After our extra hands arrived we managed to fully load the trailer in a downright spectacular time of a singular hour. It did make the trailer heavy enough that even Rumi needed a little help pulling it down the road, but we had plenty of people. While we were loading I sent those too small and weak to really help with loading weapons to pick over the store for blankets, spices, and other ingredients that don't expire along with disinfectants. By the time we were done loading there were a half dozen shopping carts loaded down with salt, maple syrup, honey, and other goods.

I felt a little bad for raiding the place considering I'd chased someone off from it, but reminded myself that they had been literal slavers. I tried to convince myself that there was still likely plenty more left in the store that a smart or experienced survivalist could make use of so it would still be a useful resource for other survivors out there. I further justified it to myself that there were dozens of other stores within ten miles of this one so even if we had somehow completely cleaned it out there was still plenty of starter supplies for any other groups out there.

Shaking the thoughts off we began the trek back to the stadium from where I was already getting the occasional whiffs of an almost shellfish-esque smell on the wind. The scent of honey soaked meat was making me realize I was getting pretty hungry after spending the whole morning basically exercising. I could see a few others in our group visibly salivating at the smell as we ambled along the pitted and cracked road, especially among our four new people.

We'd gotten to chatting a bit while working and learned a few things about them. The aardvark man was named Saul and was an utter hippie through and through. He'd been a solar panel salesman, and outside of doing some basic gardening seemed to possess no real skills. Not only that, he seemed to put no thought into any of the stances he supported, such as claiming to fully support clean eco-friendly energy, which led to us getting into a very heated debate about how clean certain energy types really were. When a new topic soon saw the two of us butting heads again Matilda swapped out for him, sending the irritating anteater to help pick over the store for supplies.

Matilda had apparently managed to strike up a conversation with the cockatrice man while they'd been looting the store. Seems he had been a doctor in training named Anthony at a hospital she'd worked for but had moved onto being a vet after finding working on people too stressful. She figured he'd be a great help to our little group should he decide to join due to the fact we were all technically animals in form now. I just hoped that he wouldn't lose his nerve again when it counted.

The goat was an utter disaster of an enigma.

No one was entirely certain of his name, as the man seemingly spoke maybe ten words of English, at best guess it was Warsame. Worse yet, his native tongue wasn't Spanish, German, Vietnamese, or Welsh either. Whenever he spoke, it seemed to bounce between something that sounded like vaguely Italian gibberish to my ear or what I'm modestly certain was Islamic. Worse yet, the man seemed to be at best retarded, if not imbecilic or an outright idiot. I will admit some of this could simply be from the language barrier, but the man seemed to struggle to figure out what was being asked of him even if someone took the time to draw a picture of it. Sometimes even when literally pushed into position next to someone else doing what we were trying to get him to do it would take the man upwards of a minute to catch on.

All in all I found myself quietly hoping that most if not all of these 'men' would elect to simply move on instead of joining up with us after breakfast despite some useful skills and a desperate need for manpower on our part.

Arriving back at the stadium I saw that most of the people here were already helping themselves to the boiled scorpion stew and grilled scorpion, including several people I didn't recognize, likely locals from the north and west of the stadium who had come to investigate all the noise we'd made last night and this morning. A warm feeling fluttered briefly in my chest as I watched the strangers trying the food, we'd likely saved these people from getting eaten by the damn boss. Their reactions to the food seemed to be decidedly mixed, as I saw some people making heavy use of salt, pepper, and honey while others were eating it straight. Considering how selective my own pallet had been, I found myself grateful for all the spices we'd grabbed considering how much of a staple of our diet jerked scorpion was likely to be for the foreseeable future.

I gave a wave to Jack as we approached and truthfully told him, "Smells great, thanks for doing this Jack."

"Don't thank me until you try it," he chuffed, nibbling on his own piece of grilled meat, "Reactions seem to be pretty divided."

"Say, have you seen Daphne?" I casually cast my gaze about, "I'm not seeing her."

"Yeah she beat you back by like ten minutes, neglected to have anything since she had that fish earlier and went to rest. Why?"

"Because," I said, lowering my head and speaking as quietly as I could, "There is a very real chance she might be affiliated with a local gang that seems to be turning into warlords." I motioned back to the four nervous looking hatchlings who were examining breakfast with either utter revulsion or naked hunger. "They claim to have seen someone similar in the gang when they got forcibly conscripted. They could be lying though and they are the actual gang members, but I doubt that for most of them. Still pass the word around to the others to keep an eye on her and them would you?"

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"You got it boss." Both Jack and I violently jumped in fright as we both simultaneously took note of Damian sitting contently in my shadow. The little bastard looked up at the both of us absolutely radiating smugness.

"Ztop. Zoing. Zat!" Jack buzzed angrily at the fluffy little dinosaur. "I know you're doing it on purpose at this point!"

"Sorry, can't hear you!" Damian cackled scurrying away, "Gotta go spread the word like the boss asked me to!"

"Stop calling me boss, dang it!" I called after him before turning my attention back to Jack, "He been like this all day?"

"A lot of folks started experimenting after they got woken up by your own experiments." Jack confirmed, "His has just been the most annoying. Though I did notice everyone else seems to be an order of magnitude less powerful than the stuff you were pulling."

