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Post by rvm45 on Oct 12, 2021 13:05:41 GMT -6
Friends,
Yeah, I have other stories that I should be working on.
The first few hundred words to this story had been floating around in my mental space for a long time.
I just wanted to write the first few pages down as a warm-up tho working on "Blue and the Faerie" and I was surprised how much tumbled out.
Fun and Games
Stairy was a bit disoriented when he first entered the playing field. Everyone was momentarily disoriented when they first arrived. That’s why all of the new transfers arrived with a short-lived bubble of both invisibility and impenetrability around them.
The Powers That Be (TPTB) might be cruel, callous and in many cases even downright sadistic. They did appreciate a good show though. Popping newly arrived players in the middle of things, without letting them catch their breath, would simply create an uninteresting slaughter.
Stairy remembered a children’s show that he had watched a long time ago. The show was called “Jambo” and every episode began with a little jingle:
“Jambo! Jambo! “Means ‘Hello’; “In a Happy Kind “Of an African Way!”
Stairy loved to alter the lyrics of songs. He had often sung:
“Jambo! Jambo! “Means ‘O Hell’! “In a Happy Kind “Of an African Way!”
Right now, he was singing to himself:
“Zombie! Zombie! “Means ‘O Hell’! “In a Happy Kind “Of an African Way!”
Yeah, there were zombies here. While Stairy had always enjoyed movies and books about zombie apocalypses, he thought that a real-life zombie apocalypse was screamingly improbable.
It was screamingly improbable—but not if a very powerful group like TPTB custom-designed zombies in a genetic laboratory, with malice of forethought.
Anyway, this wasn’t exactly a zombie apocalypse, since this world had been created to give players, zombies and other reindeer haints a stage to work out their aggressions on.
Stairy had no idea if TPTB could create a planet out of whole cloth or whether they simply terraformed a likely prospect. In the end, it scarcely mattered unless one were writing a book. Even then, one could leave that chapter out.
He examined his immediate surroundings. From what Stairy could see of the small downtown area, this town seemed a bit smaller than his native Evansville…
Say, maybe 60 000 people as opposed to about 130 000. That was only judging by the size of the downtown area. Some towns had little or no downtown area and some had multiple “downtown” nodes. Still, Stairy guestimated that this town was approximately the size of Terre Haute.
It hardly mattered. Unless you wanted to pretend that the zombies were ex-citizens, there were no people left. “Left” begged the question. The town was created and it had never had any people…
Well, he couldn’t completely rule out the biological equivalent of an NPC or two, but their existence wasn’t proven.
At least the hypothetical town fathers of this town had enough class to have a no-traffic walkway on their main street.
Evansville had had a walkway for several decades, until the stupid town fathers decided to eliminate it in their perennial quixotic quest to “revitalize” the downtown area.
Stairy had no idea why it mattered if large numbers of people shopped downtown or not. It seemed a non-issue and who cared? But the walkway was a time-honored tradition.
This walkway was paved with cobblestones—dark red cobblestones with visibly rounded corners—but the center of the walk-only road was not dished toward the road’s center.
That was a neat trick, polishing and rounding over the bricks without benefit of traffic. Then again, he supposed that bricks could be purchased with a high gloss and beveled edges.
Hell’s belles! TPTB could have chosen to pave the road with cobblestones of gold, if they had pleased.
Stairy remembered the two bookstores that had been on either side of the Mainstreet Walkway in Evansville when he was a boy—practically within a stone’s-throw of each other.
Whenever Stairy had come by a few dollars, he’d had his mother drive him to the walkway to buy books from the two bookstores.
Books didn’t seem as engaging as they once had. Partly, it was an old man’s failing eyesight, memory and limited attention span. Even his limited ability to find a comfortable reading position had contributed. It was also because he had lost much of the sense of wonder that he’d had toward the literary worlds of imagination as a boy.
But now, Stairy was young once more.
This town wasn’t a real town, but it was simulated to the degree that Stairy would not only find edible canned goods and usable tools and ammunition—randomly distributed in a real-world fashion…
He’d also find old letters, family photos and prescription medicine still in the prescription bottles.
Stairy wondered if there was a bookstore or two on this walkway…
If there was, would the books be simulated to the Nth degree? Would they be copies of books from Earth? Or would the relentless TPTB simulation create whole new authors and series unheard of on Earth?
Imagine a nearly omnipotent AI. Now tell it: turn out some original literary works in the style of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E Howard, Louis L’ Amor, Andre Norton, Karl Edward Wagner, Carlos Castaneda…
Stairy forcibly brought himself back to the present. The pointless woolgathering was a symptom of the transition.
85% of the players had no powers at all—at least not to start with. Giving a player a power cost the sponsor a huge amount of currency—whatever TPTB used for currency.
Brynlee had nearly bankrupted herself to give Stairy four abilities—plus a well above-average set of senses.
Power One was superhuman strength—though Stairy only had the junior version of superhuman strength. Having the senior version ruled out having any other special abilities.
The scorecard and heads-up display in Stairy’s mind had translated his strength into terms that Stairy—who had once been a very serious weight trainer—could relate to.
Stairy could bench press 605-pounds for 25-repetitions—in very strict style, including a one-second pause at the chest with each repetition. He could squat 955-pounds for 60-repetitions—going down each time until his buttocks firmly contacted his calves.
Then Brynlee had bought a few extra enhancements—though they were expensive.
Stairy’ grip was 60% stronger than what it should extrapolate to. His deltoids had gained another 25% strength—because almost every arm movement used the deltoids to some degree.
Stairy’s lower body started perfectly balanced, but he had always been a quad-dominant squatter—so his quadricep got a 30% increase in power. His calves too—that really increased his jumping ability.
Finally, his serratus had twice the muscle mass that nature had intended. The muscle wasn’t pivotal, but it was photogenic as all Hell—and since it was a small insignificant muscle, enhancing it was relatively cheap.
He hadn’t even bothered to check how the spot-enhancements increased his bench press and squat. His strength was already well past the point of diminishing returns.
Think of a man on very slippery ice, trying to bring his full strength to bear. Doubling his strength wouldn’t help his case—at least not by much.
Stairy would very rarely have the traction and the leverage to bring anything close to his full strength to bear most of the time. There were boilerplate exceptions though…
Stairy’s new body 6-foot 3-inches and he weighed 230-pounds. Stairy thought sourly that he was built like a baseball player or a quarterback now. Never mind. No tall slim dude ever had half of Stairy’s current strength. Even tall NFL Lineman types, who weighed well over 300-pounds, had Never come close to Stairy’s strength.
“A pure strength type will be 20% to 35% stronger than you, pound-for-pound and he will outweigh you by 200 to 300-pounds. Don’t grapple with pure strength types,” Brynlee had warned Stairy.
‘Whatever,’ Stairy had thought.
Stairy’s third ability was locked for the moment and his fourth ability was a rather weak telepathic ability. It wasn’t strong enough to lean very heavily on, at present—but it might give an occasional helpful premonition.
Of course, false premonitions were quite possible and if Stairy paid them too much heed, it would make him exceedingly timid.
Stairy’s second ability was short-range teleportation, but it was hemmed in by so many rules and restrictions that it seemed of little practical value.
He watched the zombies mill around the walkway.
The walkway had two pleasant little fountains—just within Stairy’s line-of-sight. There were trees and planters and both marble benches and ornate wrought-iron chairs and benches. Many of the buildings had sunscreen awnings.
There were a lot of tasteful murals done in the color and style of graffiti art on the walls of the brick buildings and there were several statues of bronze, cast iron and marble. There was a large koi pond with brick sides that reached two-feet above the sidewalk.
These people—these hypothetical people—had really loved their town and their walkway.
“Zombie! Zombie! “Means ‘O Hell’! “In a Happy Kind “Of an African Way!”
If a human was bitten by a zombie, he might metamorphose into a zombie—but he would die during the transition more often than not. Never mind. TPTB provided a steady supply of zombies from their vats…somewhere.
Stairy was immune to the zombie virus—and every other virus and bacteria that had ever plagued mankind. In addition, his immune system was five-times as powerful as the most resistant human’s and he healed over nine-times as fast.
He wasn’t immune to having his fingers bitten off, his throat ripped out or suffocating under a scrum of zombies though. Besides, even with his hyped-up immune system, a zombie bite was more septic than the bite of a Komodo Dragon. If he was bitten, he’d have a festering sore for some time, until his roided-up immune system slew all the pernicious invaders.
A zombie had a blind gut-sack where animal tissue would ferment and separate into protein, carbohydrates and fat. Most of their other organs were cannibalized to fuel the zombie.
Zombies had no heart, lungs, liver, spleen, intestines, bladder or kidneys. They had no skin and no genetalia.
Their blood was exceedingly viscous and what circulation there was, was provided by muscular contractions. The blood was too thick to be at much risk of leaking out.
A zombie could go into a sort of suspended animation or estivation when nothing much was happening around it. Their muscles absorbed oxygen directly from the atmosphere and stored it for their bursts of activity.
They were slow, but strong. A human without superhuman strength would feel as if he had been clamped by a hydraulic clamp when a zombie grabbed him.
Stairy could rip a zombie’s arms off—but not anywhere nearly as quickly and effortlessly as ripping a fly’s wings off. It would take a moment—leaving him vulnerable to other attacks. It was best to avoid being grabbed by a zombie.
The mental heads-up display in Stairy’s mind told him that he could level-up—just like in a game—and killing zombies was one means to level-up. Surprisingly, he only had to kill three zombies to level-up to Level-2 and five more to level-up to Level-2.
His strength and his telepathy would only increase incrementally with the early level-ups. His strength was close to maxed-out and his telepathy was not fully online yet.
God knew how his heretofore unidentified—even to him—third ability would be affected. Stairy was most interested in levelling-up his rather inhibited short-range teleportation.
Stairy had no intention of being an active participant in this farce—and Brynlee had assured him that he was under no obligation to—despite her blowing vast amounts of TPTB currency on him.
Apparently, Stairy’s very existence here served as a good-mojo thingy for Brynlee, regardless of what Stairy did.
Screw a bunch of simulated cities, zombies and reindeer haints. This was a complete world, with vast forests and mountain ranges. Stairy intended to head for the deep woods and become a hermit…
Still, he needed to gather a few tools and some gear first.
The short-range teleportation might be rather weak, but it could come in handy. Opportunities to gain levelling-up points would be few and far between in the wilderness.
Might as well make hay while the sun shines and kill some zombies and level-up.
As the bubble evaporated, Stairy drew his .357 Magnum and sighted at a zombie head.
Zombies had poor vision—maybe 20/45 or 20/50. Older zombies would see even more poorly. Still, shadow-vision had no vision beat all to Hell. Even an old zombie had considerably better than mere shadow-vision.
Zombie hearing was better than human hearing—but not all that much better.
Every time one was exposed to a loud noise, a few of the auditory nerves would die. Even without loud noises, the nerve endings seemed to gradually lose sensitivity.
Hearing tests were adjusted for age. There was no way in Hell that a normal human who was 50-years old could hear as well as he had when he was one-year old.
Something about the zombification process rejuvenated all of the hearing receptors. A zombie could hear as well as a six-month-old infant—with about a 15% amplification of volume—and loud noises had no effect on zombie hearing.
Smell? A zombie could smell about 20-times as well as a normal human and they could smell several simple organic compounds—like carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane, ethane, propane, butane and acetylene, that were odorless to humans. With a zombie’s severely limited intellect though, the value of their enhanced sense of smell wasn’t all that great.
Stairy had some very exacting specifications for his main weapon. It started as a Smith & Wesson Model 27 with a 5-inch Mag-Na-Ported barrel and L-Frame style underlug. It had a narrow, smooth trigger, unfluted cylinder, a bobbed hammer and round-butt K-Frame grip frame.
The grips were stag and there was a highly polished stainless-steel Tyler “T” adapter. The gun was bright nickeled.
Stairy had taken the time to insert a pair of earplugs. Brynlee had assured him that his new hearing wouldn’t be damaged by noise—but he just didn’t like loud noises.
If he had no time to shield his ears—so be it. This time, there was time, so there was no need to suffer gratuitously.
“Boom! Boom! BOOM!!!”
Three zombie skulls exploded. Stairy still had three shots left, so he shot three more times and advanced 60% of the distance to Level-3.
Stairy did a speed reload. He only carried three speedloaders. If you had to speed reload a revolver three times running, you were hurtin’ for certain anyway.
