Chapter 365: I Wasn’t Leaving Without My Hash Browns

Rex’s Roadside Wonders had filmed me losing my breakfast, and I was prepared to accept several crimes before I accepted that as somebody else’s successful business model.

Lukas looked through the side fence at our crawler, still parked behind the locked vehicle barrier. Beyond it, the Salt Road stretched toward a line of shade towers, offering freedom to anyone who hadn’t left a rental deposit inside the problem.

"We could walk to the next stop and report this," he said.

"We could also recover the vehicle we hired and avoid explaining why our first destination ate the paperwork."

[System: Six thousand EXP and twenty-five IP for getting your crawler back and opening the public lane, mate. No extra points for stealing the ketchup, so any condiment crime comes entirely from the heart.]

I appreciated you protecting the honest work from my personal interests.

The cook joined us with a kitchen towel wrapped around one forearm. He told us the animal normally returned to its lower enclosure when the feeding gate opened, then pointed toward a yellow lever beside the loading doors.

"Usually we run the show after closing, with the camera crew behind the screens. Nobody told me there’d be customers in there."

The detector stayed quiet. That didn’t make him an expert on everything happening at the diner, but it gave me no reason to call him a liar about what he knew.

We went around the rear loading bay, keeping the shaken customers beyond the fence. The cook pulled the lever while Lukas watched the open service door. Somewhere beneath the kitchen, a mechanism rattled and a heavy tray hit its stops.

The creature abandoned the trolley for whatever its ordinary feeding routine promised. A second lever closed the lower grille behind it, and the cook checked the indicator before allowing us near the kitchen again.

I respected that more than any speech the owner had made about safety.

Inside his booth, the owner held his wrist against his apron and demanded compensation. The camera stand still blocked his sliding door, leaving him with an excellent view of his damaged business and very few ways to improve it.

"Your cook quit, your audience escaped and your premium footage features you begging me to stop touching the controls. I’d work on one problem at a time."

"You can’t take company property."

I lifted the recording device slightly with a tendril.

"Then you should probably ask the company whether it wants this back badly enough to explain what’s on it."

He looked toward a small office door behind the counter. That was more useful than his next threat, which involved people he seemed unwilling to name in front of his departing employee.

The office wasn’t locked. Apparently nobody had expected an animal encounter to become an argument about evidence.

Lukas used his phone to photograph a board covered in vehicle pictures, arrival windows and release times. Our crawler had been added beneath a note identifying me as the red winged serpent from Ami’s club footage.

That explained the convenient welcome without proving anything about who else might be involved. Somebody had recognized a public face and decided it belonged in their next product, and the board gave us an actual lead instead of another argument about my family.

A route sheet listed the company’s next stop in Rattlewash, where Lukas’s map already promised fuel, beds and repairs. Beside the town name sat a freight-yard address and a number for production deliveries.

We copied both. The recording device had a share menu, so Lukas transferred the saved release clip to his phone while I watched the owner through the office window. My internal phone could receive what Lukas sent; it still didn’t grow a camera because taking pictures would have been convenient.

The vehicle barrier had a separate control box outside. The cook showed us its ordinary manual release, but a removable security pin prevented the arm from lifting.

Mine Now had finished cooling while the owner argued about his ruined pans.

I moved beside the box, checked the pin’s center was within three meters and selected a clear space against my lower length. The steel arrived at full weight, dragging a painful complaint out of the part of me that had apparently volunteered to become a workshop floor.

[System: Lovely work, you reinforced dragline. Another successful demonstration of stealing the heavy bit and then being surprised it remained bloody heavy.]

I had expected the weight and disliked it on principle.

Lukas held the release while the cook raised the barrier with its counterbalance. Once the arm locked upright, our crawler rolled into the public lane and the objective completed.

My EXP reached ten thousand, and my IP rose to four hundred eighty. The paid reward covered the recovery and open road, not the extra things I wanted before leaving.

I found a sealed tray of hash browns in the warmer and took the portion I’d ordered. Then I leaned through the serving window and told the waiting travelers that breakfast was free, including plates, sauce and the privilege of sitting down.

The owner shouted from the booth. I asked whether he wanted me to read his original sign aloud, and several people outside began doing it for me.

We left the cook with the remote and the unlocked customer exit, plus a copy of the footage for whoever actually investigated. He knew how to keep the animal enclosed, which mattered more than leaving its furious employer in charge of another show. He called the local road patrol from his terminal while I left the owner to explain his idea of customer safety.

Lukas drove while I ate the recovered potatoes beside him. They were slightly cold and tasted wonderfully like somebody else’s financial loss.

At the next shade tower, a public screen changed advertisements as we approached.

A red winged serpent filled the display beneath Rex’s company logo, followed by an invitation to purchase tickets for my next appearance in Rattlewash.