Bodega Cat (System Apocalypse, Deck Builder, Litrpg)

Bagel wasn't really satisfied with the situation as it was.

Who would be? Just like his litter box, change smelled like shit.

He didn't like it. He missed Raul and the rest of the crew. They had always made him feel like he'd owned the place.They all greeted him like he was one of them. True, they didn't say much when customers were around, but the silence wasn't right.

That was when the TV flickered. What had been a replay of the same old sitcom hundreds of times before was now a static image of a leaderboard. It wasn't on all of his televisions, but of the three, it was the larger, more central one.

Bagel's tail swished in annoyance as he read the new leaderboard which ranked hundreds of meaningless names. Bagel was not among them. Did he know what they were comparing? No. But clearly the system was flawed as it didn't acknowledge the inherent superiority of a cat. Worse, the number one spot was held by a peregrine falcon of all things.

Sure, it was level five and Bagel was level one and it had two hundred kills compared to Bagel's zero, but it was a bird. And birds were fundamentally prey.

On top of the whole board, it read, 'The Greater New York City Area Leaderboard'.

Because of course it did. Bagel was in Manhattan; he represented the Turtle Bay neighborhood. By virtue of being here, the neighborhood was greater than before. Beyond that, he had his Bodega, the best one in the borough…no, city! There would never be a greater neighborhood.

He purred, satisfied with his conclusion and his newfound pride for his area. It was such a shame that it wasn't the best in the world yet.

Bagel pondered on what could have happened to possibly make this board pop-up in the shop.

He expected to hear humans laughing. They usually talked about the news in excited tones, but this?

The leaderboard gave him a fair bit of pause.

There was either some ulterior motive behind whoever put the system in place, or they were trying to get everyone to compete. Were they trying to pit people against each other for a reason? What could they possibly achieve from that?

A little bell chimed at the entrance, signaling a customer. The homeless man that had been sitting out front earlier was still there.

He walked up to the counter and looked at Bagel's mount. The man regarded the cat and then the mount. A decision was made.

Bagel rolled his eyes.

"Excuse me, could you spare a bottle of something?" he said to the mount.

The man was like a feral, black cat, complete with a mangled dark coat. His hair was unkempt, and it had a smell that reminded Bagel of the streets. Bagel, as a rule, didn't judge people. At least to their faces.

He hated everyone equally.

He looked down upon this person for darkening the stoop in front of his door. Had he the words, he might have thought to ask the man to shower, but as he had only recently achieved sentience, he was in a good mood. Also, offering the man some good smelling spray would only fix the issue temporarily.

"You know what?" Bagel decided, trying to ignore the terrible B.O. emanating from the man. "If you're thirsty, head to the back. Grab a drink."

This would be his good deed for the day. Or maybe the week. He was a cat, and their outlook on good and bad wasn't dictated by human standards or timelines.

The man looked at his mount and gasped. "That's a neat ventriloquist trick. Are you practicing magic now, in the middle of all this mayhem?"

Perhaps he wasn't ready to face Bagel. Not everyone was prepared to see the ultimate life form in all its glory. That was too bad for him.

Oh, well.

His mount waved the man to the back where the beverages were.

The man walked to the back of the store, grabbed a bottle of amber liquid, and held it out in front of the worker.

"The boss says you can have it," his worker said, reading his intent. "So go ahead and have a drink. This one's on us."

The homeless man looked at Bagel and smiled.

Bagel had never seen so much yellow in someone's teeth at once. It almost matched the man's hands. At least, the underside of his palms were so yellow that he had to have done something intentionally to make him that way.

"What's this above you?" he asked. "Greater New York area... Hmmm."

The man was looking at the leaderboard. Bagel idly wondered if he'd missed the entire fight out front. He might have. "Peregrine Falcon? What game is this?"

"It's a new leaderboard," Bagel said, his tail beginning to swish in annoyance. The homeless man wasn't looking directly at him when he said that. It was one thing to not be ready to comprehend the glory of a talking cat, it was another thing to ignore him entirely.

"Did I sleep through something?"

"Maybe you should go get your head checked out?" Bagel muttered. How could anyone be so oblivious? He clearly hadn't had enough stalking practice as a kitten. His mother should be ashamed for letting him go hunt in the world while so completely oblivious to his surroundings.

Finally, the homeless man locked eyes with the cat. He gave the cat the look of someone who was finally understanding that he was talking to an intelligent being, a creature far beyond their comprehension.

"I think I really am going to go get my head checked out," the homeless man finally said, disbelief colouring his voice. "Thanks for everything. I think I'm going to need this. If a cat is telling me to get checked, then it's time." He held up his bottle, waving as he stepped out.

A smell wafted to Bagel's nose, making his stomach gurgle, and he realised that he hadn't eaten all day.

