remove the snakeskin. Leaving it in there overnight was unwise. Man, I was never going to sell this car. There would come a day when I would just have to light it on fire and move on with my life. The man who ran the shop was younger than I expected, late 30s maybe, and gangly as hell. His camo hat was worn to threads around the bill, and a silver fishhook was embedded in the side.

He inspected the snakeskin dubiously.

"You weren't kidding about being new to this."

"Is any of it salvageable?" Megan asked. He looked it over again and sighed.

"Some of it. Looks like you shredded it pretty good before you skinned it. That's a lot of holes."

"We know it's not great."

"Do you come across these a lot?"

"First one," Megan answered.

"I don't really want to find a second." He chuckled.

"Not real friendly fellas, that's for sure. I can give you a few bucks for this, but if you get another one, I'd appreciate it if I was your first call."

"Okay."

"Wait. Call me before you skin it." Megan and I laughed.

"We can do that."

"This might sound random, but have you heard about any local goblin nests?" I asked.

"No money in goblin skin." I shook my head.

"Not interested in that. Just curious if you've heard about any, is all. We heard some stories from a local and weren't sure how seriously to take them."

"That's the problem with goblins. You always have 'em."

"The EPA isn't keeping up?"

"Ha! It takes them a month to answer the phone, so how long you think it takes them to show up and clean up some goblins?"

"I didn't know it was that bad."

"You get used to it," the taxidermist said.

"A good cold winter helps more than you'd think. The rest of the year, you make sure you got a goblin club ready. Attacks aren't common, but the one time you don't got your club, you regret it."

"We like hunting wild goblins," Megan interjected.

"Would it be hard for us to find people around here with goblin problems?"

"None of these folks could afford something like that."

"We don't need paid. Just want goblins to kill." When Megan glanced at me to check in, I nodded that I was cool with this angle. With SOCs, we had no idea what to expect. If locals were asking for help, we would have some intel on what was observed, where it was observed, and other local insights that could be helpful.

"That's an odd hobby," he said.

"You can post your card over there on the board if you want."

"We don't have cards." Megan settled for a scrap of paper that said, "Free Goblin Slayers," followed by the Dungeon Divas VOIP number.

"Well, this was one of the weirder Sundays I've had in a while," the taxidermist said.

"Appreciate your business." As we pulled away to begin the drive home, Megan watched the outskirts of Uniontown fade to forest and fields.

"At what point do we do this full time?" she asked.

"We're not ready for that."

"That's why I'm asking when. How will we know it's the right move?"

"I don't know that I'd have the guts to quit the CDM to be a YouTuber. I just want some stability."

"I think it's possible," Megan said.

"Are you not open to it?"

"No, I am open to it. I'm just a wuss. That's a level of bravery I don't have."

"More bravery than soloing a goblin nest?"

"That's different." Megan continued staring out the window.

"I have a hard time not dreaming about it. Nathan's optimism has infected me. It's gross."

"He's like that."

"Did he tell you about his big family house idea?"

"I'm surprised he told you," I said.

"I know things are going well, but that's a big conversation for two people to have."

"I don't think so. It's something he wants but not now, necessarily. Letting me know what he's aiming for, though, is a very respectful thing to do."

"How do you mean?"

"I guess I see it as a kind of honesty. Telling me upfront makes the decision mine. Do our goals match up in the right places? If they don't and I hide that from him, then I'm the one being dishonest."

"That's pretty damn mature of you," I joked. Megan shrugged.

"Doing my best to grow up. For what it's worth, I like his idea. I don't want to share a bathroom with you, and I know that for sure, but being close to people who make me happy? Sounds pretty nice if it comes with my own bathroom."

"Oh, we're agreed on the bathroom thing. No question."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Sharing a motel bathroom with you last night was… illuminating." Megan scowled.

"It's good to know if things don't match up in the right way." I grinned.

"I'm going to kill you."