As Teresa stepped into Stormwreck, she noted the security checkpoint would be really easy to sneak past. Stormwreck didn’t have the same benefits as Noarosso, it was out in the open and accessible from all sides. They had a wall going up, but that would be incredibly easy to jump over.
The others made it through the checkpoint one at a time. It was kind of funny to see how it worked. There was no chance they were going to disarm everyone, so instead they just had people declare the weapons they were entering with. Magic gun? Swords? Bows? Sure, come on in. Even if they did disarm people, it would be incredibly unfair as mage archetypes were pretty much armed perpetually.
It was a quick process, faster than the TSA at a pre-System airport. There was only so much security could actually do beyond checking for zombie related injuries. Everyone made it through, ironically Benjamin got the most odd looks out of anyone due to his low level. There were plenty of low levels within the city, but it wasn’t everyday you saw a level 0 traveling with a Completionist and several level 50+ party members. Maybe they thought he was some important hot shot that needed an escort. Maybe they thought he had just been found, hiding away, managing to survive this long without killing monsters.
Maybe they didn’t actually think about it very much at all after a couple seconds and were just doing their job. Teresa found this the most likely option.
“We should get something to eat before we teleport back.” Preston said, discreetly glancing toward his dad.
“Yeah we can do that, Patrick said they’ve got a lot of seafood.” Teresa confirmed, figuring they could use a decent meal. They had been living off random monster meat and the super vitamins from the Contaminated Zone. Cooking monster meat out in the wild was a pain in the ass, so most of the time they just used the vitamins. They didn’t have enough to live on forever though, so cooking monsters was necessary.
It was okay. They had no seasoning, and a lot of monsters tasted pretty gamey, and it was difficult to cook without a proper kitchen. Weirdly enough, getting food in the apocalypse was incredibly easy. Preparing it was the hard part. One person could go out, kill a hundred monsters each large enough to feed a family of four for months, then make it home in an extremely reasonable time frame. As a matter of fact, Teresa wasn’t even sure if agriculture was worth it anymore, except to grow produce as delicacies like desserts.
While killing hundreds of monsters wasn’t a big deal, cooking them was. Corpse transport, butchering, cooking, preservation, all of that took time and effort. Thankfully Teresa wasn’t heavily involved in anything large scale like that, she only really had to look after her party. Lately though, she had begun trying to think about things like that, whether it was gathering food for large populations or allocating space for hunting monsters.
Benjamin, Sasha, hell all of them could do with some good food. They started out by simply walking the streets looking at what was available.
“Oh, I have an idea!” Sasha said as they walked by a booth serving a soup of some kind. “I’ll just turn up my Perception and we’ll go wherever smells the be- eyuhh oh God I regret everything.”
“Yeah, I don’t recommend turning up your sense of smell in a city.” Sarah said, not bothering to hide her smile. “There’s a reason they really want to build a sewer here.”
“I see that now, it was bad when I was in Lotdale but my Perception wasn’t nearly as high at the time.” Sasha said. “I feel like I just smelled what people ate last week, times a thousand.”
“Perception doesn’t exactly make your senses more intense, just more clear. When you’re in a city with hundreds of thousands of people and a hygiene crisis, you’ll pick up everything. It may not be more intense, but thousands of terrible smells hitting your nose at once as if you were standing right next to it will still be horrible.” Sarah continued.
“I still don’t really understand what you guys mean by that.” Jake admitted. “I had a hard enough time following along with Teresa’s explanation of Soul stuff and seeing ‘nothing,’ but also orange.”
“That’s cause your stats suck.” Preston teased.
“What’s your Perception again?”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant.”
“I think it’s very relevant, at least I have 15 Perception. Is yours even in the double digits yet?” Jake asked,
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“What about Vitality?” Teresa asked. She knew Preston’s Vitality was extremely low from the last time they went over each other’s stats. It wasn’t necessarily a horrible thing, as he couldn’t invest points into everything like how Teresa could, or at least not as well. He had to pick and choose the stats he needed.
“That’s a secret.”
“It was 5 the last time I saw it.”
“That sounds about right, though some time has passed since then.”
“Is it still 5?”
“Nuh uh.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Oh wow, yeah, I totally see what you guys mean about the smell and stuff.” Preston said, pivoting as he dramatically wafted the air around his nose. “My insanely high Perception makes this so unbearable, guess I’ll just have to lower it or whatever.”
“You’re so full of shit.” Jake laughed, prompting Preston to laugh back.
“No, the city is. Maybe if you had a high Perception like the rest of us, you’d know that.”
