Chapter 19

Treehouse Village

We made our way over to where the fighters were camped out, and when we saw Frank, we knew we were in the right spot. Frank saw us and waved us over.

“Travis, Beth, Janet, oh and Miss Tilly, I see, this is Brianna. She was the leader or representative of the fighters that stayed behind.” Frank said. I looked at Brianna. At first glance, she looked like a hard military woman. She looked to be about five foot eight, and she was in full camo. Brianna was decked out in military equipment as well. She had a pistol clipped to her hip, and her face said I don’t do bullshit. I kind of liked her off the bat. She looked badass. If she would like us, well, that was another story.

“Hey, nice to meet you. I’m Beth.” Beth walked over to Brianna and shook her hand. Janet and I copied her and shook the woman’s hand as well.

“So, which one of you fucked up that racist asshole, Brad?” Brianna said and looked at us. I raised my hand a little.

“That would be me. Definitely didn’t mean to fuck Brad up that bad, though. Kind of an accident, honestly.” I said, and Brianna smiled a little at me.

“Don’t worry about it too much. Brad is a piece of shit, and Rose is way-way too into him. You know they aren’t even a thing? He fuck’s her once and a while, and now she sticks to him like a sick puppy. In truth, Brad was a racist asshole. As I see it, you did the world a favor by knocking some sense into him. Maybe now that his hand is busted to shit, he’ll stop jacking off and do something more productive with his time. Probably not though he’ll just use the other hand or fuck Rose.”

Brianna finished talking, chuckled, and then nodded at me in thanks. I looked at her in shock for a few seconds and then blinked a couple of times to bring myself back.

“Um, shit, no problem, I guess,” I said, then just shrugged. I wasn’t really prepared for that reaction. I thought it was gonna be a lot of fuck you and your asshole, and all that good stuff. Guess I was wrong. Brianna just laughed at my reaction and told us to come over and sit down. We needed to figure out what our next steps were and then how we would accomplish said steps.

We spent the rest of the day hanging out with Brianna and her crew, talking, planning, eating, and then, later on, drinking. It was a pleasant day, all told. The next morning, while everyone was fighting off a massive hangover, Beth, Janet, and I sat down with Brianna, Devin, Frank, And Brianna’s second-in-command, whom we’d met last night, Rich.

Last night’s planning session had been good but short. More filled with drinking and getting to know each other. We had talked and planned for about two hours, but most of the non-leadership was getting antsy. So we stopped there with the promise to continue in the morning. Well, the morning was here, and I regretted last night’s decisions, so, so many decisions.

“So, where did we leave off last night? Does anyone remember?” I asked the small group.

“Fuck! Don’t talk so loudly. My head is pounding, you dick, head.” Brianna told me. I winced.

“Sorry, my bad, eat these,” I said, pulling six Senzuketa Beans from my bag of holding and passing them out. Beth and Janet looked at the little beans like they were live savers and took one. Brianna and Rich just looked at me, but Frank didn’t seem to give a fuck and just ate it.

“What is this?” Rich asked me.

“It’s a Senzuketa Bean. It will make the hangover go away.” I told him. He looked at me skeptically, then popped the little bean in his mouth. A few moments later, Brianna popped hers. It was only a few minutes before we were all looking a lot better. Frank let out a sigh, then said.

“Damn, those are fucking great. That makes one thing in this new world that I admit I don’t hate,” and everyone agreed with Frank. Then Frank farted. After some farts and some embarrassing comments from Brianna, we got to planning how we were going to make this place a viable refuge.

It had been two weeks since the six of us had sat down and planned the future for this place, our new refuge. We had been power-leveling Brianna, Rich, and the fighters through the dungeon. Jane, Beth, and I had all gotten to level eleven, and Brianna and Rick sat at a cool level seven. The rest of her squad had reached level five, so It had been a busy fucking week. We also lost five people in the dungeon. Even though we were being as cautious as possible. I had lost two on a dive I was leading because I had been negligent, and I had really beaten myself up about that for a few days till Janet had to pull me aside and talk to me.

Janet had lost a person on two consecutive dives, but she didn’t seem affected like I had. When Janet pulled me aside, then told me basically to stop being a dumb ass. She told me that we couldn’t save everyone. We just had to do our part. That was all we could do. I didn’t initially accept Janet’s point of view, but the more my role became apparent, the more I came around to her way of thinking. We had to make a fighting force to protect the people of the Claremont until we could get their levels up.

We held a little ceremony to let everyone know there was a leader and bribed people with good food and booze while Beth laid out the plan for the future of our little refuge. We had set up a little headquarters soon after we took the hotel in a large tent we reappropriated from the Claremont’s previous residents and formed what would become the village’s council.

