Bodega Cat (System Apocalypse, Deck Builder, Litrpg)

Bagel was once again hit with how delicious getting food delivered tasted. The food itself was delicious. Having it taken to him was delicious. Accepting it felt so human.

"Do you know they used to be able to order food delivery through their phones?" Bagel said.

"Ridiculous. They could have just walked to a spot," Meatball said.

Khaleesi was minding the register with them. It was more about them keeping her out of trouble than anything else.

"You're really convenient to be able to order things. Now. There aren't that many places we can get food. You know it's just you and the Amish market on our block, right? The Walgreens is still open but when they restock it's different."

"What else is open?" Meatball said.

Khaleesi blinked. "The German place is open. Which is wild to me. They're going to have to run out of beer at some point in time, right? Unless they restock."

"Unless they restock."

"You know what; that card is way more useful than I thought it was. Even though you basically have your shelves stripped bare hourly, he feed so many people here. Between you and the Amish market it's got to be hundreds if not thousands of people we feed daily."

Bale head and count how many people I had gotten tuned into the store. He knew that the numbers were probably around there, but he hadn't asked Janet. He knew that she knew. He didn't care. All things being equal. He didn't mind feeding more people, but he wasn't going to go out of their way to feed somebody.

Even if he really wanted to, he could only restock parts of the store at once, meaning that he had to go around and restock stuff. Stuff. The most important thing for him to restock was the food for the grill and that had been one of the more contentious things because so many nice cold drinks. But they also used to restock all the meats and all the things that the cooks needed to produce something.

It wasn't an option for him to not make the maximum amount of food he could each day. Janet had run the numbers. He has also not wanted to double check her work though he knew he could. Sometimes the system let him know he was capable of things that a normal human should be able to do. This one? He would let the AI take care of it.

"TSA meeting today though, right?"

Bagels claws shot out. "Yes. The first official one in a week. The last one was... Less than successful."

"Well, I hope this one goes better. It's open to the public, right?" Meatball had noticed it but she wasn't tripping her paw. Or was she?

"It should go better. This one is with the shareholders, and I don't think there's going to be a lot of attendance so I'm hoping it's over quickly." There had never been a normal meeting and bagels estimation and there probably wouldn't ever be a normal meeting.

---

"I called this meeting of the order of the shareholders of the TSA. This is a public meeting open to questions to the public. The minutes will be publicized on our website at a later date. The secretary duly appointed by the president, a Mr. Bagel. Because he's a cat, he doesn't have a first name separate from his last name. He is the president of the TSA by virtue of his ownership stake and his appointment by the city government."

Bagel smiled. Janet knew what was up.

"Additionally, if you're taking a look at the chart here behind us, you can see our current plans for what we're doing with the city's money and what's going to be happening next. The full copy of the store will again be on our website. Due to New York city's transformations, you should be able to find everything we are expecting a few more days to be able to purchase three more buildings and then we'll have about ten left before we can really work on some of the other expansion areas. The city wanted us to consolidate our games in one spot before we moved on to the next."

There were so many people there that she didn't know to speak to. There's only two people who has shown up and both had taken bagel aside beforehand to remind him that they were hoping that he would move faster.

"We've got one thing to notice in the minutes here and that is the amount of square footage increase. Next to it, they'll be the next acquisition so long as that works out well."

The screen flashed with the new acquisition from the five-story building they just gotten next to the Amish market. It also showed a photo of it.

"This is what your investments are working on. Safety and security," Janet said. "For this block and then more."

The slideshow shifted to a screenshot of the TSA logo. Not having to say a single word during the presentation was doing a lot of heavy lifting for his smile.

He didn't have to do any prep. He didn't need to do anything except show up and look good. If a shareholder had a question, Janet had the answer.

His job was to be a pretty face.

"Now going to open up the discussion to the water group. Are there any questions about what we're doing or the direction that this is happening. Remember that we are limited to actions at the city. Let's us take so we can't go on wild tangents."

One of the shareholders, Holly if he remembered correctly stood up.

"When can investors expect to get a return from this? And I understand that this is a government bond but..."

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Bagel at that statement standard out for a little bit before he responded. "The standard return will be about 10 years now. We understand that seems like forever from now but, Time will pass anyway. If any place is safe from the system, it's this block here with the amount of people that are invested in it being free."

She looked pleased with the answer. Holly tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear before she sat down.

All three of them, Janet, bagel and Holly turned to look at the other woman. If Bagel was correct, it was Lisa who still had blonde highlights despite the weeks of system integration. There was something about a woman that decided to go against her own nature by dying her hair color that pleased Bagel.

It wasn't that the act itself felt unnatural to him. It was just that she had chosen something very specific and human. No cat will be caught dead dying. Its own hair. That felt so utterly human. Why would you change try to change the fundamental being of who you were. Cats had for all over the place. If he wasn't happy with part of it, he would just look at the other part.

