Delusional Diplomacy

The taco shop was packed nut to butt. Outside, it was a dry blustery ten degrees. Inside, the mass of humans breathing, drinking, yelling, dancing and merrymaking had raised the temperature in the taco shop to around a hundred degrees. It was not a dry heat. The air inside was a medium that was better negotiated by swimming rather than walking. Leslie and Ray did their best to ooze through the crowd toward where they remembered their drinks being.

Once the spot had been reached, their drinks were absent, having been purloined by dickheads. Leslie volunteered to press himself back through the crowd and grab another round for the pair. He was technically closer to the bar, and taller than Ray by about six inches, so catching the bartender’s attention would probably be easier. He elbowed his way over to where Hilde was taking orders, but she noticed him and intuited his predicament.

Hilde was a spectacular bartender. Behind the varnished birch of the bartop, she was like an engineer at a nuclear powerplant. Juggling variables and making mental calculations. Her most powerful tool behind the bar was deductive reasoning. She had observed Leslie and Ray leave the bar and known that they had not finished their drinks. She had seen the Vikings come inside, they were pretty hard to miss, but she also knew what kind of crowd they were. Not being huge fans of waiting in line to get a drink, they would commandeer errant beverages and generally act like assholes. Hilde had deduced that this tragedy had befallen poor Leslie and took it upon herself to rectify the situation, bringing balance to the universe.

“It’s on me,” Hilde shouted as she handed Leslie a trio of beverages.

“Thanks, Hilde,” Leslie shouted back and melted back into the crowd.

“Make way for the Allfather,” A large bearded Viking shouted, in his gesticulation he knocked Lesie’s drinks to the tiled floor where they joined other broken glass and spilled booze. This was done purposefully to pick a fight, as dumb as that was. This rather large Viking was Magnus, the guy who was currently hooking up with Lagertha. In Leslie’s mind, he also became the person who had stolen their drinks in the first place. This was not actually true, but it might as well have been, because Magnus was an asshole.

Magically, the bar around them became far less crowded. The throng of people had pulled back and created an empty circle of about ten feet with Magnus and Leslie at the center of it. There was music playing, but Leslie had the distinct feeling that this wasn’t about to be a dance off.

Magnus, being a shady person, saw this whole thing as a torch lit mead hall with rough sawn planks for a floor. Before him was a usurper, a liar, and a heretic to boot. Completely against Leslie’s will, he was being portrayed as somebody pretending to be Odin to mislead Lagertha into something or other. The internal logic of the whole thing didn’t really need to make a lot of sense, but practically speaking Magnus hated Leslie’s guts.

“Afternoon, Magnus,” Leslie said, playing it cool. He didn’t really feel like getting in a fight today, but if it was unavoidable, he would have to oblige.

“Looks like you spilled your drink,” Magnus said.

Leslie just cocked his head and stared at him like he was the dumbest person in the world. He gave a slight frown and waited for the next part. There wasn’t really anything he could say. Magnus was going to punch him in the face no matter what. This was a bit of a baffling strategy to Magus, who just kind of stood there waiting for Leslie to speak his lines in the little vignette he had planned. When Leslie refused to participate, Magnus had to skip right to the end of the script, the part where he punched Leslie in the face.

Magnus was fast and good in a fight. He trained and scrapped with other Vikings who were all equally versed in the language of violence. These were the kind of people that didn’t mind getting hit in the face. Leslie on the other hand, hated getting punched in the face and went out of his way, literally, to have that not be the case. He already had a black eye, and wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about having a matching set. When Magnus threw his right hook, Leslie simply wasn’t there. Not that he ran away, or magically dematerialized, he simply saw the punch coming and ducked it.

The fact that he had only a single eye actually helped a bit in this regard. He had roughly half of the visual information to work with that everybody else took for granted. To have things like depth perception and a mental map of his surroundings, his brain had to make a lot of inferences about what was going on around him. He was especially good at predictive inference regarding the actions of those around him, he had to be. If he wasn’t, he would constantly be in a state of surprise when somebody’s arm or leg came out of nowhere to do something confusing. So at all times, he had to have a clear mental picture of what was going on around him.

Between his ears was a finely tuned physical prediction engine. An intuitive model honed by years of operating on an informational deficit. When he needed to update this model, his head would imperceptibly nod back and forth, changing his view of the world. He looked to be constantly in a state of subtle disagreement with the world around him by always shaking his head no. So, he saw this punch coming light years before Magnus even knew he was going to throw it.

Instead of standing there like an asshole waiting to get punched, he ducked the whole thing and continued his forward progress, ending up behind Magnus. He executed a clever little twisting half step that he had learned somewhere and came to face Magnus’ back.