He let the empty shells fall as they may—though it killed his frugal soul—but he kept the HKS style speedloader.
In a few seconds, six more zombies were dead. This was very close-range and unchallenging shooting.
“Ding!”
A notice told Stairy that he had advanced to Level-3. He was halfway to the eight zombies that he needed to advance to Level-4.
Only, he had a problem. Twelve rounds of .357 Magnum—and the .357 was a loud cartridge—was like a dinner-bell to zombies all over the immediate area.
Who would have known that they could advance on him so quickly?
Stairy reloaded once more and dropped another six zombies.
“Ding!”
He was now Level-4.
Stairy jammed the .357 hard into its holster and then he took two running steps—and teleported. He teleported to the other side of a locked glass door.
That is why that he had taken the two long steps, to get within range of the interior of the store.
He reloaded the revolver once more and teleported outside. He kept a weather eye on the countdown clock showing for how much longer that he could continue to ride the teleport carousel he shot out the S&W, holstered it and then drew his second pistol…
Something that was a good match to a Star BM on the outside, but greatly improved on the inside.
He was on his second magazine of 147-grain +P 9mm’s when he heard the “Ding” that meant that he had attained Level-5. He shot one last zombie as the slide locked back…and he teleported back inside the store.
The sun was shining on the plate glass door and none of the zombies seemed able to see Stairy inside with their piss-poor vision and limited brains.
Nonetheless, Stairy took a big step back from the door. He reloaded his .357, all of his speedloaders and his 9mm magazines.
His teleportation was on cool-down and he really did not want to face the ever-increasing zombie horde outside without it.
Since he was safe for the moment, he explored his immediate surroundings. Lo and behold! He had randomly selected a bookstore to teleport into.
He examined a few books in curiosity. There were about fifty books about a Tarzan-like cave girl by someone named “Nathaniel Gruenfeld.” There were a slew of sword and sorcery books by “Eli Pruitt.” There was a raft of Space Opera stories by a slew of authors that Stairy had never heard of.
‘Interesting but tangential!’ Stairy firmly told himself.
He reluctantly pulled himself away from the wire shelves cram-jammed with paperback books. Nonetheless, he put a dozen of the paperback books into his backpack—though God alone knew when he would find the time to read them.
There were a number of snacks arrayed behind the check-out counter. There was this world’s equivalent to Slim Jims, M&M’s, Skittles, potato chips and Snicker’s Bars.
Stairy helped himself to several of the small sausages while filling his backpack and his possibles bag with snacks. He had some rations, of course. Now he had more.
The cooler continued to work in this crazy Potemkin Village and Stairy helped himself to an ice cream sandwich and a 24-ounce cola
Stairy was tempted to say that his spider-sense was tingling. It was his low-grade telepathy trying to earn its keep though.
The telepathy led Stairy to the latch that caused a spring-loaded hidden drawer to pop out. Inside the little drawer was a Colt Diamondback revolver in .38 Special. The little .38 was loaded and there was a box of 158-grain +P hollowpoints with 32-rounds still in the box.
He guessed that allowing for the 6-rounds in the revolver, that someone had fired two cylinders-full of rounds through the little revolver.
God knew.
Stairy had always wanted a Diamondback—though truth be told, he’d have preferred a .22 LR Diamondback. But his taste had always ran more to Smith and Wessons when he had money to spend. And anyway, Colts sold for prices that would bankrupt a bricklayer, even before Colt had discontinued them.
He had a .38 Special already—a round-butt S&W Model 64 with a bright polish, bobbed hammer, stag grip and polished stainless-steel Tyler “T”.
He wasn’t allowed to take two of any one gun, or he would have preferred a second Model 27. As a 9mm, he’d have vastly preferred a S&W Model 5906 with Hogue wood grips—but the choices were the Star BM look-alike or a Browning Highpower.
He liked the 5906 because he’d owned a pair. The Browning was a fine gun—but except for his two 5906’s, if he had to go 9mm, he preferred a small light gun to the “my magazine is bigger than yours” sweepstakes.
Anyway, he now had a 4’’ .38 and 38 more rounds of .38 Special ammunition. He placed the Diamondback on his gunbelt, just in front of the Ruger Mark II .22 LR pistol that he wore left-hand strong-side.
“O Hippies, Rednecks, “Winos too, “They all Crave “The Mystic Brew…”
Stairy hummed to himself. He was rapidly acquiring more stuff than he could carry.
Apparently, the store’s owner had been a prudent soul. Stairy’s inner sense led him to three other hidden drawers.
There was a short-barreled 12-Gauge Double Barrel. The shotgun’s barrels were about 15’’ long. Stairy didn’t have a tape measure, but he estimated using the length of his 5’’ Model 27 Barrel.
18’’ was the legal limit on shotgun barrels on Earth—at least unless you processed tons of paperwork and paid ruinous tariffs. Maybe the law was slightly different here or maybe the shopkeeper hadn’t cared.
The shotgun was loaded and there was a 25-round box of 00 Buckshot rounds. Stairy was less than enamored of buckshot for social engineering. It was okay, but he’d have preferred .73 Caliber Punkin’ Balls—but there you had it.
The second gun was a Single-Shot 12-Gauge similar in concept to the H&R Topper. There was another box of shells.
The last drawer had two revolvers. Stairy’s intuition told him that the cautious owner meant to hide them in two different locales, but he hadn’t gotten the last secret compartment built.
Both of the revolvers were identical to the old H&R Autoejectors. One was a five-shot while the other was the larger-framed six-shot. There were two boxes of .32 S&W Long Wadcutter cartridges.
The old guns were chambered for the .32 S&W Short. Regular S&W Longs wouldn’t fit in the cylinders, but the Wadcutters would. Using the S&W Longs was a slight overload, but probably not too abusive so long as it wasn’t overdone. Kinda like shooting +P .38 Specials in a S&W Model 36.
There weren’t any more guns in the bookstore, though there were a few boxes of snacks in the back, a few razor knives and a bulk pack with over 100 razor-knife blades.
The bookstore itself, was larger than both the Readmore and Luhring Bookstores of Stairy’s youth combined—but not quite as big as the big Barnes & Noble outlet.
Oddly though, every paperback seemed to have a hardbacked version stocked in the back library-style—rather than covers facing outward to lure the customer.
Then the second and third stories were—of all things—a library. Apparently, in this world, booksellers also operated lending libraries. You’d think that would cut into their business.
Stairy felt a headache coming on. The bookstore and the library were chock full of useful manuals on all sorts of things—kinda like the old Lindsay’s Publishing Company, Paladin Press and Dover Publishing all rolled into one.
Many of the volumes might prove invaluable to Stairy, but he couldn’t pack them. Hell, he couldn’t even pack all of the food that he had found here.
“Ding!”
“The third special ability is partially activated. You can store an almost limitless amount of material in the inter-dimensional storage space. However, you won’t be able to call it out again until your level reaches at least Level-12,” a voice informed Stairy.
“O Hippies, Rednecks, “Winos too, “They will Screw the Zombies “Blue… “In a Happy Kind of an African Way!”
Stairy examined his new teleportation level.
At Level-1, Stairy could imagine six points in a hexagon surrounding him. Each point was precisely 5-yards away. Stairy could rotate the points until he was satisfied, but once he teleported, the points were fixed for the duration.
For 20-Seconds after he teleported, Stairy could teleport instantly between any of the six points or his original position. Once 20-Seconds was elapsed, he couldn’t teleport again for 5-Minutes.
When he levelled-up to Level-2, the distance increased to 7-yards away. The time that Stairy could teleport rose to 25-seconds and the cool-down time decreased to 4-Minutes and 50-Seconds.
At Level-3, something interesting happened. His teleportation window increased to 30-Seconds. His cool-down decreased to 4-Minutes and 40-Seconds.
His distance increased to 8-yards, but there was now a second set of six-points only 5-yards away. The number of points that he could teleport to had increased by six.
Level-4 increased his teleportation window to 35-seconds and shrank his cool-down to 4-Minutes and 30-Seconds.
At Level-5 his window grew to 35-Seconds, His cool-down shrank to 4-Minutes and 20-Seconds and he gained a third ring with twelve points arrayed on a circle 10-yards away.
Also, heretofore when Stairy teleported, the points were locked. Now, as long as he didn’t teleport to the inner ring on his first jump, he could rotate the inner ring to his satisfaction until his first jump into the inner ring locked it. It wasn’t a big increase in flexibility—but it was something.
He had no idea how his teleportation ability would increase in the future. He did know that he needed to get to Level-12 before he retired to the slow-levelling countryside.
Stairy swept the contents of the bookstore and library into his inter-dimensional storage. He also sent the Single-Shot 12-gauge and one box of 00 Buckshot into storage and the six-shot .32 along with one box of .32 S&W Long Wadcutters.
He sent much of the food as well—including the coolers full of colas and the ice cream freezer. The voice assured him that nothing would melt, spoil, rot, deteriorate or spill in his inter-dimensional storage.
He kept quite a bit of the food. He didn’t know when he would come across more food. Carrying excess food—within the broad realm of reason—would correct itself within a short while, as food was consumed.
The zombies outside were quiet, since they hadn’t been stimulated for a few hours while Stairy searched the bookstore.
He’d needed 13-zombies to get to Level-5. His heads-up display told him that he had killed one zombie and that he’d need 17 more zombies to reach Level-6.
This was starting to look like the Fibonacci sequence. If so, he would need 31 zombies to get to Level-7 and 49 to get to Level-8. Getting to Level-12 would require an astonishing number of zombies.
“It requires 25-zombies for each level from Level-7 to Level-10. Level-11 to Level 15 Requires 35-zombies each. Level-15 to Level-20 requires 60-zombies per level. Above Level-20, it requires 85-zombies per level. You are expected to graduate to something more challenging than zombies long before you advance to Level-2o. However, any zombies that you kill incidentally will contribute to your total score,” the voice informed Stairy.
Stairy teleported to where the zombies were the thickest. He used the Colt Diamondback first, since he had no speedloaders for it.
.38 Special might be a bit on the anemic side, but the 158-grain +P Lead Hollowpoints had more than enough “OOMPH!” to shatter a zombie’s skull. Stairy killed five zombies with six shots, since he had to shoot one zombie twice.
He teleported to a distant spot as he holstered the empty Colt and drew his .357.
Every time that he’d shoot the .357 dry, he’d teleport before reloading and starting over.
Eighteen shots netted him fifteen zombies—since riding the teleportation carousel distracted him a bit. Still, he had leveled-up to Level-6 and he had three zombies to his credit toward Level-7.
He teleported back inside the bookstore to reload his revolvers and his speedloaders and to assess his gains.
His Teleportation window had increased to 40-Seconds and his cool-down was down to 4-Minutes and 10-Seconds.
Boring! Still, it was something.
He could also feel his telepathy growing a small bit.
Stairy went to the third floor and used his senses to search. Sure enough, there had been access to the roof at some point but someone had plastered the trap door over…
It didn’t take the super-strength Stairy long to re-open the access panel.
He looked at the zombies milling around aimlessly in the walkway. All the gunshots had zombies coming from far and wide.
‘I should have thought of this earlier,’ Stairy thought.
Stairy took the small light rifle off his back. The rifle was a Pseudo-Scout Rifle. It was a very light bolt action with a 17-inch barrel and it was chambered in 7mm TCU. It had a forward-mounted Scout Scope.
The barrel was both low-friction stainless steel and polygonally rifled—both gave the 120-grain 7mm Bullets a bit more OOMPH!
Stairy removed the vortex flash suppressor and screwed on a foot-long suppressor in its place. It wouldn’t “silence” the supersonic crack, but it would almost totally obscure the muzzle blast—making his location very obscure—especially to the thick-witted zombies.
“Zombie, Zombie “Means “O Hell!...”
Stairy half hummed before he held his breath and started to squeeze. The boat-tailed, partitioned softpoint exploded the brains of a zombie a good 200-yards away.
Stairy calmly sniped one zombie after another until he’d gotten the requisite points to attain Level-9. By then, allowing for a few misses, he had fired over 100-rounds. Running low on ammunition was starting to be a concern. He only had 250-rounds of 7mm TCU.
Stairy decided to finish the next three boxes of ammunition, if he had to, to get to Level-10. That would leave him 140-rounds of 7mm TCU for his rifle.
After Level-10, the levels became much more costly.
“Ding!” He had attained Level-10.