It was a tough life, sleeping and managing a bodega. It was always good to have a little snack.

But would they happen to have any fish? His store didn't stock any unless it was a special occasion.

Why would someone be baking something at this exact moment? He realized that perhaps it was one of the stores next door. Maybe they hadn't gotten the news either?

"Can you watch the store while I go and check out the smell?" Bagel asked one of the workers. He didn't actually know. Just because he had summoned the workers from his deck, didn't mean that they had any more official relationship than the working one.

"Of course, boss," the worker said. "Just don't unsummon me and I'll stay here as long as you need."

That gave him a pause. He really liked riding on these mounts and never realised how much he would enjoy riding on someone's shoulders before, this particular time though it had been a very comfortable if odd experience for him. The mounts couldn't say no to him. At least that was what he thought. He could always unsummon them but that would lead to them having problems.

He could always figure out what a shop AI was. But that meant that he would have to put off investigating that wonderful new smell.

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He looked over and saw the other worker. Now he had a decision to make. He could choose to ride on the one that he was already comfortable with and sitting on or he could summon his pizza rat.

He could also wait for one of his cards to draw so he could summon a chef. All in all, he couldn't be bothered to move. He probably needed one of his summoned cards to check and see if the grill worked.

"I think I'll swap you two around," he said, mentally commanding his mounts to swap.

They quickly did as told. The new spot was the same as the old, just less warm. Neither could compare at all to Raul's warm lap or his strong grizzled hands that always managed to find just the right spot to scritch.

For a moment, Bagel thought to ask the summons to pet him before dismissing the thought. It felt wrong, almost sacrilegious.

Bagel was once again at the threshold between his home that he had loved and lived in for years and the loud, bright, grimy outside world. But that smell lingered on his nose, pulling his attention.

He needed to do it. He needed to go out, and he needed to taste whatever that was.

Outside was another pizza rat in that odd hue, which meant that it was not from a deck, and it was fighting off against what had to be a dozen monsters led by humans.

This had to be one of the oddest things ever. For years, people had complained near him that New Yorkers were rude and inconsiderate of others, and he had just accepted that as facts. To see them all helping each other in this small way during what had to be the most pivotal day of their lives warmed Bagel's heart for about two seconds. Then he realized that this was not helping him get whatever that fresh smell was and had to refocus.

Cards dropping from the pizza rat momentarily shocked him, as well as a system message that he dismissed. Apparently it didn't like that and instead it just spoke aloud to him.

**For taking part in combat, you have earned fifty experience.**

Next to the bodega was a combination of health-food and homeopathic pharmacy that Bagel had only been in once in its entire life. It has been during his rebellious phase where he wanted to strike it out on his own and have a harem of lady cats. That part of his life, thankfully, was long gone.

They didn't bake anything there. The building beyond that was a wide and long catering building with several shelves that could not compare to his own Bodega store. It was like they took a city-standard bodega and stretched it out so that you could sit next to second avenue and eat whatever you were buying from the new world.

That wasn't all. Across the street, a building he now recognized as a Subway appeared to have gone dark.

Perhaps that would be a place that he could buy. Directly across the street was a pizza joint. The smell came from further beyond, possibly the new place.

People had said things about it. They thought that cats didn't listen to their conversations. Bagel did. He just hadn't cared before. He didn't have a need.

The spot in question was beyond the pizzeria. Something about Middle Eastern cuisine and lots of words that he didn't previously have any context for. Now that he was thinking about it, he didn't understand how his previous brain had really understood it, but he was willing to roll with it. They were words that made no sense before he got smart and they made no sense now.

That was when he ran into a bigger problem.

He had never crossed the street by himself.

There was just too much traffic. Even now, people were still trying to drive around the little fight that was happening on the sidewalk.

The apocalypse had happened and people had still decided to go to work or something. Because of course, in their little lizard brains, they would want to keep up appearances. It made no sense at all for Bagel, but he had taste.

There was no accounting for taste, after all. If they wanted to go to work, he would just have to wait until the traffic lights let him pass.

That was what humans did. They waited for the little glowing bulbs to tell them when to go. The problem was that despite learning their language, he knew nothing of their other forms of communications. What did the two yellow orbs mean? What did the green one mean? And why did the damn light randomly beep, setting his fur on edge?

To add insult to injury, the cars always flew one direction down second avenue and never the other way. He didn't trust the pattern. Humans were too unpredictable, changing their habits just because something went a little differently one day—like the bodega staff who had decided to not return and leave him all alone. He checked both ways of the street and seeing only still cars, he urged his Mount forward.