This all happened pretty quickly, so Magnus was still reeling from throwing his haymaker. With his back exposed, Leslie could have done any number of underhanded things, but he chose to dust off a move that had been popular when Mr. Drake had been a child. He reached down and pantsed Magnus. Quickly and efficiently, like a vacuum cleaner had sucked his pants to the floor. Raucous laughter erupted through the bar, where there had formerly been a palpable silence.

As Magnus reached down to retrieve his pants and return them to their former state, Leslie kicked him in his bare ass and sent him hurling into a number of innocent barstools. After a couple seconds of disentanglement and re-panting himself, he came at Leslie, his face scorched red with rage and embarrassment. Not that Magnus’ bare ass was something that hadn’t been seen at the taco shop before. It had been widely evidenced in various pranks and moonings over the last couple of years, so it was old news. It was the manner of its exposure that he took umbrage with.

Lesie was undeniably on his own here, there was pure malice and murder in Magnus’ eyes. This was something that was going to be settled here and now, with a liberal application of violence. Were this twenty or thirty years ago, Hilde would have called the cops and let everybody know that she had done so. The mere threat of somebody of authority showing up would have diffused the situation and dispersed the crowd. Here and now on the other hand, roughly half of the ad hoc police force in the valley was already here, five beers deep and dressed like Vikings.
In the half of a heartbeat that it took for Magnus to close distance on Leslie, a barstool appeared out of nowhere skittering across the floor. Arranged vertically, in its normal use case, a barstool is an innocuous thing. Oriented horizontally on the other hand, a barstool becomes an object d’art whose sole purpose is to ensnare the legs of the unwary. Caught unawares, the top part of Magnus continued its forward progress while the bottom part tangled in the barstool. Leslie stepped aside as Magus tumbled faceward into the crowd.

“This ends now!” A shrill voice proclaimed, this was Lagertha, “This is Apres, and the truce applies.”

She stepped into the space that the crowd had cleared for Magnus and Leslie to fight to the death in. She was dressed in a reasonable approximation of something royal. Faux ermine collar, satin cloak, and a set of form fitting scale armor that her pregnancy was testing the limits of. Traditionally this armor would have been made of mythril, forged by dwarves in the heart of a volcano or something, but this was the real world and she had probably had it printed out in the hardware store. How the shades chose to interpret that ceremony was unknown to Leslie, but he could only imagine that she referred to Allen, the manager of said hardware store as Durrin or Dvallin or something mythologically relevant. This hardware store would no doubt be located beneath a convenient volcano that only she and her friends could see.

She helped Magnus to his feet and whispered something in his ear. It was no doubt something diplomatic and designed to let him save a little bit of face while he made his way out of the bar to wait in the car. Leslie observed a humiliated man, scolded like a child and sent to his room. The Vikings on the other hand, saw a battle hardened warrior, heading out to their longship to make ready to depart.
The longship was made fast to a rough hewn wooden dock at the head of a spectacularly rendered fjord. Lagertha, being Yarl of this band of Vikings, had a lot of influence over their shared delusion. She was able to tell Magnus personally to go kick rocks in the parking lot, and make it appear to the rest of the Vikings that he was off on some sort of epic journey to secure their travel home. While he was yelling in the parking lot and having a general hissyfit, the rest of the Vikings saw him fending off skraelings, accompanied by procedurally generated Norse death metal.

“Thanks, Lagertha,” Leslie said while things got back to normal in the bar, “that was about to get out of hand.”

“It may not seem like it,” Lagertha answered, “but there are rules here. The sanctity of the Apres truce is not to be broken. Magnus will face consequences for pulling that shit.”

“I doubt it’s over between us,” Leslie sighed, “that dude just doesn’t like me man.”

“I’d love to disagree with you,” Lagertha went on, “but I fear you are right. I’d even love to say that he means well and he is nice once you get to know him, but that isn’t the case.”

“Then why are you with him?” Leslie asked.

“He is useful in his own way,” Lagertha looked out on Magnus in the parking lot, he had scared up a hammer from somewhere and was busying himself smashing the headlights of the random vehicles scattered here and there, “fuck, I’ll be right back.”

Lagertha ran out into the parking lot and talked Magnus down off of whatever bridge he was on. In the intervening time, Hilde had scared up another set of drinks for Leslie, which had been the original mission plan. Leslie offered to pay for these, but Hilde refused on principle. Leslie made his way back to Ray and gave them their vodka soda.

“Thanks for that barstool thing,” Leslie noted, “that probably saved my ass.”

“No sweat,” Ray offered their pint glass up for a cheers.

“Hey, do you remember if I took any pills in the car?” Leslie asked, having forgotten dry swallowing a couple of mushroom tabs.

“I doubt it,” Ray said, “our drinks were in here man.”

Leslie shrugged and washed down four mushroom tablets with a mouthful of whiskey.