We didn’t leave immediately. JoeyT perused the shop interface, filling me in on what he found. Apparently he would collect taxes on anything the shop sold, although he was able to lower this from the starting rate of 16.7% to a minimum closer to 1.4%.
“So it starts at one-sixth - or two-twelfths - but you can bring it down to 2/144,” Byron said. “Those would be nice round numbers in their number system.”
The shop let us input blueprints, after which we could buy an apparently unlimited quantity of whatever items they listed… but it only worked for small, portable items. Anything that appeared at a set location, like my wall blueprints or Davi’s door, couldn’t be added, which meant that my Shop blueprint couldn’t be added either. We added all the Blueprints we could and purchased several for our own use, then set up a little “house” nearby for TAF. One of the Walsenburg residents had actually gotten a roof blueprint, something we’d assumed didn’t exist because we’d never seen one. She offered it, wanting to take care of the “new additions to our community,” so we were able to make them a completely secure - if small - shelter.
The “Display requests” option didn’t show anything for now.
The water for sale was wonderful. The jugs it was stored in were weird, but easily stackable, and the water itself was pure and refreshing.
The rations were godawful.
The kids sometimes made food out of Play-Doh that they’d bring over and ask me to eat. I usually just pretended, but I’d accidentally taken a bite once when Gavin woke me from a nap and said he was giving me a “cookie.” That had been tastier than this. Better texture too.
Still, the rations would keep us alive. They’d keep all of humanity alive, as long as they had access to a Shop. I hoped someone near Meghan had claimed one.
Unanimously, we’d decided to leave the bulk of our food supplies with TAF, filling the truck with water and nasty rations.
“Are you sure?” Avalanche asked me. The tall woman was still bristling at suggestions that Twinkles wouldn’t be returning, but she’d seemed calmer, or more tired. She’d stopped objecting to insinuations that their group would be there for a while, and had helped unload the truck and started to negotiate with some of the Walsenburgers for amenities like bed frames and mattresses.
“Definitely. We’ve come a long way together, and I feel terrible about leaving. I wish we could stay, but…”
“It’s okay.” Avalanche smiled a little. “Your kids need you. Go. Be there for them.”
“You’ll still be a part of TAF to me,” JoeyT said. “Fought more monsters next to you in the past few weeks than we did in a whole season of professional play in Legend Scramble. I figure that makes you part of the team.”
Bolero laughed. “A thousand percent. You’re on the squad forever. If this ever… When things get back to normal, look us up. I want to meet these families you guys are trying to get back to.”
“Do you want us to fix up a truck for you before we leave?” John asked.
The remaining members of TAF exchanged looks. Bolero shook his head slightly, and Avalanche spoke. “No. No reason to slow you down. We know how to do it if we want to, and we won’t be using it right away. It would just be one more thing for us to guard. Besides… When Twinkles makes it back, I’m not sure we’ll leave Walsenburg.”
I must have looked surprised, because Avalanche shrugged, reaching out to grab Zephyr's hand. “We only left the ValuCo because of the danger. We have friends waiting for us back home, but not small kids. With the Shop, we can live here indefinitely, and the neighbors seem nice. It… might be better to stay here until things get back to normal. We've had a few close calls. I don't want any more.”
“I’m more worried about you guys,” Bolero said. “You sure you want to leave us the canned food? We can’t be sure how long the rations will last.”
“We’ll have plenty of water, so we’ll be fine even if they go bad quickly,” I said. “Other Shops should be pretty easy to spot at night. Even if they’re uncommon, we’ll be covering a lot of ground. We’ll find them.”
None of us took the option to purchase land, although one of the Walsenburg residents did, getting nothing more than a differently-colored hexagon on a Shop interface and the ability to toggle monster spawns on and off in a small area.
“It’s what we need to do to ‘win’ the game, but it really doesn’t help us right now,” Davi said.
I couldn’t disagree with her assessment. We’d actually spent a fair bit of our funds. Joey had bought the Shop, and the rest of us had bought extra room coolers and lights and heaters, plus as much to eat and drink as we could afford.
Even Avalanche spent her Money to be sure that we were well-supplied. “You don’t know how common other Shops will be yet,” she said. “Plus, if you have a lot to spare, you can be more aggressive about handing it out to other people.”
It didn’t actually take that long for us to be ready, not with the extra hands from Walsenburg helping load and unload supplies from Frank. The sun was still high overhead when I realized there really wasn’t anything else for us to do.
Part of me ached to get on the road. To push the accelerator down to the floor and make it home as fast as possible. Another part of me was reluctant to leave. Ashamed. Guilty. If I hadn't been here...
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There was no way to know how things would have been different.
I knew that, intellectually.
“Guess this is goodbye,” John said. He reached out to shake Bolero’s hand, and seemed surprised when the younger man hugged him instead. John didn’t hesitate to return the hug, and his voice was shaky when he spoke again. “Y’all are good kids. I’m right glad to have traveled with you. I’m so sorry about Twinkles.”
Avalanche glared at him and John hastily amended his statement. “That he’s taking so long to get back, I mean!”
“He’ll get here,” JoeyT said. “We’ll be waiting for him when he does.”
There was so much I could have said. So much I wanted to say… so much I felt I should say, but didn’t want to. I felt a lump rise in my throat, and I swallowed. “Take care of yourselves. Joey, keep working on your footwork. Your balance is still shit.”
He grinned at me sheepishly. “I’ll try.”
