With the momentum of having achieved one of my goals for the day done, I was eager to continue.

 

A short query on my clusters returned what I was looking for: a schedule for the delivery of my shed and related supplies. I knew it was coming in today, however the exact time was something I hadn’t known. But, now that I was inside the majority of computers used at SEYA, it was trivial to find out anything about its operations that wasn’t too confidential.

 

Surprisingly, civilian deliveries were done early in the morning. Once on the island, it took a few hours for each item to be inspected, cataloged, and prepared for pickup by either the mail service or the store that had ordered it. Since it was early in the afternoon, it was likely that my stuff would be ready- although since I hadn’t provided a way to contact me when I ordered, I didn’t have a way to know for sure without going to town.

 

As much as I would have preferred to not exist outside my room, but with how nice the day was it wouldn’t be so awful.

 

Since it was moderately inconvenient at around a fifteen minute walk, I decided I wanted to take my motorcycle out and ride it to town. Normally, this would bring some greater inconveniences like dealing with parking, refilling gas or batteries, and putting on hot and stiff protective gear- however, I realized none of that applied to me. If there was no parking I could throw it back in storage, the bike’s exorbitant price tag was justified by the gimmick that it ran on ‘ULE cells®’- normally equally extortionate, but convenient as an MG who could just refill it as I wished- and finally, my costume offered better protection than anything on the market while being quite comfortable.

 

Once down in the garage, I went over to one of the side entrances and fake-opened a real door to my [warehouse], stepping inside to retrieve my bike. As I passed back through the door I had co-opted, I almost ran over someone trying to get into the building though it. Due to the sharp divide between spaces, I had no way of seeing what was on the other side until my eyes were through. Because of this, when I pushed through, the person on the other side had almost no warning as the front end of a motorcycle suddenly appeared from a door.

 

They probably would have been fine since I wasn’t going that fast, but when I came through, I found someone knocked over to the side of the entrance. I couldn’t tell if they were crying or hurt, but a sudden bout of relieved laughter answered my question before I could ask.

 

“That surprised me! Jeez, can you give me a little warning before walking through a wall next time?”

 

Relaxing in response to the woman's jovial attitude, I apologies, “I’m so sorry. I’ve never seen someone else use that door before so I thought I’d be safe. You alright?”

 

She waved me off and stood up. “Yeah, I’m good. And it’s nice to see that you are as well.”

 

I awkwardly stood there for a few seconds- minutes in subjective time- trying to piece together why they were being so familiar despite this being our first meeting to my knowledge. I entertained some ideas of maybe having met them at my debut party, around town, or maybe at a meeting- before dismissing all of those because of my general dislike of socializing.

 

Noticing my confusion, she offered, “My name's Emily. John and I were the ones that brought you over here from that Breach…” Trailing off into a facepalm, Emily continued, “my bad. I forgot you had some pretty bad injuries at the time.”

 

I quickly rushed to reply at her embarrassed tone, “no worries. I knew you sounded familiar, just didn't know from where. Massive thanks for that, by the way, I don’t know where I’d be without you guys tracking me down.”

 

“It’s my- well, our- job. By the way, what were you doing with that trick?”

 

“Ah. I’m heading into town and needed to grab my bike out of storage.”

 

“So the door is fine now?”

 

I startled a little as I realized I was blocking the entrance and scooted out of the way. “Should be, I think. Was something wrong?”

 

With a small chuckle Emily said, “Oh, it just felt like it  was welded shut. Must’ve been the perk’s doing. Anyway, see you around!”

 

With that kerfuffle over with, I was able to get going to town. The ride was nice until I got close enough for my threat detection to start picking up the sewer-crawling demons, breaking me out of my willful ignorance. I debated turning the program off, but couldn’t bring myself to become fully blind to the issue. If I was going to be indecisive, I might as well have the looming reminder pressuring me to never forget.

 

I tried to act normal despite the demons as I picked up my order. When I arrived at the storefront, I was immediately recognized and led around back. There wasn’t a lot of space in any of the shops since that was both at a premium and not all that necessary. This was the only household construction and appliance store, however, mostly because there wasn’t a need for any more. It only existed to serve the small city of SEYA and military employees as well as their families in some cases- and it was generally inconvenient to live on a travel-restricted island so most people lived here on rotation.

 

My order came in the form of a number of flat-packed boxes. Luckily, I was putting them into the warehouse so I didn’t actually need to transport them anywhere or I would have been out of luck. Despite that, it was still an ordeal to get them situated in a good place in my interdimensional storage.

 

The packages were too big to move by hand any reasonable way, so I had to gaslight the employee helping me into letting me use their forklift and a loading door. Like with every situation where I could pull the ‘I’m an MG, am I really going to do anything bad?’ card, convincing them was probably way easier than it should have been. I technically had forklift certification from my MG-ID, however that didn’t necessarily translate to actual skill and knowledge. 

 

Luckily for me, driving stuff came intuitively; of course one of the only things I’d say I was naturally skilled in was next-to-useless. Just like lock-picking and lying.

 

I was very thankful that the assembly of the shed had been designed with a single person in mind. It was a simple task of assembling panels into walls that then slotted and bolted into a base. Aside from the lateral supports, the roof was technically useless since the whole construction was in an indoor-like environment.

 

Was it still indoors if the entirety of existence for this small dimension was the interior of a warehouse- and thus not having anything to be considered outside?

 

Regardless of that, I still wanted to properly close all six sides if only so that being inside the shed felt noticeably different from being inside the warehouse. Actually doing that was a bit more work, but proper lifting posture and being able to generate kinetic energy made up for the fact I didn’t think to ask for a ladder.

 

Since the intention was for the nested building to be a long-term housing option, I had splurged on some nice faux windows. Their bulkiness looked goofy from the outside, but made them much more real looking than normal LED panels by projecting the image onto a curved screen such that all the rays were parallel like with the sun’s light. They also all networked together to simulate time passage in a complete environment.

 

Aside from the few pieces of furniture and appliances, I also made sure to get a nice air conditioning system so it wouldn’t get stale in there.

 

Finally, to complete the trying-to-remember-the-old-world-in-a-hyper-urban-cyberpunk-dystopia look, I put a small lawn of turf complete with a flamingo and low white picket fence out front of the shed. On the off chance someone else ever came in here, hopefully that’d get a snort out of them.

 

All in all, it was actually quite nice to have. The warehouse as a whole still had quite a few things I wanted ready access to- with that list constantly growing as I encountered minor inconveniences- however, most of that stuff would require longer term plans to acquire. Some of that came from my ideas requiring tokens to make or use, while others were things that were hard to get either due to price or possible questions that might arise from even trying to acquire one.

 

Even if in hindsight I was building a self-sufficient doomsday bunker, it's not like I wanted everyone to think I was.