****Elliot and George****

Ellliot slowly came to, his muscles protesting as he crawled out of the dingy bed, nearly stumbling over his brother. Despite it being his turn on the bed, he’d gotten awful sleep.

“C’mon George, let’s get breakfast,” Elliot said, nudging the mutant with his talon.

Elliot and George were mutants, albeit not impressive enough to go into the super business. They just had no visible ears, serrated teeth and prehensile feet with claws.

Otherwise, normal human strength and durability.

Why were twin brothers both mutants?

Because their dad lied to their mom about being sterile because of his mutation and their mom bought it.

I swear to god, if I ever find that guy…

It was a mixed bag of emotions, since if their dad hadn’t been a scumbag they probably wouldn’t exist, but the general consensus was that if they saw him on the street, the two would drag him into a back alley and beat him half to death.

“Breakfast, G.” Elliot nudged again.

“Ow, I’m up, I’m up.” George shoved Elliot’s taloned foot away from his ribs and began crawling to his feet.

They slipped on yesterday’s clothes and stumbled out into the living room, where mom was sleeping in her recliner. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her waitress uniform.

George reached over and turned off the T.V. while Elliot closed the blinds, then the two of them snuck out the front door.

“Whaddya think? Old man Pete?” George asked as they walked out onto the street.

Old man Pete ran a local grocers and would sometimes pay them a fiver apiece to unload freight out of trucks.

Ten bucks was enough to buy several pounds of rice and beans. Enough to get them through a couple more days.

They only thing got when they arrived was disappointment.

“Sorry boys,” Old man Pete said, huffing and puffing as he unloaded a truck absolutely filled to the brim with food. “High Tide’s got me in the red, so I can’t afford to pay you anything.”

The sight of all that food just sitting there made Elliot’s mouth water.

“How about a bag of rice each?” he said, pointing at the tiny fist-sized bags that could’ve only cost Pete less than a buck apiece.

“No can do, boys, I gotta sell everything you see here if I even hope to stay afloat.”

Elliot saw his brother looking at the nearby sack of rice with an intensity he could read a mile away.

I’m gonna take it. Screw this guy.

He gripped George’s shoulder, his nails digging in and shook his head.

What about next time? He said with his expression.

Old man Pete was a valuable source of food that they couldn’t afford to get on the bad side of.

“Well, sorry you’re having a hard time,” Elliot said. “We’ll check back later,” He guided George away by his grip.

“Man, screw that guy,” George muttered as soon as they were out of earshot. “can’t spare a dollar of food for someone to unload his truck? It’s bullshit.”

“Maybe. Does it matter?”

“Not really.” George said with a sigh.

“We should be pimps. Or dealers. Not too many of them have someone they can trust with their back. We have a natural advantage.” George said.

“George, I love you, but we are not becoming pimps and drug dealers.”

“Why not? We’d be good at it!”

“It’s practically guaranteed that one of us would die and the other would retire a broken husk of his former self. Plus you can’t even talk to girls.”

“That is true.” George said, glancing around. “We could do a bait and switch near the angler hotel?”

Elliot actually had to think about that one for a little while.

“Nah,”

“Why not?”

“Because I wanna be around when mama gets old, not missing a limb or in jail!” Elliot retorted. That shut George up. For a while.

“What about…what is that?”

Elliot glanced over to see George craning his neck, watching a black-haired kid with brand-new clothes putting up fliers. Obviously an out-of-towner.

WANTED

Labor at Oberon Scrapyard

6k monthly salary

No experience required.

The black-haired kid was covered in lean muscle and didn’t show any signs of malnutrition. He was wearing earbuds they could probably pawn for about ten bucks, should he lose them in some kind of freak accident.

Sadly the kid didn’t walk like someone who felt even the slightest bit uncomfortable in the slums, which implied he might be a super, and attacking him was a one-way ticket to the morgue.

“Wait a minute,” George said, squinting. “Six thousand dollars a month!?”

“It’s a scam,” Elliot said dismissively. “There’s no way you could get a starting salary like that with no experience.”

“But…”

“It’s either a pyramid scam, a trap to experiment on the homeless, or a weird sex thing where you get pressured into having sex with someone you’re not attracted to.”

“For six thousand dollars, I’m attracted to whoever they want me to be.” George said, hustling across the street.

“George!” Elliot called after him. “damnit,” he hustled after his twin brother.

“Hey man,” George said, tapping the kid with the earbuds on the shoulder. He had an eerily symmetrical face with an ethnicity that Elliot couldn’t quite place and brilliant green eyes.

“Sup?” The kid asked, taking his earbuds out and turning to face them. His shirt had white text on a black background.

Will Dungeon Master for Mountain Dew

“Is that for real?” George asked, pointing at the poster.

“Yeah, it’s part of Paradox’s deal with Locust, where he pays locals high wages to help prop up spending at local businesses, so she gets more regular payments from them in turn. It’s a really interesting economics experiment, although I wonder if it would create inflation in the microcosm that is the slum-“

“That’s enough nerd,” George said, glancing back at Elliot, ripping the poster down and shoving it in Elliot’s face. “Whaddya say?”

Elliot sighed. “Fine, but if they try to separate us, or go to an undisclosed second location, we are out.”

“Awesome.” George said with a grin.

The two of them broke into a sprint for Oberon Scrapyard.

Paradox shrugged, put his earbuds back in and went back to hanging up posters.

****

“Man we’ve been waiting for hours,”

“It’s been fifteen minutes,” Elliot said, glancing at the clock on the recruiter’s desk.