His teleportation window had increased to 55-Seconds and his cool-down had shrank to 3-Minutes and 50-Seconds. Once the cool-down had decreased to under 4-Minutes, he only shaved off 5-seconds with each level-up. O well…
He’d gained a third circle 12-yards away, and this circle had 18-equidistant points. He’d also gained a 3-yard circle with 5-points arranged in a pentagon. Like the 5-yard circle, the 3-yard circle could be rotated until he teleported into it the first time. Five points on a circle with a 3-yard radius were all pretty close together no matter which point you chose—but still…
He still had 146-rounds of 7mm TCU left. He fired six rounds and killed five more zombies toward Level-11. He decided to give long-range—or truth be told—moderate-range sniping a break for awhile.
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 12, 2021 13:30:38 GMT -6
Chapter Two 4894
Stairy looked around the walkway area. There was a small hardware store across the street, but the walkway was far too wide for Stairy to teleport across.
The building adjoining the bookstore sold office supplies and there was no visible access from the roof. The next building was only two stories tall, but it had a prominent stairwell housing and there was a sporting goods store on the first floor.
He teleported to the roof of the sporting goods store. He paused on the roof and watched his internal countdown clock tick down to zero. God knew what he might find inside, He might need to teleport.
Stairy confronted the door leading to the downstairs.
“Hell’s belles and cockleshells and skeletons all in a row!” Stairy complained aloud.
The door was one of those heavy-duty iron-clad doors. Stairy had every confidence that he could rip the door off its hinges—if he only had better traction than the sheet-asphalt-covered roof afforded and if he had a better handhold. Yeah, given traction, he’d be more likely to rip the door’s handle off.
O well! Stairy had a pry bar. It was octagonal 4340 tempered steel and in view of Stairy’s superhuman strength, the bar was a good bit thicker and more robust than a standard bar.
As Stairy wedged the bar into a crack and started exerting his strength, he wondered if having the super-strength ability had made him a bit muscle-headed.
He should have asked for a comprehensive set of lockpicks. He hadn’t used picks much, but he understood the principle. This building, with its sturdy door might prove to be a handy temporary base of operation—but he was forced to destroy the door to gain access.
The door screeched and a portion of the door frame bent and broke away. Stairy now had a point of access. He grabbed the door’s edge with one hand and exerted an opposite force on the door’s frame with the other hand.
The door buckled and came out of the doorway, but Stairy received a long deep gash on his right forearm.
“Shit a big, gold-plated, razor-edged brick!” Stairy cursed.
Stairy washed the gash with peroxide and then Betadine. He clumsily sewed the gash up one-handed. It was clumsy only because he could only use one hand. Many would have been amazed at his dexterity.
He took an antibiotic and a pill that speeded up healing by a factor of three. He bandaged his forearm the best that he could.
He didn’t want to explore the sporting goods store at the moment, but he needed to make sure there were no hidden threats.
There were three apartments on the second floor—two smaller ones on either side and a larger apartment across the rear.
The first apartment apparently belonged to an old lady. Stairy had no need for women’s clothing—but on second thought, with infinite storage, they might serve as a source of fiber—or just rags.
The old woman had two good things in her apartment—a jumbo bottle half-filled with morphine tablets—and a Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless in .32 ACP, with Mother of Pearl grips. The pistol had a loaded magazine and one loaded spare.
Apparently, these people were more accepting of both guns and opiates than the people back home.
‘Screw the war on drugs!’ Stairy thought as he popped two of the morphine tablets into his mouth and dry-swallowed them.
Stairy was able to determine that the second apartment had belonged to a Spartan-living construction worker. Except for some clothes that were too small for him—but could provide cordage—and some sheets and blankets—there was little worth keeping.
The third apartment had apparently been home to a happy family. Nonetheless, Stairy found a hookah, several pipes of various makes and description and what looked like several large coffee cans full of pipe tobacco, hashish and opium.
He had never smoked a hookah, nor had he ever had any desire to smoke a hookah—but the logic of a post-apocalyptic world and his infinite storage space both urged him to store it. The principle was, that he might never have an opportunity to acquire a hookah again, and who knew what role it might play in the future?
He put the hookah, most of the hashish and tobacco and all of the opium into his storage unit. He had the morphine pills for the historic future. Who knew what might come about in the post-historic future?
One pipe, some tobacco and some hashish stayed out. Stairy had never smoked a pipe and he had never smoked cannabis or hashish—but who knew what straits this world might drive him to?
There was a gas stove hooked up to its own bottled gas and the kitchen was rather liberally supplied with food. Stairy stored about 80% of the food. That way, if something came up and he could never return, it wouldn’t be a total loss.
He kept enough food out to let him cook several meals with the luxury of a gas range and ample kitchenware. Things would get one Hell of a lot more primitive, once he left the city.
Come to think of it, he could store the range and the propane bottles before he left as well.
‘It is time,’ Stairy told himself as he reluctantly started down the stairs.
He met a zombie halfway down the stairs. He was holding the silenced Ruger Mark II in his left hand. The barrel was not vented to bleed the gasses out and make the rounds subsonic.
Opinions varied, but Stairy would rather deal with a mild supersonic crack than deal with a weakened .22 round that wasn’t all that powerful to begin with.
At the moment, the Ruger was loaded with special, heavier than normal jacketed-truncated-cone, sub-sonic bullets. The jacket, the greater bullet weight and the truncated cone shape all compensated for the lower velocity—some. Truth be told, it still wasn’t up to a full-powered .22 LR’s performance level.
Still, the sound of the round firing was no louder than a very languid handclap.
Stairy shot the zombie five times in the head. Maybe the first shot to the head would have finished the zombie—but then again, maybe not.
Stairy was already wounded and he had no desire to grapple with a zombie. It was better to waste a few rounds to be certain the brain was sufficiently disrupted.
The zombie tumbled limply down the stairs. There was a zombie waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. This one had been a woman—at least it had some long hair left on its scalp and the remains of a pink sundress.
Someone had shot the zombie more than once with a shotgun—or maybe this was the after-effects of a grenade or claymore. The left leg was almost severed at mid-thigh and the zombie drug it limply behind as it crawled toward Stairy.
The left side of the face was also messed up and one eye was missing.
Stairy holstered his Ruger and drew his Bowie. He’d custom designed the Bowie.
Start with a Western Bowie—the best production Bowie ever made. Extend the blade length to 16’’. Make the swedge deeper and more recurved—and make it razor-sharp.
Braze a brass envelope on the spine. Make the handle more ergonomic, stag handled and angle it just slightly like a saber’s grip. Extend the downward guard into a full-fledged knuckle-bow like the Confederate Bowie.
He also specified that the knife be a quarter-inch wider and one-sixteenth thicker at the spine.
There was no sense wasting even .22 LR ammunition on such a weak client.
Stairy waited until the zombie reached for him with its good hand and then he chopped the hand off. Then he quickly stepped close and chopped its head off with his Bowie.
‘Ach Ja! 30 more zombies to level-up to Level-11. Then I’ll still have another 35 to get to Level-12. I think that once I get to Level-12, it will be time to head for the hills,’ Stairy thought.
The zombie’s hand had a ring with a big-ass brilliant-cut ruby. Stairy cut off the finger and carefully removed the ring. He didn’t want to cut himself on a sharp zombie bone and have to fight off God knew how many pernicious festering organisms.
The sporting goods store had some good things—many sets of sweatpants, sweatshirts and “T” shirts, as well as scores of athletic socks and athletic supporters.
There were weightlifting belts and although Stairy wasn’t sure what use the belts would be in the post-apocalyptic world, he stored them away diligently…
Along with Olympic and exercise weight sets, kettlebells and beaucoup solid dumbbells—as well as numerous exercise devices—some useful and some crack-brained.
Stairy stored them all with a shrug. It was greedy not to take everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Lo and behold, the sporting goods store also sold hunting licenses. They had a few boxes of .22 LR and some shotgun shells for sale—12-Gauge; 20-Gauge and .410.
Stairy had yet to see a 20-Gauge or .410 in this vale of tears, but he stored the ammo anyway. The #6’s and #7.5 birdshot was less than helpful. The magnum BB shot might have some utility in the 12-Gauge.
The store had no long guns for sale, but there were a few pistols in a small glass display case. There was a Beretta Jetfire .25 ACP and a Beretta .22 Short Minx.
Sadly, while the Minx was bright nickeled, the Jetfire—which Stairy preferred—was blued. There was also four .38 Specials—a S&W Model 36 and a Model 37. They were 2’’ five-shot .38’s. The only difference was that the Model 37 had an aluminum alloy frame and was consequently lighter.
There was a Colt Detective Special with its 2-inch barrel and then there was a 4-inch Colt Police Positive Special. Stairy had owned a Colt Police Positive Special, but his had been a .32-20.
There were boxes of .25 ACP, .22 Short and .32 Special. There were also a few boxes of .38 Special ammunition and two boxes of .357 Magnum.
Finally, there was a Ruger Super Blackhawk in .44 Magnum. They had .44 Magnums when Stairy had shopped for his entry gear, but all of them had been single action. Anyway, .357 was quite sufficient for slaying zombies and for serious social engineering—and you could carry more rounds for the same weight penalty.
Stairy had super-human strength and now he had his all-but-limitless interspatial storage capability.
The voice in the player’s shop had assured him that double-action .44 Magnums were. They just weren’t in the player’s store—at least not in the part that he could buy from...
There was some .44 Magnum ammo, some .30-30, .30-06 and .223—but no 7mm TCU. 7mm TCU was—but he would probably have to trade for it in the player’s store…whatever.
Stairy stored all the pistols—except the .25 ACP—and all of the ammunition, except a box of .38 Special, a box of .25 ACP, a brick of .22 LR and a dozen rounds of Magnum 12 Gauge buffered and plated BB shot for his double-barreled 12-Gauge.
He also reluctantly stored the old woman’s 1903 Colt Pocket Positive too—although he loved handing the mother-of-pearl grips and the neat little compact shiny pistol.
Omar had written:
“The Vine had struck a Fiber; which about “It clings my Being—let the Sufi flout; “…Of my Base Metal may be filed a Key. “That shall unlock the Door he howls without.”
Omar’s Tao was wine. Stairy thought that while wine had its good points, pistols were his Tao. Even pistolcraft itself took a second place to the pistols themselves.
Pistols were…
Given plenty of .22 LR ammunition, Stairy decided to try to snipe at the zombies from the second-story roof. With his silenced .22 LR pistol. It should be a no-risk method to level-up and it would give him a chance to improve his long-range pistol marksmanship—though he wished that he had a scoped and silenced .22 rifle to shoot the zombies with.
Stairy carried enough stuff to allow him to assume the Chapman rollover prone position while being high enough to see over the 30-inch wall around the roof. He started plinking at zombies.
The first zombie was a lucky hit and he went down like a sack of shit when the little .22 bullet hit his brain. Of course, there as a slight sonic boom, since the factory .22 bullet was flying faster than sound.
Stairy sighted at the second zombie. He zombie was about 60-yards away. Stairy could see bits of residue fly when the .22 Bullet hit, but it didn’t hit hard enough to penetrate the skull—or if it did, it didn’t do enough damage to the brain to deactivate the zombie.
The second round was a clean miss, though the zombie opened its bleary, clouded eyes and looked all around. First it had been smacked then the near miss had caused the zombie’s sensitive hearing to pick up the tiny series of sonic booms as the bullet whizzed past.
Stairy gnashed his teeth in irritation. He took a few deep breaths and then took another shot at the zombie. It was a hit, but not an effective hit.
The zombie rose to its feet and looked all around while it gave the peculiar raspy croak that zombies made when strongly stimulated.
They no longer had lungs, diaphragm or vocal cords. God knew how they croaked—but there you had it.
The fifth round put the zombie down. Stairy saw his zombie count rise to seven.
He had needed 30-zombies to level-up to Level-11. Even if he averaged 10-rounds per zombie, that only came to 300-rounds. The brick of high-velocity .22 LR that he’d kept out of storage had 555-rounds.
He was more than willing to expend a whole brick of ammo to attain Level-11, if it came to that.
It took Stairy two-days to attain Level-11. He was in no hurry and he had paused twice to clean the suppressor, as about 100-rounds was its limit, before its effectiveness started to decline—though ever so slightly.
He could now teleport for a full 60-Seconds—or one Minute and his cool-down time decreased to 4-Minutes and 45-Seconds.
He had scored seven zombies toward Level-12 by the time that he had exhausted the brick of .22 LR ammunition. It was a pity that he hadn’t kept a second brick out, but the idea of rooftop sniping with .22’s hadn’t occurred to him until after he’s stored five bricks of .22 LR—along with several 100-round and 5o-round boxes of .22 LR.
