NOVEL NEXT 103. Evolution? Noooo
"It's going to be trans-formative," Khaleesi said.
"It will be something new if they do the thing. Whether the game changes or not..." Paolo appeared unfazed.
Bagel had gathered Raul's family for whatever was about to happen. If nothing happened then they would just have a snack together. There was a chance that they were all about to get assistant message that would ruin their day. If there was one...
"You really think that they're going to do more dungeons?" Liza said.
"I'm just saying there's no pattern that we've determined of humanity trying to figure this out. But the 36 days was a thing. Raul and I have debated on this one a lot," Khaleesi said.
Marble held both hands up as if he hadn't even been a part of this discussion. They all knew he had. Of course he had.
"Raul, you told me that you thought that it was going to be a mix of of the cards," Bagel said.
" It would make sense for them to have new car art. Think of it. How many places have you seen cardar? That isn't exactly the same. I mean even the new pizza rats we get when we kill an Omega rat..."
Raul pulled out two pizza rat cards from the stack. There was a slight difference between the two and the artwork. Some didn't have a scavenger ability which let them use any kind of energy. There were some small differences but they only had two examples.
Raul brought out even more evidence. "And then look at the mascot cards. There's such a variety of those cards. It's as if they went nuts with that card. But that's going back to our discussion about intelligent design in these cards."
He passed the cards around and looked and nodded. It was just one of those things you did with cards. Someone offed you a card. You took a look. You gave them the benefit of the doubt.
Khaleesi groaned."There's absolutely no way that there isn't someone behind all this that's making these decisions as to what cards get made and maybe not where they're going but if there's a system behind this..."
All them looked up to Janet who was surfing up overhead not saying a word.
"Janet, would you be able to create copies of cards using the same rules and just swap up the artwork? Maybe a few tweaks here and there?" Paolo said.
"If given enough time, I could simulate the system that creates these cards, but only the aspects that have already been brought up. I can't confabulate new things but I can analyze what's what's available and tell you things."
Paolo placed the cards on the counter. "If one of the artificial intelligence is that the system created could create things like the system does at least in the abstract, then we have to believe that it's possible."
"So we think that this is actually going to happen then?" Lizas voice was soft. " I would be far less concerned about this if it was a evolutionary change, not a revolutionary change. Off of everything I've seen so far, that seems to be the trend. I can only hope it's going to be like that but there is some wisdom in the masses."
Paolo shrugged. "I for one think it's going to be revolutionary. They told us their goal is to kill less many humans is possible or to kill a certain amount of humans. They're in it for the entertainment. So why wouldn't they try to squeeze as much entertainment out of us as possible."
Khaleesi frowned. "That just sounds so reductive. You'd think that an alien species capable of this would be well in the peace and love and all those things. You can't really believe that they're going to spend all of their energies setting up this kind of game this death game... When they could be just being space tourists or something like that."
"Don't you think if they could become a space tourist they would just do that? Maybe they did that first before all of this and then decided they wanted to do this afterwards because they were bored." Khaleesi put her hands in her hips as if that was going to change anything. It was almost certainly not going to.
"You know we need to do, Dad? Let's put money on it. Or credits? Heck I'll put a whole deck on it."
Bagel had never heard of this idea. This sounded intriguing to him.
"Are you making a bet on what the system is going to do?" Bagel asked. "I've never made a bet before."
The entire family turned on him and it looked like all at once. They'd agreed on something for the first time that entire afternoon. It did not make Bagel feel good.
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"I'm going to bet that the change is more evolutionary than revolutionary," Raul said. "And heck I will play my cards. I will throw down three decks for that. Not even starter decks. The good full ones."
Paolo whistled. "You know what? I'll take that action. Three decks? You know, I'm thinking it's going to be more revolutionary. And I think we need to define the terms here. More dungeons is evolutionary. A change in how dungeons work, what I'm saying is what's up next... That's what I'm betting my cards on."
"I'm with Raul here," Lisa said.
"Oh, current wife, you wound me." Paolo pretended to faint.
"Current wife? Dad come on," Khaleesi said.
"My current husband understands the particular place that he's in right now and how he should probably not consider how much hotter I would be in the market if I really wanted to be."
"Well my current wife..."
He was cut short by a system message.