Indeed, he spied his stripes and realized that he was quite enamored with it. There was no reason for him to dye his hair. And even if it went gray, he would be handsome still then. Nothing would change outside of him so he wouldn't change anything inside.

However, she just looked like she was here to observe.

They gave the shareholders another minute to go over that before. Janet was going to go into new items. The AI had followed something called Robert's rules orders, though he didn't understand what that meant. It was something that they were trying to adhere to because of course, humans wanted laws about things. He just had to be a party of that. He did not want to have to go by their system, but he was here now, and he was doing things for them because they needed his powers. They needed his magic cards to save the world so he would begrudgingly accept because they were paying him handsomely.

Or at least it feels like they're paying him handsomely. Somebody was making money off of this. Bagels new aim was for that person or entity to be him.

When it was time for them to go over new items, the only thing was that Holly requested that they had a frequently asked questions item to their web page. This prompted bagel to have to check to see if they had one, which they did, thanks to Janet creating one.

Job done, Janet released them and called for the next meeting of the shareholders to be in about a week with the notes going to be posted that evening of the meeting they had just held. It was so simple and so quick. How he was able to just manage the human's credit in order to buy and hold more land. It was like you could transfer the land either. There was no stipulation allowing him to do that, something that the building department was really incensed about.

How is he going to know that he couldn't just transfer the deeds back to the city willy-nilly. He didn't want to, but he would if he had to.

He just didn't want to.

---

"What do your think's going to happen next?" Kate said. "More of the same? Or do you think that the system is going to try to increase the difficulty again or something?"

"I don't think they're going to increase the difficulty exponentially. It's been what twenty-one days? Twenty-eight days?"

Ashley hated being on a duty they were doing. But someone had to do it.

"I mean there's no way to be closer to the action that on cleanup duty right?"

The two women were driving a repurposed laundry services work van.

"Oh, there's one. Fuck that's gruesome. Masks up," Kate said.

Both women put their masks up over their noses as they stepped out. There was a time before the system arrived that Ashley didn't understand why people had worn masks in so many pictures of World War one. She understood why they did it during covid. She didn't disagree with it, but this was different.

"We've all going to do it," she said, her voice no louder than a whisper. She'd been repeating the mantra several times, hoping that today was not going to be the day that she had to put someone into a body bag.

"Fuck," Kate intoned.

The grown question looks like she'd had her skull smashed in against curb and the scorch marks all over her made it clear that it had been a mob with electric ability. If Ashley had the gas based off just what she was seeing, the woman had been attacked by a Omega rat, and then either electrocuted and then fallen or fall and then got electrocuted.

People were just giving the body a wide berth. Ashley couldn't blame them. Just because death was now an old part of life, didn't mean that people didn't have a bit of reverence for it.

The woman clearly didn't have any cards. Her purse was still on her purse as well.

"Do you want to set up the bag while I put her purse away?" Kate said.

Kate was a bit more comfortable with this, so naturally she led Ashley to the next steps almost automatically. It was like being shepherded through a violent fight. Ashley had been through enough close calls in the dungeons that this wasn't unheard of. But with the adventurous guild stepping in to be an auxiliary Force for the police, they'd given specific training on how to handle a body so that people didn't get infected or developed some problems. There was a morgue set up in trailer outside of the hospital that they were going to bring this body to.

Kay went back to the van to call it in, leaving Ashley alone with the girl. Was she a girl? She had been. Now she was gone.

Ashley found it hard to look away. She wanted to bear witness to this woman's life and her triumphs and tribulations. She wanted the woman to be alive with her just for another minute or two. It would be great to spend an afternoon with her. Just talking to her about her life and everything she'd been through.

She'd been through a lot. They all had. The woman had survived weeks into the system apocalypse without having a card deck of her own. To have her life and in such a way this late in the game felt terrible.

It wasn't like so you could see the end of the game. But it also would be the worst game ever. She just needed to see an end to it.

But the only end that anyone got was the ending that resulted in the woman in front of her being brutally murdered on a street that had been so safe before this.

"Forty second avenue," Kate said. "Between first and second street, yep. Okay I'll keep you posted."

Kate returned with the bags.

Ashley tried not to gag. The body bag was supposed to not smell like anything. It was supposed to smell neutral to nothing when there was a body in there so long as the body was cold.

Kate laid down the body bag next to the woman and they rolled around to one side as Kate slipped the bag underneath her. They rolled her onto the bag and into it, only pausing to zip it up.

They were handled on either side, making this easier. That it hadn't brought a stretcher which they should have but in the time that things had started happening, they hadn't had being able to find any. It wasn't like the FDNY just left these things laying around.

In fact, she was just happy that the girl wasn't that heavy and that she was able to use mob support to pick the woman up and put in the back of the van. It would have been easier with a human-shaped mob but her gentrifier crab felt like was built for this.

Maybe not for moving body bags with humans in them but that kind of load moving.

It was slow going, but it needed to be done.