“You do that,” Alvin laughed.
Chapter Fifty-one
Breakfast was a variation on one they’d had before; the roses were made of pear this time but the bruschetta was the same. Wintersbreath ate with enthusiasm, knowing this would be her last meal here and wanting to make the most of it.
With breakfast done and everything in order, they were on their way to the garage when Alvin looked at the normal portal entry. “I wonder if that’s connected to the garage one?”
“We can find out,” Becky suggested.
“I’ll give it a look,” Alvin said. “Be right back.”
“Sir,” Jarvis interrupted from the kitchen, “it is not connected. The normal portal is still active where you last left it. They are working to get them synchronized, as another player has been abusing the different entry points betwe—” Jarvis cut off as he froze.
“Assholes,” Alvin muttered. “It wasn’t even me who broke your shit this time.”
“What happened to your elemental?” Wintersbreath asked.
“He broke a law and is frozen as punishment. No telling how long until he’s back to normal.” Alvin wrote a quick thank you to Jarvis before shepherding them all to the Mustang.
Once they were out of the base, Alvin parked Ruffian in the stable yard. A couple of guards were waiting for them, standing at attention when they got out of the vehicle. Captain Steelheart stood just ahead the others, saluting them.
“Welcome back, Champion Wintersbreath. The Queen wishes to speak with you immediately. Her Majesty has asked the rest of you to wait while she receives Champion Wintersbreath’s report. She will likely call for you tomorrow. She will be seeing a number of Matriarchs then.”
“We good for a room?” Alvin asked.
“Yes, it has been arranged, as well as a small stipend if you wish to visit the tailor. These guards will be your escorts while you are in the city, to make sure there are no further assassination attempts.”
“Has that been looked into?” Becky asked coldly.
“That is one of the things the Queen will be addressing tomorrow,” Steelheart replied stiffly.
“Very well. Thank you, Captain,” Becky said, her tone regaining its usual warmth. “Will you be our escort for tomorrow?”
“I shall,” Steelheart replied.
“I will see you tomorrow,” Wintersbreath said. “Thank you, for all you’ve done.”
“We do a job, we get paid,” Alvin said with a hint of a smile. “I look forward to tomorrow.”
“Think about what you will ask for,” Wintersbreath said as she gave each of them a hug.
“Already am,” Alvin chuckled.
“As am I,” Becky added.
Wintersbreath left, with Captain Steelheart trailing after her. The guards looked to the other three expectantly. Alvin just shook his head. “Should we go see the tailor, or just check into a room?”
“Let’s get a room,” Becky said. “We can buy clothes from the kiosk later.”
“Works for me. Take a break, ladies, we’ll be here awhile,” Alvin told the guards as the three of them headed for the inn door.
After being showed to their room, they went back to the base. “Sir, you have already been in game for eight hours today. You slept during the drive to the capital,” Jarvis told them as they entered.
“Works for me,” Alvin said. “We’ll probably need to check in tonight to double check that everything is good for tomorrow. What we haven’t done in ages is check our XP or upgraded gear. You two are going to be pretty shocked, I suspect. I would be if I hadn’t been buying explosives and flamethrowers.”
“That sounds like a good idea,” Becky nodded. “It’s been a while since we had any real downtime. Come on, Mousie, let’s go see what we can do.”
“I’m going to look at base upgrades,” Alvin said as a pad appeared before him. “Maybe I can add another automated room. Any requests?”
“Leather or guns,” Becky said over her shoulder. “Upgrading the garage works, too.”
“I’ll check,” Alvin said as Becky and Kuro left the room. He sat down at the table and Jarvis brought him a cup of coffee. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, sir. Thank you for your concern when I was put into time out. I can’t act, but I’m still fully aware of my surroundings.”
“Good to know,” Alvin said, picking up the cup as he slowly worked his way through the store. “Anything you need, Jarvis?”
“There are two items that I would like, sir. The first is a pantry, which produces any standard cooking ingredients. The other is a cleaning closet, which does the same for cleaning supplies. Those two items will make my job much easier, and will eliminate the need for continuous small purchases.”
“Works,” Alvin found the items and purchased them, placing the pantry in the kitchen and the cleaning closet next to it. “Done, though I’m curious as to why you didn’t mention them earlier.”
“Thank you, sir. If you wish to upgrade the pantry, it will produce specialty foodstuffs once a week and up as far as you wish to upgrade it. As to why, they didn’t go in until this morning. The base system is being expanded a little at a time.”
“Specialty foodstuffs?” Alvin asked, looking up from the pad.
“You must provide a sample of each new item, but once you do, the pantry could produce things like grezle meat, or even dragon meat. The downside is that the item can’t be taken from the base, outside of having been eaten.”
“That’s an oddly specific clarification,” Alvin chuckled.