He caught several people giving him a bit of a stare. Someone honked, and Bagel barely refrained from bolting, digging his claws into his Mount's shoulders and hanging on for dear life. Taking a moment to calm down, he realized that they were actually just looking at his Mount.

Of course they were. He was proud to consider the creature card his own. That pride in his work and his managerial style just felt like something he'd been born with.

When Bagel got to the center of the street, he realized that this was as far as he had gone on his own in ages. It was here, back in his foolish days, that a yellow car had swerved and nearly flattened him. Raul had rescued him as he had cowered in the middle of the street, too scared of the four-wheel monstrosities.

And then, a pizza rat spawned in front of him. Bagel hissed

"Kill it!" he shrieked.

"Yes, boss."

The speed at which he was removed from the man's shoulders and put on the opposing sidewalk gave him pause, but pretty soon, his worker was in the thick of it, fighting against the pizza rat. Bagel idly wondered how many pizza rats had spawned in the city as he flipped through his current hand. He had three energy points, but one was in the worker that was back inside of the bodega.

He tasked a summon to guard duty.

In his hand, he had two chefs and a restock. He instinctively knew that all he had to do was cast one of those while summoning one of the other ones to use the energy. But he also felt that it was going to have to be one of those things where he waited a minute for his energy to recharge.

It wasn't entirely clear. Whatever the system had given him, it hadn't given him much more than the rules to follow, not even a basic strategy guide. Doing so would have probably given him too much of an unfair advantage, even if he deserved it. . The worker slammed the pizza rat, hitting it with his fist. As soon as he did so, Bagel could see a number above the rat's head, blinking yellow. And then the rat hit him right back. Now, his worker had his own blinking number above his head.

Bagel tensed, unsure of what to do next.

Looking between the two, it was clear to see that something was happening. The worker hit the rat again and the rat hit the worker. The next hit would send either one of their numbers into the negatives. That was probably bad.

Bagel was on the edge of a seat, about to summon his own rat when one of the other humans with a deck came over and used their pizza rat to kill this one. Bagel breathed a sigh of relief. Negatives apparently meant death, and he really didn't want to know what would happen to his Mount if it died.

Humans were very helpful when they wanted to be. He could work with that. But could he trust them?

"Thanks for the help," Bagel said.

The human, a man with a goatee, looked back at him as if he had two heads.

"Oh, this is definitely getting old," he said. "Look—a peregrine falcon is the top card bearer in our region... Somehow." Bagel flicked his tail at the audacity of a bird upstaging him. "So maybe you should think about what the rest of the animals are going to be doing around you. Some of us are able to talk now. Get over it. Also, I have no idea what a peregrine falcon is."

The human stared at him, eyes flashing as he was distracted by a system message.

Bagel let it go. There would be more conversations like that.

He would have to keep an eye on that. It was useful to disarm humans by talking, but this had been the fourth or fifth human today that had kind of lost their momentum when they figured out that he was a cat and that they were talking to a cat and all the things that were associated with that. It put a real damper on information gathering and prevented his ordained pets.

Instead of talking to him, they should be bowing down and thanking everyone that they got to see such an amazing specimen. There had to be no purer expression of masculinity than a tomcat out in the prowl trying to figure out what that wonderful smell was.

"Now," Bagel said. "If you'll excuse me, I smell a sweet treat that's calling my name."

"Oh yeah, go ahead," the man said. Bagel continued, passing the pizza place and heading to the small bakery.

He was pleased to see that it was still open. Perhaps the people inside hadn't gotten the news? Or maybe they had no family? Either way, they had not opened the door. Having something under his control with hands and thumbs and fingers was amazing. No door was an obstacle to him anymore. How did they work? But for now he just didn't have to wait for some lowly human to finally take notice of him.

Inside, two men behind the counter grinned nervously at him. There was something about the worker that caused people to look away and then look to him. Perhaps it was because he had a card deck or perhaps it was his luscious coat. He would never know. He could ask but that would be presumptuous.

Of course they were admiring him. Who wouldn't?

"Pardon me," Bagel said addressing the two people. "I smelled the most wonderful thing and I was just wondering do you have some freshly baked..."

Behind the glass were a multitude of freshly baked and soft buttery pastries. He recognized the croissants, a staple of Raul's Friday afternoon snacks—sometimes, Bagel even got a bite. But everything else?

There were sparkling jellies and hard crystals and fascinating shapes. Behind the man, was a small rotating platter of rolls that smelled absolutely scrumptious, but it was not the divine smell that had led him here.

His eyes might be betraying him. But his nose? It would never. He quieted himself and tasted the air, trying to discern which of the goods had caught his attention and taken him so far.

He was drawn to a little, round cinnamon thing. It just seemed like the right name for the thing. The most important thing was that it was fresh.

"You made this after the system happened," he said. "Didn't you?"