““Damn I’m exhausted.” Miriam Shadowbane slumped up against the bar and motioned to the barkeep. “Pint of Bloodweiser and start me a tab. I’m going to be here a while.”

Tankard in hand, she slid into a booth with two of her three fellow blitzers, Kyler and GiGi Calcompton. GiGi was scribbling on a pile of napkins and Kyler had an impressive stack of glasses teetering at the edge of the table. VVV was missing, off in the hospital after a nasty hit from a gutter runner of all things.

“So, how’d it go? Was coach pissed?” Kyler asked.

“Not too bad. Honestly, he mostly just talked up those damn catchers, how they each scored a TD and how proud he was… it was nauseating. I’m so worn out from chasing those gutter runners around that I couldn’t even think of any smart retorts in iambic pentameter. He did give me grief for drawing on our team training on the very first blitz of the game with those double skulls, but I just ignored him. Anyone smelling that storm vermin would have missed the block too.” She took a long draw on her pint. “And anyway, the Heel got double skulls on the second turn, too, and she didn’t have to stay after the match to talk to coach.”

“Coach knows better than /
To try to talk stratagem /
With the Heel when /
She only had two fouls,” noted GiGi.

“Yeah, she looked like she was ready to get into some real nasty stuff tonight, I gave her plenty of space on my way out of the building.” Kyler shuddered. “I heard coach chewing out Eloise, too – something about how many passes those rats made and how she needed to start ‘living up to her potential’ or something like that. What did he say about you using our team training to turn pushes into double skulls when you had a chance to sack their ball carrier dead to rights?”

Mariam ignored him with a scowl. “Speaking of blocking, the main thing he wanted to talk to me about was us blitzers,” she said. “Told me we haven’t been pulling our weight out there with our blocking. Hell, even Baudelaire managed a casualty and look at that guy. He’s like if Yeats and Eliot had a contest to see who could get the most maudlin.” Everyone laughed. “What about you, Kyler? I thought your punches had gotten a lot ‘mightier’ since last match.”

Kyler stared moodily into his glass. “Maybe if I wasn’t spending all damn half trying to catch gutter runners I’d have the energy to really give it to them. Seems like we just couldn’t keep up, even though I could have sworn we were more than fast enough to take on rats.”

“You’re right. You ARE fast enough to take them on.”

Everyone swiveled to see Conner Klose hobbling up to the table on crutches. Kyler slid over, whacking the stack of glasses with his elbow, but an eagle-eyed waitress grabbed them before they could hit the floor. She glared at Kyler who just shrugged and asked for another round.

“Conner! Good to see you! You look… better? Well, your right leg does look a little, I don’t know, short?”

“Yeah, doc said I should be good to play our next match but I’ll never have the speed I once did. Looks like I’m going to end up riding the line, which, as you know, isn’t exactly the best way to become a star.” The blitzers looked down, up, anywhere to avoid making eye contact. The life expectancy of those on the line of scrimmage was not exactly known to be long.

“Which is why I went out to see a guy I’d heard about from my cousin Chet earlier today.” Conner’s cousin Chet was famous with all the players. He was the guy you went to if you needed to get your hands on some of the more banned books of poetry, or something especially toxic to get you in the right headspace to write that epic poem you’d been planning. They nodded. “I’d heard this guy was an unlicensed wizard who could affect your speed with special charms. So I went to see him.”

Conner flagged a waitress down and ordered a drink. “Long story short, this guy can’t make you faster, so it was a total waste of time. His charms only make you slower. Classic Chet, am I right? But there was something interesting. Just as I was leaving I saw an invoice on his desk, and it had an interesting name at the top: Crag Mere. Looks like someone from there had ordered some slowing charms a while back but were refusing to pay.”

The Blitzers stared at Conner, then quickly looked down at their wrists. Each one had been given a special friendship bracelet by the Crag Mere Hospital goblins before their first match. Not thinking about it much, they’d been wearing them ever since. GiGi reached out a hand and snapped the thread.

“I think now we can /
Catch some vermin /
So let’s find some heads /
And cave them in.”

A cruel smile lit GiGi’s face, and the rest of the blitzers couldn’t help but smash their glasses together and cheers to that.
”