“I wish I’d met you guys under better circumstances,” Davi said. “Byron and I copied a few pages with the most important information, and the little dog said he remembers my whole notebook.”
“You could stay,” Bolero said.
Davi froze, and for a moment I thought she’d take him up on it. Then she pasted a bright, fake smile across her face. “Thank you… but no.”
Bolero looked disappointed, but nodded. “Then you’ll be Team Always Forward East. Don’t forget us.”
"Never," Davi said. "We'll do you proud."
With one last round of tearful hugs, we said our farewells and climbed aboard Frank. Five minutes later, the only thing still visible in our rearview mirrors was the tall red Shop spire.
Byron broke the silence in Frank’s cab. “I’m surprised you didn’t stay, Davi. You’d gotten really close, I thought, especially to-”
“I did,” Davi interrupted. “I like them all a lot. They say never to meet your heroes, but they were awesome. Not as deadly to monsters as they were in-game, maybe, but I can’t fault them for that.”
“Then…?” Byron’s voice rose in question.
“I’ll miss Twinkles. I’ll miss them all. But… I only met him in real life a couple weeks ago. I didn’t spend hours every day for years working on a team with him, following his orders. Admitting that he’s gone-” Davi’s voice warbled, and she took a deep breath before continuing. “It’s horrible, but it doesn’t make me feel like I’ve lost part of myself.”
Byron stiffened. “You think that’s how they feel?”
Davi made a noise halfway in between a laugh and a sob. “Isn’t it? You saw. They didn’t even want to talk about the possibility. I might have wanted to stay and work with the rest of TAF, but not if I had to keep… pretending.”
“Well… I, for one, am glad that you stayed with us old folks,” John said.
“You’re all great guys, and I trust you. I’ve got lots of friends back in Huntsville. And Byron’s not that old.” Davi’s voice was deadpan.
“Just Byron?!” Kurtis asked. “What about me and Vince?”
Davi didn’t respond, but her mouth flickered briefly in a ghost of a smile. She’d zinged Kurt and I on purpose.
She’d be alright.
Eventually.
The truck was quiet for a while afterward, just me calling out pavemimics to help John avoid them as he drove. Davi quizzed us all on our Novelty, but was surprised to find that it was uniformly low. I had the most, with five, followed by Davi with four. No one else had more than two.
“That’s weird,” she said. “I thought it was Frank that did it, and we’re driving again…”
“We only started a little while ago. Maybe it takes time?”
“Or maybe we got it for building him, and we have to do something else weird to get more. If we want more. I don’t know if we do. The Shop is good, of course, but…”
She didn’t finish her statement. She didn’t need to.
“I wish we’d been paying attention last week,” Byron said. “I should have been, but I was focused on other things.”
Davi grimaced. “Me too.”
“Plenty of things to figure out,” said John. “We’re only human, you know. Don’t be too hard on yourselves.”
“It’s only our lives at stake,” Davi said.
“Dunno if we can claim to be ‘only human’ anymore either,” I said. “Humans aren’t known for the kinds of things we can do.”
John looked troubled. He didn’t say anything else until we had to stop a mile later to clear a Monstrosity off our wheels. That was a full-team effort, with all of us leaping far from the cab to clear out any rams charging Frank’s sides or back when we stopped, and clearing out a safe zone to fight in before we upset our shapeshifting stowaway.
It was something we’d done dozens of times over the past few days, but it took longer with only five of us. It wasn’t harder, per se, just more time-consuming. Without TAF, we had a bit less ranged damage and a lot less melee. Byron’s knife-covered pot still did an admirable job separating the pavemimics and softening them up, but with fewer hands holding knives, I was less willing to head into a clump of four morphing monsters and hope for the best. We had to plink away at them, throwing ranged abilities and the knife pot again and again until the monsters were separated out into singletons or pairs.
“At least it was still light outside,” said Byron. “That’s gonna get even more fun at night.”
"If I could get a katana..." I gave my chef's knives a resentful glance. "These just aren't cutting it. Literally. They're still better than my staff against these guys, but that's about all I can say."
“You get first dibs if we find one," Davi said. "I'm more concerned that I got ten more Novelty."
“Ten?!” I asked, checking my interface. “Huh, I got eight.. I guess that makes some sense. ‘Novelty’ means things that are new or unusual, right? If cars aren’t common, Monstrosities must be rare.”
Everyone had gotten significant novelty when we fought the ball of angry pavemimics. Byron, Kurt, and John had gotten seven, eleven, and sixteen respectively. All of us had gotten some, but the exact numbers didn’t seem to follow any kind of pattern that we could figure out. John had been the farthest from the monsters and arguably done the least. Why should he have gotten the most?
We argued for a bit, but didn’t come to any conclusions. Eventually, I stepped in to stop the discussion. “We need more data to figure anything out, and we probably won’t get it sitting here. We got lucky with the hellbats - they mostly ignore Frank and only attack when we’re outside - but we’ve only got tomorrow and the rest of today before something else appears.”
“What’s the next city we have to go through?” Kurt asked.
“There’s one about the size of Walsenburg about twenty miles down the road,” I said. “After that, we’re looking at real tiny places, stuff with just a few streets. That’s true even if we decide to get off I-25 and head southeast on US-87.”
“We should get closer, but then wait a few hours,” Kurt said. “Try to blast through at night. We’ve got a long way to go, and we’re not moving fast enough.”