Although I wanted to find a clear path towards driving a wedge between the Ringo-Dango’s various different sub-gangs, I had no knowledge of the lay of the land. I couldn’t tell what motivated any of them. Not without having grown up here, or being force-fed the information by AI nanos before spawning. Which, well, if that had been an option, then I missed it. I needed intel. 

But first I needed to grab some chow.

I headed over to my fridge and popped open the door.

“SURPRISE!” Calamari yelled. Streamers popped out of the fridge, while he did a little dance. “YOU’RE OUR TEN BILLIONTH TRANSACTION!”

I hunched over, putting my face just inches from his own. Dude was just monotone screaming at me and I was not at all in the mood for it. “Is it intel? Because if it is something super dumb or useless I don’t think I’m going to handle it very well.”

“BETTER THAN INTEL!” Calamari screamed, doing some sort of spin and following it with a K-Pop booty shake. He winked, then slinked one tiny octopus leg behind him, stretching it impossibly long into the nether space that apparently inhabited my fridge. Moments later, his arm returned, holding onto a large plate full of the most dubious-looking sushi I’d ever seen.

“TADA!” Calamari said.

There were bits in it that looked like mold, but fuck it. Free was free. I took it and thanked him, digging in. And to be honest it was pretty good. Exotic, for sure. Especially since some of the more rubbery bits battled my fork when I moved to eat them.

And when I finished, I was surprised and delighted to see that I had gained a +1 to my CON, bumping my HP up to 162.

I coughed in amazement, and looked over at Calamari, who was spinning and dancing the the world’s most-legged ballerina.

“That was awesome, Calamari. Thank you!” I said, gifting him with a smile.

Calamari bowed and scuttled back off to his fridge. “IF YOU NEED ANYTHING ELSE, DIRK STONE, YOU KNOW WHERE TO FIND ME!” he exulted. The door clicked shut behind him.

I shot off a salute in his direction, then felt a little rumble in my stomach. The food had been awesome in terms of gameplay, but it hadn’t been filling. I went to the food replicator and spent another few credits on something more my style. 

Bacon (crispy) and eggs over easy, buttered wheat toast. 

What came out was decent enough, though the eggs tasted vaguely like powdered plastic. Everything was, of course, nano-built and therefore made by little bots, so maybe one of them had glitched and exploded into my matter-converted-to-egg-splatter cuisine.

Didn’t matter. I’d had worse. Powdered eggs and K-Rations certainly popped into my mind. 

And, if a single little nanobot had spooged into my eggs, I really couldn’t complain. Because my body was now roided out, my brain was firing on cylinders it had never used before, my body was moving at Olympic speeds, and I knew exactly where all of that had come from.

This apocalypse wasn’t half bad. At least not here, where it wasn’t hellfire and brimstone.

I was back up to over a thousand Credits, and the game menus informed me that my credits per hour for being the leader had jumped from 75 to 95. People downstairs were leveling up, and that had some nice consequences attached. 

I took Patches for a quick circuit of the patrol routes my people were covering. The weather had improved… but not much. The sun was still hidden behind a thick bank of fog, everything seemed damp, and even the air as we walked the beat seemed to stick to your face.

So far, my patrols had gotten off easy. None of them had gotten into any serious scrapes, but one of my NPCs informed me that they’d chased off a couple of snoops. One of the squads had been forced to put a guy down who was trying to run surveillance from up in one of the other buildings nearby.

And checking my system relation, I saw that this had definitely been the Boss, because my rating with him had fallen another 50. That troubled me. It meant that everyone attached to me had the ability to mess up my relations with other gangs. 

Not sure why they hadn’t informed me, until they had me check my holographic phone and I realized there’d been about fifty messages over the course of the day. These were routine updates: patrol completed (chased off a streaker), patrol completed (killed a guy and confiscated his surveillance equipment from a building nearby), patrol completed (nothing to report), that sort of thing.

I sighed. Never really liked dealing with reports. My time was always in the thick of thing, smashing up the enemy and putting them into permanent time out. That sort of thing.

Was alright though. I was the bossman and I was making the credits, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t getting compensation. I went over and whipped up Patches for a little run around the neighborhood, barely noticing my security teams shadowing me the whole time through.

Was starting to feel like I was the president.

From there, I had a little fetch time with my good boy, which in turn ranked up my Animal Handling skill by 1, and just felt incredible. The fighting was good, but feeling like I was back in society and not all broken . . . that felt better. People smiled and waved when they saw me, and now one crossed the street to avoid my approach.

Felt like something I could really get used to.

When the day got dark, I headed back to my little dominion with a smile and a wave for everybody. Spirits were high, and if all went well I could keep us from getting wiped out by the Boss.

Hopefully by snagging one of his enforcers and fragging the other two, I’d pushed that back a ways… but I wasn’t going to count on him to sit around twiddling his thumbs. 

