"Thought I did. Now, I'm not so sure. Jilly told me you chatted."

    "I hate that nickname," grumbles Jill from where she's drinking alone in a corner, mostly out of everyone's sight.

They're big enough to be a city but they gossip like a small town. It's very endearing.

"Suppose I'll remain a mystery to be deciphered."

"Then ya say things like this and sound like every other feckless boy what gone to their deaths in the wasteland. Water with your piss?"

"In a separate bottle, please."

"Don't worry sweetheart it's watered down enough by itself."

He sits at the table John is slumped over and grins at him. "So how's my favourite lump doing? Had a good day?"

"Bullied, I tells ye."

He's not gonna comment on the fact that when given free money out of the generosity of a chump's heart, he chose to spend it on the cheapest booze available and he didn't even drink enough to throw up (which Zash gathers is a common occurrence for him). Zash is pretty sure he's got John's number, by now.

Frank's number, he's pretty sure.

"How about I tell you a story about my life, then?"

"...what for?"

"You make friends by getting to know each other, don't you?"

"'M not tellin' you any more stories."

"I'm not asking for any."

"Then suit yourself."

    "Here you go, feckless boy, here's your piss and your water."

"Can I have some of the piss?"

    "That's between you an' 'im."

"Sure, you can have some of the piss."

"Cheers," he says, finally lifting his head up from the table to raise a glass.

"So," he says, filling John's glass and his own. "Let's see... Ah, I know which one.

"A while ago, must be a few years now, I went to this town..."

It was a much smaller town than Warrens, the kind that only has the one pub and the one diner. It was called Little Arcadia.

The only reason it managed to survive was because it had a plant. The SEEDS project had many ships, not all of which were the big ones housing humans or the plants carriers, and the smaller ones were still plant-powered, so small towns like this one were founded where people found the crash sites for those. And of course, whoever controlled the plant would control the whole town, and while most such places managed to stabilise into a regular mayorship this particular town was more of a dictatorship controlled by a small gang. They walked all over everyone and could have everything they wanted from them. So, while on the outside it was a normal town, it was very much the kind of place people left if they could.

And they did start leaving, though not anywhere the gangsters could see. People just... started disappearing, one day.

Turns out one family had found another plant buried underground and they were sharing its resources freely. Of course that beat out the controlling gangsters.

Zash was hired by that family as a bodyguard when the gangsters started sniffing around. They knew they were going to be found out eventually, and they knew it was going to be trouble when that happened, and they wanted to be ready.

(He elides a bit over the details, here, but the attentive listener will be able to infer that he sort of singlehandedly guaranteed the gangsters, when they did find out, failed miserably at actually hurting anyone. Somehow.)

The gangsters started getting really worried as their town gradually became a ghost town, and a new town started to sprout around that one family. The equilibrium was shifting, and not in a way they liked, and they were finding themselves not really able to do anything about it. So they went out and hired a famous criminal duo, the Nebraska family, to try to deal with Zash. They were a father and son, notorious for their large-scale robberies, and even more notorious for how it didn't seem like they stole much when they did. That was very curious, and Zash went to investigate.

Gofsef, the son, had some form of congenital damage that made him nearly tetraplegic. Radolph, the father, managed to procure some cybernetic enhancements for him from Julai, which made him a lot stronger and more resilient but which required constant and expensive maintenance. That was the only reason they turned to crime, it turned out. So Zash talked to the family that had found the extra plant and they reached an agreement: the Nebraskas would stop harassing them in exchange for some help from that plant to produce what it needed to help and to pay for what the plant couldn't produce so they could buy it elsewhere.

They won the Nebraskas over.

(Zash once again elides a bit over the details here but "get the plant to produce some specific things like that" isn't, really, something you can do using the kinds of standard plant engineering practices the majority of people can manage. It is extra hard to do so in a way that won't be extremely inefficient and that would inevitably consume the plant.)

Eventually the town was empty, and a new town had been born, and then...

...one of the gangsters came over to beg. In the middle of that kerfuffle their plant had turned red, probably because of all the extra strain they'd put on it to produce the stuff they needed for their little war. And they were losing, and without the plant they'd have to leave and figure out how to exist elsewhere when they had zero marketable skills. And the townies were enraged at the audacity. Some of them even suggested sending that one gangster's head back to the main gang to let them know how they felt about it.

The family that had found the plant disagreed with that, and instead told the gangsters they could in fact come over and make use of their plants. And Zash said, actually, let's bring the new plant over to the old one and hook them both together so they can help each other produce things; this can sometimes rescue plants out of red state, and the both of them can be more efficient and effective together than the sum of their parts. And the townies hated the idea, but they didn't have much of a choice in the matter, so they went along with it. The town was restored. The gangsters... were hated, for a while, but people eventually got over it. The new situation was much friendlier and better for everyone involved.

No one died. Not a single person.

"Oh, look at me, talking your ears off, I'm sorry that must've been so tedious."

(He says to his audience of "the entire bar": over the course of the story, more and more people started to pay attention, and many even brought their chairs closer so they could listen to him. Hilda eventually got people snacks. There's something really compelling about the way Z tells stories; they could almost feel like they were there themselves.)

John didn't, quite, sober up during the conversation, but he sure is looking a lot more alert and pensive than he's been. Something about this guy...

    "Wait, come on, what do you mean no one died?" demands Lin.

"Guess we were really lucky! It helped that these people had known each other all their lives. Some people got really badly hurt, it's true, but they didn't want to kill each other."

"Okay but, but accidents happen, you can't mean that."

"Like I said, we were really lucky!"

"You know, one time my dad's cousin was shot in the heart and it turned out it'd missed his heart by half an inch and he lived."

        "I heard a story of someone who was shot in the head and survived."

    "Now you're just making stuff up—"

            "No, I heard that story too, it's true! It was on the paper one day..."

And the bar once again dissolves into lively conversation, the spell cast by Zash fully broken and everyone returning to their own bodies and lives.

(Man he really needs to take care not to project so much, it really gets to people.)

"Zash the Stampede," says John when Zash once again plops him onto his own bed later that night after getting drunker again. "That'zz you, izzn't it?" he slurs.