“I don’t need a high Perception to tell you that.”
“Well for your information, my Vitality is not 5, thank you very much. If it was, I would have probably died while sparring by now, healing magic or not.” Preston clarified. “Still not that high though, there’s a reason I had to take so many breaks.”
“Your skeletal structure took quite a few breaks as well.” Jake teased him.
“How rude.”
They continued looking around at the options and eventually settled on getting a soup of some kind with a bunch of seasonings inside. It was pretty damn good, enough that Teresa was willing to slightly turn up her sense of taste to enjoy it more.
Benjamin looked like he wanted to cry eating the soup, though everyone downed their servings in no time. There were various kinds of fish, or fish-like monster, in the soup along with seasonings and herbs Teresa had never eaten before. It was something she would go out of her way to eat even pre-System, it was damn good.
Good enough that Teresa went back to get a second portion and ask the guy at the booth about it. He was a level 15 healer archetype, which was one of the reasons they got food from him specifically.
Apparently the guy just loved cooking and there wasn’t much to it. He wasn’t some world renowned chef, he just cooked for himself pre-System and that was all there was to it. Post-System, he went around trying a bunch of different plants while using
after eating them to ensure he wasn’t about to get poisoned. He talked a bit about how the skill could affect the taste of some spices and shouldn’t be used on everything since it could completely negate spicy flavors. Additionally, there were some poisonous plants that he ate that tasted fantastic, but could potentially kill someone if they didn’t have the attributes to resist the poison.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
They talked a bit about how he was trying to modify his
to not change flavor, as it was often the poison itself that tasted good. He had a theory that people’s sense of taste was to keep them from eating poison, but hadn’t developed that way for poisons from entirely different planets. Teresa had no clue how true that was, but she couldn’t rule it out either.
Mukouda, the man in question, shared some details about his
, and Teresa did the same in return. When Teresa used the skill, she removed what was considered toxic to either herself or the target in question. Teresa talked with him a bit about how she could target cancer cells with the skill, and he talked about how he tried to make the skill only target the harmful effects of poison without completely neutralizing it.
If he could get a tasty poison twice as deadly as cyanide to instead be as potent as capsaicin without drastically altering the flavor, he would be happy. He had also gotten the
Once the group was done eating, they went towards the teleportation station. It was nice not needing to access a heavily guarded and incredibly important City Monolith in order to teleport out of Stormwreck, and it made things a little cheaper as well. Teresa, Sarah, and Sasha had all gotten a few grand from killing the multiversal invaders, so they were doing just fine on money as well.
The teleportation station was a large, flat metal disc with glowing white circles that reminded Teresa a bit of Star Trek. When she entered a circle, a System screen appeared asking where she would like to go. The list only contained Arconette and The Mall, though Teresa didn’t find it surprising New Haven wasn’t listed. It was a short walk anyway, maybe a hundred miles or so. Teresa selected The Mall, and after confirming everyone was good on cash, clicked accept.
FWOOMP
Instantly, Teresa appeared by the City Monolith in The Mall. It was actually indoors, a temporary building had been constructed around it. The building was extremely plain, though Teresa spotted paste drawn along the walls in a strange pattern.
The rest of her party appeared shortly after her, though thankfully the room was large enough to very easily contain several people.
“I thought you said it was a campground?” Sasha asked questioningly as she looked around. Rather than say anything, Teresa just led the way to the door and opened it, walking outside. “Oh, never mind.”
There were still a lot of tents, though it was gradually improving. Teresa hadn’t been gone for that long, about a week, but there were still several new buildings. Additionally, the only people Teresa saw using any of the tents were adults in good health, though the time of day wasn’t the best to determine who was living in tents and who had an actual home.
She scanned the area with her eyes for Nikolas, figuring he was the first person she should talk to about Nouarosso. Teresa spotted several familiar faces, and eventually found Nikolas talking to Theo, the tank from a friendly party that had gone to the Contaminated Zone with Teresa. She knew they had lost Leo, their healer, and wanted to stop hunting monsters after. Teresa wasn’t sure how that had actually developed, but they both looked tired.
Nikolas spotted them after she waved, and replied by raising a finger as if to say one minute. Teresa nodded and let him be, not wanting to interrupt their conversation.
Sarah and Preston both took their sister and father respectively to look around, while everyone else stayed put until Nikolas eventually made his way over.
“That was fast, weren’t you guys just here?” Nikolas asked, a smile on his face.
“Oh you know, just took a quick trip to the opposite side of the planet and back. Nothing big.” Teresa joked. “Everyone was pretty close, and Sarah’s sister was actually tracking us so that sped things up.”