Which meant it was time to get some information. 

We had one of the goons from the market fiasco, and it was about time to go have a little fun with him. A successful Interrogation check told me he wasn’t likely to give me any reliable information through torture, which meant I needed to get creative. Thoughts washed over my cyber-enhanced brain in waves.

We had the Boss’s guy held in a small apartment, tied to a chair. He was presently surrounded by my griefers, who were quite efficiently teaching him the value of not giving up the latest Ringo-Dango gossip. BluntMachete seemed particularly into it, smashing the NPC for all that it was worth. And GhostFaceGangsta was rolling a bit opposite, talking gently and definitely playing good cop to all the rests’ bad.

They paused the body blows when I stepped into the room. 

The Boss’s goon was nearly unconscious, based on his health meter anyhow. There was only a sliver of pink left above his red health bar. His head hung down, and blood flowed down his lips and nose.

“Take a break, folks,” I said, “I’ll handle it.”

Some spitting on the captive and dark chuckling followed before they made their retreat, muttering about how that poor bastard was really in the stuff now. I closed the door behind them and sighed.

“What do you think, buddy?” I asked my best boy. Patches huffed in response.

“You’re right, this calls for a drink.” I headed over to the replicator thing, ordered up a beer for the low, low cost of 10 Credits, and leaned against the counter to give the guy a longer look. I slurped noisily at the beer, enjoying the creamy head, and considered how to proceed.

Letting out a loud and satisfied “Aaaaahhh!”, I put the beer down and stared him in the eyes. 

“How about some nice, juicy steak?” I suggested. “We can slap a cold steak over that black eye, or I can get it medium-rare well and give you a bit of a break. What do you say?”

Nothing. He was in the midst of eyeing me, and warily. 

A popup told me I was on the right track though. My Interrogation skill had succeeded, and the man was closer towards telling me what I needed to know.

“What’s your name?” I asked, after another noisy slurp. “God, that is good. I mean, for a stuff quality, expensive beer that’s been crafted out of God knows what at the molecular level, it sure does have alcohol in it. Which is a major bonus in this new world. I was starting to think everything would be robots and killing people. And I mean, that’s fun and all, but a guy needs to unwind every now and again, especially after an arms dealer clerk turns most of your buddies to paste.”

I took another long sip of beer and put the mug back in the replicator. “You can frost this mug so every time I drink, it’s ice cold, can’t you?”

It could, for 2 Credits a pop. I beamed, and made it so..

“Ice cold brewski and no beer runs,” I remarked. “I’m starting to really like this place.”

The daze of being constantly beaten seemed to be wearing off, and the goon blinked a few times before finally looking at me. His non-lethal damage bar was filling back in, and in real time. He was at about a third of his pink bar.

It was a lovely little tidbit to add to my encyclopedia of knowledge about life here now in the friggin apocalypse. 

“You want one?” I held the icy mug out toward him, but he was tied to the chair, couldn’t grab it from me, and didn’t react anyway.

Instead he stared at me.

“What’s your name?” I headed back to the replicator and ordered up that steak, a porterhouse, with a nice juicy bone attached. I declined the offer of baked potato to go with it, simply staring at him as I waved the meaty morsel through the air before him.

His mouth opened and shut, the fog of confusion seemed to pass. 

“This steak ain’t gonna eat itself,” I said, though I could probably ask the replicator for one of those. A self-cannibalizing steak. I wondered what the machine would do with that command.

I gave it all another wave in front of his face, seeing that it was now beginning to pool juices. The machine had added some roasted garlic and a sprig of something for garnish I hadn’t asked for, and it smelled terrific. The goon’s eyes locked on the plate like he’d never seen steak before. 

“Last chance,” I told him. “Patches here is looking mighty hungry. I’m sure he’d love it if you don’t take it.”

“I–”

I dumped the steak on the floor. Good boy he was, Patches stared down at it. 

“What’s that? You got a name? Or you know something that’ll help you get some steak and get out of this pickle you found yourself in?”

“I–” I waited for him to speak. “My name… is Delmer.”

“Delmer.” 

“Delmer Klevins.” 

I gave Patches the hand signal, and he bolted forward to snap up the steak. Delmer Klevins jerked forward and watched as my doggo chomped away. 

“Delmer, buddy, you gotta be quicker. You don’t look hungry. Now, you want some beer or not?”

“They’re gonna kill me,” he moaned. 

“Dead men don’t kill people,” I told him. “And in the meantime, if you’re gonna die, why not die with a beer in your hand and a steak in your stomach? Tell me what I want to know and I’ll throw in the baked potato.”

A pop up informed me that my Interrogation skill had again been successful, and I ordered another steak.

He deflated, relented, and then the rest was history.