There was 140-rounds of 7mm TCU left and Stairy had promised to stop at 140-rounds.
Stairy now had the patience, breath control and trigger control built up from 2-days of long-range pistol shooting—and shooting a .22 pistol at targets from 40 to 75-yards away was long-range shooting for a .22 LR Pistol.
He killed 18 zombies with 20-rounds of 7mm TCU,
Stairy’s healing was nine-times faster than normal human healing. All of the players would have enhanced healing speeds, but Stairy’s healing speed was at the upper end, even for a player.
He wanted to check out the hardware store on the other side of the street anyway. He wanted to open the door and try to take a few steps before he started the teleportation whack-a-mole game with the zombies. That way, he would be close enough to the hardware store to teleport inside.
Unlike most of the other businesses, the hardware store had one of those accordion-like folding security fences across the doorway.
Fortunately, Stairy could see through the fence and through the plate glass door—since he couldn’t teleport anywhere if he couldn’t see his arrival point, though there were a few exceptions to that rule.
He took the bandage off of his arm. His healing was nine-times normal, but the healing pill that he’d taken had speeded up his rate of healing another 3x—but the healing pill only worked for about 40-hours.
That would be about 45-days’ worth of healing, before the pill wore off—and then the wound had had several more hours’ worth of 9x healing added on.
He used a pair of cuticle scissors to snip each of his crude sutures and then he grasped the thread with a pair of tweezers to pull them out.
Back on Earth, when Stairy was young. He had removed his own stitches several times—either to avoid missing work or to save money. He had never been overly blessed with money.
Back then, there had always been a wee-mite of pus come out of each now empty suture hole when it was lightly squeezed. He’d squeezed the pus out and poured some peroxide into the holes and within a day or two, they would be healed without any trace where they had been.
With his jacked-up immune system, the antibiotic pill and the healing pill that he’d taken, there was no way for the suture holes to get infected.
He studied his arm and decided to have a good meal and a good night’s sleep and attempt to cross the walkway tomorrow.
If he couldn’t teleport, this locale would be rather challenging, with all the locked security doors and what not.
O well…While he might sympathize—to some degree—with other players, it was not helpful to dwell on their plight. All of them were volunteers, after all.
Stairy had been willing to enlist, because he was at the end of his lifespan and he had been too decrepit to do much of anything for two or three decades. It would be worth it, to feel sound and young once more, even if he perished in the first wave.
A pistolero had no fear of death. The prospect of being maimed or crippled was exceedingly frightening. Harm to one’s family and loved ones might be a scary thing. Compromising one’s honor somehow—that was scary. Dying? Who gave a shit!?!
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 12, 2021 13:55:26 GMT -6
Chapter Three 7920
Stairy needed 12 zombies to level up to Level-12, and most important, to gain access to his internal storage.
He was a bit of a crank, so far as seeking every possible advantage in his endeavors.
There had been two boxes of .357 Magnum 158-Grain jacketed hollowpoints inside the sporting goods store. Stairy had kept one box out. If he went through 50-rounds of 158 Grain jacketed hollowpoints, in addition to his own quantity of 125-Grain jacketed hollowpoints, before he could get to Level-12, something was wrong.
A 50-round box of centerfire cartridges was heavy. Super-strength or not, there was such a thing as inertia and one’s bulk becoming obtrusive.
In a single teleportation carousel ride, he could only use 24-rounds of .357. That was all that he had speedloaders for. Maybe 30-rounds, if he loaded once from loose cartridges.
That left him 20 extra rounds to play with. He headed for the roof once more.
He was satisfied when he had slain 8 more zombies and had gotten within 4 of his goal. He stopped even though he had a few loose rounds left.
Although he was wearing earplugs and headphones, the zombies weren’t. The extra loud .357 muzzle-blast was luring in zombies from far and wide and he didn’t want to have to walk across the walkway, stepping on zombie heads as stepping stones. Images like that were great for cartoons, but he couldn’t see it working at all well in real life.
Stairy waited until the zombies had gone back into estivation mode, having a good low-bulk, high protein meal in the meantime—then it was time to go.
He unlocked the door to the sporting goods store. It was one of those high-security doors that had to be unlocked on the inside as well as on the outside. He locked the door behind him and took several steps.
He buried a hatchet from the sporting goods store in the skull of the first zombie to confront him. The sporting goods store had a few camping supplies including a few hatchets. He left the hatchet buried in the zombie’s skull.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t have several more hatchets. Time and distance were more valuable than a moderate quality hatchet.
His silent attack let him advance about another 5-feet before several zombies noticed him and they all started that bizarre croaking sound.
Stairy fired six rounds from his .357. His early pistol training kicked in, and he fired three 2-shot double-taps to each zombie skull, instead of the more ammunition conserving single-shots, without consciously deciding to spot the zombie team that advantage.
“Ding!” he was now Level-12!
He activated his target acquisition mode of his teleportation. He noted that his most distant teleportation site was well inside the hardware store.
He could have taken himself out of harm’s way immediately, but as the proverb said:
“No mutts; no glory.”
Stairy had often wondered why a man with purebred dogs couldn’t also attain glory. At any rate, the context that the proverb was inevitably used in, made it clear that it encouraged a Samurai-like suicidal courage…
Although what that had to do with mixed-breed dogs was beyond Stairy.
He moved a fair distance away and shot another 5-zombies.
A man may miss a shot and his wife may cheat on him. Neither was an acceptable state of affairs. Either was worth going to almost any length to avoid.
Still, these zombie’s heads moved in all sorts of exaggerated and jerky, eccentric movements as the zombie’s charged. Stairy hypothesized that the zombie’s necks were stiff.
If a man’s wife cheated on him, it would be a major blot on that man’s character on Judgement Day, when every secret thing was made known—for the simple reason that another man had counted coup against him.
If Stairy missed a zombie, it wasn’t as if the zombie had counted coup on him. Zombies could not count coup. Animals could not count coup. Inanimate objects could not count coup. Women could not count coup.
Only another man could count coup on a pistolero and cause his stock as a warrior to be permanently lowered.
Belief was not an issue. Stairy didn’t need to know that coup had been counted against him. He didn’t have to believe in coup. The one who counted coup against him didn’t have to believe in coup or know that he’d counted coup.
Coup was like time. It moved on, regardless of what anyone thought about it.
God had many commandments. Honor only had one:
“Never allow another to count even the most minor coup upon you, even at the cost of your life.”
Life was exceedingly cheap. Honor was infinitely valuable.
Stairy cleared the hardware store. There were 5 zombies inside and Stairy was pleased. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Was shooting fish in a barrel easy? Stairy wondered about the light-refraction, the bullet muffling characteristic of water and the undesirability of shooting holes in one’s rain barrel.
Still, folks used the expression to mean something falling-down easy.
When he levelled up to Level-12, he only gained 3-seconds worth of teleportation time. Now he had 63-Seconds. Cool-down had decreased to 3-Minures and 40-Seconds. He didn’t gain any new points.
O well, O Hell! A gain was a gain, even if it was a minuscule gain.
The hardware store was chock-full of good things. There were all sorts of hand tools, generators, gasoline motors, lawn mowers, Roto-Tillers and suchlike.
There were some small Harbor Freight Style Lathes—up to 20-inches or so, and Milling Machines. There were even a few junior-grade surface grinders. There were belt grinders, bench grinders, air compressors as well as air-powered die grinders, angle grinders and drills.
There was medium quality stick, MIG and TIG welders. Stairy was a bit of a snob, so far as welding equipment went. If it wasn’t a Lincoln—or better yet—a Miller—it was shit so far as he was concerned.
However, he did store all the welding gear. Missed opportunities never come back.
The old gun makers proverb said:
“If you can TIG—then TIG. (Assuming a good AC/DC foot-operated TIG set-up…) If you cannot TIG—OFW (Oxy-Fuel Weld.)”
There were some OFW torches—including the very expensive Smith Jeweler’s Torches—but only a few bottles of acetylene and inert welding gases. There was no hydrogen—for aluminum OFW—at all.
Stairy salted everything away. He would try to find a welding supply store later and load up on consumables as well as gas bottles. Somehow, in the current economy, he didn’t think that demurrage charges for the gas bottles would be a problem.
Files, drill-bits, taps, dies, screw drivers, sandpaper…
There were all sorts of plastic shit: PVC pipes, sheet poly, this, that and another thing. Generally, Stairy turned his nose up at almost anything plastic—but then again: there you had it.
He stored everything away.
Like the bookstore, there was a fairly well-stocked assortment of snacks by the cash register. There was also a breakroom that was fairly well-stocked with food—including several cases of Campbell’s soup.
Maybe free lunch food was one of the employee’s fringe benefits.
He had half hoped to find more guns—or especially more ammunition—particularly 7mm TCU. Alas and alack!
The hardware store only had one floor. Next to the hardware store was a trophy shop—of all things. The next store further down was a coffee shop. On the other side of the hardware store was a shoe store.
Stairy found a few tools in the trophy shop as well as some sheets of brass. The trophies were good quality wood but the figures and cups were plastic and he didn’t bother to store them.
There were a few sterling silver cups and bowls that caught Stairy’s interest.
He also found a small bottle with 37 Demerol tablets in the manager’s desk drawer.
The coffee shop mainly had coffee, of course—and a few snacks. Though he had absolutely no idea what good they were, Stairy stored the glass-topped tables and ornate cast-iron chairs from the coffee shop.
The shoe store had shoes. Only one size of shoe would fit Stairy, but the other shoes might be good for trade. Failing all else, he could find a use for the leather and the shoe laces…
Stairy’s telepathy—that had maybe increased a bit over 5% with all of his level-ups—led him to a Marlin Lever Action 39A in .22 LR in a locker in the shoe store. The rifle was scoped—though sad to say—it wasn’t a Scout type scope.
Stairy retired to the trophy shop—where there as a work table and a vise—and he had soon created a clamp-on PVC suppressor for the Marlin .22 LR.
He needed to go back to the sporting goods store and store the propane stove, the rest of the propane and whatever food was left. Then he needed to clear out.
The last orgy of .357 shooting had brought in scads of zombies. Not only that, but the noise and the zombie influx would cause his presence to stink in the nostrils of any other players in the area.
Stairy painted the white PVC suppressor glossy black and then waited for it to dry.
The coffee shop had a small decorative tower—but it was large enough for someone to sit in—and it had windows on all four sides.
Stairy carefully worried away the glazing and stored all of the window panes. There were eight, in total, two per side.
He plinked away at the zombies. It took a few shots to get the suppressed Lever Action sighted in, but when he did, the results were worth it.
Level-13: Teleportation time up to 66-Seconds; Cool-Down down to 3-Minutes and 35-Seconds.
Level 14: Teleportation time up to 69-Seconds; Cool-Down was down to 3-minutes and 32-Seconds.
‘Ach Ja, it only goes down by 3-seconds per level now…’ Stairy thought.
Finally, at Level-15, something interesting happened. His teleportation time increased to 72-Seconds. His cool-down decreases to 3-minutes and 27-Seconds…
He gained a circle with 24 equidistant points on its circumference, 3-Yards beyond his heretofore furthest circle—and the last circle was free to rotate until he used one of its points.
Also, he had gained several intermediate circles with from 12 to 16 points, in between the circles of points that he already had. Some of these were part of the joint lock-down while others remained free to rotate until he had used one of the points on that circle.
It was too much to keep track of, but the rotatable circles were bright red while the frozen circles were fluorescent lime green in Stairy’s head’s-up mental display.
With all the intermediate circles, it was fair to say that Stairy could teleport to almost anywhere within a 10-yard radius that he chose to teleport to—at least, close enough for government work.
On the down side, the head’s-up display informed Stairy that in the future, he would alternate between increasing his teleportation time and reducing his cool-down time with each increase in level…
And in the future, his teleportation time would only increase by one-second, every-other level. His cool-down time would continue to decrease by 3-Seconds every-other level—for awhile.
His telepathic sense had been going up minusculey with each rise in level, but he got a batch release that raised his telepathic power by 7% and it would continue to raise by one-half of one-percent for every level for the foreseeable future.
Stairy shrugged and went back to shooting zombies from the tower. It took 60-zombies to level-up to Level-16.
“Ding!”
“Your teleportation time is still 72-Seconds. Your cool-down time has decreased to 3-Minutes and 24-Seconds. Your mindpowers have increased by .05%.