“Is it just me, or does the scrapyard look…not capable of making enough money to pay six grand a month?” Elliot asked.

The entire yard was slumping in place, covered in rust and decay. They’d seen Oberon scrapyard from a distance every now and then, but now it looked about forty years older overnight.

“Oh right, this is the place the demon came out of.” George said, slapping his fist into his palm.

“This place?” Elliot asked, pointing. “I just added a fourth option. Ritual sacrifice. If you see a curvy looking knife or weird pentagrams in the floor, we run like hell.”

“It’ll be fine,” George said, waving it off.

It’s almost never fine! Elliot raged internally.

Before he could put that to words, he heard the whine of an active microphone cut through the murmuring crowd as two men took the stage. One was a gator-looking man with no hair and thick armor-like scales.

Oberon.

The other was a suit of power armor a couple inches shorter than the old scrapyard owner.

“Thanks for coming.” Oberon said. “Some of you have worked here before, some of you are here for the first time. My name’s Oberon. Paradox here bought the scrapyard from me, then hired me as the foreman because he doesn’t know shit about running a scrapyard.”

That was blunt.

Paradox took the mic.

“That is true,” Paradox said, stepping forward. “Previously this scrapyard disassembled junk and sold it for pennies on the dollar to middlemen who went on to reforge it into civilian equipment. That is no longer the case. The new mission statement is to cut out the middle man and transform the scrap on-site into high-spec parts for supers who need rods and joints that can withstand thirty tons of torque, cables that can pull entire buildings, and tubes that can take pressure higher than the sun.”

“Now,” Paradox said, holding up a finger. “Obviously there’s not enough room for all that on…what, three acres?”

Oberon nodded.

“So I decided to have a little demonstration, maybe earn a little trust that I can do what I say I can. Paradox reached out and grabbed a remote with a cartoonishly big red button on it. “Would everyone make sure to stand behind the tape?” Paradox said as he himself retreated away from the scrapyard, joining the milling crowd who parted around him like a school of fish.

Elliot glanced down and spotted a yellow and black caution tape a few feet in front of him.

“Here we go,” Paradox said, pressing the button.

Under Elliot’s disbelieving gaze, the scrapyard exploded into motion. Junk cars and rusty steel beams were lifted into the air, disassembled and melted into their constituent parts.

The melted steel was extruded out of invisible machines while the ground was cleanly stripped away and replaced with concrete. The steel bars, several hundred feet long, were driven into the concrete to create a towering frame that Elliot had to crane his neck to see the top of. Steel began being woven between them, as if some giant invisible spider were building a nest. Slowly it began to take recognizable shape as the wire frame of a towering building.

Plumbing and electrical wires sprang up, along with motors and sheet metal creating venting for each of the skeletal rooms. Glass was extruded to form toilets and sinks connected to the plumbing on each level.

“We’re gonna leave this side of the wall open for now,” Paradox said into the mic as thick concrete began to be extruded onto the metal frames to form the floors and ceilings. “Makes it easier for the arms to get into, and bonus: we get to watch the progress on the inside.”

In a matter of minutes the scrapyard had become dominated by a massive twelve story building that towered over them and the surroundings slums. It was made of shiny concrete and steel, so wide it actually looked squat.

“Alright, we got shipping and receiving, the sorting floor, the disassembling floor, the chemical floor, the metal floor, the plastic floor, the garbage floor, machining floor, offices, servers…”

Paradox pointed out each floor from bottom to the top.

“I was curious how you were gonna fit a hundred and fifty workers into that scrapyard, Oberon said, taking the mic away from Paradox.

The armored figure leaned into the mic in the gator-man’s hands.

“I’m Paradox.”

How does that explain anything? Elliot thought.

“Alright, ladies and gentlemen,” Oberon said, “If you’re interested, line up in front of the recruiters and give them your information. They’ll tell you if you’ve got the job and when–“

Elliot tuned out Oberon and looked for George, locating him already standing in front of one of the recruiters and filling out paperwork.

George glanced at him.

What are you waiting for, an invitation? His twin said with his gaze.

Elliot broke into a sprint, jostling his way through the crowd to get a place in line with his brother.

There were only a hundred and fifty openings, after all.

***Locust***

“He did what?” Locust asked sitting upright.

“He made a twelve-story industrial building worth probably about twenty million dollars with the scrap on hand at the scrapyard. In minutes. Kid can literally print money.” her spy said, wild cheering in the background.

“I guess he wasn’t kidding about breaking his stuff being a waste of time,” Locust said, leaning back in her chair. That fit what she knew about how cheap he was able to sell his power armors for, as well.

I guess ten percent isn’t such a bad deal. Locust would like more, but who wouldn’t? If Paradox could deliver on effortless reconstruction, then there was a possibility he could also deliver on bricking all her power armors to leave her high and dry.

I don’t…like that. Nobody had had that much leverage over her in years, and she was rapidly working to stabilize her new territory and relegate the armored units to secondary uses so they couldn’t be used as strong leverage again.

Still, it was just business. Locust wasn’t one to hold a grudge against a well-played move.

Which was why she called up Monolith. There was no way the idiot would believe that Paradox could fix his new building for free. If she taunted the blockhead just right, she could use Paradox’s new building as a poison pill to further weaken her competition.

“What do you want, you green hag?” Monolith’s voice rumbled over her speakers.

“I just wanted to let you know that that scrapyard you wanted to put a hotel on so bad, now has a huge twelve story building on it, paying me about a million a month. I guess you lose at monopoly, Mono.”

“You goddamn evil bi-“

Locust hung up on him and put her feet up on her desk.

“God, I love my job.”