Meeting with the two groups on Kirtland Air Force Base had taken us until midday, and we still hadn’t put down the Shop. When we’d been driven through the city the previous day, I’d been hugely impressed. In a little under an hour, we’d made it further through a city than we did in a full day’s drive on highways. It had taken us multiple days to traverse a comparable distance through Santa Fe.
I was still impressed by that, but it had become obvious that the clear roads weren’t universal throughout the city. Special effort was being made on the highways and main thoroughfares. Smaller streets were still clogged by derelict cars, and not every area was being cleared of monsters. There were still enough people on the streets to keep groups of wostriches small - no more than two or three at a time - but we had to stop regularly when the hexcrabs attacked and to clear the axles of pavemimics.
Evidence of the Titans’ attack was clearer along today’s route as well. Yesterday, I’d seen a few scorched areas, but the fires seemed to have been contained quickly. Here, they’d clearly gotten more out of control, with one field of blackened and crumbling buildings covering a full city block.
It was sobering.
Frightening.
I could tell from the look on Kurt’s face that he was thinking the same thing I was, that these fires must be common across the country, that here was one more threat that imperiled our far-off families, but neither of us said anything.
What was there to say?
After heading south for some time, our transport finally ground to a halt in the center of a large grocery-store parking lot. The lot was full of cars, but a team of locals was hard at work pushing the cars to the sides, creating a large empty area in the center.
“That’s where you want the Shop?” I asked.
Hutto nodded. “No big rivers in Albuquerque west of the Rio, so an empty parking lot is the best firebreak we could find. Two Shops we know of got taken out by the Titans yesterday. One got smashed directly, but the other burned down. We’ve got Titanbane and firefighting teams on standby now, but…” he shrugged, gesturing to our bus. I got his implication immediately. Getting here hadn’t been swift, so defense would largely be up to local defenders. Creating a “natural” firebreak around the Shop gave them the best chance possible.
I’d been asked to take 24 followers from Kirtland, but with my Ruler interface allowing me up to 288 and only a few slots filled, I’d taken many more. I could remove followers later if I wanted, and I’d made sure to familiarize myself with the names of the 24 I’d promised to keep. The Money tax on their earnings had already been hugely lucrative for me - 25% of the earnings of 300 people is no joke - and it was no issue to purchase and place the Shop. It looked identical to the one JoeyT had placed, identical to every Shop I’d seen, but I headed inside anyway. This Shop was mine, and my friends and I all wanted to check out the trade-in options on our Initiate Titan’s Heart.
Plus the military wanted me to set heirs, as part of “securing” the Shop. They’d warned me that I wouldn’t be able to set anyone I hadn’t met since the Maffiyir began as an heir, so I listed my co-workers, the remaining members of TAF, and, on a whim, Kenan and Rina. There didn’t seem to be a limit to the number of heirs I could set, and as long as I set a large variety of heirs from different locales, Hutto didn’t insist that I placed anyone local on the list. I appreciated that. Kirtland seemed to have done great things for the area, but if they’d insisted I made one of their own my heir it would have been… uncomfortable. It would have been a sensible move, but it would also have been a necessary setup to a sudden betrayal. The fact that they didn’t insist made it clear that their request to set heirs came from genuine desire to see the Shop keep functioning.
Basic Shop
Options:
Display available purchases
Input blueprint
Display requests
Ownership detected. You may access shop controls.
The Shop controls let me change the tax percentage - which I set to minimum - and collect my earnings. I’d have to stop by before we left Albuquerque for good. A queue had already formed at the Shop’s second control plinth. My earnings had been at zero when I first opened the Shop’s screen, but they ticked up by the second. Even if purchases slowed down, even with a minimum tax percentage, I’d easily be making hundreds of Money per day.
Although, did that matter? I was already making thousands of Money a day as a Ruler. Hm. I’d kind of gotten used to being broke all the time, so being suddenly awash in funds was a startling change.
I bought an Alternative Ration to celebrate, chomping down as I brought up the “Display Requests” option. It had been blank when I’d looked at it in other shops in the past, but now showed a request for an Initiate Titan’s Heart, with a slew of reward choices available.
Portable Shelter
Personal Transport
Speaker (Entertainment)
Screen (Entertainment)
Projector (Entertainment)
Minor Matter Replicator
Personal Rejuvenator
Personal Stabilizer
Initiate’s Dagger
Initiate’s Sword
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Initiate’s Spear
Initiate’s Mace
Initiate’s Axe
Initiate’s Halberd
I frowned. “Kind of… underwhelming? Unless I’m missing something.”
“Where are the guns?” John asked.
Hutto shook his head. “Not here. There was one gun-like reward from the Mandatory Trial, but it’s not very powerful, and it tires the user quickly… basically like an ability. We have a team who got some traditional guns working, but they haven’t been able to do so at scale. The Minor Matter Replicator is helping, but we’d need a lot more of them before you start seeing guns on the regular.”
“Ooo… Can you just copy anything with the Matter Replicator?” Davi asked.
“Anything you can fit inside a cube about yea big,” Hutto said, holding his hands about a foot apart. “Takes a day for replication to occur.”