“TPTB take a dim view of players continuing to farm zombies when they reach higher levels—like little children continually reciting their ‘A, B’s’ ‘A, B’s’ and never going on to learn how to read.
“If you continue to obstinately farm zombies, it isn’t out of the question for TPTB to send special tribulations your way," the voice helpfully advised Stairy.
‘Never you mind,’ Stairy thought.
If he couldn’t get a job done with the teleportation ability that he had at the moment, another second or two worth of carousel riding or a few seconds less cool-down time was unlikely to make a watershed’s worth of difference.
The increase to his mental-powers was nice but it accrued slower than molasses in January.
22 LR cartridges were very valuable things to a survivor. At about 100-rounds of .22 LR per level—allowing for a few misses or failure to destroy the brain with a single bullet—it wasn’t worth it for the minuscule gains.
Stairy carefully sniped a few more zombies—to finish out the brick of .22LR ammunition that he was working on.
26 more zombies down—leaving only 34 more to go to Level-17.
Stairy wasn’t sure if advancing one more level would constitute “Farming” in the eyes of TPTB—but he decided to be prudent. He stored his suppressed Marlin Lever Action and the rest of his .22 LR ammunition and prepared to head out.
He wasn’t looking to ride his carousel and harvest zombies on his way back across the walkway. He just wanted to cross the road.
Question:
Why did Stairy cross the road.
Answer:
To get to the other side.
He drew and transferred the silenced Ruger into his right-hand. Being right-handed, he was very uncomfortable wielding a blade in his right-hand, though ambidextrousness was a goal to aspire to and work toward—and he could use a blade in his gun hand if necessary. He preferred not to.
He needed a few steps to be within teleportation range of the sporting goods store.
Well, he had gained 3-yards, but he still needed at least a couple of steps. The first zombie that stepped forward to confront him lost its head to the Bowie sword in Stairy’s left hand.
Then the suppressed Ruger Mark II in his right hand fired a 3-round burst into the second and third zombie’s eye-sockets. Then the Bowie sword split the skull of a fourth zombie.
The sword made a “Splat” sound. The .22 LR made a languid clapping sound. The sudden motion of the zombies also made some noise.
The zombie’s hearing was well above the human average—not quite super-human, but definitely very sharp.
Several of them were drawn toward the sound and movement. Then other zombies headed that way to check out what caused the other zombies to migrate that way.
Stairy was soon rather hemmed-in by zombies.
He dug his feet in and charged past the loose cluster of zombies.
The zombies weren’t anywhere near as hard to penetrate as an NFL goal-line defense. Even if Stairy wasn’t Gale Sayers, he had more power in his legs than three world champion superheavyweight powerlifters and he had more spring in his legs than an Olympic high-jumper and an Olympic broad-jumper combined.
He knocked the zombies over like ten-pins.
Just as he prepared to teleport into the Sporting goods store he was shot in the back!
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Post by texican on Oct 12, 2021 15:16:18 GMT -6
rvm,
Question:
Why did Stairy cross the road.
Answer:
To get to the other side.
You just had to, didn't you...
Thanks for the new story and numerous chapters.
Texican....
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Post by texican on Oct 15, 2021 13:20:50 GMT -6
rvm,
FYI. Chapter 1 does not have the word count.
And, there is not a Chapter 3 yet. Hint.
Texican....
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Post by NCWEBNUT on Oct 15, 2021 13:34:43 GMT -6
rvm, FYI. Chapter 1 does not have the word count. And, there is not a Chapter 3 yet. Hint. Texican.... And here I was wondering where chapter 10 was
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 17, 2021 12:07:05 GMT -6
Chapter Four 10 472
Stairy fell to the floor in pain when he touched down inside the sporting goods store.
His head’s-up display told him that he’d been hit high and left with a 3-round burst from an M-4.
Thankfully, his heart, spine, clavicle and scapula were spared. Stairy was wearing a thin Level II-A vest. It wouldn’t stop rifle bullets or even some high-penetration handgun rounds.
Stronger vests were. They were thicker, stiffer and heavier though. The improved—improved over the best that Earth had to offer—II-A vest was the strongest vest that Stairy could wear without being inconvenienced.
Besides, the stronger vests were much more expensive and Stairy did not have infinite funds.
The short 14.5-inch barrel robbed the .223 bullets of some velocity. The bullets were hollowpoints and while hollowpoints didn’t tend to open up much in bullet-resistant fabric, they were deformed to some extent.
Finally, while the vest did not stop the .223 bullets, they were robbed of some velocity in the process of penetrating the vest.
Fortunately, all three bullets exited. Having both entrance and exit wounds would increase bleeding somewhat, but it meant that he didn’t have to sweat having a bullet lodged inside him.
Despite the pain, Stairy managed to drop his backpack. He supposed with the interdimensional storage, there was no need for a rucksack at all, but he hadn’t gotten all that sorted yet.
He immediately called his backpack into storage along with his 7mm TCU. He removed his pistol belt and summoned it into storage. Then he removed his shirt and his vest.
He swallowed a pill that was supposed to dramatically speed blood clotting. The pill would work fast, but this wasn’t a magic story where the pills would work instantly.
The three exit wounds were in front and Stairy applied a dough-like adhesive that was said to close wounds off. He could only reach one of the wounds in his back with the adhesive.
He swallowed a super-healing pill, an antibiotic and he swallowed two Morphine pills while he chewed two Demerol tablets to speed absorption.
He stripped his pistol belt of everything except his .357 and one speed loader and cinched it around his waist. If whoever shot him pursued him here…
Well, he was in no condition to fight a battle, but neither did he intend to submit meekly to his demise.
Stairy sat on a chair and waited. He would either bleed out and die, or the bleeding might stop and he would live. His client turning up and demanding customer service was a wildcard that could happen anywhere during the healing process.
It was probably better to nap. With the healing pill, he could do over 24-hours’ worth of healing in only one half-hour, but it would take almost a half-hour for the healing pill to start doing its duty to God and its country.
Still, Stairy’s natural healing was better than 9-to-1.
The thing was though, he couldn’t afford to sleep. His client might come knocking at any time. Anyway, he didn’t think that he healed any faster while sleeping. It just made the time go by faster.
Stairy had sat down facing the door—though crashing through the half-inch tempered plate glass seemed a bit orcish. The rooftop sniper would almost certainly try to find some easier venue of approach.
Just then, that same gentle tingling that clued Stairy in when something good was nearby, was tingling like he’d stuck his finger into a light socket.
A woman, clad in ultrablack from head to toe walked through the high security plate glass door like a freakin’ haint.
Some of the information came from the system while some of it was gathered by his mindpowers—but all of the information was conveniently displayed on his head’s-up display.
“Name: Lora-Ah
“Level-67
“Ability: Phase through solid matter. Good for 3-Seconds. Cool-Down: 30-Seconds.
“Ability: Sense other’s abilities and how much cooldown time remains.”
She stopped in front of Stairy.
“Your name is ‘Stairy.’ You are a Level-16 newbie who has been farming zombies like a moron. Your abilities are Super-Strength—considerably compromised by the bullet through your scapula—and short-range teleportation—with more than 2-minutes of cool-down remaining,’’ she sneered.
“Never mind. You’ll be dead long before your cooldown is over.”
Lora-Ah pointed her M-4 at Stairy and just as her finger touched the trigger, Stairy teleported.
He arrived behind Lora-Ah and he shot her right between the shoulder blades with a load of 00 12 Gauge Buckshot from the double barrel 12-Gauge that he had called out of storage.
As expected, Lora-Ah was wearing a ballistic vest that stopped the lead balls from severing her spine or destroying her heart and lungs. It did knock her off-balance long enough for Stairy to shoot the second load of 00 into the back of her head.
“Ding!”
“You have defeated a player over 40-Levels higher than yourself. Your level is raised to Level-19. You get a 5% bonus in mind-power, over and above the .05% per level,” the head’s-up voice informed Stairy.
Ach Ja! His teleportation time was up to 74-Seconds while his cool-down had decreased to 3-Minutes and 23-Seconds.
He sighed in relief. Lora-Ah had only had 2-seconds until she could turn immaterial again. She hadn’t been seriously incapacitated by the blast to her back and if she made it to an adjoining building or even an adjoining room, the difficulty of dealing with her would go up dramatically—probably insurmountably.
When Lora-Ah died, Stairy received a reader’s digest version of her more recent memories.
There were established players who largely levelled-up through PK—Player Kills. There wasn’t any stigma attached to it here. Indeed, that was the raison d'état of this game.
At any rate, these several city blocks that encompassed the town square were considered Lora-Ah’s territory. The other PKs wouldn’t intrude here, unless they meant to challenge Lora-Ah.
Lora-Ah had been watching Stairy for some time—letting him raise his level, like fattening a Christmas goose.
There was more. Lora-Ah did not have interdimensional storage. She was already in the very elite 1% who had more than one special ability though. She had a series of caches spread throughout her territory to hold her spoils.
He hadn’t teleported as a Level-1, so he had a single Level-1 teleportation—six points in a hexagram, all 5-yards away and he could ride the teleport carousel for 20-seconds. It was a sort of last-resort emergency reserve.
He hadn’t teleported at Levels 2 and 3 either, but it didn’t work that way. He could only store one Level-1 teleportation.
To recharge the emergency reserve, he had to level-up without using his teleportation ability at all in the process. The storage feature only came into play when his reserve slot was empty. All of the level-ups he’d gotten without teleporting, while sniping from the rooftops, was wasted since storing was a now-or-never sort of thing.
Leveling-up became increasingly difficult and thus it became exponentially harder to earn a promotion without using his teleportation.
He had used teleportation to survive and advance from Level-16 to Level-17. However, the system considered advancing to Level-18 and then to Level-19 as discrete events, so his reserve slot was recharged.
Lora-Ah had thought that she had shattered his left scapula, while in fact, the scapula was untouched. She had only seen two of Stairy’s four special abilities and she hadn’t known that he had an emergency reserve teleportation available.
“Your telepathy was sufficient to partially obscure Lora-Ah’s scanning ability. You haven’t yet stored enough mind strength to accomplish feats requiring great power—but your mind powers are also capable of great subtlety. You should concentrate on strengthening them,” the system said.
“Aside from levelling-up, what else can I do to strengthen my telepathy?” Stairy asked.
“There are meditation techniques for sale in the Player’s Store. At first, the gains from using the techniques are negligible—but you have passed an important threshold. I’ recommend that you buy a good-quality meditation technique the next time that you’re in the store,” the system said.
When an injured player levelled-up, he did not revert to a perfectly sound body, in the bloom of good health. Would that it was so. The healing process did leap ahead slightly over one-week though.
Since Stairy’s healing was a bit greater than 9x normal, that meant that with three level-ups, that he had been healing from the effects of the wounds to his back for over six-months.
His left arm was weak. Its mobility was reduced and there was a certain amount of pain involved in using his left arm in some overhead movements.
Nonetheless, he needed to clear out. Some of the other PKs might sense Lora-Ah’s demise and come looking for him.
Stairy stored Lora-Ah’s body—since the system told Stairy that even Lora-Ah’s headless corpse could be bartered for something, during his next visit to the Player’s Store.
It didn’t take Stairy an exceptionally long time to locate Lora-Ah’s caches and gather together all the things that she had left.
There was food, drugs, clothing, weapons and ammunition. Lora-Ah was an accomplished PK and she was also a bit of a hoarder. It made sense to be a hoarder in an apocalyptic world.
As soon as Stairy had stored everything from the last cache, he requested to visit the Player’s Store.
Stairy believed that one did not so much “buy” a firearm—particularly a handgun—as much as he “adopted” it. Once one adopted a child—or a puppy—or a gun—they had pretty much signed-up for the duration.
There was nothing wrong with buying purely to resell at a profit. There was nothing wrong with having gunstore or breeding and selling puppies for profit.
One had to make a clear distinction between guns bought for resale and guns adopted into the family though.
Anyway, once in the store, Stairy sold many of Lora-Ah’s guns. He kept several as well. Her ammunition choices weren’t in line with his own, but the system advised Stairy that the discount on returned ammunition was ruinous. It was better to keep the ammunition as a hedge against an uncertain future.
Stairy sold Lora-Ah’s body, her combat clothing and some other things.
He bought a twin to his Model 27 .357 Magnum revolver. The only difference was that this .357 had grips of black horn as opposed to stag. He arranged for several of his guns to be nickel-plated—including the Diamondback, the two breaktops and the Beretta Jetfire .25 ACP.
