Bodega Cat (System Apocalypse, Deck Builder, Litrpg)

By the afternoon of the ninth day, Bagel had settled into a rhythm with how he ran the shop.

He would pop his head in the morning at the guild and then head back to a shop, back and forth, every half an hour to see what was going on with the guilds. When appropriate, he would sell the cards himself.

He had help. Raoul was in and out, as well as his sister. Bagel was finding it easier to leave it to his card summons to make sure that the shop was running. It was like he had five assistants depending on a time. As a cat, Bagel had the problem of not having hands. Janet solved this. He never felt like he needed thumbs, which the system apparently wanted him to want.

Janet, herself, the floating AI sphere of blissful knowledge, was always helpful. She could sell things herself and but it just was that humans wouldn't go to her unless she was the only option.

In the back of his mind, Bagel was worried about theft. Cards were valuable.

He was worried that in time he wins would try to steal a card or two. There was an amount of protection from having a temporary NYPD structure out front granted. He was less and less worried about that by the day. He lived in a society with rules.

The door opened, and a man walked through with a stack of cards. Bagel could not help the contain himself. He just got in a lot of credits from somebody who bought out his gentrifier crab card and he was going to save those for later.

Or at least he was until the man started putting cards down in front of him and every single one was from a location. He had not received the card from yet.

"These are all very interesting,"

Janet said. "Most of them are on the deck builder website, so I can quote you the prices for those."

The van blinked as Bagel and Janet just stood on either side of him from the counter. On his left, the AI shimmered in the air next to the cash register and on his right, Bagel sat in the customary place, watching every card that he pulled out.

"Where did you get these cards?"

Bagel asked. "I've never seen this trash bin card before. This is a creature too? Oh, it's a dark poison creature. That makes sense."

The man sighed heavily. "Unfortunately, they're all from Staten Island. But I won't be going back there soon. I just want to stop some of these out for some ones you have or yet credits for each of them,"

"We haven't seen a lot of dark type cards recently so you should will give you a fair valuation for them. What were you looking for?"

"I wanted some electric ones or flying ones but I'm just so tired of all these poison trash and slime mobs."

This made Bagel realize he was missing a piece of the puzzle. Saw that. Probably half of the cards that you had laid out face up were in slime or trash type cousins.

He had to remember which typing and he was pretty sure the dark type one was strong against psychic types.

Bagel probably needed to check. "You came all the way from Skyline to here just to sell some of your cards and make some money?"

"I've got to feed my family."

Bagel nodded. "That sounds important. I wouldn't know."

"It's more important than you can ever imagine, especially when you're thinking that they might want to live till next week. There are a few deck bearers out there with cards like your restock card, but many people have been telling me I got to go to all these scar shops and find one for myself."

Though he looked normal, he smelled like he needed a shower badly.

"The problem with the restock card is that you must also have a linked place from which to buy all your stuff. It's not enough to just have the card you have to own the building, building, which means a mantle card," Janet said.

Bagel shook his head. "We don't have any of those for salt, before you ask. They're too valuable. We've seen people get them from a dungeon."

The man paused. "From a dungeon?"

"It's not for everyone," Janet said. "But the rewards are great for some of them."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

After selling cards for half the day, Bagel was ready for some downtime. But this person was intriguing.

"Do you want to put out a quest for it?" Bagel said.

"A quest? What does that entail?"

"The adventure's guild next door begun taking requests this morning. They filter the card-based requests through the shop, though it's mostly for heal cards. If there is a request for the right amount of credits, they'll probably find a private seller."

Reporting what cards a part received wasn't mandatory,1 but highly suggested. There had been a lot of cards added to the duckbilled website from user input. On the eighth day, though, it seemed like they had mapped all the combinations.

The way it worked was that cards had varying levels of strength along the types that were available. Normal cards which comprised all of Bagels' deck ' deck could take any energy type.

There were ten types of which Bagel only care for a few of them. Some, like Marsupial Type, meant nothing to him, but fire and electric he understood. He had mostly normal and electric types on his deck. Thankfully, the gentrifier crab took electric energy, as did the pizza rats.