“It seems someone was worried that food eaten in the base would come out... explosively and wanted clarification, sir,” Jarvis managed to keep a straight face, but humor glittered in his eyes.
“Don’t blame them, but that is funny,” Alvin snickered. “I’ll look into the upgrades, since we’ll likely be here all day. I hope that isn’t going to cause you any trouble?”
“Not at all, sir. I’ll start with the bedroom and bathroom to make sure I’m done in there first,” Jarvis said walking away.
“Cleaning?”
“Every day,” Jarvis replied.
“Really glad we have a butler,” Alvin chuckled.
“I figured you would rather not clean, sir. Funnily enough, hiring a person to clean bases seems to be the first thing many players have done. Some have opted instead for upgrades to the cleaning closet so it automatically cleans the base for them.”
Alvin blinked as the words sunk in. “Wait, if I upgrade the closet, it’ll auto clean? How about the kitchen? Would it cook all the meals?”
“Every functional room can be automated, sir. The only rooms that can’t be automated are bathrooms and bedrooms.”
Alvin wondered for a moment. “Huh…Wait, can Mousie’s dance room be automated?”
“It is classified as a training room, sir. It can be modified to a great extent and automated to a degree.”
Flipping through the pad, Alvin started looking over the training rooms. “Fucking hell, this is amazing. It’s like a god damned holodeck.”
“An apt comparison, except there won’t be holographic enemies taking control of the base from you like happened a few times on that show,” Jarvis pointed out.
“Fuck, this opens up some really interesting options. A penalty-free training environment that can adapt to a wide variety of scenarios…” Alvin trailed off, sipping at his coffee and going over what the training rooms could become.
Jarvis left Alvin to start his cleaning for the day. It might have been tedious and boring to most people, but it gave Jarvis something to do, for which he was grateful. His requests to the company for certain upgrades were still pending, so pushing that aside, he got on with his tasks.
Becky and Kuro came out of the kiosk room and saw Alvin still focused on the pad. “We have a lot of choices, Hero. Before we did any spending, we thought it might be a good idea to come and check with you, in case you needed some XP from us.”
Alvin sighed
as he set the pad aside. “I could use all of it, I’m sure. The problem I’m looking at is what to upgrade and what we should wait on. Here, check these options.” He slid the pad over to Becky. “I’ll go grab some juice for us.”
Becky picked up the pad and looked it over, with Kuro leaning over to look at it with her. Alvin brought them back some juice, then went to check the kiosk. After a few minutes, he went back to the dining room.
“Well, what do you think?” Alvin asked as he took his seat.
“I like these ones,” Becky said, sliding the pad back to him. “If we give you some XP, then we can do them and still upgrade our stats some.”
Alvin looked at her suggestions, “You thinking about the leathers we’ll be getting from Olmera?”
“That, and Mousie’s armor. The automated leather shop adds fifty points of armor back per day, split between up to ten items. Leather items can be repaired there, too. My jacket needs a lot of work, and your duster can be fixed.”
“Upgrading the auto-shop so it can repair at point one percent instead of point oh-one is probably a good idea,” Alvin mused.
“With all we’ve been putting the Turtle through lately, it’s almost mandatory if you want to keep it,” Becky said.
“Why the training room over a gunsmith?” Alvin asked.
“We’re not really trained. It’s been a little over a month, but we’ve been winging it. If the three of us are going to be a real team, we could use time to practice in a safe environment. If you look at that upgrade, it’ll even do vehicles, so we can practice with the Humvee and Ruffian while taking on dragons, drakes, or even undead hordes. Best part is that all gear is simulated based on our current gear, so we don’t degrade our real stuff training. We can add in stuff just for the simulation, too, like upgrading the M240B to an M2 on the Turtle.”
“It’s a good point, but we will need to add a gunsmith soon. Some of our guns are going to need a good going over, like your Tommy,” Alvin pointed out. “We could pick that up, but I want to increase some of our stats. Bringing them up to an even baseline across the board would eat a little over half of what we have.”
“Which is why I only picked those three rooms out,” Becky grinned.
“Let’s do stats first, then we’ll transfer XP and do the rooms,” Alvin said, getting to his feet. “We can do a little training in the training room afterwards to see how different we feel.”
“We should upgrade the room, do training for an hour, then upgrade and train again,” Becky corrected him. “It will give us a better baseline.”
“Gothy has a solid point, Hero.”
“Fair enough,” Alvin picked the pad off the table and upgraded the training room. “What shall we set it for to start with?”
“How about Green River right after the apocalypse? We have a solid idea of what that was like. It should randomize what we face and where and when they come, but at least it’ll look familiar to us,” Becky suggested.
“Works,” Alvin nodded. “Let’s show you what a town in our world looked like right after the Gates opened, Mousie.”
The three of them went through ten minutes of zombie hunting, which seemed ridiculously easy to them. Alvin was frowning when he called a halt to the simulation. “Increase zombie intelligence to triple current simulation, and add in more mutated animals.”
