Bodega Cat (System Apocalypse, Deck Builder, Litrpg)

*Cashiers are allowed to fight customers here so please be mindful and take only what you need. We are all in this together.*

A big sign on the store had to be the mood of the day. Bagel made a note to allow his employees to fight customers. It was only common sense.

Bagel moved around the security guard like he never wanted to touch a human again. Which is to say equal parts carefully and quick. The Amish market still had a line halfway down the block. His Bodega had food, damn it. They could have just bought something from him, but he could only restock what the store has originally had. They would be out if they were looking for something else and he knew that someone in the store had a restock card.

"What do you think that they hold up is?" Ashley said. "Registers? People willing to do the work? My job imploded, so I imagine others would as well. But they keep showing up. It might be because they don't have decks or because they don't know anything else."

Bagel let her talk about that for a minute and decided to let her ramble. It was easier that way. Where she tended to talk for a lot longer when he didn't interrupt her. He wanted to see how long she would go for. A success meant that she might figure out something without his intervene. He always like that option.

"Here is it," he said.

The large sign revealed that he was at the Pickler, a place that sold quality sandwiches with pickles. It has been made by someone who considered themselves a professional, but there was definitely some disagreement with that claim that had seeped into their artwork.

That small deli comes into a large commercial area and upwards to some other kind of commercial enterprise.

Or at least it had until recently. It had been some sort of school. Maybe if they've had a standing Army...but the guild wasn't anything like that.

It didn't really matter much in the end because there was no will behind that apparent whoever had owned the Pickler or worked there hadn't come back to pick out their job during the system integration. Clearly I haven't left unlocked but it looked like more that people had just taken all the food they could get and left messages of well wishes for others. Because in addition to all of the prep work that they had undertaken, ß

Bagels going to need to clear the entire building if you wanted to buy it. Even though it was adjacent to one of his previous ones, this one was not a for sale immediately.That doesn't matter. He had to try harder and he could do that. Or are you going to contract that drying harder out to somebody else and pay them the we could afford.

It wasn't that he didn't want to go. It was that he had every incentive not to go and pay someone else to do it. But not a time you need to check out things himself. That's the only one of those times, especially since it used to be a deli store and now was nothing.

If they did everything right, they could go through the first floor, clear it all and make sure that nothing was out of the ordinary. Then they would take the second floor and the third floor and go up that way. If their architectural plans were correct and there was a set of staircases right by the side of the building that they could ascend up through, and potentially go back down the other one. Bagel didn't trust any elevators left missing even though they almost certainly worked because the power and the billing worked. There was not going to be an elevator surfacing company to show up and fix it though. So if they got trapped in there they would have to use their mobs to get out. So it made sense for them to use this stairs.

Bagel played his possum dragon card from his hand and played it.

The six foot long the summon appeared in front of him, all fur and tiny paws.

Those claws are sharp enough to cut through the glass doors this month that it would have to eventually fix the doors. No one wanted just an open door as that would attract pigeons or other birds that were not so delicious as they seemed. Maybe even a peregrine falcon would show up and try to sneak its way in.

Bagels on having that. He had a the possum dragon float by the glass door and scratch a circle so that one of the humans could reach in and open the door from the inside. This was naturally Kate as she had wanted to take him more front line role now. From her told him turtle had to become an excellent to deterrent in advance against hostile mobs. She was able to to adjust it so that it was just hit the hitting enemies.

It could hit humans but she never did that.

There was never a good reason for humans to fight other humans but they seem to find reasons they could make up four all the time. He could see it. Humans using their decks to fight each other for scarce resources. If they didn't have the ability to get my food. There was no reason that they would not kill each other for little scraps or left. Thankfully the water still worked. The sewage worked and you didn't have to do much about garbage cuz they could just burn it up or I love the single service that was really working, sanitation department actually drew their job for once. They showed up on time.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

In fact, the streets they never looked so clean as they did. Now! It just so happened. The looked after him because the possum dragon was fiddling with the door. In Trying to open it before the door just fell right open.

"Well, that was easy," Kate said before cursing.

"You should not have said that. You really should not have said that." Ashley looked distraught.

"What's the worst that-" Kate began, but, Ashley cut off my sentence with a powerful glare that Bagel could feel.