*People of Earth! Congratulations on reaching the end of the second cycle! Well be honest we didn't expect so many of you to survive for so long. You have done exceedingly well. Expect things to increase in difficulty with this latest update! Now get out there and defend your home world!*
"I'll take my payment as soon as possible. It sounds like things are about to change, revolutionarily," Paolo said.
Bagel slumped. He hadn't even gotten a chance to get a bed in. He really wanted to try it. But it sounded like this is the kind of thing that was going to end up being a bigger problem than the actual change.
There would have to be another way for him to test out betting. Especially if it was as ubiquitous as the human said. He would have to make up his own bet later and see how it went.
There was all the chance in the world that this would end up being just another change that they could deal with.
"All right, let's go out there and see what the new change is," Bagel said.
---
It didn't take it long for Ashley to figure out that several of the spawning mobs were now going to be spawning a third tier of mob and those in some cases would drop three cards.
"Go around," she yelled to Kate.
"I'm just going to flank him."
"Then get him."
With this swarm in front of her, Ashley was the center of attention. She was using Kate as whatever the opposite of bait was. Kate ran up with her four mobs and directed them to take down another one of these advanced pizza rats. The card called them Pizza Rat EX and they looked like shiny Omega rats. I didn't show up everywhere but they did show up with great frequency and they had to be handled quickly.
One pizza rat EX was able to break down an entire deck bearers party with one or two blows. And to wield them one had to have electric energy. This let them do 150 damage but at the cost of specializing a ton in one direction. The people that had electric decks? They loved it. And there were even some EX cards with the scavenger ability, making things even weirder.
She got her first taste was her forge made Pizza Rat EX was the size of a mastiff. Usually they were smaller but now? With the change and how it worked and the need to slowly build it up, not only did the ex card last for ten minutes, it was amazing when pulled.
It had to be fully set up, but when to got moving it was a monster.
Her swarm rat slammed into the mob over and over again, using it's electric attack to do a hit that took down the overwhelming majority of the mobs health.
Kate's floating tentacle monster finished it off, it's slam attack knocking it to the ground, buffeting it down before it disappeared and was replaced by some cards.
"One kill, three cards." Kate raised a fist. "The economy is going to be in shambles."
"The card economy, for sure but we need to make sure that the volunteer economy is a robust one."
Ashley didn't like this setup but it was better than any other form of arranging volunteers. If it was your turn in the queue, you took the next hot job. If you were waiting, you could rest or go run a dungeon. Or at least one of the less full ones.
---
They had found ten spawn points inside of the neighborhood that spawned EX mobs. Oh these are Pizza Hut export cards that had dropped from the mobs. Each one now had two teams on it or a team and a half that rotated out. The teams would cover entire blocks and bagel was working to get all of the roads connecting to those spawn points as soon as possible. He didn't care if it moved the actual spawns around so long as they could deny mobs from spawning where they were. One of those 10 was inside of a building which was unfortunate and it was on the far corner of Turtle Bay meaning that he would have to buy up everything between his block and there.
He was moving as fast as he could with as much credit says. The system gave the people but still he couldn't purchase everything. He finished buying out Tudor City and then he finished buying out the block directly east of his between 1st and 2nd avenue.
He now had a straight shot to buy the United Nations father. They make that its own special enclave. It already been used as an enclave for international diplomats. It has its own walls and before the system day it even had its own police force. Those people had disappeared but nothing had taken their places.
Beta wasn't sure if he wanted to actually open negotiations with whoever was back there, but Gladys was definitely going to be taking care of that. There's also a matter of a giant hotel on 44th Street that now opened up. Apparently all the staff have just left it there and glad I said to get even more people to get it back up and running. Yes, all the computer systems worked but nobody wanted to reset something the way that it was supposed to be done.
Bagel found himself reviewing the security of the hotel. It was just a cursory inspection, something that Gladys had asked him to do to make sure that he was still in touch with what was going on.
It was after all a very tall building with a lot of rooms and not every single room was related to the hotel. Many of those rooms in the same building. They were part of a business that would never be running in or was already obsolete next to the system.
It didn't take the smartest cat in the world to figure out that he could just start filling up the rooms once he'd purchased it. But I did take him some finagling to get the doors to where he can with the keys that they had. Whoever had designed the system hadn't accounted for the apocalypse, but thankfully, they didn't need it to work like that.