NOVEL NEXT 108.
Vince had his situation under control. Gladys was doing well with her goons assigning rooms to people that needed them and getting the promise of rent from most. Meatball had even snatched up half of Chelsea under his watch, but Bagel was getting close to filling out his fourth block.
Things were looking up. Even the adventures guild was in the black, save for the lives lost in defense of the city.
That was one thing that caught Bagel's eye though.
"How long have you had these coffee cups with the anime girls on them? Is that a new thing or did I miss something?"
In fact, they're about 12 cups there, one for each of the workers and Vince. One was drinking up a coffee that had been clearly steaming recently. He couldn't tell but he was pretty sure they were all hot.
"There's the cat that sells these? I think you know him. Copernicus?" Vince said. "Honestly they are delicious."
"That's because you drawing yours in milk and sugar!" One of the men working with the pipes said.
"This is true. but I would never pretend to be anything other than who I am to score cool points within a cat that sells coffee."
Khaleesi laughed. "Your coffee is free at the bodega. Bagel let's anyone drink that."
Vince scratched the back of his neck. "Yeah but I don't want to walk there every time I want to get my fix."
Bagel briefly considered going into a direct competition with somebody from jellyside layer in an overt way. But that would just cause a lot of problems later on. And he didn't need to compete with them. They were doing enough competition among themselves to not even do well.
They must have had some other motive or they thought that this was going to work. But that wasn't his problem. He didn't have to worry about their attempts to save face when he had real issues to work with.
"So did you go up there and get it and then bring it down here or did he come to you?" Khaleesi said.
"They're doing... He has his valet moving it around."
Bagel realized blatantly that he hadn't seen the cart in a while. And by a while that was roughly a day or two. A day felt like an eternity now. It was one of those things that he hadn't thought about. He needed to pay more attention to what Copernicus was doing. He needed to pay more attention to what Jellyside Layer was trying to do if they were actually going to go out and do these kinds of stunts.
"That actually makes sense," Bagel said. "Now is there anything else that we need that we can get for you that you can't get?"
Vince shrugged. "Right now I'm happy. I'm just going to keep testing this for a little bit and then we'll move into full scale production within the week. I hope that I'll have a solution for you very quickly. If not, then I'll come knock on your door. Khaleesi drops by once a day anyway."
Khaleesi's face went beat red. "I'm just here to work. That's all. Don't think that I'm here in any other capacity."
Bagel rolled his eyes. Another human thing that he was really happy that he didn't have to deal with. He did not know what he was going to do about this. It didn't merit his attention. any slight against Copernicus might.
"Now where did those flyers come from?" Bagel said.
---
"Ace, can you enhance that image?" Khaleesi asked.
"I can't just enhance images. I can fly the drone closer if I have to?"
The image of the east river displayed on the largest screen in drones and scones. It wasn't clear what mobs were spawning without going in close. Bagel hadn't spent much time exploring Queens or Brooklyn. If they travel directly across the river the ways that the streets pointed they would arrive at Queens.
The specific neighborhood was called Hunter's Point and so far as he could tell they had an artistic mob. It looked like the attack of the mob involved painting in some way and that was a bit different than most of the things that he'd been exposed to. They would draw something and bring it to life in their attacks. They would do the same amount of damage with just about any attack but unfortunately the artwork itself didn't stick around.
That was one of the benefits of it. But if the flyers had come from someplace else so would either be from the neighborhood directly south of it which was in Brooklyn or one of the neighborhoods next to it. They needed to investigate either way. It wasn't like they were going to move that far away from where they came from. There would have to be extended circumstances.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
"Is it possible that the Titan class golden eagle mob has a sense of which direction more humans are in?" Ace said, adjusting her flight suit.
"When you say that, what are you talking about?"
Ace shrugged. "It sounds like the mob was intelligent. It sounds like it picked a spot to go unless it just last John to the first few minute saw and started flying that way. But even then it probably would have seen some all the other flying deck bearers wouldn't it?"
"So what you're saying is that we need to be afraid of the sky now? That actually makes a lot of sense. I don't want to be afraid of the sky."
"Well if we can find it where they're coming from then we can prioritize that neighborhood."
The view of the camera shifted as it moved closer. It was clear that the mobs were being killed off at normal rates. There was no horde of shades. There wasn't even a horde of the artist monsters that they had expected.