The council consisted of Beth, Janet, Frank, Devin, Rich, Tess, and myself. While sitting in the counsel room after our little, new leader party, Beth told Janet and me that she had just received a village quest. It said that she had met the qualifications to found a village as the village leader, and the notification asked if she would like to accept the quest. Yes/no.

Janet and I had told Beth to accept it and create the town, so she did. The next few hours had been a lot of calming people down at the sudden changes that had occurred when Beth had created the village. First, a wall appeared around the grounds, an actual stone wall eight feet high with ramparts and two gates.

So we now lived in the newly founded Treehouse Village. The worst part of the how village transformation thing was that when the walls popped up, it scared a lot of people, that’s for sure. The second thing that happened was a town hall building papered. The town hall looked like it had been plucked straight out of a small town in middle America. Which felt off for a magical building or what I assumed was a magical building. I guess the building did need to be magic. The system could have done the magic, and the building could be perfectly normal. I mean, I was just guessing here.

The last thing Beth did before creating the village was give the village a name. Without talking to anyone, she called it Treehouse Village. She said she could change the village’s name whenever, and it would just be a placeholder for now. We had spent the rest of the day apologizing and explaining what had happened and how we had created a village and everything. Now, we were sitting around a table in a room on the town hall’s second floor, discussing how to start training the non-combatants.

“Look, gear isn’t the problem. We have enough gear now from our dungeon runs to outfit at least half of the people in this village. What we need to figure out is how to approach leveling delicately. These people have had it rough. We just need to keep that in mind.” Beth finished saying to the group.

“We also need to think about food. We’re getting pretty low on the stuff we found here. We’re gonna have to figure something out soon, or we’ll have some really angry people on our hands.” Brianna said.

“We need to find a more sustainable food source. We can’t keep foraging. It’s just not gonna last with this many people to feed. I think it’s time we start thinking about forming hunting parties and foraging groups.” I said, agreeing with Brianna. Brianna nodded her head at me as I finished my thought.

“Well, we need to talk about what we’re going to do with the build points,” Beth asked the group.

A couple of days after Beth had confirmed the town, she named the town TreeHouse Village, by the way. Beth had found a new page called town management in her stat sheet. This page told her she had B.P. or Build Points, and when she reached a certain number of build points, she could apparently magically add new buildings to the village. I didn’t understand how it would work yet, but it sounded straightforward. Get build Points and buy the building you want. I assumed you got to decide where to place the building, then, um… Poof, the building magically appears.

I say apparently because we hadn’t had enough B.P. to build anything yet, but there were some great options. We could increase town defenses and build civilian housing, merchant shops, and other buildings like auction houses. It was amazing, but we didn’t know how it worked yet.

We were starting to approach some of the lower-priced options on the list, and the time to start thinking about options was approaching. We had only just begun to try and understand the breakdown of how we acquired B.P. It seemed to be based on population and individual level. We figured we were getting about 25 B.P. plus per person per day. We weren’t sure about the exact breakdown, but that was our collective best guess.

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The number of people freed at the Claremont was much more than we had first thought. Minuses the thirty-odd folks who had left with Rose and Brad, but we still had 225 people living under our care. It was an intimidating task that lay before us, but we couldn’t fail these people. The one good part of having so many people in the town was that our B.P. was rising steadily every day since Beth officially became our leader.

Like I said, I didn’t understand the complete breakdown that we, well, really Janet and Brianna, had figured out, but we had 47,250 B.P. We needed 32,000 B.P. to get the merchant’s shop and 25,000 B.P. to house two hundred people. These were the two options I thought people would be most enthusiastic about them. Saving up points for some of the more expensive options didn’t sound great, personally. I thought I had the right idea about it, but of course I did. It was my idea. They seemed like great starting options to me.

We had enough to buy two mass housing units for 30,000 each, which was a great deal with how fast we earned points. I was right, and I knew it, but the problem was convincing everyone else. The main argument for spending the points we had accrued up to this point so far versus waiting weeks to get more points was that we could get comfortable housing for three hundred people at the cost of 200,000 B.P.

It was a good argument, even though I was starting to get swayed. The comfortable option came with a hundred and seventy-five two-bed, two-bath units. Another hundred and fifty three-bedroom, three-bathroom units, and every unit came with a balcony or a yard and in-unit laundry. On top of all that, the last twenty-five were master sweets. I mean, that part of the building description alone sounded great cuz you better fucking believe I was getting a master sweet.

