NOVEL NEXT 84. Return Ferry
"So we took the ferry back up here. What we need is your help." Ashley leaned back, away from the police officer. He had just given him the equivalent of three buckets of verbal diarrhea in her reports, which has ranged from the difficult of doing all of the little pieces of stealing a ferry to just explaining what a problem the fliers would be.
Sergeant Parvo was nodding along to her recounting of the attempt, taking notes. He looked up. "I wish Lieutenant Gil was here he would have had a solution for this problem with the machine guns. We went to Iraq together. Of course I outranked him there..."
Ashley nodded. The man in the blue uniform paused his note taking.
"I didn't say this but I have a Iraqi festival that could have let you guys but I just know it's not going to work cuz I had it fixed."
"Eating machine guns issue. It's just the training and the ammunition. I'm not sure if what we have is going to work."
"If you want some training then we can arrange that. Anything to reclaim the land. If other islands like this then I can't imagine how bad Long Island is right now. Some parts of it are basically inaccessible."
Ashley leaned back against the wall. The stool that she had was nest against the wall by choice. She'd pick the corner of the adventurous guild to set up in for this interview and he'd come up by the bench. It wasn't a bar but it was a bar top setup. It just was more efficient for them to have a place where he could talk to her and she could sit down and reply.
"You... What?"
"You've heard about ghost guns?" Ashley began.
Parvo blanched, a difficult feat because his skin was dark. "You know what? Don't tell me I don't need to know this and I don't want to be held liable later. You want the details and how to make the ammunition? I will call somebody I know."
"As much as you can get. I don't think that we're going to be stingy with it so..."
"Noted. This sounds like we're going to need to bring in the coast guard. They've got those cool mobile platforms that are actually built for this. You've got... A borrowed ferry."
Ashley shrugged, taking a long sip of her beer. It tasted like freedom.
At some point now they're going to open the beer card up again and she was so excited for that. She hadn't gone a lot but it was only a block away from her house. So why wouldn't she go when she had a chance? There were so many things that she had just taken for granted that she couldn't even deal with. Now. He couldn't even find it and leave her hose in and Kate had been about it. And Ashley appreciated Kate's attention to detail.
"Alright. I'm looking for a weight amount of these at the ferry because I hear they get really hot and if you want to use them a lot then you should consider mounting them to something?"
"There should be a very simple way to mount them. I think you could use a tripod, but if you're on a ship then it should be as easy as setting that up on some sort of thing that you've weld into the ship. I think we have a mechanic eye somewhere in the force and I will see if I can send over to the guild later. Or you can talk to Ace. She was pretty good about drones..."
"Lieutenant Gil wife? She's been working with Drones and Scones. I'll hit her up."
Sergeant Parvo grimaced. "I heard that she knows way too much. You should think about what you're going to do to land. I was not even that high on the chain of command and I had no clue what was going on."
"If your higher chain of command would tell us what they want us to do that would be great. Right now kind of just using it as an experience and card farm opportunity. We're getting a whole lot of money from this and bagel's going to be able to buy up a lot more land due to the density of how many we're killing me. It really is just a mess out there. I don't think there's anybody still living on the island."
"Half a million people used to call that place home."
"Fuck. That feels way more like a statistic than anything else."
She didn't expected that to feel so close to the heart. It wasn't her job to say of Staten Island. Well true. It was a quest that the the city put down upon them to do but she could only do so much.
"I can see the look. Just do what you can. No one is asking you to be a martyr. We just need to figure out a way to know that the city get overrun."
"How is the NYPD doing?"
Now, it looked like his turn to be taken aback. The creases of the wrinkles around his face were were far more evident at that moment.
"Fuck. Did you know how many precincts there were before this?" He said. He lowered his voice. "We lost five so far. On top of Staten Island."
"We lost five? How?"
"The buildings were overrun. We had to let them go. We stripped them of anything useful and then we bombed the heck out of them. Well not me but the rest of the guys did."
Ashley wanted to shove him but refrained. "Parvo that's a shitty way of saying you had to cede ground. I'm guessing a lot of people died."
He nodded. "There's no official death count but the roll call..."
He didn't need to say anything else to her. She'd been to enough memorials to understand. This was going to take a lot to get past.
"We're hiring again though it's not going to be the same normal training. We're looking for people with experience... People like you. I understood that you're leading the guild but we need all the help we can get."
Actually appreciated the distance they had from the NYPD. Technically they didn't have to take any of the quests so the nipiti gave them or the assignments. But on the other side, everything that both groups are doing was to benefit the greater good. And most of the credit good was just allowing people to be safe and have the most normal lives possible in the new hellscape that they had arrived in.
"Well, that's a tempting offer. Came here to become a star on Broadway and I'm getting offered a position in the New York's bravest. No offense if I turn you down?"
He shook his head.