“What can you tell us about the other choices?” Kurt asked. “The personal transport sounds interesting.”
“It’s not bad,” Hutto allowed. “But I don’t think it will work for your purposes. It’s basically a slow motorcycle. It does hover, so you can take it off-road, but it’s unprotected, so you’re fending off monster attacks constantly outside of the city. Uh. Other choices. I was briefed on what we knew before we came out this way, but we haven’t tested everything yet. The Initiate weapons are stronger than the Basic ones that came from the Mandatory Trial. The stabilizer seems to freeze one person’s health state, so it’s a little useful in a crisis because we can save a heavily-damaged person to heal later. Sleeping in the rejuvenator seems to make you rested on less sleep, but that’s just for one person. The only one of the entertainment options we’ve tested so far was the Projector, because the colonel thought it might be useful for communications.”
“Not so much?” I asked, noticing Hutto’s expression.
“No. It’s a hologram projector, which is cool, but it has its own media. We can switch between options, but all of them seem to be alien shows. Doesn't seem to be any way to input our own. I’m told there are a bunch of former professors from UNM who are very excited about it, but practically…” Hutto shook his head.
“I like the sound of a really strong spear… or making it part of my Ruler crown so you guys get subject benefits. Uh, I’d guess you’d know what those are too?”
Hutto nodded. “One second of fire immunity per day, per subject.”
“Either might be useful for fighting another Titan,” Davi said. “But for building an airship, I think it’s gotta be the matter replicator. If we get a gear train built out to one propeller, being able to take all the parts and copy them is going to save a ton of time and effort. Unless Kirtland will let us just use theirs?”
Hutto laughed.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Davi said. “You guys okay with this?”
“Your arm, your call,” I said.
Davi rolled her eyes and claimed the Minor Matter Replicator, a small machine about three feet tall and a little over a foot wide with two doors in the front. “Alright, we’re good to go,” she said.
“You guys already looked at Alabama?” Hutto asked. We all stared at him, and he raised his eyebrows. “The land purchasing thing? It’s centered on our current location, but you can zoom way out, you know.”
Before he’d finished talking, I’d already pulled up the interface. Zoomed out far enough to see both New Mexico and Northern Alabama, it was hard to make out details, but I could still make out the scattered sheen of purchased land, which was clearly denser in northern Alabama than in much of the country. It was beyond me to pick out my neighborhood, or even Huntsville proper, but…
“At least someone near home is doing okay,” said Kurt.
“More than we knew this morning,” I agreed.
When we had set out from the airport, I’d hoped to be home within a week or two, but problem after problem had cropped up. Now, we hoped to build an entire airship and fly it across the country. We were looking at a different timeframe entirely and… so much time had already passed. It had been August 3 when this all started, and now we were well into September.
I still wanted to get home, needed to get home, but my goals had changed. Initially, I’d planned to race home and ensure my family had food and shelter. Now, I had to hope that Meghan had pulled off miracles, getting herself and the kids into a stable situation where they could sit tight. I wanted to get home so I could get in between them and the massive threats that were now emerging: wostrich packs, Titans, wildfires… plus whatever horrors next week would bring. These things were hard enough for my friends and I to deal with.
With three kids?
I loved my wife and respected the hell out of her, but impossible is impossible.
We threw ourselves into our work.
While the air force worked to clear the sports arena for us to work in, we made our way to the nearby air force base to scavenge parts, a challenging task made more difficult by constant monster attacks. Since the panels of the airplane bodies were riveted together, Animate Machinery didn’t help with taking them apart. Unscrewing a screw? Yep, that’s a machine, sure. Straightening the end of a rivet that had been pounded flat? No dice.
The exterior panels of the aircraft were the most accessible source of aircraft-grade aluminum, but we also needed to cut apart the plane’s skeleton to harvest titanium. We could have gotten it from the engine, but accessing and extracting from the frames was far easier. In addition, we had to track down propeller planes to harvest, the, well, propellers, which necessitated a trip across town to a private airport.
Kurt had been taking metal-shaping abilities, but “cutting” the pieces free was still somewhat tedious, and it was difficult for him to maintain focus since the next twelveday had started and the gator-faced snakes we’d faced in the trial were now lurking in every shadow.
His Novelty - along with Byron’s - returned to zero. I was happy that they’d been added as followers by an air force lieutenant and were earning the associated bonus Points, but unhappy that the “shield” they seemed to have provided us from earning Novelty was gone. The Challenges were dangerous.
On that topic, though, it seemed we were in luck. As the days went by, and a lumbering bearlike monster joined Kurt’s hated snakes, it became clear that we would get at least a little more time off from the dangerous events. My whole group had been invited to every challenge every twelveday until the most recent one. I hadn’t really internalized how unusual that was, even after talking with countless people in Walsenburg, Glorieta, and Santa Fe.
The past few days showed how atypical our experience was. Mucking around with metal and having standard fights against standard monsters? Our Novelty barely wiggled.
When I mentioned it to Davi, she sighed. “I know. Finally. We deserved to catch some kind of break.”