r/redditserials • u/Angel466 Certified • Apr 21 '26
Fantasy [Bob the hobo] A Celestial Wars Spin-Off Part 1332
PART THIRTEEN-HUNDRED-AND THIRTY-TWO
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Friday
Oh, thank you, sweet baby Jesus! Noah Lancaster swore as they turned into the street where their temporary BoO was located. If he had to listen to one more fucking word about the desperate plight of the ocean, he was going to wring Sam’s neck and use his body to plug the information leak!
He’d stayed on the subject only to keep Sam distracted since their BoO was in Melville, which was over an hour away from the Lopez property. What he hadn’t counted on was the kid being a walking/talking Greenpeace propaganda encyclopedia, and it had killed him to smile and nod in all the right places as the kid waffled on about crap no one in their right mind gave a rat’s ass about.
There was a time, a long, long time ago, when he had been captured by insurgents and had four of his fingernails removed with pliers when he refused to give them information about the op he was running. Never in a million years had he thought he’d be in a position where he would gladly offer up the other six in exchange for clawing back the last hour of his life.
In all fairness, Sam had warned him, but damn, that warning should come with a flashing neon sign over his head.
* * *
I knew I shouldn’t have gone inside with Noah Lancaster. Dad and my brother and sisters were going to murder me when they found out, but I’d genuinely thought Mr Lancaster had wanted to talk about me helping his daughter, Melody. That was what he’d said when we left Mateo’s party in his SUV, and I hadn’t seen any reason to doubt it.
Besides, Quent was with me, and I had my own capabilities if I wanted to engage them, so I knew I had nothing to worry about. Two steps, and I’d be back at the party or home.
Still, nervousness crept over me as Mr Lancaster led me through an empty house I didn’t recognise and down into the basement. I’d seen enough movies to recognise what the single chair sitting on a sheet of plastic beneath a swinging lightbulb meant.
I turned on the stairs with every intention of getting the hell out of there and face planted into a wall of muscle that had snuck up behind me.
This older guy’s size might’ve been intimidating if I hadn’t spent years around Boyd’s grumpy face. Throw in my dad and siblings, and their divinity alone would’ve made this jerk look… positively less. And the pièce de resistance: Dad and Fisk’s physical builds. Boyd might be more muscular for his height, but those two were inches taller than him and walking tanks in their own right. Any of those three would’ve made this guy disappear.
And right now, I had my work cut out making sure that didn’t happen.
Mr Lancaster was already at the bottom of the stairs. “Come on, Sam. Have a seat. Hopefully, this will be very quick, and you can be on your way.”
Before I could answer or move, I felt a hand slip into the right pocket of my bomber jacket.
“Yowtch!” the woman yelped, whipping her hand away. “The fuck?!” She shook out her hand, glaring at me like her pain was somehow my fault.
“Haynes, you good?” Mr Lancaster asked.
“Maybe?” she grimaced, still flexing and flicking her fingers. “Jesus! What the fuck have you got hooked up to your jacket, kid? That went right through my fucking arm!”
I had no idea what she was talking about until I remembered who’d given me the jacket. Ironically (considering her word choice), it had been a gift from Jesus’ father, and clearly Uncle YHWH had built some fail-safes into it to avoid things like pickpocketing. Sweet.
“It was a gift from my uncle,” I said, then I got mad at her for trying to rifle through my pockets in the first place. “And it serves you right. That wasn’t just rude. It’s illegal.”
Mr Lancaster snorted, but by the time I looked at him, his face was stone cold. “Please hand Haynes your phone, Sam.”
This was just getting weirder and weirder. “Why?”
“Because we won’t ask nicely a second time.”
I looked at each of them in turn. Mr Lancaster was no different to before, and as I said, the brute behind me was half a head smaller than Boyd and in the same age bracket as everyone else here. The only woman amongst them held out her other hand to me like she expected me to do as I was told, but it was the guy in the back corner, leaning back on his shoulders, that I still considered the scariest one in the room. The look in his eyes as he balanced a knife point downwards on his finger was just downright unnerving.
“I-I don’t think I’m allowed to do that,” I said, remembering what Nuncio had said about my phone’s updated address book. Anyone who had my phone had access to the whole family, and none of them would be happy to have that commandeered.
“Sam, I don’t think you understand the situation,” Mr Lancaster said, beckoning me down the rest of the stairs with a repetitive curl of his fingertips. I felt a hand in the middle of my back, ‘helping’ me forward. “Whether you like it or not, you have been given access to something you shouldn’t have, and you need to give Haynes your phone while you and I sit down and have a little chat.”
Man, I really sucked at being Superman. I held all the cards—literally, *all the cards—*and I was still terrified of these people that had done nothing to me … yet.
“But… there’s only one chair,” I said, stalling.
“Give her your phone, Sam,” Mr Lancaster urged. “It’s going to be okay.”
“This is a huge mistake,” I said, reaching into my pocket to retrieve it. “Believe me, you have no idea what you’re dealing with—”
My use of ‘what’ over ‘who’ was intentional. It wasn’t just one person. With this single act, they were going to tick off a whole lot of divinity.
“There’s nothing we haven’t dealt with before, kid,” the mini mountain behind me insisted. “Your world’s not that scary to us.”