"You're doing more than anyone could ask of you on your own time so it would just be more intrusive. We could make you a sergeant. But I don't think you really want this."
Stolen novel; please report.
"Did you ask Bagel? Actually where is he I haven't seen him or Kate today?"
Ashley looked around the guild. There are a lot more couches around now and several more places where people just eat and drink. The little shop in the back was much expanded in his offerings even though the shelves looked half bare. They knew what they were selling and they just had a list of orders written on actual paper that the two people behind the counter kept working on.
Liza was putting together a pair of pants and fulfilling an order.
The space felt both large and expansive but also not enough. Their activity spilled out into the front where the the cots would be temporarily wounded and the walking wounded were. Paolo was more than happy to remind her that he'd had no clients that day. Or in his words, no patients.
"He overdid himself yesterday and I feel like he went into some sort of work burnout cycle. Liza made sure that he went back up to the apartment and he was sleeping through the night. It's already ten; he should be back. You can go check on him if you want to?"
Parvo nodded. "Once I get this report sent in
... Actually I should go check on him first. It's just around the corner?"
Second floor, the door is at the back of the four five deli to the apartments. The key is under the rug if it's not open. It's the only apartment on that floor.
"Bougie as fuck, eh?"
"It feels big but there's four people living there now. It won't feel so big if they're all back home."
"Alright thanks," he said. "I've got to deliver him some credits anyway."
---
It was always bother someone. Somebody interrupted his naps. But humans, one of things and bagel was going to try to deliver as much as they could to provide value for his neighborhood. That also meant that if opportunity was going to knock, he might as well answer it. But this time, opportunity just opened the door. Sergeant parva walked in. The man was still in a blue outfit, than normal one that virtually every single officer wore. He looked tired and his uniform had seen better days.
Bagel idly wondered if he used to press his shirts. What do you do now without dry cleaning or my the water works so the washing machines had to work. The electricity worked meaning that the dryers worked. But perhaps I was thinking that this was far more normal then he expected. The only problem was that he didn't really have reference for what was here.
"Parvo?" Bagel said, stretching. That man wasn't any on the family members that he thought was going to show up. In fact, he half expected it to be Meatball, playing a prank on him.
But Meatball was busy.
"Hey Bagel I thought I would drop in. Ashley said you might have overdone it yesterday and yeah just wanted to check in on you."
Bagel didn't know what to say. Something's felt warm and it wasn't for once a fart. Of course they haven't come in and get them him feeling vulnerable. Perhaps he wanted something. There was going to be an ask somewhere?
"First off I've got some credits I'm going to transfer over from the city," he said.
Touching wasn't necessary to transfer credits but it enabled the initial bond.
It took only a second for a bagel to accept the amount of credits that the bank was giving him. His eyes widened at the amount.
"That was... How many people...?" Bagel stammered.
"You could probably buy a whole block right? The city government had to get that here. They're trying to reclaim the subway."
Bagel know exactly what that meant.
"So they've decided on a direction?"
"You know what they want. They're supposed to leave it up to your discretion but then why you do start moving West and South and North. Basically every direction except for East. Now you and I both know that there's still a few blocks before we reach the East River, but these bureaucrats are not planning this the right way."
Bagel swished his tail. It would be just like the city to send him somebody familiar. He just hadn't expected Sergeant Parvo to be the one.
"Officially I am not going to tell you which way to expand, but I am also going to tell you that there's no Subway lines over there. There are Subway lines directly south and west of us and the city wants to get those back."
"I'm going to have to talk with my shop assistant before I buy any of these but I catch her meaning loud and clear."
"It's good that we understand each other. I want to remind you that you're invited to the Biergarten if you ever want to just talk. No pressure."
"I'll keep that in mind."
Bagel was going to have some heavy decisions to make. Now that the city was going to start playing their hand. He could now buy almost a block and a half with what he had. Actually, considering that he had the discount he could buy more than that, but was he going to do that? Every time that he he brought up a building it had to be clear to monsters and that was an arduous task. Some of the buildings were clear already making it easy but others he needed to call in the adventurers guild.
The humans were not in charge of the TSA the way that he was based off of the last meeting. He wasn't going to let that stop him. Of course they were going to want something from him.
And of course, he was going to be a good handsome boy and pretend to give them what they want but really figured a way to get them what they needed instead. Did they need a beer garden? Or did they need him to grab up more of the roads. The only rule that really affected him was that he needed to buy buildings or roads or land that was adjacent to the previous stuff that he bought.
Other than that, they left it up to him.
It wasn't that it was trying to aim to please. He was trying to form a safe zone and if part of it backed into the water then they wouldn't be attacked from that direction. And he knew how much it would cost. But the buildings that he wanted to buy between what the jelly was and the East River was were going to cost way more than he thought. He couldn't even see how much a building would cost until he owned something adjacent to it.
He could only guess.
But now it was time for him to roll the dice and make some educated guesses.