He also bought pearl grips for the Jetfire and the two breaktops. At first, he was inclined to also order a spare set of stag grips for each, since he felt that pearl was prone to breakage. The system assured him that these pearl grips had been subjected to a process that would make it hard to shatter them deliberately.
There was really no need to stick to short handy rifle barrel lengths now that he had his storage. He commissioned a Scout type .223 Bolt Action that was close to being an image of the 7mm TCU, except that it had a 20-inch barrel—for a time that .223 was available, while the less popular 7mm TCU was not.
On Earth, the difference in popularity would have been overwhelming. Stairy wasn’t even sure if 7mm TCU had ever become a commercially loaded cartridge on Earth or if it was still a pure wildcat.
He had lost touch with the latest news from the gun world the last couple of decades of his life, since he had no money to buy new guns or to go shooting. Truth be told, he was barely able to leave his home under his own power as well.
Here, the 7mm TCU was much more common and available—though not as much as the .223.
He stocked up on 7mm TCU and heavy 75-grain .223 ammunition.
He got some custom .73 caliber Punkin’ Ball loads for the 12-Gauge. He thought that the .73 diameter Punkin’ Balls were noticeably better performing than the standard .69 caliber Punkin’ Balls.
Stairy bought a long ultrablack leather drover’s coat that reached halfway down his calves and he replaced his perforated ballistic vest.
“What are the best meditation techniques to develop mind powers for telepathy?” he asked the store.
A catalog featuring a number of meditation techniques floated into Stairy’s mind.
There were techniques that were purely for building mental power. There were techniques that made it much easier to find treasures. There were techniques to hide oneself better and counter-measures to let one find one’s clients better. There were techniques to better allow one to read minds and other techniques that allowed one to deceive other minds.
“Can I study more than one technique?” Stairy asked the system.
“Yes. The meditations are tedious and a bit tiring, but they aren’t time-consuming. You could cultivate up to three at one time. If you use more than three mental meditations, I’d recommend that you stick to no more than three and alternate the less important ones on alternate days—or whatever. The only real limiting factor is how many credits that you have,” the system replied.
Stairy saw that the price of two medium-quality meditation techniques would equal the number of credits that he’d already spent and would pretty much bankrupt him.
He shrugged. There was no sense in saving credits. It made a little sense for those who had no spatial storage to save some credits to buy ammunition in the future, since there was a limit to how much that could be carried at one time.
The only drawback was that there was a lower limit to how many points that you had to have available to come to the Player’s Store. Each level-up and each PK netted a certain amount of credits. There were a few other ways to earn credits, but Stairy hadn’t fully explored them.
There was no sense in miserly hoarding credits for tomorrow that could save your life today.
Stairy’s only regret was that A.} He could only afford two of the meditation techniques, and B.} that he couldn’t afford the highest quality.
“This is the body of Lora-Ah,” the store’s voice said.
The voice was identical in pitch, tone, pronunciation and diction to the voice of the system, but Stairy thought that he could detect a subtle difference—but that could have been his fancy.
“Yes,” Stairy conceded cautiously.
“Lora-Ah left an inheritance for whoever took her down. Will you accept it?” the store asked.
“Sure, why not?” Stairy said.
He saw a surprising number of zeroes appear behind the numbers of credits at his disposal.
Stairy bought all of the best meditation techniques for mind power.
He learned that his spatial storage and his teleportation were linked abilities. He used the same extra-dimensional space to store things as he did to teleport through—though he didn’t teleport through his warehouse. That would be messy.
At any rate, his power of space could be improved with the right meditations. The techniques were expensive, but not prohibitively so—not to Stairy, who had Lora-Ah’s inheritance.
He bought a pair of superior healing pills. And a few other things.
He had a brief message from Lora-Ah, but he’d watch it later. He needed to get back to the game world and eat one of the superior healing pills—and get back to full strength as soon as possible. He’d watch Lora-Ah’s last will and testament while he recuperated.
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Post by texican on Oct 17, 2021 20:51:50 GMT -6
rvm, FYI. Chapter 1 does not have the word count. And, there is not a Chapter 3 yet. Hint. Texican.... And here I was wondering where chapter 10 was f, Your begging has gotten bigger. Texican....
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Post by texican on Oct 17, 2021 20:52:49 GMT -6
rvm,
Really like your unique stories.
Texican....
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Post by NCWEBNUT on Oct 17, 2021 21:43:21 GMT -6
And here I was wondering where chapter 10 was f, Your begging has gotten bigger. Texican.... Beg big and never be disappointed
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Post by texican on Oct 18, 2021 12:05:24 GMT -6
f, Your begging has gotten bigger. Texican.... Beg big and never be disappointed Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 20, 2021 11:22:27 GMT -6
Chapter Five 13 071
Stairy swallowed the superior healing pill. HMMMmmnnn…?
According to the pill’s description. It should improve all of his physical attributes by about 6%. He shrugged. His basic bench press was 605 x 25. 605 X 1.06 = 641.3-pounds.
That was leaving out any bonus that he was getting from his strengthened deltoids. He supposed that the bulked-up serratus might also contribute a pound or two, though it mainly came into play in overhead pressing movements. Even his enhanced calves, quadriceps and even his greatly strengthened forearms might contribute in a very minor way.
It really didn’t matter. Fighting haints or other players was not a high-repetition bench press contest. As he had already concluded—except in a grapple with a super-strong player or a bear, he already had far more strength than he could readily bring to bear.
He was more interested to note that his mind power would increase over 2% from the action of the pill.
No wonder the super-healing pills were so expensive!
Stairy had retired to Lora-Ah’s most secret hideaway—a 5-foot by 10-foot fallout shelter a good 15-feet below the basement floor of one of the businesses.
Someone had been very industrious when building the little one-man shelter. Rather, TPTB had simulated a busy-beaver secret shelter builder.
From what little he “knew” about TPTB—and any or all of his information was subject to error—but they were into realism. They might have tweaked the numbers slightly, when they laid down the basic rules for this simulated world…
The inhabitants—the hypothetical inhabitants—were probably somewhat more likely to make hidden stashes, secret passages and hidden rooms than a comparative number of Earth people. That made for far more interesting game play. They were far from being a paranoid people wholly devoted to building neat secret hideaways though. That would seriously affect the realism of the simulated world.
However, although both his and Lora-Ah’s abilities were extreme cases, every player had senses and intuitions that drew him to these interesting hiding places. Otherwise, they would be largely wasted.
Stairy tried to calm his nerves. He didn’t like being so far underground, with only one exit. If he was discovered, he’d be caught like a turtle in a jar. An Earthquake or cave-in was also an unpleasant prospect.
If the ceiling of this tiny room collapsed, even with his super-human strength, there was no way that he could dig himself to the surface.
If he couldn’t teleport, he’s have said:
“To Hell with this elaborate, excessively deep and elaborate grave!”
As a rough general rule, he had to be able to see his teleportation point. One of the exceptions was that he could teleport to somewhere that he had been fairly recently, even if he couldn’t see his arrival point, so long as there hadn’t been major changes.
He couldn’t teleport into a solid block of steel or stone, but if he teleported into the middle of a Jungle Gym—for instance—the force would rearrange his head and limbs however necessary to let him teleport there.
The power wouldn’t dislocate hips or shoulders, decapitate him or break bones. It would transport him into a position reminiscent of the late stages of a “Twister” game, if that was what it took to let him arrive somewhere.
He had thoroughly scouted every square inch of the surface and the rather large basement where he might want to teleport in an emergency.
Lora-Ah had shared his distaste for being buried, but she could phase out and pass through solid matter.
Stairy healed. He worked on the meditations that would increase his mind power and his spatial power and he went over both the memories that his telepathy had plucked from Lora-Ah and her last will and testament.
Lora-Ah was one of those highly contemptible people who believe that the end justifies the means.
Stairy firmly believed that having a noble end in mind, made despicable acts exponentially more reprehensible.
Say one fellow was a sadist and he tortured people from a sheer love of cruelty.
Now suppose that there was a second fellow—someone who believed that torturing people was wicked and sinful…
But he was willing to go against his own moral beliefs and torture these people—as a special exception—because the information obtained might save lives and even help win a just war.
The second fellow was far more evil than the first. The Bible said that God would forgive anything, so long as one pled the name of Jesus.
Stairy didn’t see any problem with God forgiving even the cruelest torturing and murdering sadist. He supposed that God could also forgive people who had once thought that their ends justified their means—thought they would have to repent of such wicked thoughts in order to be forgiven—after all, the Bible said that God could forgive anyone…
It was just that Stairy couldn’t picture God forgiving the second sort. Sure, he believed it, in the abstract. He just couldn’t picture it.
Lora-Ah had joined the game, because she’d been promised money to help her family. That was okay, so far as that went, but Lora-Ah did not believe in violence or killing under any circumstances—but she was willing to commit acts that she thought were evil in the pursuit of a good end.
She still thought of her family fondly, but she had discovered—much to her initial dismay—that she liked causing pain, bloodshed and death. In fact, acts of cruelty turned her on sexually. That was why she had paused briefly to taunt Stairy—who she thought was helpless before her.
Be all that as it lay. Stairy had less contempt for the sadistic Lora-Ah than he did for the:
“It is only to help my family” Lora-Ah.
Nonetheless, Lora-Ah had hedged her wicked bets. She had left whoever succeeded in killing her a legacy—and instructions on how to do a great work of do-goodery.
Thoreau had written:
“It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him…”
However, if what Lora-ah said was true, this was an evil he felt compelled to oppose.
Perhaps Lora-Ah simply wanted to avenge herself, by aiming him at powerful people. Perhaps she was sincere, but her information was incomplete or even in error.
Well, he had been old and Brynlee had offered to bring him to the gamer’s world and give him a new lease on life. She had told him that it didn’t greatly matter precisely what he did, once he was in the gamer’s world.
He had told her that he intended to get away from the stupid gladiatorial nonsense and go dwell alone, in the mountains, close to nature.
“Do whatever you think is right,” she had told him.
Stairy wasn’t afraid of death. Even from his earliest memories, when he was only four of five years old, he wasn’t afraid of death.
He feared pain, though he had largely overcome that fear. He was terrified at the idea of becoming a cripple or an amputee—but an unshakable resolve to solve such a problem with seppuku soothed those terrors considerably.
The only real fear that he had left, was the fear that he would somehow conduct himself in a manner unworthy.
It was an odd scruple. He had no fear of being shown unworthy before God. God forgave—easily and thoroughly.
Even though God forgave you though—and erased all record of your sin from the heavenly record…
Reality also recorded everything and while God or heaven might not remember an act of cowardice, that did not mean that it had not happened.
Some might say that so long as God forgives you, you should be satisfied. But Stairy had solemnly promised himself that he would never forgive himself, if he ever committed an act of cowardice.
Not taking a stand in this matter wasn’t exactly cowardice—but it wasn’t exactly the act of a warrior—a pistolero—either.
Stairy spent three-weeks in the claustrophobic little fallout shelter as he absorbed the full effects of the superior healing pill.
Three weeks wasn’t a long time towards building more mind power or spatial power either. It did allow Stairy to consolidate his gains and to gain the beginning of a foundation in special ability.
*********** ************** ***********************
Stairy’s first order of business, after leaving the pit, was to level-up. He had a sound premonition that Level-25 would be a sort of watershed.
His head’s-up display no longer showed a count of how many zombies that it took to level-up. Instead, there was a bar-graph that showed that he was 43.2% of the way toward leveling up to Level-20.
*********** ************* *******************
Stairy moved through the small town like a ghost. He’d come across papers that had told him that the town had been known as “Taylorsburg.” The name of a simulated town hadn’t seemed important and Stairy wasn’t into names. If what Lora-Ah said was true, then the name of the ill-fated little town assumed more significance.
Anyway, Stairy only wanted to get to the entrance to the subway, not have to confront and kill any homicidal sociopathic PK’ers yet.
It made no real sense for a little town of 80 000—Stairy had found that his initial guestimate had been a bit low—to have a subway system. These people seemed to have a positive mania for subways though.
The town had no public busses and very few taxis. Instead, they rode the underground railroad.
He wasn’t sure in what world it made sense to allocate resources this way. In this world, he supposed.
He saw the hand of TPTB here. Subways and other underground warrens were great places to have darkness dwelling haints—like giant spiders. It made the gameplay more interesting.