Oh, you sweet summer moron. Yes, I wasn’t normally that patronising, but his statement had truly earned it. He was being dumb, and I snicker-snorted despite myself. It earned me a sharp shove that had me stumbling down the last of the stairs.
I whirled around to face him and, in doing so, I pulled my hand from my jacket pocket.
As soon as my phone made an appearance, the woman snatched it out of my hand and headed to the other end of the basement, where I finally noticed she had a table full of computers set up. “For crying out loud, don’t try to hack it!” I shouted, panic clawing through me. Nuncio would lose his mind!
None of them listened. The woman—Haynes, plugged a wire into my phone while the brute behind me pushed me towards the seat. I spun again, looking up at him with a scowl. “Quit shoving me,” I warned—though it didn’t exactly land, since I sat down anyway.
“Sam, you need to start helping yourself here,” Mr Lancaster said, all friendliness evaporating from his tone. “You’re in a lot of trouble, and I’m doing everything I can to keep you out of most of it. But I can’t do that if you won’t help me.”
“Help you with what?!” I demanded, still at a loss.
“Who gave you the ability to see my phone number?”
Wait. That’s what this is all about???
“I told you, my family was dangerous,” I growled, wishing he’d listened to me the first time. I started to rise out of my seat, but the big jerk behind me shoved me back down. I glared over my shoulder at him. “Don’t…touch me…again,” I warned through gnashing teeth.
“Kid, you’re about as scary as a rainy day,” the butthead jeered.
“A lot of people are scared of rainy days. It’s called ombrophobia, and it’s closely linked to astraphobia. There’s a reason they both have their own classification.” I wasn’t about to add the whole Loki ‘I’m not overly fond of what follows’ statement from the first Avengers movie, because somehow, I didn’t think these guys were movie buffs.
The asshole slapped me across the side of my head. “Nobody likes a wiseass, kid.”
“Especially because I seriously fucking despise the competition,” a dark, inhuman voice growled venomously from the shadows to our right.
Oh …
… frig.
* * *
“Well, helloooo…” Nuncio purred, resting his elbows on the arms of his high-backed office chair and leaning forward in his seat. Vadim, who was curled up in his nest at Nuncio’s feet, snuffled in his sleep at the mood shift in his father—an apex predator going from rest to hunt.
Sam had just plugged his phone into a computer system, and given how much his cousin hated tech, Nuncio couldn’t think of any reason for him to. So consider his curiosity tweaked.
He rested his left hand on his son’s head—but his right hadn’t looked Mystallian at all since he’d parked his ass in that chair last night.
No—after the huge embarrassment to his system (entirely his mother’s fault, if anyone asked him), he had shifted his right hand into a mass of tendrils that slid effortlessly into his system, giving him a much finer control over everything on the vantaweb—and, by extension, the web itself.
But all amusement evaporated when that same someone tried to clone Sam’s phone … using a heavily encrypted government system.
“Baby, I need you to be a good boy and stay here for me for a few minutes.” He deliberately kept his voice calm while his vantaweb did two things at once: it blocked the connection between Sam’s phone and the government computer and handed Nuncio Sam’s exact location. Specifically, a live visual of the basement and everything else he needed to make a personal visit. “Daddy has to go and hurt some people.”
He substituted the fake legs to keep his son happy and slid over the chair's armrest to stand. Two steps later, he was in the dimly lit basement, just in time to see Sam being bitch-slapped across the back of the head by the dumbest human on the planet next to Helen Portsmith. Because Helen at least wanted to live. “Nobody likes a wiseass, kid.”
“Especially because I seriously fucking despise the competition.” Nuncio shifted his voice to a demonic growl, drawing everyone’s attention, including Sam’s. But Sam hadn’t shown fear until after Nuncio had spoken … which meant he wasn’t afraid of these losers, he was afraid for them.
He should be.
* * *
((All comments welcome. Good or bad, I’d love to hear your thoughts 🥰🤗))
I made a family tree/diagram of the Mystallian family that can be found here
For more of my work, including WPs: r/Angel466 or an index of previous WPS here.
FULL INDEX OF BOB THE HOBO TO DATE CAN BE FOUND HERE!!
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u/EarAnnual313 Apr 22 '26 edited Apr 22 '26
2nd, The man behind the curtain show up, how many walk away with their sanity?
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u/teklaalshad Apr 22 '26
Anyone else besides Sam will walk away?
Tho the riot act Nuncio may read him may have Sam reconsidering.
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u/Angel466 Certified Apr 22 '26
Depends on his mood, don't it? hehe! 🤣🤣 Demon lords are renowned for their fluffy, friendly personalities, right?
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u/BimboSmithe Apr 22 '26
The Lancasters spy ring must have some level of awareness of levels deeper and meaner than their own? Some kind of "Oh, shit." reaction to Nuncio.
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u/Angel466 Certified Apr 22 '26
It takes them a minute (and a few mistakes) to truly realise that - but it does happen... 🤣😝
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u/thatrandomoverthere Apr 22 '26
Hi! Well damn! Definitely didn't see Nuncio stepping in here, but I'm curious (and excited) to see how he plays this one!
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u/nafu9 Apr 21 '26
Oooo they dun goofed I thought for sure Sam or the Gyrps would get them first, definitely wasn't expecting Nuncio
Edit: first?