Jim laughed. The snake tattoos on his torso curled and corkscrewed in simulated excitement. “Y’know,” he said, “there’s a new movement in the post-human, ah, community. Started up in Idaho, in one of the intentional communes. They take a pretty strong anti-narcotic policy. Apparently it distracts us from the important work we should be doing.”

“Fuck that,” Roland said, and spat on the ground for emphasis.

“I don’t disagree,” Jim nodded, and produced an enormous and very phallic blunt. He lit it, pulled deep, and passed it over. Roland took a long drag and eased into a slump as the THC did its slow work.

“So, Jim,” Roland said after a few more passes, once the acid and weed had time to push his brain into a hazy new equilibrium, “why are you here?”

Jim gave an eloquent shrug, popped the blunt out of his mouth and stared at the curling smoke. Roland stared too. In his eyes, it was wreathed in a chartreuse-black halo of heat that seemed to almost vibrate near the cherried tip.

“To catch up,” Jim said, “and to offer you a job.”

“Job?” Roland snorted. “I need not your filthy lucre. Look at this wealth that surrounds me,” he made a broad gesture that encompassed the broken remains of his hovel. “What could you possibly offer?”

“Well,” Jim said, “for starters I can replace your hot plate. I think Bigsby broke it with his body.”

“So I’ll steal another one,” Roland said. “What do you really have?”

“I’m gonna guess a few million won’t pique your interest?”

Roland blew a fat, wet raspberry. “I don’t even care what currency you’re talking about. What good’ll money do me?”

“Not even Cascadian scrip, eh?” Jim asked with a grin.

“Cascadia?” Roland had heard the name, of course. Last he remembered, the Pacific Northwest’s premier independence movement had been agitating to secede from the Coastal Pact. “Is that a thing now?”

“As of six years ago,” Jim said. He took a deep pull on the blunt, handed it back to Roland, and exhaled a thick white cloud as he spoke. “And they just finished their own civil war, so the value’s skyrocketing. You really don’t get out much these days, do you?”

Roland’s response was another deep gulp of his coffee.

“Anyway,” Jim continued, “I know you don’t care for cash. But there is something I think you might want, and I can buy it back for you if you’ll help me out.”

“Wait– buy it back? Buy what back?”

Roland recognized the snake-man smile on Jim’s face. He had the vague sense that he’d seen it before, enough that the sight of it set his hackles arise and sparked an itch in his left trigger finger. He took a deep hit from the blunt and handed it over to Jim.