Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-Nine. Recruitment.

Chapter One Hundred and Fifty-Nine. Recruitment.

"Oh, these are good," Eddi was eating his french fries one by one.

"You should try dipping them in ketchup," Eric advised, "but not in the car," he added.

Their trip through the drive-through had been painless, with Bob ordering a large order of fries for himself and a large vanilla milkshake for Monroe. That particular event, Bob knew from past experience, was best conducted in an environment where the floor was easy to mop up afterward.

"This looks interesting but a little messy," Eddi observed as he opened the box containing his Big Mac. It appeared that the employees putting the burger together had felt that it was best to provide a miniature side salad by means of stuffing the container with shredded iceberg lettuce.

Bob popped a fry in his mouth and closed his eyes, savoring the taste. He knew that french fries weren't good for him, but they'd been a favorite of his as a child. It was always the last thing the cafeteria had dumped out, so it was the freshest food he'd been able to find in the trash, and they usually had enough in there to fill him up.

McDonald's fries were, to Bob, the pinnacle of french fry evolution. Tier seven fries, as opposed to the tier four fries he'd had in school.

"Stars above," Eddi moaned through his first bite of his Big Mac. At least that's what Bob thought he'd said; it was a little muffled.

"Yeah," Bob agreed, "while Thayland is my home now, one of the very few things I wouldn't mind importing from Earth is the food." He sighed and shook his head, "I spent most of my life here eating bland, tasteless food. I always thought that one day I'd have the means to try new things and branch out."

"We need to get this recipe for Kevin," Eddi had swallowed his first bite and was now much easier to understand, "and this 'Shake,' which doesn't make sense," he continued, "because it doesn't shake at all, and it's so thick that you can't really shake it, but it's so good."

"I'll order in Chinese later tonight," Eric offered, "I doubt you'll have had anything like it before, but it's delicious."

"Thanks, I love trying new things," Eddi replied excitedly, experimentally dipping a fry in a dollop of Big Mac sauce and nodding in approval at the combination. "How did you pay for this anyway? You just handed her a little hard sheet of metal?"

"Plastic, actually," Eric corrected him as he turned onto I-5. Bob suspected the only reason he wasn't flooring it was the open food containers and his meticulously clean upholstery.

"Most people don't carry their currency around with them," Bob explained, "we give it a group of people to hold onto it for safekeeping, and we carry around little cards that are constantly kept updated with how much we have available, kind of like the way the Adventurers Guild keeps up to date with the other branches, except it's constantly happening."

"When we want to buy something, we hand the person selling it our card, and they send a signal to the bank, which are the people who keep our currency for us, and the move that much money from our account to the person we're buying something from," Bob finished.

Eddi had been chomping through his Big Mac like a shark at a surfer's convention. He swallowed and wiped his mouth on one of the napkins. "That's a pretty neat idea; it's because you didn't have spatially expanded bags, huh?"

"Something like that," Eric chuckled, "you should try dipping a french fry into the shake."

Eddi looked at his few remaining fries and then at his shake, which was about half full. He tentatively dipped a fry down into it, pulling it up carefully, having recognized that Eric was very protective of his car.

His eyes widened. "Earth has the best food," he mumbled.

Bob helped unload the beer, carrying it into the kitchen, where the pile quickly overflowed the counter and became a tower in front of it.

"So," Bob looked over at Eric, "how much do the people you messaged know?"

"I told them I was celebrating and sent them a selfie of me flexing both arms," Eric said, popping the top on a cold beer. "I told them to keep quiet about it, and I'd tell them about a new treatment when they got here."

Bob grimaced. All it would take is for someone to put that photo up on social media. Eric laughed at his expression, "Dude, everyone is going to think it's a new prosthetic of some sort," he chuckled, "no one is going to think that I've actually got a new arm," he finished with a shake of his head.

"I know I shouldn't worry, but I can't help but feel like if the wrong people found out, they'd try to lock me away, and when I escaped, they'd cancel me, smear my name so badly that I'd lose any chance I have of getting things moving," he shook his head, "part of me wants to just throw back the curtain to get things snowballing more quickly, but I know that's the wrong move as well, as I can't support that many people yet."

He let out a long sigh. "I don't know where I'm going to put all of these marines as it is," he admitted, "even if you sleep in shifts, I don't have enough beds."

