You have dropped half of a small tribe of Goblins into a manaless void!
Enemy: Level 1 - 3
You ran your chainsaws blade through the back of a Goblin!
Enemy: Level 1
[I.P Weaponization] Proficiency has increased!
[Dimensional Manipulation]
Portal Generation Proficiency has increased slightly!
[Dimensional Manipulation]
Dimension Generation Proficiency has increased slightly!
Jake watched the last goblin fall into the darkness below just as the goblins had watched his precious belongings go flying into the ground, waiting.
You’ve dropped a Goblin into a manaless void below!
Enemy: Level 1
You have killed half of a small tribe of Goblins through burning and suffocation.
Enemy: Levels 1 - 3
Quest Completed!
The foul intruders have been vanquished! It shall be a great deal of time before another herd of beasts find themselves foolish enough to colonize one of your outposts again.
Caution: Completing this quest does not grant your outpost immunity from monster invasion at any point in time.
Rewards for Quest Completion
Progress towards Level Up
Level Up!
The system has granted you five stat points to freely allocate as you see fit. The maximum size of an area you can gamify has also increased.
300 Game Tokens Rewarded in Total
+100 Tokens for Quest Completion!
+100 Tokens for 2-Day Quest Completion Streak!
+100 Tokens for Early Beta Tester Bonus!
$300 U.S Dollars Rewarded in Total
+$100 Dollars for Quest Completion!
+$100 Dollars for 2-Day Quest Completion Streak!
+$100 Dollars for Early Beta Tester Bonus!
Current Non-Token Funds in Holding
$1,000 U.S Dollars
Jake didn’t ask for the total amount of dollars he had earned at the end there, but he definitely appreciated seeing it.
New Quest
Founder’s Quest 3 - Pre—
“I’m going to need you to hold off on that one for now,” Jake said, closing the last message.
From where he was standing on the main treehouse’s deck, he walked back over to the still burning goblin hut and summoned a couple fire extinguishers from his Inventory to put it out. After that was done, he put his extinguishers away and climbed down the treehouse’s ladder.
Unlike the bathroom instance where he could see outside the instance’s exit, he couldn’t see the real world in this one. On the outside with his display shades on he saw the instance’s giant alternative to his tree covering his normal tree’s top half. On the inside, however, he saw the instance tree in its full glory from its peak to the soil and the open plain that surrounded it. There was no normal tree beneath it and there was no grandparent’s backyard surrounding it.
Jake couldn’t see the instance’s edge, but he wasn’t completely blind to it. When he was about halfway down the tree’s ladder, he could feel the end of the instance.
Once he was actually fully past the halfway point, the world visually shook with the kind of static you’d see on an old television. In less than the time it takes to blink, Jake was switched from the ladder of the tree in the instance to his mundane tree’s ladder. It was disorienting, but not in the head spinning kind of way he experienced when he first took his display shades off in an instance.
Jake stepped down from the mundane tree’s ladder, then walked over to the ladder he had placed against the side of the house to get up to the roof.
On top of the roof he had a bow with a quiver full of arrows and an assortment of decorative white rocks of various sizes laid out on the roof. He’d brought them up there before beginning his assault on the goblins’ invader camps in preparation. The bow, the quiver, and the arrows were bought from a hunting catalog and the white rocks came as a part of a limited time home decor collection.
Infomercial Product Weaponization
Anything and everything can be a weapon as long as you’ve seen it on television!
If a product you're using has been bought from an infomercial or a catalog, you gain bonus proficiency in using it as a weapon.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
This skill’s effect can be applied to multiple items at once.
As he usually did, Jake had mixed feelings about anything that even hinted at giving any validation to his grandmother’s hoarder habits, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t about to use everything that was available to him.
When he picked up any of these items, Jake could fill his powers running through them. He’d never trained to use a bow before, but he had felt confident enough holding it to try shooting an arrow into the instance tonight.
Once he had exited the instance under the arrow fire of the goblin guards, he wanted to give them his own arrow fire in return. Unfortunately, when his first arrow hit the edge of the instance, however, it bounced off its translucent border and fell spinning down to the ground below.
The only reward Jake received for that effort was a tutorial.
Tutorial - Out of Bounds
Unless an instance is unbounded, attacks from outside the border of an instance can only enter said instance under exceptional conditions.
Nothing Jake could do about that. It wasn’t like he was planning to play at being a sniper anyway. He was just testing out what he could do. His real plan was to get up close and personal from the start.
