A Bit Of A Structural Reorganization

The Delica clung to the snow covered roads like a mountain goat. The Viking camp was clear across the valley, up by the mountain. So Leslie and Ray had a good twenty minute drive under normal circumstances. The current circumstances were certainly a touch abnormal as far as most things went, but the roads between Ray’s condo and the mountain were relatively clear. This was probably due to the weather.

Nobody really wanted to go out and riot or plunder yet, as those things were best perpetrated when the temperatures were above zero. The best looting weather was probably low to mid sixties, that way you didn’t work up too much of a sweat. Looting is hard work.

Leslie decided to take the back way to the mountain. There were a couple of different approaches to the hill, but the main one that everybody took to go have a nice day of skiing was the access road. This was the most straightforward and gentle approach to the mountain. It was still a steep and winding road blasted out of the granite bedrock that would give even the most hardened of mountaineers pause, but compared to the other approaches, relatively gentle.

Leslie had chosen West Hill as the best bet for a safe approach to the Viking camp. Every town in Vermont had a West Hill. The other cardinal directions seemed to lack the sort of panache that was required when naming a craggy prominence. Never would you see a North Hill, or an East Hill. You get the occasional South Hill, but there was something about a West Hill that just rolled right off the tongue. This was silly, of course, because every West Hill in creation was east of something and names were just sounds that bald monkeys made.

This West Hill road was an irresponsibly steep bandaid of pavement that was actively disdained by the mountain it occupied. The mountain employed various strategies to rid itself of the pest. Mudslides, floods, sinkholes, nothing seemed to work. The people that lived there just doggedly replaced it, seemingly as a sort of standing challenge to entropy.

Leslie picked his way up the grade at a careful pace, not wanting to stuff his rig into a ditch or have any other unforeseen danger change the course of his day. They whined their way past empty second homes and ski houses in various states of repair. This time of year, when the leaves were all down, it was possible to take a kind of census of the local goings on. In the summer, all of these houses were hidden away behind a screen of lush forest canopy. Now, you could see the bones of the local population. Long driveways were laid bare and the structures they led to held evidence of the folks inside. Woodsmoke, shoveled pathways, paw prints of beloved pets, all served as clues to occupancy.

Vermont was sparsely populated. The winters were a bit too much for most people. There was a class of wealthy people who claimed to enjoy Vermont in all of its seasons. Inevitably, after the vibrant colors of autumn had waned to reveal the grey bones beneath, they could be seen packing up their cars or clutching plane tickets heading south to Florida in one of the largest migrations of wealth in the modern world. If asked, they would claim it was for tax reasons, and they were truly remiss to have to sit another winter out. Deep in their bones though, they knew that the winter would eat them alive, and they had the money to winter in easier circumstances. Little things like cleaning snow off of your million dollar car, or having to watch your footing while walking into a five star restaurant were all little reminders that they lived in the real world where poor people starved to death in the cold. This kind of bummed them out, so they picked a whole ass other place on the planet to be for six or seven months.

The Vikings had an encampment pretty close to the mountain. They had chosen the twelfth hole of what used to be a rather popular golf course because of its proximity to lift service and skin tracks. This used to be a popular golf course, but the advent of the Viking camp had altered the circumstances under which a golf course usually operated. The Vikings chose this spot out of convenience, they had access to some spectacular fishing and absolutely unbeatable views.

The local golf enthusiasts had put up a bit of a stink when this arrangement had first become apparent. After a few demonstrations of exactly how violent and obstinate the Vikings could be, the enthusiasts decided that it was high time that they had a brand new golf course a couple of miles down the road. Some of the locals referred to this as the Viking sacrifice zone, others called it Assgard, most of the local constabulary called it home. That’s how they were able to pull off this blatant land grab from a bunch of people well versed in blatant landgrabbery.