“Glad to hear it. We’ve got a good chunk of people at Arid Junction right now, working on clearing it out and dealing with the radiation. George and Jonathan are there right now along with the rest of my party. We’ve got a few from the Contaminated Zone force there as well, though as you can see some have moved here as well.” Nikolas said. “Care to catch me up? Last I heard about was New Haven. Eli and Mitsuki have been doing fine as far as things can be expected.”
“I think I’ll go catch up with my grandpa if you guys don’t mind.” Jake said, excusing himself. Teresa was well aware everyone had managed to use their families as an excuse to get out of debriefing, but it was a good excuse that she wouldn’t complain about.
“We can catch you up, where should we head to talk?” Teresa asked.
“The City Monolith is good. One of the defectors from Arconette knew how to make the silence inscription thing, so that building is soundproof.” Nikolas said.
“Perfect.”
They entered the structure built around the City Monolith, which looked pretty plain from the outside. That was fine, for now purpose beat aesthetics. Once inside, it was just Teresa, Saylee, Randall, and Nikolas as they began to go over what happened after New Haven.
Perhaps it would have been better for Benjamin to be there to talk about Nouarosso, but that could come later. Teresa was able to replay the events in her memory just fine, and could account for any details with full accuracy while explaining what had happened.
“You’re going to have to tell George and Jonathan about the skills you saw, especially the acid arrow and the flame whip shield.” Nikolas said.
“Those can definitely be useful so I understand. Anything that does damage over time like that acid is a good counter to healing buffs, and the fire mage had great defensive capabilities for someone of his archetype.” Teresa replied.
She continued to explain events, while Saylee and Randall interjected occasionally for extra details. Nikolas asked a lot about what they said in Nouarosso once she finished, and Teresa had to recount the exact conversations they had.
“The guard asked for a name, specifically he just said name, then Preston said Benjamin Miller-”
“So while they may not know your name, they’ll likely be able to figure out Preston’s.” Nikolas said. “Was there anybody Benjamin talked to while there? Friends, guards, anything?”
“We’ll have to ask him about that.”
“Got it.”
“We need to make improvements to security here.” Saylee said. “It was astonishingly simple to walk in and out of these places. In both Nouarosso and New Haven, they had someone following us from a distance. It’s a good idea executed poorly, as the level difference was too extreme. Teresa and Sarah were both able to hear them, so if we want to implement something similar here we need to do so under the assumption anyone with a high level will know they are being followed.”
“The Mall is already spread thin, so our security measures haven’t been nearly as robust as they should be. We have low levels exclusively on guard duty now, and we have a couple high levels who rarely leave The Mall anymore, but there are too many places to guard and guard duty slows down progression. Blue Waters and Arid Junction both need attention as well, but we don’t have the numbers for this. The Scilians have been learning about combat with the others and are also required to hit level 5, but to be honest they kind of suck in terms of combat potential. They have no mind for even the most basic strategic thinking in combat that we would accept as common sense, at least they’re eager to learn.” Nikolas said.
“Are we sure taking Arid Junction was a good idea?” Teresa asked. “It feels like we have too much stuff to protect at this point.”
“Perhaps in the short term yes, but The Mall is too far from human civilization. Even without Chernobyl active, the entire Contaminated Zone lies between us and Arconette, and we haven’t found anyone closer than them. We also can’t risk burning down the forest here with rocketry experiments. It spreads us thin, but will just have to manage.” Nikolas said.
“So we just need the numbers then.” Teresa said. “We don’t have enough people.”
“We’ve been looking, we don’t even need humans. Just people.” Nikolas said. “I’m sure Saylee told you a bit about what the Madagascar team found in the tundra up north?”
“The System Dungeon?”
“Yes. I bring it up because that’s the only thing of interest we have found. Further exploration is difficult due to the high level monsters in the area. Recently, there was a notable increase in the level of Portals spawning nearby, though we haven’t been able to confirm exactly how much stronger the Portals are getting or why. We haven’t found any more settlements, but between hunting monsters and all of the construction here we are struggling. It’ll pass once things get moving, but for now it’s a struggle.”
“Then let’s take Nouarosso.” Teresa said. “They have the numbers we need, we just have to get a group together again and take them out like we did Chernobyl.”
Teresa wasn’t expecting the idea to be a popular one, but she believed it was possible. The Mall had access to higher level Portals and could therefore produce more powerhouses. The Mall even had a few Completionists now from Arconette, primarily Noel from Jim’s party. If they focused on grinding a few levels then-
“We are absolutely not doing that.”