Eric didn't look concerned. "I can hit a surplus store and grab some tents and cots," he replied, "we're Marines, Bob," he grinned, "a tent and a cot is downright luxurious."

Russell reached down and rubbed his leg gently.

"Your world has to be hard," Eddi observed from across the table, "you just have to live with those kinds of injuries," he shook his head.

"Our world?" Robbie asked, tearing his eyes away from Russell's newly grown leg.

"So," Eric spoke up, glaring at Eddi, who appeared entirely unaware that he'd done anything wrong, "Bob here got blown into another dimension, where magic is real. That event triggered the process of magic becoming activated in our universe, which is going to have the side effect of spawning tons of crazy high-level monsters." He drew in a deep breath and continued, "which means we need to level up so we can save everyone, which means going back to this other world and killing monsters."

He looked over at Bob. "Does that pretty much cover it?"

"Less rather than more, but you got the highlights," Bob replied. "Long story short, monsters are going to appear, huge ones, and they won't disappear for a hundred and ten days, and no, don't ask about that number," he warned, "once they're gone, there will be monsters running around, but they won't be anything that the people who've leveled up over on the other world won't be able to handle."

"We've got about a year and a half to save as many people as we can," Bob continued, "you can assume that anyone left behind will die. The world where we will be taking refuge has a very small population, and without magic, there is no way we could manage, but that magic comes at a price," he held up a mana crystal.

"This is a mana crystal. They coalesce from the bodies of monsters you've slain, and it took me one hundred of them to regrow your leg, which is, for me, about three hours of non-stop monster slaughter. I need billions, maybe even trillions of these to build the housing and infrastructure necessary to house even a fraction of the Earth's population, and even then, I'll be putting people into magical stasis and stacking them up like bricks," he shook his head. "That's where you come in. I need people who will kill monsters, eight hours a day, every day so that we can save as many people as possible," Bob explained, "which means leaving Earth behind."

"Eric," he nodded to the marine, "told me that what I needed were marines and that he knew some who would be willing to come over and help if healed their wounds."

"So, are you willing?" Bob asked.

The three men looked at each other for a brief second, then turned their attention back to Bob. As one, they boomed, "Oorah!"

"Not that I'm complaining," John, the owner, and proprietor of John's Army/Navy Surplus, said, "but what the hell are you going to do with a thousand fuckin' cots?"

"We're having a reunion," Eric explained, "we figured on having a couple of hundred drunk marines camping out in the desert for a couple of nights, but people messaged a friend from this company or that, and the next thing you know we aren't sure how many people are going to show up."

"Damn, I'd ask for an invitation, but I'm taking the wife and kids to Yosemite this weekend," John grumbled as he continued to hand up the cots.

"Yeah, it's not gonna be family-friendly, you know how it is after half a dozen beers," Eric grinned.

John snorted, "Don't I ever," he replied with a grin of his own.

They'd been loading the U-Haul Eric had rented for the better part of half an hour, falling into easy conversation. John had spent twelve years in the Army, and they both had stories to swap.

Eric had spent the last three hours practicing his speech, and he was feeling much more confident in his explanation of what Bob needed.

He'd learned the hard way that Bob shouldn't interact with people. Once he'd pulled his cat out his inventory, and the marines had watched the overly enthusiastic super-sized fluffer make a complete disaster of the kitchen floor in his efforts to devour a milkshake, it had become clear that the best way to introduce people to Bob, was to introduce them to his cat first.

Mike had mentioned that the dude's work had been stolen from him for years, and he'd been sort of an anti-social cat-lady, but Eric had never met someone as spectacularly bad at human interaction as Bob was.

Eddi, who was clearly the Thayland equivalent of an uber-geek, and from another universe, who lacked context for most references in any conversation, was still more personable than Bob.

He stacked the last cot and started strapping them to the walls of the truck.

"If you end up doing this again, shoot me a text," John said, handing a business card to him, "I'll bring some extra beer."

"Will do," Eric replied, shaking his hand before he closed the door to the truck and headed back to Dave and Amanda's. They also needed a better place to come back to Earth, the neighbors had to be wondering what was going on. The desert might not be a bad idea, he mused. Be a little harder to get people out there, but you could gather a lot more people at once.

He shook his head. He'd talk it over with the guys who were volunteering to do pickup duty.