I sent Isiah off with the skeletons to check the rest of the store, not that I expected him to do that but I figured it would do him some good to distance himself from the heavy smell of Iron.

I had found myself a new, challenge, might be the wrong word for it. I knew exactly how to remove the flesh from these corpses, the problem was that I had no idea where to dump the meat.

This place might be where we set up so I shouldn't leave it here, just outside would cause the stench to leak in and that's no good. So the best thing was to head somewhere else entirely and do it there.

With Isiah having all my fellows I started wandering the store. The main door had 6 sets of window frames on each side, the simple way would be to fill the frames, but 1 frame still had the window and was nearly fully intact. I wanted to keep it for no real reason other than its rarity, I wasn't too sure how I was gonna get it out if it's stone frame or whatever the hell they make stores out of, but I'm gonna try.

Even if I don't end up wanting the window as bad as I think I do it'll sell for a hefty chunk with how rare a nearly intact window is, it's only got that little crack in the bottom left.

The checking counters served little use so we'd just get rid of them. The conveyor belts on most were pretty well intact so if we had power we could do some shenanigans with them, so it's a real shame we don't, might be worth keeping though. They'd probably fetch a pretty penny.

This place was oddly full of things to sell. I know The Whistlers about this place nowadays so people stay far but it wasn't always here, meh whatever, works for me.

I wandered the isles for a bit, the shelves were in pretty rough shape, They'd all end up getting removed likely. The refrigerated sections were empty of course, I wasn't aware if any of the refrigeration would function if we got electricity, Isiah might know how but I certainly don't. The chances of him knowing were pretty minuscule but I'll ask anyway.

There was nothing of note besides what I assumed was the 3 fellows' things, they must've been camping out in the store. A few tents, and some bags, located near the end of the store in a corner. They didn't have any guns on them so there was nothing in particular here that I cared about, but extra food and water was always welcome.

The jerky they had was especially good, maybe I'm biased because down at Mudtooth when it came to meat we ate nothing but bugs, but this shit was good. The storage area had intact shelves, this wasn't a small store but it wasn't big. For our goals, I'd say that it's serviceable.

I headed back to the checking counters took a seat and called out for Isiah, and he appeared eventually.

"Head on back to Red Grove, we need tools, hammers, nails, whatever we can build with really."

He seemed a little wistful but he left.

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Now that there was only one thing left to do. At first I tried directly picking up the corpse and the only thing that achieved was covering me in blood, so I just dragged it. There was a gas station down the road and past that a fast food place, seemed as good a spot as any. After I got the first corpse there, then the second, and while I was just outside I heard a barely audible whistle. Ignoring it I dragged the corpse in and sat it with the rest and sat down on a chair after after wiping off the glass and gazed out the window frame.

Listening to the whistle get louder over the next minute I stood up and got to work. After about 15 minutes I'd gotten a good start on the 1st one, maybe I'm just weird but I somehow found it less revolting skinning this one so far than the Mistwalker.

Speaking of I wish it'd go somewhere else, its whistling was distracting me something fierce.

As I removed another strip of flesh it knocked down a stool in the diner, wandering just past it went to loiter around the back. That's how my next few hours went, skinning, gutting, ignoring the loiterer. And after all that, I had a few bloody skeletons. Since the only thing I could store in Ossuary was bones I could clean them very easily since the blood couldn't come with them.

Once my bones were nice and clean I headed back to the store and grabbed a cyan vial and did that thing I love to do. This one's name will be Ron. I brought the extra bones back and even got to make a discovery, the bones don't need to be put together just relatively close, so I didn't even have to assemble the skeleton.

My other Skeletons were nice dry and dead but this one still had that pinkish-yellow in its bones, it'd take a few days to dry out so I left him in the back.

Isiah would be back soon so I sat about and lounged for a while.

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It took a lot of effort, the chiseling of a wall with a fancy magic dagger for hours effort, but I got my window. Isiah had mostly bought wood, they must have a nice surplus of Awakened down there if they were selling wood so that's a nice little bonus. First, we made a square of wood, then we filled the center with 5 small straight pieces of wood.

After doing that 11 more times, we binded the wood to the window frames using epoxy. After they were dry we used some rusty corrugated roofing and attached it to the frame we made using screws. With the windows closed off there was a whole lot of building ahead of us, and by us I mean Isiah, it's not like I know how to build a good cask or anything. So I took Bandit and Joe and left Isiah to do his thing I was heading to Red Grove to go check out their dungeon

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The energy in this place was not too energetic but it was better than Mudtooth, the people were fairly well-mannered at minimum. We only did a small check and didn't go too deep, we estimate this place has got a population of about 11'000 people. So I did the only thing a person looking for information should do, I headed to a bar and struck up conversation with the patrons.

I wouldn't describe this place as a bar though, it was more like one of those medieval taverns you hear about in books, lively and rambunctious. This place was not any sort of conversion as seen typically but was constructed entirely after the descent.

I'd have to oil up someone real nice if I wanted to get the info I wanted, people kept the info about their dungeons pretty tight in these areas.

Chatting and drinking through the night I got little bits and pieces. After hours of drinking and chatting things started to go a bit off the rails, my notebook was full of little bits of knowledge. so I stowed it and was going to leave but then realized that I couldn't feel much of anything and my legs were barely functioning. So I bought a room and stayed the night.

It was a pretty nice room, it had all the things you'd expect a room to have so I give it a 9/10.

I spent the next while touching up my notes into a nice quick summary before sleeping like the dead.