The boathouse was clearly a post-Warp construction, its roof ripped from some midcentury-medieval diner and placed atop thin beams of freshly cut wood, its theme the only thing holding it together.

  W’s impromptu workshop had the same kind of cobbled-together feel. Her cart had unfolded to reveal rolls of fabric and rails of hangers, while a row of picnic tables had been turned into workstations.

  One held a sewing machine covered in stickers, its electric motor replaced with the back half of a bicycle. Another had strips of leather stretched out along it. A foam anvil and inflatable hammer marked the metalwork table.

  “Wow, you’ve got a lot going on here,” said Roy as they approached.

  “Have to. There used to be tailors, tanners, cobblers, and blacksmiths. Now a costume designer has to do it all.” W. was hammering a section of chain-link fence onto a wooden frame. “I’m getting ready to theme your brigandine. Want to watch?”

  “Sure,” said Roy.

  She’d already cut the shoulders from the hockey pads and sewn them onto the baseball chest protector. Now she took out a blowtorch, made from a can of ultra-hold hairspray taped to a novelty lighter shaped like a dragon, and used it to melt the plastic on the front. She then used a trowel to push the plastic back into place.

  “You said plasma did this damage?” asked W.

  “Didn’t you see the fighting last night?” Bastion asked.

  “Nope. I slept through it.”

  “Yeah, it was plasma,” said Roy. “Lots of different types of it. A few lasers too, but a plasma ball did that crater in the center.”

  “See, once I’m done here, you should be able to shrug off stuff like that. I might leave a few of these dents, so long as they all look like dented metal instead of melted plastic, that is.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Roy. “There was something that happened last night I wanted to ask you about. There was a sphere of slowed time that refracted laser beams, but not all the other light. Do you have any idea why that would happen?”

  “Sure. Theme magic messes with physics, but only in ways people expect it to. Actually, it's more like it changes things to make them more entertaining. Think about it, bending laser beams are cool, but if everything looked like a distorted fishbowl and you couldn’t see what was going on, that’d ruin the movie.”

  “It did look normal in the shades,” said Bastion. “But they never fired lasers into a time-slow field in the movie, so…”

  “They had those exact stop watches in the movie? asked Roy. “OK, that’s essential research. We need to find a copy when we’re in the swamps.”

  While Roy and Bastion went off on their tangent, W. pressed the brigandine’s shoulder-pads into the chainlink fence, fixing the pattern into the softened plastic. “I have a waffle iron too. The combination of patterns should make a really good chainmail look.”

  “Cool,” said Roy.

  “You do the details first?” asked Bastion. “Not after it’s been painted?”

  “The order I do things in depends on whether I want the materials to behave like what they actually are, or what they’re themed to look like. The more work I do, the more it starts behaving like the finished article. Which is what you want, but it can complicate things.

  “If this brigandine starts to react like metal instead of plastic, then making it malleable suddenly takes a ton of energy. My little improvised blowtorch wouldn’t melt it. I'd need the heat of an actual forge, which I don’t have here. So I do all the plastic stuff first, then the metallic paint, then I age it so you'll have an easier time pushing resonance through it."

  Once W. had pressed the waffle iron to the shoulders, she repeated the process on the arm and shin guards. As a final touch, she pressed metal buttons into the joints to act as faux rivets.

  “OK,” she said. “Stage one complete. And check this out. I got these from some of the mayor’s fast-food navy uniforms. Hope they don’t miss them too much.”

  Roy examined the new knuckle guards she’d added. The jagged metal spikes looked brutal, and Roy imagined he’d be able to punch through all kinds of things with them.

  “Were these bottle caps?” he asked.

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  "Yeah, there are tons of these things lying around the wasteland. You have no idea how often I'll open a random drawer and find dozens of them. Nobody's found a use for bottle caps, so I thought I might as well do something with them.”

  She turned to Bastion. “Most of your stuff’s over at the leatherwork table,” W. said, pointing to where the armor pieces were laid out.

  “I’m going to use a box cutter to carve some old west things on the arm guards: vines, guns, stars.”

  “No stars, please,” Bastion said.

  “Got it. After that, it’ll be mostly weathering. Sandpaper and shoe polish. For the gloves, I added washers to the knuckles and decorative buckles to the wrists for extra flair. For crossbow bolts and bullets, I’ve made you a bandolier out of belts. There’s a sling for the crossbow itself, and also belts. The boots have spurs made of gears, and I’m giving them steel toecaps with the same silver paint I’ll be using for the base layer of Roy’s armor. Oh, and one last thing.”