Stairy was after the Giant Underground Spiders. Killing one spider would cause his bar to advance 27% toward leveling-up.
TPTB had possibly over-engineered the spiders a bit, because few players came after them.
Of course, all of the subway wasn’t infested with Giant Underground Spiders and the warrens of tunnels had a number of things to recommend them to some types of players—especially timid players who survived by avoiding the strong.
One might ask why timid people would consent to becoming game pieces in a game centered around bloodshed and violence.
Some of them, like Stairy, were very old. Unlike Stairy, some of the candidates hadn’t studied martial arts since their teens and spent decades pursuing marksmanship, weaponcraft and pistol expertise.
Some had lived remarkably humdrum lives and when they were near the end, they had accepted the offer of having their youth restored—even though they had little or no desire to battle.
Stairy had started with no desire to battle either. It was simply that in Stairy’s case, reluctance did not mean incompetence.
There were those, like Lora-Ah, who came to help their family. TPTB—or the sponsors, like Brynlee, who claimed to be separate and apart from TPTB, and sort of victim in her own right—could cure cancer, paralysis, blindness—whatever.
People enlisted for money to bail the family business out of bankruptcy, to heal a beloved father, mother, child or spouse—or for similar motives. Everyone wasn’t compromising their core moral beliefs to take part in the gladiator-like games, as Lora-Ah had compromised her pacifist beliefs.
Stairy would have questioned the murderous aspect of the game himself, if he had come to play the silly reindeer games with the others. His stated goal was to accumulate enough gear and points, to go dwell alone in the mountains.
If someone attacked him, he would defend himself. If not, he didn’t intend to attack anyone. So, his admittedly rather flexible conscious was clear and untroubled.
Then there were the very dangerous characters who thought that cowering below ground was the best immediate tactic, given the circumstances.
Stairy had his doubts about this tactic. The longer one cowered in the dark, the further ahead everyone else got—but there you had it.
Finally, there were people who had been all bloodthirsty and raring to go when they had arrived in the playing field and had promptly repented when confronted with the reality of bloodshed and death. Now they simply wanted to hide. Of all the underground denizens, these were probably the most dangerous.
Stairy had to slay three zombies just inside the entrance to the subway. His progress bar advanced to 46.74. As had been said, zombies weren’t worth very much in the current economy.
Stairy put away his 7mm TCU Pseudo-Scout. He got out a highly customized Marlin .45-70 Lever Action. The rifle had a 16.5-inch barrel and a three-round magazine.
The Marlin had been converted to takedown. There was really no need to spend the credits on the takedown conversion, but Stairy had always wanted a few Marlins converted to takedown.
The bullets were 420-grain hard-cast lead with a wide meplat. They were loaded up to good +P .45-70 levels, without getting into the insane ++P loads that amounted to .458 Winchester Magnum Lite loads.
Those screamer loads were okay in strong falling block actions like the Ruger Single-Shot Rifles, but they still seemed idiot-fringe to Stairy. If you wanted a .458 Magnum or a .460 Weatherby, why didn’t you buy a .458 Magnum or a .460 Weatherby? Why abuse the equipment?
Stairy kept his stag-handled .357 and his silenced .22 Automatic—and of course, he kept his Bowie sword and a couple of other blades. He put everything else into his interspatial storage.
He pulled out a double-barreled Howdah Pistol in .45-70. It had 13-inch barrels and it looked, for all the world, like a sawn-off shotgun.
Stairy had been excited when Pedersoli had introduced their .45 Colt Howdah, but they had ruined it, by giving it a Saw-Handled Grip. Plow-Handle! Not Saw Handle!
Anyway, Stairy’s Howdah had a rounded plow-handle grip reminiscent of the pistol-grip portion of a shotgun’s stock.
He had the pistol loaded with bronze Teflon-coated bullets. The loads were a bit lighter than the ones in his rifle. Although the Howdah was perhaps 60% heavier than the .45-70 Thompson Center Single Shots—and his gun had superior stocks for absorbing recoil, the Thompson was considered a brutal-kicking handgun.
He didn’t carry any light reloads for it. If it got down to where he was relying on the Howdah for more than two-shots, he’d use the rifle loads in it. By that time, the situation would have deteriorated to the point that a bit of recoil would be the least of his worries.
When he had bought the new firearms, the appropriate software and muscle-memory to handle them well—though not necessarily consummately—had been downloaded into his mind and body…
But, he had never tried shooting either the Lever-Action or the Howdah with super-human strength and speeded-up reflexes. He didn’t think that it could reduce the effects of recoil very much—but still…
“A Huntin’ We Will Go! “A Huntin’ We Will Go! “On the way to Kill, “An Eight-Legged Wabbit… “A Huntin’ We Will Go!”
Stairy hummed silently to himself as he penetrated deeper into the warren of tunnels.
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Post by texican on Oct 20, 2021 16:03:26 GMT -6
rvm,
Thanks for Chapter 5.
He's off to kill spiders. Just how hard are the spiders to kill? Chapter 6 should reveal.
Texican....
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Post by udwe on Oct 23, 2021 20:35:07 GMT -6
This is pretty good, didn't think I'd like it at first.
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 27, 2021 14:21:22 GMT -6
Chapter Six
15 638
Stairy stalked to within a dozen feet of a Giant Underground Spider. He carefully drew a bead on its basketball-sized head. The head was the size of a basketball, but the brain was the size of a large orange or a small grapefruit. Sloppy aiming would miss the brain.
Fortunately, Stairy had detailed anatomy charts all tucked away in his long-term memory. The knowledge cost as much as 2500 7mm TCU cartridges, but it was a bargain at that price.
He also activated the LASER sight (Yes, “LASER” is an acronym and every letter SHOULD be capitalized. “They” have quit doing it that way in the modern world. “They” are wrong!)
Stairy felt that anything that relied on batteries was inherently unreliable. Even if God gave it to you and solemnly swore that it would never let you down…
Well, God never lied. It wouldn’t let you down—but it was still unreliable—by definition.
Even so, God had never shown up in the flesh, sitting cross-legged on a white cloud, to guarantee any of Stairy’s equipment—especially the unreliable LASER sight.
Stairy didn’t intend to rely on the LASER sight, but it was working at the moment and it would make harvesting underground spiders more reliable and less risky.
The spider’s chitinous armor was a bit hard to penetrate, but except for that one mild peccadillo, giant spiders weren’t hard to kill—if you got in a good first shot.
They spun gossamer webs and mainly preyed on zombies. They only lived close to the entrances of the subway and they put out an aroma that was like catnip to zombies.
Their webs didn’t have to be that invisible, given zombies notoriously poor eyesight. It still warranted a caution, when wandering around in the dark subways.
Some of the subway’s lights were still burning, but others weren’t. Stairy brought his own lights, of course, but hand-held illumination—whether electric flashlight or burning torch—had a way of distorting things and hiding the semi-transparent webs.
Once you shot a spider and failed to stop it though, it would come off its web and charge like an enraged wild boar. Unlike a wild boar, their eight scuttling legs made them particularly adept at changing directions quite abruptly.
Boom!!!
Stairy flinched at the loud report. He mentally flinched, well after the shot. The subway was nowhere to be wearing ear plugs.
The spider sagged lifelessly.
Stairy’s experience bar went to 73.74%. One more spider should get him to Level-20.
The system informed him that the spider’s legs and parts of its body was edible. The meat was reminiscent of lobster, crab or crawdead. Also, the silk spinnerets could be processed to give some specialized cordage and the glands that put out zombie attractant also had occasional usages.
Stairy promptly stored the spider.
He’d never eaten lobster, He’d eaten some crab legs that were rather good, but he’d also encountered some canned crab that smelled so foul that the dogs wouldn’t even give it a good sniff—let alone eat it.
Crawdeads though—he’d eaten crawdeads several times, including at an upscale buffet in Gulfport Mississippi. He liked crawdeads and shrimp.
As he stalked through the labyrinth of subway tunnels, the old “Amazulu” song was running through his mind as he hunted spiders.
“O…O…O “Montego Bay…”
Stairy had never been to Jamaica. He had formed an opinion based on images from the movies and the travelogues—beautiful beaches and comely black women in bikinis…
He’d always wanted to visit Jamaica—even though going anywhere that he couldn’t pack a pistol was a bit of an anathema to him.
Then a Mexican woman who had been to Jamaica several times had told him some things.
The island was a place of grinding poverty. Sure, there were beautiful beaches and upscale motels, but there were very few places on the island where you couldn’t see shanties and slums, if you simply shifted your point of view or turned around.
As for the beautiful women, the ones who hung around hoping to hook up with American tourists were either prostitutes or vicious green-card stalkers—or both. The two states weren’t mutually exclusive.
Maybe the Mexican woman had been unduly negative about Jamaica, but her assessment had dumped a bucketful of ice water on any desire that Stairy had possessed to visit the place…
But he still grooved on the “Amazulu” song—though so far as Stairy was concerned, Reggae music was only a couple of clicks above heavy metal, so far as being unlistenable—which still placed it about 144 clicks above Country “Music.” At least Reggae wouldn’t rot your mind—so long as you didn’t buy into Rastafarianism.
Stairy killed his second spider without too much drama. He levelled-up to Level-20 with .74 % toward Level-21.
While he was satisfied that the big bonuses were still waiting for him at Level-25. Level-20 still had a few welcome bonuses.
His teleportation time went up to 80-Seconds or 1-Minute and 20-Seconds. His cool-down time decreased to 3-Minutes. Each subsequent level would only take one second off his cooldown or add one second to his teleportation time, by turns. His outermost circle expanded by one-yard.
‘Don’t knock me out, dudes!’ Stairy thought.
Still, his maximum teleportation distance had grown—little-by-little—to 16-yards. That was nothing to sniff at.
He also awakened another facet of his spatial ability. He now had a small space that he could teleport himself to—like his warehouse, but friendly to people, and other living beings.
The area was a circle. It was as flat as a geometer’s dream and it had about the same surface area as a basketball court. It was 77-feet in diameter.
“Can I grow a garden in here? Plant trees? Build a house?” Stairy asked in delight.
“Were it me, I’d wait until you get your Level-25 bonus. Your space should grow noticeably at that time. If you look at the ground, you’ll notice that there is no soil,” the system informed Stairy.
“You will need to import soil—and I’d recommend that you sterilize it. If you’d be satisfied with a garden, a foot of soil should suffice. If you want to grow trees, you will need 4 or 5-foot of soil—or more,” she said.
“Currently, you can only stay inside your mental space for 3-hours. The cool down is 24-hours. Your time inside will grow glacially, though Level-25 should add two or three hours and maybe take an hour off of your cool-off. Mostly though, your time inside will grow very slowly—and the next major level bonus isn’t until Level-50,”she said.
“It is mine. Why am I limited as to how long that I can stay there?” Stairy asked in exasperation.
“TPTB want you to battle diligently, not to hide like a hibernating turtle at the bottom of a lake,” the system said.
The third Giant Underground Spider turned out to be atypical though.
Stairy encountered one of the mini-subway cars. They were smaller than the subway cars of New York or Tokyo—places that Stairy had only seen online or on television. They were big enough for their intended purpose though.
The lone passenger car partially obstructed the railway and Stairy couldn’t see what was beyond until he moved past the car—being extra cautious in the narrow passage between the car’s sides and the tunnel wall.
Once Stairy could see around the subway car, he saw a Yellow Underground Spider.
Yellow Underground Spiders were maybe 60% larger than a regular underground spider. It was jet black with a very busy labyrinthine pattern of bright fluorescent lemon-yellow stripes on its body, particularly its back.
Stairy wasn’t sure what useful purpose the patterns could possibly serve in the stygian gloom of the tunnels—but there you had it.
It reminded Stairy of a gigantic version of the Written Spitten that he had often played with as a boy.
Written Spitten got their name from the scribbled pattern on their webs that looked like writing. They were maybe 3-inches in diameter—including their legs—and they were a surprisingly docile spider.
They would always attach a web to one’s arm and then they would contentedly climb all over one, leaving a web as they travelled.
Stairy had the crack-brained idea to “tame” a creature with a brain the size of a BB—if that. He had tried keeping them in peanut butter jars with holes poked in the lid—feeding them flies and grasshoppers.
They never ate Stairy’s offerings and after a day or two, they would dry out like a mummy and die. After the first couple died, he didn’t try to keep them. He’d play with one for an afternoon and then he would carefully place it on a tree branch somewhere.
They were too good a sport to be imprisoned to die. They were his friends.