The master suites had a large master bedroom with an en-suite bathroom. A large entertainment room, two spare bedrooms, and two additional bathrooms. The master suites were fucking nice! Honestly, Once I was a hundred sure I was on the list for a master suite, my previous arguments fell apart, making a choice easy for me, but we did end up deciding to get the merchant shop for 32,000 B.P.

That decision definitely set us back on buying the housing option, but in for a penny in for a pound. We just had too much loot that needed selling. I and the rest of our small leadership group were interested in getting our hands on some proper gear. We also wanted to understand the currency in this new world. There had to be something like that in the greater integrated galaxy. I was pretty interested, actually. We had picked up a lot of shit, and I wanted to see if I was rich now or just hoarding junk.

Our small council of Frank, Devin, Brianna, Rich, Tess, Janet, Beth, and myself all took a vote, and it was a unanimous decision to buy the shop now and then save points and go for the comfortable housing option when we got the points for it as our next perches. Brianna and Beth decided that we could use the time waiting for the housing as motivation to gain levels because the faster everyone advanced in level, the faster we would obtain B.P. The quicker we got the housing option we wanted, the better. I thought it was a pretty good plan, and that’s precisely what we did.

We started training the civilians for the next two and a half weeks. The plan was to get every person in the village to level ten. It was going to take a lot longer than two and a half weeks to do that, but we had to start somewhere. Janet, Brianna, and I figured out a way to trap packs of savage ripper bunnies. We then would use them as a starting point for leveling. We also thought It would be good to get the civilians a little desensitized to killing in a hopefully gentler way than we had experienced.

It worked well, too, or as well as could be expected from people who probably hadn’t killed anything except the occasional bug here and there. Some people wouldn’t go for it no matter how easy we made it. This one lady, Janet, eventually had to grab the bunny by the back of the neck and then grab its back legs, holding it on the ground for the young woman. She was about twenty-five and had been one of the people held captive by the Mad Max people.

She was holding a short sword and had been shaking the whole time. When Janet was holding the bunny down, it twitched at one point, and the woman dropped the sword and ran to the edge of the enclosure, hopped the fence of the enclosure, and started crying. We had a couple of cases like that, but for the most part, people wanted to get stronger.

After what happened to most of them at the hands of those Mad Max fuckers, a lot of them saw the world as might makes right, and I couldn’t blame them. They had been trapped, with no way out and no hope in sight, and the three of us had basically destroyed every last one of their captors in less than an hour. They looked at Beth, Janet, and me like we were real-life superheroes, and it was honestly a little creepy sometimes.

We had been doing regular dungeon runs and figured out that it took four full days of staying out of the dungeon to reset, but even longer if you left the boss alive. In that case, it would take six to reset. Now, we try to clear the boss almost every time, but that puts people at a higher risk, which leads to more injuries. Luckily, there were no more deaths. Janet, Beth, and I were busy as fuck. We were the only ones who had to be there for every boss kill, but we had been leveling up Frank, Branna, and Rich so we could catch a break.

We usually finished the dungeon in about two days now. We had it down. How to kill the guy, and we beat the boss within ten minutes on average now. We were taking on the boss this one time, and Beth, Janet, and I were with Brianna and Rich. We had cornered the boss and were about to kill it when Rich missed a block and stumbled. He stuck his sword hand out to steady himself, and the boss used the opportunity to take his arm at the elbow.

Brianna freaked out. She screamed and finished the boss in a rapid flurry of blows with her long sword. Even after the boss was dead, Brianna just kept stabbing its body over and over again, screaming, “You took his hand, you mother fucker, you… you mother fucker!”

Janet ran over to Brianna, as Frank, Beth, and I ran over to Rich to give him a Senzuketa Bean. Frank was pretty freaked out about the whole thing. I think Frank didn’t like the whole fighting to gain levels thing. I’m sure if he could gain levels another way, he would have. I wished I could have helped him, too, but I only knew one way to gain levels. Kill monsters.

Janet reached Brianna and put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. As she did, Brianna turned and swung at Janet with her sword. Janet pushed the swing aside with her axe. Then, she slammed her hand down on the woman’s wrist, breaking Brianna’s hold on her sword. The sword dropped to the ground. That seemed to kind of snap Brianna out of it, but she still looked like she wanted to kill someone. Or, well, I guess a second somebody, seeing as she just finished the boss a second ago.

“Hey, Brianna, it’s okay. I know you’re pissed right now, but listen, he’ll grow it back. He’s gonna be fine. With some Senzuketa Beans, he’ll return to normal in just a few days.” Brianna’s eyes went wide, and the anger fell from her face, replaced by embarrassment.

