I was sitting in my RV, going over a report from the construction team about how far they had gotten in converting the office building into bedrooms when I someone knocked on the door. I opened the door to see Tony standing there with another man. “Hey, Greg.” said Tony, “This is Simon. We need to talk to you. Something major just happened.”
“Sure, come in.” I said, and motioned them inside. Once everyone was inside I and Tony sat down, but Simon wouldn’t take the chair I offered. “How about you tell be what brought you here.”
“Yes, sir.” he said crisply. Definitely a military background. “I am on the construction team that is refitting the office building. At approximately oh ten-hundred we heard a gunshot nearby. I drew my sidearm and went to investigate with several other construction team members, in case we were under attack. In the nearby parking garage I found that two salvage teams had an altercation. One of them had stabbed a member of the other team and had been shot in return by one of the man’s teammates. We managed to calm everyone down and tend to the wounded. Neither were in danger of dying, and in fact the knife wound stopped bleeding shortly after that. Several people did, however, stay with them to insure that the fighting doesn’t continue.”
“At ease,” I responded. “This isn’t the military. I’m a mayor, not a drill sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.” he said, and seemed to relax.
“So, I assume they were fighting over salvage rights?”
“Yes sir, the garage in question is just outside the settlement’s border, which the outside team claims means we don’t have any claim to it.”
“Maybe we don’t. But if the other team was there first, they might have had a claim to some of the vehicles. I’m surprised the situation got that serious, though. Why would you try to kill someone over salvage?”
“It’s actually pretty common.” said Tony before Simon answered.
“When I was still in the city I heard of it happening several times. Two salvage teams would both want to salvage the same thing and would get in a fight over it. Often that fight would result in them opening fire on each other. Since the plague not only cured all disease but also makes you heal faster, and even regrow limbs, they figure they are at most inconveniencing the other person.”
“What if the person takes too serious of an injury and dies, though?”
“Then the System will revive them. I even heard of a case where a man was shot in the head and died. Over the next four days his wounds healed and the missing brain matter was regrown, and when it was over he woke up with a bit of amnesia. It took the System a couple of days to restore his lost memories, but even severe brain damage only cost him a week.”
I rubbed my eyes. “This means that our laws concerning assault and even murder will have to be revised. They still cause psychological issues, pain, and downtime, but not permanent injury. This is why I never wanted to be a politician.”
Tony nodded. “So, what do we do? Our guy wants the guy charged with a crime and arrested, but we can’t really do that, and we don’t even have a jail to put him in if he was arrested.”
I thought about it for a while. “Seems to me like they will both recover, but that there may be damages depending on who started it.”
“You want to turn this into a civil matter?” asked Simon in surprise. “I wasn’t expecting you to order the firing squad, but shouldn’t the guy at least get locked up?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know what happened, and even if we did I’m not sure we should lock the man up for what is ultimately a few days of injury and pain.” I paused for a few seconds to think. “We do need to investigate, though. And if we find that the outside salvagers are hostile to us, we need to protect our people from them. Tell me, Simon. Do you have any law enforcement experience?”
“I was an MP for my base in the middle east, sir, though not as a civilian police officer.”
“That’s fine. Would you be willing to become the town sheriff, at least temporarily?”
“Yes, sir.” Simon said, standing up straighter.
“In that case, I don’t have a badge, but I’ll see what the System has. In the mean time, I want you to investigate the situation. Since it happened outside of our borders, I’m not sure how much info Gary will have, but as sheriff you will have access to his surveillance data if you need it for security or investigation reasons. Also, talk with the people involved and see if they are willing to turn over their memories of the event. Their assistant AIs should be able to convert them into a video file. It isn’t as good as the Surveillance skill, but it will let you see what happened from their point of view.”
“Yes, sir. I have a question, though. Who is Gary?”
I smiled. “Oh, he’s the Settlement’s Core.” I took him to the storage shed where Gary and Bob were currently living and introduced him to the two of them. I then registered him with Gary as the town sheriff, and he got to work looking through Gary’s data.
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Leaving Simon to work, I went back to looking over the town’s issues. Over the last week the construction crew had finished around forty apartments which people had already moved into, and the other teams had finished the septic and water upgrades as well as the bar. The bar crew had asked for 550 zerka at one point, but it was a minor cost. They would be having a grand opening tonight, and had already hired the staff, so I walked over to check the place out.
Once inside I noticed that they had built a wall to cut the front half of the store off from the back half, with only a door in the middle and two bathrooms separating them. The left side of the room had a large bar that seemed to be stocked with a sample of all of the varieties of alcohol the warehouse contained. They had even salvaged a beer tap from a bar, and brought in a few kegs, which were stacked in a corner. The rest of the bar area was filled with tables, chairs, and booths. They had found a jukebox somewhere and hooked it up at the back of the bar, and even found a pool table, which was set up in one corner.
While I stood there looking a man came in from the door to the back. “I’m sorry, we aren’t open yet.” he said. “We are having our grand opening tonight at six, though, so please return then.”
“Oh, I’m not here to drink. My name is Greg Summers. I’m the mayor. I just wanted to look the place over before you opened.”
“Oh, sorry. I’ve already had to drive a few people away. Too many people want something to do in this town. I was considering opening at noon and selling pub food just to deal with that fact.”
“Well, I was thinking about building a second restaurant, so that could work. If you decide you want to do that, just tell me and I’ll get you a Food Service Station so you can make the food.”
“Thank you for the offer. I might take you up on that. So, do you like the place?” he asked, motioning around the bar area.
“Looks pretty good, though I never visited many bars. The thing I worry about, though, was the ‘special feature’ that we added.”