"You're not allowed to drink submissions. No one is. Anything else. Send your turtle in and let's see if he does any damage."

Apparently Kate didn't I have a problem with this as the group around them all just sat waiting for her to be the canary in the coal. Mind. The fact that there was an example of humans using birds, not his food like they should be, but to determine if they should be in the mine or not meant that Bagel was very sad about the system knowledge. He just gotten about canaries. He wanted to assist Ben and that came a blank. Human and Benz will know to check later with Janet recipes. For such a small bird, they might be delicious. And if they were so delicious and small, why didn't the humans eat them after they died in the coal lines. Who cares if there was some sort of black lung thing going around if he got you delicious canaries.

Or it could be because canaries sounded like cherries.

Bagel spent a lot of time thinking about how things sounded like and rhymed was the kind of thing that humans like to hear.

To that end he was thinking of getting a rhyming dictionary of some sort though he didn't think that it would help much.

It was like this system gave him just enough to have a baseline understanding of the world but after that it was up to him to really do a thing with it. And he done things he gone so far. Expanded his store and holdings. And now, with the acquisition of this building, if he could buy it then he could house so many more humans and perhaps be that much closer to finishing out the block and then? He could get the entire neighborhood.

"All right guys. Know the truth here. It's not doing any damage. Do we want to head in?" Bagel sends some hesitation in Kate's voice. Perhaps she was tired of this or perhaps you didn't want to get anyone hurt, but either way, it wasn't really up to her to make that decision for other people they had come here knowing that this was going to be a dangerous mission and now they have to live up to the expectations of that. They were adventures and killed even if a few were police officers. Just too all the peace and if anyone knew with it, Diane is where it was this team.

The people with them had all gone at least ten dungeon delves before. They have proven themselves even in this small time since the formation of the guild and their mission to destroy all the dungeons around the neighborhood and Manhattan eventually.

Once Kate had said it, the tension in the group eased. They began to file inside.

It was clear that all the adventures some of them had to worked together before. Three groups emerged. The first was with Bagel, Kate and Ashley and it contained Ashley's swarm.

The second group was made up of off duty police officers. Yes, they were all suspiciously wearing the same off brand body armor. Yes they all wore shirts two sizes too large to hide that fact. They were fooling no one.

The third groups was made of guilders. They wore the safari type outfit that they killed it in the sales. If dungeon diving has a fashion sense, this was it for the modern New Yorker, or at least for the kind of people were on dungeon dives as well as having a subscription to the New Yorker.

The police officers went in after the swarm of mobs. Every person on this delve had a deck and was already brandishing it.

This was going to be a different kind of experience for him as the police officers clearly wanted to be ahead and nobody else was going to say anything. His role as a support and as the person to be buying the building that meant that he didn't really need to do much. He had to be there yes physically to purchase it but he could have done that from his terminal and he needed to make sure that no one was there with a claim that was better than his or some sort of card powered that would let them buy it. It would assumed that he would be able to buy the entire building outright so there was a hotel on the block that was very tall of height that he could get and he would hate to have to clear a hotel floor by floor. But if that was what it was going to have to happen for him to house all this humans then he would do it.

The drone was not showing much.

That was a problem wasn't it? She wanted to call the shots. She wanted to be a shot caller. She wanted to be the one in the decision seat. They had decision seats in the NYPD right? The person that decides the thing that needs to be done?

That had to be a thing because TVs and TV and movies made it seem like it was real. So of course it was real. She was real and she'd seen it happen on television so well. Perhaps her law and order binge had not given her the right understanding of what the actual law I was supposed to do.

What Khaleesi did know was that they were supposed to take care of the kind of things and that they were over stressed and over taxed and there was a chance that she could make something out of this. Would she? She didn't know. Her original plan of becoming a space astronaut ninja princess was not going to work out as well as she thought based on the fact that there was no one hiring that. It hadn't been like she was going to be able to find one. She was going to have to start at ground level and work her way up to princess. But in this new economy where you didn't really make much, unless you use your deck to kill things with your drones?

Khaleesi wasn't going to be able to strike out on her own until far later. That meant that when she saw movement on the fourth floor, instead of doing what she should have done, which was to call it in, she activated the experimental laser.

That's when things went to shit.