Becky raised an eyebrow at him, but didn’t comment. The next forty minutes was much more exciting, with each of them getting caught by a zombie or animal at least once. When Alvin ended the training session, they were all sweating from exertion.
“That is a very different world than the little I saw of it,” Kuro said as the street full of wrecked vehicles faded to the plain room it had been before the upgrade.
“Let’s go stat up,” Alvin breathed out. “That’s what we’re likely to be facing when we get back,” he told Kuro.
“I shall do better,” Kuro said. “I should get a gun for fights that start out longer than sword distance away.”
“We’ll pick you up a decent one when we get to Green River or Beatty,” Becky said. “Until then, strap this to your thigh.” Becky handed Kuro her S&W 1911. “It’s only got seven in the mag, and you need to reload it to fire again.”
Kuro got it added to her thigh and walked through Becky’s instructions. “I shall use it when needed. Thank you, Gothy.”
“Add this on the other side,” Alvin said, handing over his IMI Desert Eagle .357 Magnum.
Kuro did as he told her, puzzled as to why he was giving her his sidearm. Once she had it strapped on, Becky giggled.
“You’re right, she does look like a badass with two guns strapped to her legs,” Becky said when Kuro frowned. “You’re a darker, less busty version of a well-known adventurer from our world.”
“Croft was never that flexible,” Alvin said. “Yeah, the twin handguns with the leathers look amazing, and it’s better than the missing throwing knives.”
“I shall try them when we train,” Kuro said.
After they had raised their stats, the three were back in the training room. Alvin and Gothy now had sixes in every stat, making them both a few inches slimmer, more toned, and more buff in the muscle department. Kuro’s stats were now at a minimum of six, but both Personability at seven and Nimbleness at nine were higher.
“My swords will do as much as your rifles or more,” Kuro murmured as she drew both blades and spun through a quick dance.
Alvin whistled softly, watching the taut firm muscles flex as she moved. Becky agreed with him, licking her lips as she imaged running her hands over Kuro in the shower later.
“Which reminds me, our knives will do the same thing,” Becky murmured. “The trade off of close and deadly against distance. If they get close, it will be better for us to go melee and conserve the guns.”
“That’s something we’ll be trying here,” Alvin said as he waited for Kuro’s dance to end. “Too bad we’re getting the other upgrades for the base. Otherwise, we could match her in stats.”
“That’s a good point, but those other two upgrades will be a bigger boost to us surviving than Nimbleness or Personability will.”
“It’s odd having a Personability of six,” Alvin chuckled softly. “I still recall the looks people would give us when we were still under three.”
“We might need the boost for speaking to the Queen,” Becky added. “It should make it easier to get people to listen to us, as long as we aren’t blatant assholes first.”
“I’m working on it,” Alvin sighed.
“Sorry, I felt the need to test my limits,” Kuro said as her dance ended. “I believe I can strike harder than even Wintersbreath now.”
“Hopefully, we never have to find out,” Becky said.
Alvin took a minute to really look Becky over with her new improved stats. A good portion of her gut had gone away; she was still plump, but not flabby. Becky had gotten her clothing altered, so it fit her properly after the slimming she had undergone. Her breasts had dropped a size or two as well, but they seemed to have a bit more lift to them. The muscles on her arms were taut and defined. Not bodybuilder, but definitely pronounced. Her skin was clearer, looked softer and smoother, and her hair had a sheen that screamed healthy.
“Like what you’re seeing, Hero?” Becky smirked.
“Gods, yes,” Alvin said.
“What of me?” Kuro asked.
Eyes going to the leather clad Elf, Alvin smiled. “Beautiful as well, but in your own way.” Kuro’s thin frame had added on lean muscle that was sculpted as if by a master crafter. The bits of her exposed skin seemed to pull the light in, letting it caress her dark skin and show off the clear definition of her muscles. Alvin couldn’t think of a way to accurately describe her besides a living statue, as no human was that perfect in shape.
“You’re not hard on the eyes either, Hero,” Becky smirked. “I’m betting those abs are rock-hard washboards. From the way your shirt fits, I’m saying you’re right in line with that T
hor actor now.”
“I doubt I’m that ripped, but I’m a far cry from where I was,” Alvin chuckled. “We done admiring each other?”
“Yes, Hero. Let’s try this training again.”
~*~*~
“Okay, break,” Alvin finally called out an hour later, freezing the simulation. “Cancel program,” he panted, the room dissolving back to a plain room. They had been a little more in synch with each other, and they hadn’t been touched by the mobs. Kuro’s extra Brawn made a big difference when the enemies had gotten into melee with her. Alvin and Becky resorted to knives twice each, and were both times impressed at how quickly they dispatched the zombies compared to the first time. “Comments?”
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