“Oh, the rooms. Sure, I can show them to you.” He motioned for me to follow and lead me into the back. There I saw ten doors, six on the back wall and four on the front wall. “Each of these rooms is identical.” he said, then pulled out a key to unlock one of them. Inside I saw a simple queen sized bed with a lamp beside it on a bedside table. The room had electric lighting and carpet, and was painted a beige color. There was even a clock on the wall. The only thing that seemed out of place was a metal thing hanging on the wall that had a small stone in the middle of it.
“What’s that?” I said motioning to the metal thing.
“Oh, that’s the thing that will make this all work. Here, let me show you.” He went to the bar and grabbed a half drunk can of beer then returned. He then walked over to the bed, dumped the whole thing on the bed, and threw the can on the ground. “Now, watch.” He walked over to the metal thing and touched the stone in the middle. A few seconds later the can disappeared and the beer spot dried up before disappearing as well. “These are room cleaning devices we found on the market. They only cost fifty zerka each, so we bought eleven of them. One for the bar and one for each room. Now all the customer needs to do after they are finished with the room is just touch the stone in the device, and the room will be clean. It will save us from having to find someone who’s willing to clean this place, given the purpose of it.”
“And you suspect that it will get a lot of use for that purpose?”
“Oh, yes. Five of the town’s ladies-of-the-night and one such man have already inquired about working here. They won’t be official employees, but they will be allowed to walk around the bar area and pick up clients as long as they pay the five zerka fee for each use of the room.”
I shrugged. “I guess that works. Should keep the customers from trying anything with the employees.”
“Well, the employees are all used to that from previous jobs, so they are all paid between 30 and 40 per shift. But at least we found enough waitresses. I and one other woman will be the bartenders, and we even hired an ex club bouncer to work security.”
I nodded. “In that case, seems like you have everything under control. Maybe I’ll come by tonight for a drink and see how popular the place is.”
“I suspect you’ll be waiting in line to get in, but you are free to come by.”
I nodded, said goodbye, and left. I noticed that the sign on the door said they would be open from six pm to two am Tuesday through Saturday. An interesting schedule. We might have to expand it if this place was as popular as the manager seemed to think it would be.
I checked in on the production group just to make sure everything was running well, then made my way back to my RV. The suggestion box on the town’s bulletin board had two things in it that I wanted to do as soon as possible. The first suggested an actual government building be set up where the leaders had offices. The second was from the people on the construction teams. They wanted concrete.
I had sent a scout out to an old rock quarry I knew was northeast of the town and they verified that the rock there was high in limestone. I had even figured out the cost for setting it up. I could use the generator and outpost core from the warehouse, but I would need an automated miner, 5000 zerka, a concrete processor, 2500 zerka, and a bulk warehouse for storing it, 5000 zerka. We would also need a way to get it back here, which meant that I would either need to repurpose our concrete truck back to its original purpose, or I would need some sort of teleporter. While you could send things between an outpost core and the settlement core it was linked to, as we did when we traded with St. Nicholas’s, the sheer bulk of the materials we needed to ship would use too much energy if we didn’t decrease the cost via a proper teleportation device.
That brought up the possibility of buying a teleportation platform again. While we couldn’t yet afford it, I was sure that we would need to buy one for the rock quarry outpost and St. Nicholas’s before long.
I removed my flying disk from my inventory and grabbed the Outpost Core and generator. The device was identical to the one Silan had used to visit us, and at only 500 zerka it seemed like something that was too useful to pass up. I made sure that the warehouse had all of the other devices in it, and flew for the quarry. It was just over twenty kilometers away, about nine from where the Alfs had set up their settlement in the National Forest. I sat down and checked the area to make sure that they hadn’t made a claim on the area. There were no people or System devices in the area, so I set up the Outpost Orb and generator in the main office. Once I was done I named the outpost “Rock Quarry Outpost” and linked it to the settlement, setting it to have a 200 meter perimeter and bringing over the other devices.
I set up the Warehouse first, then the Automated quarry near the rock wall. As soon as it was activated it started sending out some sort of energy beam to collect stone, placing it in the warehouse. As it did that I set up the Concrete Processor and told it to start removing the limestone and making cement. I stepped back and watched as everything ran smoothly.
I then posted a notice on the bulletin board, informing the people that we would need people to run a new rock quarry, as well as distribute the rock and cement produced. Within thirty minutes I had twenty volunteers, including a man that used to drive a concrete truck and a man that used to work on a road crew. I hired all of them, and gave them the location of the outpost.
Down the road were some cheap duplex apartments, the only kind of housing that anyone would build this close to a blasting area, so I expanded the area to 500 meters in the direction of the building. Normally you wouldn’t use an oval field for your outpost or settlement, but I didn’t want to spend the power making it circular, as that would decrease the mining speed. I went over to the apartment, cleared the place of zombies and corpses, and bought twelve of the cleaning devices the bar had used, 600 zerka. One went in each of the twelve apartments I cleared in six buildings, and I activated them. While it wouldn’t make the places neat, they would at least be clean.
By the time I was finished, the rock quarry crew had started to arrive with the concrete truck, so I showed them the apartments and let them choose one. They would have to have a roommate, as we didn’t have enough for everyone to have their own apartment, but they still preferred this to living in the dorms. I promised to have the construction crew hook up better water and sewage, then grabbed a power device from the warehouse and spent the next hour hooking up the electricity, something I had forgotten. I had to make a run to the nearest hardware store for the wire, but two hours later I had all of the apartments connected to the Outpost’s power grid.
I sent Tony a notice to get the former sewage crew out here when they had an opening, and flew back to the town. It was late afternoon, and I hadn’t eaten anything today, so I went to the restaurant and got something. Just as I was finishing up, I got a message from Simon. He had completed his investigation and wanted to inform me of his findings.