“Fuck, I remember now. When that guy on Sam’s team lost his leg. Fuck! Sorry, I went kinda crazy there for a second. I forgot about the whole growing body parts back thing. I thought Rich had lost his arm forever when we were so close to a perfect victory. I just lost it. Fuck! My bad, you guys.” Brianna said, still clearly embarrassed and also quite flustered. Janet took pity on the woman.

“No worries. Happens to the best of us. Don’t let it fuck with you. Okay? It’ll grow back as good as new, don’t worry. “Janet told the Brianna and patted her on the shoulder. Brianna had been fine by the time we got out of the dungeon, and Rich’s arm grew back just like we said it would.

When Frank, Devin, and Brianna saw Rich’s arm grow back over the next few days, they were amazed at how fast he was healing. I could tell that Rich was a little freaked by the whole ordeal. It was healing fast enough that if you looked at it long enough, you could literally watch the man’s arm regrowing. It was a real head trip I knew from firsthand or arm, experience.

At the end of the first week of our intense “training camp,” we decided, or well, the council that I was on, decided that it was the day to build the shop. Everyone was excited once the news spread. The merchants’ shop was fucking so needed. Once Beth had bought the building, she could pick a location to place it as long as it was within the town’s limits.

One cool thing was that at the end of the building text, there was a line with a warning. The warning told Beth that wherever she intended to place the building would be magically cleared, and anything residing in said area would be destroyed. Once we figured that out, we tried to cheat the system and piled up our garbage bags in the area where we planned to place the shop. When Beth went to set the building, all the trash vanished. That was amazing. It really worked. We had to remember to do that every time we placed a new building. It wasn’t a fix forever, but we’d take full advantage while we could.

The shop finally appeared, well, it both did and didn’t in a way. When the shop was placed, it had a hazy look to it, and when I got within ten feet of the new building, I got a prompt that opened without me telling it to.

“You cannot enter this space yet. Estimated time till temporal stabilization: three hours. Please be patient while the area is stabilizing. Thank you, and have a pleasant day.”

That was a bummer, but it was only three hours, so it didn’t matter, really. Three hours passed, and they were probably the three slowest hours of my life. It was fucking killing me, but when it was over, it would be totally worth the wait. We had so much gear that I had five bags, two fifteen-slot bags, and three twenty-slot bags full of my personal loot. The twenty-slot bags came from the boss of the dungeon, and Beth, Janet, and I had all taken a few for ourselves.

I was more than excited to get in the shop. I had shit to sell and money to make. When the shop finished temporal stabilization or whatever, I popped up from where I had been waiting and started jogging over to the shop. I didn’t make it more than half the distance to the shop before confetti canons fired, music started playing, and a magical sigh appeared out of nowhere, lighting up the entrance to the merchant’s shop. The sign read, “Humanoid Support Ventures, the one-stop shop for all your bipedal needs.”

“What the fuck! That’s kind of odd? I guess it makes sense. The galaxy is a big place. There must be thousands of different races out there, and it made sense that there would be shops that focused their business on certain species. Maybe humanoids were a niche market. Whatever the reason, I was ready to just get into the shop and find out for myself.

Once the theatrics were over and people realized that the shop was open for business, a crowd began to form in front of the building. The situation had almost gotten out of hand for a second when a few people tried to make a rush for the shop’s door. I had to knock a guy out. I wanted to let everyone, including myself, go buck wild in the shop, but the building looked like only ten people would fit inside at a time. I was worried that if I just said fuck it and hoped in the shop. I would exit the shop to a brawl. That would definitely get blamed on me, so fuck that noise.

I had been wondering what I was going to do when Janet and Beth walked over to me. “Oh, thank fuck you two showed up. I think in another five, we’d be stopping a brawl.” I said. Janet chuckled at me while Beth was at least kind enough to try and conceal her mirth.

“Sorry, Travis. It looks like everyone can’t wait to get into the shop. Good to know it was the right choice, and you’re right.” That’s all Beth said before she got to work. It took Beth five minutes, and everyone who wanted to enter the shop had formed a line. Beth only intended to let in five people at one time. We didn’t want to crowd the place.

I was in the first group to enter the shop with Janet, Tess, Rich, and Brianna, and the first thing I noticed was that it was a relatively small establishment. There was a table with two chairs on one side of the room and a small bookshelf full of books on the other. Finally, there was a counter across from me, and there was a… fox person, that was the best description I could give, standing behind the counter. The fox person was dressed in a fine suit with a bow tie. The dude looked sharp. Oh, and I was all by myself.

“Hello, sir. How may I assist you this day.”