Leslie brought the Delica to a snow crunching stop about a thousand yards from Assgard. He didn’t really know what was going on there exactly, but pulling up without any reconnaissance was unwise even when it wasn’t the end of the world. The Delica had a couple of generously sized sun roofs. These were controlled from an array of buttons on the center console. He hummed the front one open and snagged his deer rifle out of the back. He wasn’t looking to send any lead downrange, but the rifle had a handy scope on it that would make this whole recon thing a touch easier. On the off chance somebody was looking at him through a scope of their own, he levered the rifle’s chamber open, leaving it in a state that couldn’t be fired.

Using the scope of the rifle as a telescope made him uncomfortable, because fundamentally he was pointing his gun at humans. Range safety and barrel discipline had been drilled into him as a youth through various object lessons, and he viewed pointing his barrel within ninety degrees of any human on the planet as unbelievably rude.

He poked his head and his rifle out of the sunroof and settled his elbows on the roof of the Delica, making sort of an ad hoc bipod. He brought his eye to the scope and had a peek at the goings on in Assgard. Mostly, it just looked like a normal day around the camp. Fist fights, drunkenness, people tuning their skis, but one thing was severely amiss. A log about as big around as the torso of a man had been sunk into the ground. Around the base of this, preparations for a bonfire had been made. This was all pretty normal Viking stuff, they burned shit all the time, the thing that was out of place was that their Yarl, Lagertha, was bound at the feet and wrists and lashed to this log.

Leslie went out on a limb and guessed that the correct term was probably former Yarl at this point, but he had suspected that something like this was bound to happen. That’s why he was here. In his couple of evenings with Lagertha, he has asked her a few questions about how the Viking society actually worked. From her telling, it sounded like a bit of a nightmare. Backstabbing, literally in some cases, political intrigue, cabals and conspiracy was a normal state of affairs. What kept Lagertha in power, other than her paranoid and capricious nature, was how she was perceived by the other Vikings. They were all shade addicts, so every piece of information that made it to their brains had been shaded in some fashion to make the world seem more Vikingy.

Lagertha was extremely smart and very well educated. Fundamentally, she knew that the reality that she chose to live wasn’t real. She saw beyond the frequent sightings of Yormungundr and Slepnir and chose to gamify the situation. She did everything in her power to manipulate how the shades represented her. As a result, to the average Viking, she looked like a Valkyrie fresh off a flight from Valhalla. They saw her as clad in a period accurate set of silver scale mail and sporting a pair of frost white wings with a roughly twelve foot span. She gave off an ethereal glow wherever she went and looked decidedly like she should be smack dab at the top of any organizational chart she happened to find herself on.

With the failure of the shade server, all of this glamour she had crafted simply ceased to be. Instead of looking like a Wagnerian badass, she looked a lot like a knocked up waspy trustfunder from somewhere way south of route four. Route four being the spiritual southern frontier of legitimate native Vermont exceptionalism. Her claim to power disappeared with that shift in perception. Judging from her current perch on the pyre, this happened quickly and drastically.
Leslie took one last sight picture of the camp and ducked back down into the cab of the Delica. He sat there for a full minute, elbows on knees, head in hands, trying to formulate a reasonable plan that didn’t involve things like his deer rifle, or a nuclear death sword. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt here, except for possibly Magnus. That guy was a total prick. If Leslie was a betting man, he would have put solid money on Magnus being behind this rearrangement in the Viking org chart.
Another quick peek through the scope of his rifle confirmed his suspicions. Magnus could be seen strutting around the camp wearing a crown of deer antlers. Occasionally, he stopped by the pyre to gloat over the helpless Lagertha.

“What’s good, man?” Ray asked after Leslie had settled back in the van.

“It all looks pretty bad,” He informed them, “They got Lagertha tied up. Looks like some kind of sacrifice or something. Gonna burn her.”

“Shit,” Ray thought for a second, “I think I might have an idea.”

“I’m all ears,” Leslie Idly wiggled the gearshifter in its neutral position.

“Alrirght,” Ray cracked their knuckles, “So, the shade servers are down, right? If these guys are anything like me, they are having a pretty rough morning. The reality that they are used to is gone. So, like me, they will be looking for any scrap of their old lives to cling onto. If we give them something familiar, something Viking, they will do just about anything we ask.”

“Like what?” Leslie asked, intrigued.