Bodega Cat (System Apocalypse, Deck Builder, Litrpg)

There were enough people trying to fleece him for a card.

His cards.

Bagel wanted people to be responsible citizens so he didn't have to but also; this meant that the man was now out going to go look at postings at the adventurers guild to try to make up the credits that he needed for what he wanted to do.

Bagel couldn't be happier. It was of another potentially satisfied customer that would come back with all the money that he wanted and then bagel will be able to funnel that money back into buying cards from other neighborhoods that were further out.

The possum dragons were one of the hits. They required little and they took any energy. Bagel now had seven energy, five of which were electric, two that were dark. The ability of his bodega required him to dedicate one of his five electric energies to power it as well as one of his four active summon slots.

One of the things that the humans learned was that at level twenty five you got to take a perk. Potentially again level fifty though no one had confirmed it. It would have been great for them to confirm it because Bagel was pretty sure the meatball was getting close to that threshold and she would know.

Ashley would be close if she kept fighting all the time but she had stopped. Bagel would have kept doing stuff but he got an experience penalty.

It meant that he had to work extra hard to get where he was going. And because he got a little bit of experience every time he sold something or bought something, he was incentivized to do that.

It was not nearly as much as it got from fighting. But he was willing to take that penalty to just be able to do what he needed to do. And that was going to be his problem if somebody else came in and bought that gentrifier crab out from underneath the other man.

It might be enough for him to put it in a sealed glass case and then make a display of something similar. If he did that then he would be able to pretend that he had some high value cards. But then he could not sell any high value cards. The ones that everyone wanted were the were-house cards.

Those have been deemed too important by the city to actually let civilians have without a brief talk. A contingent of police officers and civil service volunteers had been sent to scrounge up as many as possible.

That convoy hadn't been heard from you yet even though it had left nearly two weeks prior. Or at least it was just not enough news for it to register to bagel. The humans tended to not involve him in things that they considered their business and he was more than happy to let this continue.

There had to be a certain threshold of how much information there was before it made it to bagel's ears. Unless of course he was paying for information. That was something that Copernicus had told him he needed to start doing. People appreciated getting paid for their knowledge and what they uncovered.

Raul came in that afternoon to try and work out a little bit of his post-dungeon blues, Bagel had him explain what had happened in the last several dungeons he had run.

"They were all pretty bad but I think I'm getting a hang of it." Rail brush his electric black hair out of his eyes. It wasn't long but it was distracting him.

"But your team has been pretty good about it?"

"It's a little bit of this, a little bit of that. They need to get off their high horses and not think we are heroes."

"I can't imagine anyone trying to be a hero in this. We're all just trying to do our best to survive."

"Weird that it felt like it was easier for the system to take over than for capitalism to just end. Anyway, let me tell you about this last one. It was a seal themed dungeon and by that I mean Navy seals, baby seals, sacred seals... It's like the system is making a mockery of what a human is and it's trying to make some references to itself or something?"

When Raul was done with his brief summary of the three dungeons he had run today, Bagel was happy to hear that there had been no clown types. Bagel hate clown types. Especially the ones that just sat in your hair for a while because they smelled particularly like something or other. It was hard to get the smell of clown meat out of somebody's fur, but he knew exactly how much it took and he appreciated every single moment that a volunteer had taken, Liza, to clean him off.

"That is weird. You're not the only human to tell me that. You know... I expect weird things from humans now all the time."

Raul patted him on the head, the gentle friendly familiar pat that Bagel loved for so long reminded him that he had been in the shop for a long time. In fact, Raul was supposed to take over for him.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

"Hey, where's Meatball?" Raul said, scanning for her.

"Adventurers guild business. Almost certainly. I told her she was free to go. She told me it didn't work like that."

"So probably the same place as Khaleesi and Ashley and Kate is what you're telling me? I'm biting. My parents are over there as well. No they're not. Actually because my mom is still upstairs so that's out."

Bagel smirked. He might be able to get a good meal out of Liza. All of her food was always great. It was never a question. The only answer was when he would be eating it.. when would Liza as fees him if he messed up the rest.

"Do you want to stick around?"

"I think that I'm going to take her really long sleep tonight."

"Meatball?"

"You know it."

His dreams were in tossing and turning all night. Was he ready to face oak world without some of his friends? He could if he had to. But he didn't want to.

---

"All right, that's all I can do for now. Make sure that they all eat as much as they can."

Members of the adventurers guild had come into the Bodega and cleared out his shelves.

He would be compensated of course.

They were loading it out onto an electrified delivery truck. With that truck, there would be driving as far downtown as I could to try and get to the ferry and once there, they would be using Janet too, meatball and potentially police in order to remove the ferry from the dock.

Khaleesi had spent several days working out how she could set up a dock there. In the end, it was going to take bringing you the actual ferry back up to forty second street.

There was a very nice section of roosevelt island by the United Nations that they were going to use as a land bridge to connect to a floating pier.

This crew was the work crew that was trying to set that up. It would save them time getting people onto the water and moving.

"How has it been looking out there?" Bagel asked the man with a neckbeard. But at that exact moment he wasn't sure whether he could say it out loud.

"Well the only question we have now is if we can sling up some sort of zip line because I don't think that the ground is low enough there. We have a secondary idea which is hang on to a drone and then fly down."

"They don't want to fly on one of their scavenger drones? I can't imagine why not."

The man chuckled. "Believe me when I say that the zipline idea is one of the better ones we've had."

"I cannot imagine anyone willing to do that, but also things are so strange now that why not."

"See that's the spirit. I should be out here celebrating my thirtieth birthday but instead what I'm doing is loading up crates of food and supplies so that we can stage an assault against Staten Island. Things are so strange."

"But at least you're doing it safely!"

The man tugged at his high visibility work vest like it was an ill fitting braid. It was three sizes too large but Bagel wasn't going to say anything. The man he was now sure had looked a lot larger. The last time that they had encountered each other.

Gone were several layers of what had to have been fat. Now the man looked like he had been running constantly for two months and was about to punch Forrest Gump's lights out. It was probably just the way that things were around here that there just wasn't enough food to go around in general or at least enough food from his convenience store for it to go around.

Sometimes people come to him with bags full of groceries from the Amish market and he would just look at them and shrug. People could still be greedy even in an apocalypse. He knew damn well how that felt.

"I am safe. Yes. None of the mobs won't attack somebody who's glowing neon."

"Wait is that true because I heard..."

"It's not true. Don't tell anybody. I do not want to be held liable. I know that there's no functioning courts right now, but eventually we will have a society that works."

"A lot of humans think they're going to go back to something like the old days. Do you really think that? I'm not sure that we're going back there." Bagel was adamant that he didn't talk about this was Ashley or Kate. He didn't want them to think any different about him. But he was definitely a cat.

Nothing was going to change that.

Nothing was going to change how humans felt about their society. They built theirs up over years and now it would happen again.

Did they elect the system? No. He was happier when he didn't know about things like this.

He just needed make sure that cats were not shut out of the dialogue.