I lifted and shifted my tail to the side, setting it down heavily and making a note of where the four unknowns were in the resulting ping from my tremorsense before continuing in a whisper, "I'm pretty sure a lot of that was from using Focus to power up abilities. It's fairly easy once you're aware of it, but fairly tiring. I planned to go over what I've figured out before sparring tonight."

Jack nodded, his jaws clenched and antennas twitching. "So keep it under wraps."

"We've already got at least one hostile group in the area," I stated at conversational volume, "Seems silly to go spreading it all about and nullifying our key advantage."

"So what's the plan then?" Jack asked, his antennas and body posture shifting in such a way to easily portray grim determination. He looks so gosh dern cool! I swear I'm getting jealous.

"Eat breakfast." I answered grimly. My gaze drifted over to the diminishing pile of lightly grilled baby scorpions, my tongue flicking out and catching a scent that smelled just divine. "Then offer up some suggestions on things for folks to do today while warning everyone about the gang in the area." Seeing the clear confusion in Jack's stance I reminded him, "I'm not in charge or anything Jack, don't know why people keep acting like I am."

Slithering around the wasp man and looking at the remaining food, I gripped one of the roast scorpions by the tail and swallowed it down whole. The taste was somehow both somewhat similar to grilled shrimp and radically different in an utterly bizarre way that was very difficult to describe. Sadly I also found it roughly as filling as a singular jumbo shrimp, meaning even if I ate all three of the remaining three foot long scorpions I'd only be halfway through the appetizer. So I held myself back, making sure everyone who was willing to eat had their fill of breakfast before I ate the leftovers and drained the few gallons of remaining scorpion/fish/dandelion stew. I still didn't really feel full.

"Alright everyone," I called, letting my mountain of a voice ring out over the gathering of chattering people like a tinny megaphone, "Gather round, gather round. Now that we've all had a moment to wake up and feed ourselves we should probably start figuring out what we're going to do with the rest of our day. Now we've already had a fairly busy start with both the discovery of a local gang from Fort Value apparently turning warlord and slaver, according to our new guests, as well as the discovery of a small but powerful heavy weapons cache." That got people murmuring again and those that hadn't already introduced themselves to our newcomers casting them a worried look.

"While normally I'd call that a pretty full day and be done with it," I continued, speaking over the chatter, "We don't have that luxury. So I'm going to list off several things that we need to get done with before sun-down today and you're all free to handle it in whatever order you like, I'm not your dad, but I will heavily suggest you move in groups of at least three. First off, we need that trailer unloaded and all the stuff in it properly stored and inventoried so we know what we actually have.

"Second, I really need someone with hands, and preferably thumbs, to finish building those latrines myself and Matilda started on this morning. They shouldn't need too much work really, a fire in them for maybe an hour to dry out the clay walls, a simple floor of wooden boards, and the frame of a wall we can put tarps or something over so everyone can't see us doing our business. I'd also like whoever does that one to also start cooking as big of a meal as possible for supper and get to jerking all our meat since they'll likely have some free time. If you don't know how I can show you, it's not a hard process, but it is time consuming.

"Third, I'm pretty sure all of us would like some better beds and clothes. In fact, many of us, including myself, are shamefully nude at the moment! Well, as luck would have it, I know for a fact there is a mattress store next to the Hobby Plaza and Salvation Navy down on Abrams. I figure between those three stores we should have everything we need to both have some proper beds and start actually making some clothes properly fitted for us, not to mention some really useful tools going forwards.

"Fourth is I'd love for someone to go to the local libraries and start salvaging all the books they can. Preserving knowledge is going to be key to our future and with the internet dead, books are our best reservoir of the stuff. Even fictional stories can sometimes hold useful nuggets of knowledge so if you do grab some books grab them as well. Plus, you know. Eventually we'll hopefully be established enough for some down time and books are something you can use to pass the time even in the heart of winter.

"And lastly, seeing as we have wild monsters and bandits roaming about, I'd like for us to get started on some form of wall, even if it's just an earthen berm behind a ditch. I know at least a few of us are skilled diggers thanks to things like fossorial mutagen and other abilities so hopefully that will keep things from taking too long. Though This is a massive area I'm wanting us to block off. While I think we should start with just the roads around the stadium itself to start with, we should absolutely expand out to wall off Green and Cluck parks as a form of Mott and Bailey defense eventually."

"And just what will you be doing while all of us are doing this?" Jerry demanded angrily from where he'd been talking with several people I didn't know.

I really wanted to say taking a nap, because honestly I was already feeling exhausted despite it probably not even being ten yet, probably from my less than restful sleep. Instead I told everyone, "I'm going to be heading up towards the Veranda and River Legends Park, there's a plant shop over there I want to see if there are any viable plants or seeds to start a bit of agriculture here with. Moreover, there's almost certainly going to be more people up that way who I want to at least warn about our local would be warlords and see if any of them want to join us. You're free to come with me if you want, do keep in mind that with it being so close to the woods, lakes, and golf courses there will likely be a lot of monsters in the area including potentially several big boys such as that guy."

I pointed to the towering corpse of the scorpion boss slowly rotting in the morning sunlight where it lay on display for all to see. "So who wants to come with me?"