  She pulled a piece of thick brown fabric from the sewing machine. Bastion broke into a wide grin when he saw the shape of it.

  "Is that..."

  "Yes. It is."

  "A duster jacket. Oh man, this is cool! What did you make it from?” asked Bastion.

  “The hotel curtains, but don’t tell anyone. Also, it's not finished yet, but it’s going to be great.”

  “This is all great,” said Roy. “You’ve thought of everything.”

  “Well, not everything.” W. walked over to a tarp and pulled it aside, revealing a large beige disc with algae-covered rubber skirting and a rusted steel fan mounted on the back. There was just enough faded paint left to read: “Gator Glade Tours.”

  “Wow,” said Roy. “Our very own hovercraft.”

  “Does it work?” asked Bastion.

  “Nope. I checked out the fans, both the big one up top and the ones underneath that lift it, and they’re all rusted to hell. Also, the engine’s corroded, so we’ll be relying on magic to make it run instead of anything mechanical. Like I said earlier, physics is basically the plaything of theme magic, if what you’re doing is cool enough.”

  Bastion whistled. “That’s gonna take one hell of a re-theme.”

  “Not as much as you’d think. This thing was used for tours of these swamps, and it came with a bag of old brochures. These hovercraft used to be iconic in the exact area you’ll be using it. That should give it a real boost. Whatever theme we go with will probably work in the swamp even if it wouldn’t work anywhere else.”

  “What were you thinking of?” asked Roy.

  “My first thought for performance was high-tech cyberpunk, but there’s no way it’ll stay clean enough out in the swamp for that theme to hold. So then I started thinking about retro-futurism. The used future look is flexible, since dirt and wear are baked into the aesthetic, but we don’t really have the right materials. I had everything I needed for armor in my cart, but for this we’ll have to scavenge from the local area.”

  “What do we have the materials for?” asked Bastion.

  “Two options. First is Post-apocalypse junkyard.”

  Bastion made a face. “Isn’t everything technically post-apocalyptic now?”

  “It’s kind of a misnomer. Sure, there was an apocalypse, but not the one anyone was expecting. People were imagining nuclear war and plagues; nobody was really thinking of a warped reality. What I’m talking about is a pre-apocalypse idea of the post-apocalypse. Lots of tin shacks and bashed together scrap. People liked that look so much that they’d create fictional worlds that were still full of that stuff even hundreds of years later. It’s the kind of thing you end up building when you don’t put any effort into building anything in particular. The one thing it’s good for is easy reparability.”

  “What’s the other option?” asked Roy. He was hoping for something with more pizzazz.

  “Steampunk.”

  “No steampunk,” Bastion waved his arms emphatically.

  “Why not?” asked Roy.

  “It’s creatively bankrupt,” said Bastion. “No insight, no cohesion, just slap a bunch of gears on something and call it a day. Back in Star City, there were dozens of guys trying to do the same steampunk shit. All talking about how their totally unique genius idea was going to get the power working further away from the Star Power Tower. All with the same random springs and gears breaking down constantly and getting filthy coal dust all over everything.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that,” said W.

  Bastion sighed. “There’s never even been one good steampunk movie.”

  “What about Rust and Bones?” said Roy.

  “I haven’t seen that.”

  “OK,” said Roy. “So it’s about this steampunk skeleton, Edward. T. Bones Jr. He wakes up in a scrapyard and has to recover his memories while other brass skeletons hunt him down. There’s a really cool airship sequence.”

  “If we were making something as cool as an airship, then I might be OK with it. I’m not being unreasonable here, Roy. I put up with the diving suit, didn’t I?”

  “Would you honestly rather we do junkyard?” Roy asked.

  He sighed again. “Fine. Steampunk. I just really hope we find a flying car to replace it at some point.”

  “When you do, I’ll retro-future the hell out of it for you,” said W. “But for now, we work with what we’ve got. Luckily, this is a Victorian hotel, so it should have everything we need.”

  “We’ll go ask Big Time where to scavenge,” said Roy. “And maybe what monsters to expect out in the swamp.”

  “Good idea,” said W. “If I know what’s out there, I might be able to build some countermeasures into your costumes.”

  “Sure thing,” said Roy. “And thanks for doing all this for us.”

  W. waved them off, and Roy and Bastion walked the neatly manicured path back to the hotel lobby, ready to find out exactly what dangers lurked in the place they’d already agreed to go.