Though the view was warped since the instance was much bigger on the inside, Jake could still tell that the tree’s remaining large branch was very close to his grandparent’s roof on the outside. It was why he cut down the other branch first and didn’t bother trying to cut down the second one when the guards started firing at him.
Feeling a bit like a mad man, Jake bulk ported the rocks and hunting gear into his Inventory, then took a running jump off of his roof towards his instance. As he passed the dimensional boundary, the just short of twenty foot drop was replaced with a fifty foot one.
Right as gravity was taking hold of him again, Jake slammed into the deck on top of the tree’s remaining major branches behind the charred remains of the goblins’ hut.
Definitely a good way to get the blood pumping, he thought.
He took the long climb down back out of the instance, removed the ladder from the side of his grandparent’s house, bulk unpacked everything he had in his Inventory, then got ready for work. He still had his job to go to in a couple hours, after all, and he wasn’t about to quit it until he got his last check at the end of the current pay period.
And so it was, just like that, Jake went to work having flushed a giant slime monster down a giant toilet the day before and slaughtered an entire tribe of goblins before sunrise acting like none of it had ever happened.
If his behavior had been off after having been mauled by giant spiders and almost drowning in cleaning gel, the boys at dispatch made no attempt to inform him of that being the case.
He doubted they had actually noticed anything off. If they did, his usual partner, Ernie, would have noticed too and Ernie definitely would have brought it up. The man was constantly looking for any excuse to distract himself from the job.
When Jake got back home after work, he only took a short break before slipping his wrist brain onto his wrist, putting on his display shades, and pulling up his quest he had put on hold.
Founder’s Quest 3 - Prelude
This next quest requires a specific kind of location for you to complete it.
Hidden within your treehouse, you have a map that the goblin’s weren’t able to get their filthy hands on.
Find the map to continue on with the quest.
Following the quest’s instructions, Jake climbed up to the abandoned tree fort in his backyard’s instance and entered it for the first time. It was a complete mess on the inside. There was glass from a shattered window, turned over and emptied chest, a knocked over table, desk, and chairs, a side bedroom with a mattress the goblins had made a point of ruining, and a raided fridge and ransacked cooler that had been turned over.
Jake was already feeling no regrets for what he had done to those goblins, but seeing all this made him even more sure of himself.
He was also impressed.
Not with the goblins, of course, but with the system that had generated all of this. The System had turned some expired cans of soda and a few blankets into a cooler, a fridge, and a bedroom and had turned some walkie talkies that needed new batteries into a full set of gear in the chest that those moron goblins had thrown out.
He was really starting to appreciate the potential of settings The System could produce for him.
It took Jake less than five minutes to find the hidden map the quest had talked about. At first he’d tried checking the knocked over desk and for a hidden compartment and did the same with the bed. Since the quest said it was something hidden, he assumed it wasn’t something that the goblins had just knocked over and left out.
When he didn’t find one in the desk, the bed, or behind the fridge, he checked the round table they had knocked over. Immediately, he noticed that it had a twist off top. The goblins must have been only looking for food and the creature comforts—and maybe some form of currency too—if they hadn’t ended up finding it.
He twisted off the top and found the map right there. The map was one of those kinds that they printed on foldout pamphlets they’d hand out at museums and amusement parks.
Just like the quest description implied, the map covered his local area cutting off a bit after the area that contained the city proper. While he was still looking around on it, three points suddenly lit up. Two of the points were glowing yellow and the one was green.
Founder's Quest 3 - Prelude
Choose one of the marked locations on the map below and begin the process of integrating a local store into the Gamify Connected Store Network today!
Jackpot, Jake thought. He was one step closer to getting the money he’d been collecting from the quests. But what was all this other stuff that was scribbled over this map?
Before his display shades had highlighted the three points, the worn out map already had multiple locations circled on it. Each of the circled locations had arrows pointing to them with text written at the tail end naming them. These were the names:
Creepy Old House
Old Factory [On the Roof]
The Fountain in the Park
The Sandbox
The Old Movie Theater
There was one more arrow pointing off of the edge of the map towards school. It was the same school Jake had gone to for elementary and middle school.
Howard K-8 [The Middle School Library]
There was a Post-It Note with the word ‘Go Back’ on it stuck next to that arrow.
What is all of this, he wondered. He noticed a folded paper slid under the lip of the hidden compartment, pulled it out, and unfolded it. Four words caught his eyes.
—this city is dead.