"Whoever is cleaning up these streets, I commend them," Ace said. "They're doing almost as good of a job as we are. And I think that it's going to be something that the NYPD needs to look at."
"I am not ready for another bilateral meeting. They talk forever and it's not relevant to what's going on for most of the time that I'm in it."
"That's government kid. you would think that they could work things out, right?"
"But it's so boring and we've got so much shit to do. It feels like I'm spinning my wheels when I go to those meetings."
Ace smiled. "Okay this looks promising. I can see what the issue is here. Whatever neighborhood is north of that one is the one that's spawning them. So if they're able to spawn there on the river or directly next to the river and that's a Titan class mob. That's able to summon other mobs it could pull mobs then make a beeline for our project on Roosevelt Island. This is supposing that it locks on to one thing that it's interested in attacking and then just goes after it instead of stopping anywhere along the way."
Dozens of golden pigeons were flying around, north of their current trajectory. They flew close enough to get attention, but it was clear that Deck bearers had been summoning half of those. There was no other way that the mobs would be fighting similar summons.
"That had to have been rough. If you didn't have a range attacking deck when this started, you would have been shit out of luck," Ace said. "Those poor fuckers."
---
Ashley had finally gotten the police department to listen to their inquiries and the first thing they asked was if they could put up a recruiting poster in the guild.
"Sergeant Parvo, You've got to understand that people don't want to be told what to do and what you basically ask them to do is work twice as hard for the city government. They're already doing your work as volunteers and getting paid handsomely for it. I don't think that they're going to get a better deal."
Parvo, unlike many of the times that you'd seen him had shown up, not in uniform. His excuse had been that he'd worn through several just doing dungeons. She had offered to get him a complete set of adventurers gear if he paid half price.
He had declined but clearly didn't want to.
It was another thing that wasn't her problem.
"We're doing everything we can to keep the community safe. You know this more than most people."
"Then why are you back here again? Asking for more help?"
"It's becoming more and more clear to the department that some of these gigs are going to be more effective uses of the guilds time than others. I know we would like to see a special emphasis on this. This is why we're adding an extra bounty. We understand that. The specific job of watching the streets for spawns is very boring so we're wanting to compensate people."
"Parvo. They're getting enough money from defeating monsters. Unless you can get them them food that's different from what they can get from the Amish market or the Bodega? They're not going to be motivated."
He sighed, running his fingers through his not so short black hair. "Look we're doing all we can here. If what you're saying is that we need to get more food back in circulation to smooth this over? Then maybe I need to offer a job for that."
"That sounds like it's going to be a big expense. What are we thinking? 20 credits a day to go restore some of these old businesses and see if we can get them running again with the warehouse cards?"
Parvo's eyes brightened. "And we need to commend you guys for getting all those cards to us. It was one thing getting McTavish out there. We don't even control him. He just knew what needed to be done. Long distance drone shipping business is going to be the thing that keeps us viable. You know that it says that each Warehouse will feed roughly a thousand people? We just have to make sure to pick the right buildings. We're so densely packed here that we are just going through many of those Warehouse cards."
She wasn't really pleased at what they were doing with the cards but it was the government and they had made a decision and she was going to have to try to pretend to support it. Ashley hadn't been the biggest fan in the government. Growing up and moved to New York City had given her a better sense of small government interventions that actually worked. She loved the buses and the Metro on those things were part and parcel of the New York City experience for a good reason.
If they were going to save any small part of this Society it would be because of what they did now.
So she wasn't thrilled about it but she knew that she was going to do what she could no matter what. Part of that was accepting that she was now going to be a warehouse card delivery service.
"I could ask you something. Have you seen anyone from the TSA recently?" Ashley said. "It's like they came by once and then they balanced. Bagel has still been holding the meetings but..."
"I don't know what they're doing. Officially, it's been too dangerous to send those City bureaucrat types out."
"Unofficially?"
"Unofficially, just between you and me, I don't think that those Rich mother fuckers from downtown even give a rats ass about us. They haven't been bringing any credits up here, which is not a credit to their character. But maybe when they finally get all of Soho then we can talk. I just don't think that things are moving fast enough down there so we need to save ourselves first."
Actually did not expect that. She'd expected something different, especially because he had seemed to be such a staunch supporter of the institution that he belonged to. Rose colored glasses did not last long in an apocalypse.
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