The bell rang and Bagel put away the article about card typing. The customer at least looked like she was serious in the best ways about dungeon diving. He wore a functional outfit with enough pockets to put ten babies in there and leave room for more.

A man came in with a contract for a bagel which he looked at for about five seconds after the man put it down.

"Care explain what this is about?"

The man jumped up, spooked by a cat talking to him. Of course, he was looking at Raul. He was not even regarding the cat as anything.

"Listen to the cat. He's the manager of this place here. What is this about?" Raul began flipping through the pages of the contract.

"I'm sorry I haven't talked to a cat before. This is very unusual."

Bagel closed the five-page document and gave the man the most incredulous dare that big let him in a while. It would let the man come in and said that he was from New Jersey or something. Not only that, he was trying to sell the man a bridge or something. Although he seemed unable to sell one, he must have persisted in trying to sell them.

"This is a contract. We are looking to buy some cards from you long-term and it's not a binding, but we want to buy about 20 cards a day for our people."

"Why is it 20? Are you trying to convert people to deck buyers today? Is that what's going on?" Raul asked.

"I represent the midtown adventurers' guilds, however, much of a thing, that is. We're a little behind the turtle Bay guilds. I actually looked at the interior of the Guild next door,door, and we are a lot behind. So we need any help we can get. And people seem to come here to trade cards and until we have our whole guildhall set up in Times Square, we're not going to really do that."

He held out several cards to show Bagel. One of them was a mascot card. In fact, several of them were different flavors of mascot cards. It was like they were all the same card but with different artwork, and Bagel hadn't seen that before. Basically, all the cards that he'd seen from each area had been the same artwork as if it was the same card.

"These are the local cards. I take it? We can do a one-for-one swap, but you're probably going to need your own car. It's... it's... Janet, how often do rare cards drop?"

"Post fight reward cards are a 5% drop for regular rares and a 1% drop for the more rare cards to include mantles and other cards that tie decks together."

Bacon knew the answer, of course. He just wanted her to say it out loud.

It would have helped if she was doing the thing where she let him know about rarity, but he was pretty sure that the man had been on the deck builder site half of the day. Just researching prices and trying to find a place where you could trade guards. He had a lot of mascot cards.

"If you have so many of these mascot cards, why aren't you using these to make more deck bearers?" Raul said, examining one of the Iron widow cards. At least it was MasterCard with the Iron widow character, a giant Mecca suited character that just looked kind of sad. And is it you need to drink?

"I don't really have a way to keep people from leaving with the cards and going through their own thing. I need them to actually stick around and fight the monsters we have. I've been running myself ragged and until I saw you had this bus adventures killed like I'm going to be honest with you, after I'm here. I'm going to go talk to the people next door and see if I can get them to help me out. We need help. If there's something about turtle Bay, that's got people coming through and actually sticking around and finding who these dungeons. We're barely holding on in midtown."

There was no reason Bagel could not accept this contract, though he was wary of signing too many deals with humans. Being the conduit for the TSA and supporting the adventurous Guild next door with credits and cards had already made him a very rich cat compared to where he was previously. Now all he need to do was tie it all together and actually figure out a way to pop it off. Second location. Couldn't use his own mantle over there, but maybe if somebody else came through with a mantel, they'd let them hook up to the local building and claim the building and bought it then they could ...

"Do you have somebody that can buy up land?" Bagel asked. "It's not like you can hide. The mobs will find you wherever you go. You have to just make a safe space for your people."

"Unfortunately no. That's why I keep wanting to do all these dungeon runs."

Bagel considered the contract for a long minute. He really wanted to help people out. But he also saw the credits. "I cannot sign this without talking to my shareholders, but since no one else has given me such a contract. If Janet agrees to it, then I think we can come to some arrangement."

The man perked up. For the first time since he arrived, he looks genuinely happy to be there. Gone was the fog that had passed across his face.

"I can do it in a formal arrangement. That'll be fine. It's just that I need it. And we're all hurting. In fact, I'm going to take as much food as I can carry out of here physically. I think I used to be a freaking investment banker. What's my portfolio worth now? Nothing."

"I don't know what Benson banker would do in the Apocalypse, but if you know anything about selling bonds, then maybe we can come to a different arrangement."

"Bonds? Like government bonds?"