A Wolf Spider was a brown spider about the same size as a Written Spitten. Stairy didn’t know if Wolf Spiders could spin webs, but they didn’t. They stalked and pounced upon their clients.
One day, Stairy had grabbed a Wolf Spider with his bare hands, before going to school. He meant to place it in a jar and examine it in more detail after school.
Unlike the friendly Written Spitten, the Wolf Spider had bitten Stairy. It had hurt really bad.
He was convinced that he would die if he didn’t get emergency medical aid—but that would mean shots. Stairy was less afraid of death than he was of needles. He’d gone to school convinced that he would keel over dead sometime during the day…
Nothing happened except that he had two pinhead-sized little white scars on his palm for many years thereafter and he never again tried to grab a Wolf Spider with his bare hands. In fact, he slew Wolf Spiders out of hand.
A Yellow Underground Spider looked somewhat like a gigantic Written Spitten from Stairy’s childhood. It stood about 5-foot tall, but it was shorter when it hugged the ground to scuttle.
Its midsection probably compared to the mass of a 650-pound sow—though it was shorter and rounder than a sow—or the oblong abdomens of the Written Spitten.
Its head massed as much as a Pitbull with two venomous fangs as thick as a Railroad spike and half-again as long.
Like the Wolf Spider and unlike the Written Spitten, the Yellow Underground Spider was a stalker. Unlike the Wolf Spider, once it caught something, it endeavored to roll it up in a network of webbing.
The Yellow Underground Spider had contrived to back a big dog into a corner. The spider hadn’t yet managed to bite or snare the dog. Meanwhile, the dog kept up a stream of non-stop baying as it feinted and lunged at the spider.
Either the dog had just started its battle cry or the odd acoustics of the underground had shuttled the noise away from Stairy.
The spider was moving too rapidly for Stairy to draw a bead on the spider’s brain area—but if he waited for a perfect shot, the dog would probably be bitten. Stairy fired a shot into the spider’s head—without much hope of hitting the brain. Then he ripped off three shots into the midsection of the spider as fast as his superhuman strength and speeded-up neural impulses could work the lever of the .45-70.
How much good would shots to the abdomen do? Very little, over the short haul. If he somehow managed to escape death for a few moments though, he would be glad that he had taken the insurance shots to gradually drain his client’s vitality.
Stairy called his Marlin into storage and simultaneously called his double-barreled 12-Gauge—loaded with the hardcast .73-Caliber punkin’ balls into his hand.
He stood and waited until the spider was within spitting distance. He only had time to point-shoot at the head. He didn’t discharge both barrels at once. Instead, it was a quick “pitter-patter.”
Boom! Boom!!!
Stairy instantly teleported to a point 16-yards away from the spider and reloaded his double-barrel shotgun. He could keep up the teleporting for one minute and 20-Seconds—or 80-Seconds.
If it took the spider 10-Seconds to zero in and charge to point-blank range, then he could shoot a pair of .73-Caliber punkin’ balls into the spider’s head eight times before his carousel ended. Sixteen of the 12-Gauge balls ought to have pretty thoroughly destroyed the spider’s head by then—even though it was bigger than a basketball.
This time, as the spider came scuttling in, Stairy only had time to shoot one round before he was forced to teleport precipitously away.
He shot the second round into the spider’s ass without hesitation and reloaded. This time, as the spider charged, he gave it both barrels at once.
Once his carousel ride ended, he had the 20-Seconds of emergency reserve. Never mind that he wanted to grimly hold onto the reserve—but he could only teleport 5-Yards with the Level-1 ability. 5-yards wasn’t going to help his case much, with the spider.
When he was almost out of reserve, he needed to maneuver the spider to where he could put 32-Yards between them with his last teleport and then run.
All cowards are good runners. Stairy had never been fleet afoot. In fact, he had rarely encountered anyone in gym class or football practice who wasn’t a much better sprinter than him.
As an eight-legged arachnid—who had mainly absorbed damage to its head—the spider’s speed afoot and its stamina was only marginally reduced.
Soon enough, Stairy was down to only 3-Seconds. As he prepared to teleport away one last time, the dog attacked the spider from behind. The dog’s bite was surprisingly powerful and he damaged one of the spider’s rear legs—marginally.
The spider whirled around to confront the dog. Instead of teleporting, Stairy stepped close and placed the muzzles of the double-barrel shotgun against the head of the spider—in direct line with the spider’s brain.
The spider collapsed—deader than Judas Iscariot—while Stairy’s short-barreled 12-Gauge’s barrels exploded from the backpressure.
“Shit a big, gold-plated, razor-edged brick! Hell’s belles and cockleshells and skeletons all in a row!” Stairy cursed as he flung the ruined shotgun against the subway wall.
The Yellow Underground Spider was worth more than a standard Giant Underground Spider. Stairy saw his progress bar advance to 60.74%.
He started to store the spider carcass. With the destruction of his shotgun, he felt like he had lost on this deal.
“I recommend that you watch the spider’s carcass for a moment, before you store it. Storing it will kill the hatchlings,” the system said.
Little yellow spiders a bit bigger than Stairy’s fist ate their way out of the spider’s abdomen.
“They eat their way out of their mother. The time is a little early, but since the mother is dead, it is now or never,” the system said.
No sooner than the first wicked little beast emerged, than it caught the next spider to emerge and devoured it.
As Stairy watched in sick fascination a somewhat smaller spider emerged from the mother’s abdomen. The first spider started binding it with a web.
“That one is male. She means to mate with it before she eats it. Even if she never meets another male, she will have a lifetime’s worth of sperm on tap,” the system explained.
“But he’s her litter-mate!” Stairy expostulated.
“That isn’t a consideration to them.”
Stairy was still bitter about the treatment that he’d received at the hands of the female race. He identified with the little male spider.
He quickly donned a pair of gauntlets.
“Fraid not bitch!” he said as he beheaded the female.
“What are you going to do with him? If you put him back on the ground, one of his other sisters will simply mate with him and then eat him,” the voice said.
“What else can I do?”
“Bind him to you. You can keep him as a pet—a fighting pet to back you up,” the voice said.
“Take the gauntlets off. He won’t bite you,” she added.
An instant later, under the system’s guidance, Stairy linked his mind with the baby giant spider.
He could see through the spider’s nine eyes. The spider had no “hearing” per say—but its feet were as sensitive to vibrations as the little blind girl Toph Beifong in the “Airbender” anime.
The spider also had a powerful, but idiosyncratic set of chemoreceptors.
“Put it in your living space. The carcasses of its siblings are the best nourishment for it,” she said.
Stairy systematically eliminated twenty-three spiders and threw them into his new space.
Two more of the spider offspring turned out to be male. Stairy extended his mental power to them.
“Go with God,” he told them.
“They don’t always get eaten when they mate—not if they’re clever enough. That brief mind touch you gave them, should make them far more clever than the average giant spider,” the voice said.
Next Stairy fixed his attention on the dog.
It looked like a beefed-up 300-pound version of a Bloodhound—except the color.
The dog was a very pure white interspersed with patches of liver-colored fur. The liver patches were about as big as both of Stairy’s hands laid side-by-each.
The pattern was reminiscent of a giraffe—with more white and less angularity in the dark patches.
“How does it navigate down here in the dark?” Stairy asked.
“Examine it more carefully,” she said.
There were five extra ears on the dog—tiny ears about the same size as a rat’s ears.
Two, on the sides of the head—just above the base of the floppy Bloodhound ears, pointed inward. Two near the center of the head both pointed outward at about a 25-degree angle. The last little ear was in the dead center of the head and it pointed straight ahead.
The dog also had a third eye in the middle of its forehead and its tail was double-length and prehensile—with a very sensitive tactile sensing tip.
“Go ahead and bind it. Its pack was destroyed and it is kindly disposed to you, since you rescued it,” she said.
A moment later:
“It is still a puppy! It has baby teeth!” Stairy said.
He could sense the inside of the hound’s mouth once their minds were linked. It could injure the spider’s leg—with baby teeth!
Stairy retrieved the ruins of his shotgun. It wasn’t like him, not to scavenge and cannibalize parts. His emotions had gotten the best of him momentarily.
Then he sat and watched his teleport cool-down count down.
“You can put the hound in your space when you want to. The spider and the hound will feel your imprint on each other and they won’t damage each other,” the voice said.
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Post by texican on Oct 27, 2021 20:40:29 GMT -6
rvm,
Stairy is building his pack. Now what fun will this pack have.
Additional chapters will reveal. Catch the hint, rvm.
rvm, your imagination definitely creates great reading.
Thanks,
Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 28, 2021 12:06:52 GMT -6
Friends,
Spotted an ERROR.
Stairy's inner space is approximately the size of a Basketball court—about 4600-Square Feet. It is 77-FEET in diameter. 77-YARDS would make it about as big as a Football Field—47 700-Square Feet.
Corrected this.
Ran the numbers. 77-yards would give ABOUT 42 000-square feet
…..RVM45
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 28, 2021 15:52:24 GMT -6
Chapter Seven
18 812
Stairy used the hound’s scenting ability to find the giant spiders more quickly and he leveled up without further incident for awhile.
Level-21: Teleport time up to 1:21 and his inner space grew to 78-feet.
Level-23: Cool Down time decreased to 2:59. Inner Space—79-feet.
Level-24: Teleportation time 1:22. Inner Space—80-feet.
His experience bar to advance to the watershed Level-25 was at 63.1. On the other hand, the spiders were getting considerably scarcer. Stairy was getting a bit weary of the never-ending labyrinth of tunnels and his temper was getting a bit waspish.
He decided to leave the infernal tunnels. He’d eat a good meal and get a good night’s sleep up above and then decide just what his next move was going to be. He wasn’t sure if it made sense to continue grinding in the tunnels. Maybe he needed to kill other reindeer haints to level up.
There was a zombie blocking the nearest subway exit. Stairy could have used his Bowie sword and saved ammunition, but his patience was at low ebb.
Apparently, TPTB felt that the best gameplay—that is, the most interesting game play for them to spectate—came about when there was a reasonable amount of ammunition in play. Consequently, one often found ammunition and ammunition wasn’t ruinously expensive in the player store.
Stairy drew his .357 and shot the zombie in the head. He didn’t bother with the silenced .22. He was well back from the mouth of the tunnel and the underground would muffle the shot.
His experience bar climbed to 64.9% as he reloaded the single spent cartridge.
“O No! You didn’t!” the system shrieked at Stairy.
“Call the hound into your space—unless you mean to use him for a decoy and sacrifice him. You need to run, dodge, climb—whatever—and you won’t have time to shepherd the hound,” she said.
“I don’t sacrifice my friends or my kin,” Stairy said as he called the hound into his space.
“What is this about?” he demanded.
“You fired your .357—right at the mouth of the tunnel—right at dusk. I can’t believe that you’re so stupid!” she said.
“You shoulda said somethin’,” Stairy said.
“Don’t stand there arguing! Run!” she shouted in his head.
Stairy took the stairs three at a time, faster than a world class athlete could climb an equal number of single steps.
“What are we fleeing?” he demanded.
Knowing what the source of the problem was, would give Stairy some idea which way to jump.
“Mutant Vampire Bats! They’re really feeble. Killing a single bat would only gain you .71 advancement points. They hunt alone and they’re simply nuisances—though they can carry the zombie virus and a few other plagues—but you’re immune,” the system said.
“Thing is, they are all exiting the tunnel en masse and since you fired your very loud pistol, each and every one of them will key on you for the historic future,” she said.
“What about the post-historic future?”
“You may not live that long. Stairy, I would have warned you—but with your jacked-up neural-impulse speed, the interval between thinking and acting is too brief—and your irritable mental state caused you to react at almost reflex speed when the zombie pissed you off,” the system said.
She sounded positively mournful and it was the first time that she had called Stairy by name.
“Never mind. If I don’t survive, you can go be someone else’s system with a clear conscious,” Stairy said.
The first of the Mutant Vampire Bats just started to emerge from the subway entrance.
Stairy dropped behind an old-fashioned blue mailbox. He brought a six-shot pump shotgun out of his storage. In general, he preferred punkin balls to buckshot, but sometimes it was advantageous to have buckshot for crowd control.
The bats had a 4-foot wingspan and a body the size of a skinny housecat. While they could fly faster than most men could run, they were more gilders…
And the first few bats to emerge from the tunnel were scattered.
Six shots of 00 Buckshot dropped six of the abominations. Stairy quickly reloaded with buffered, plated BB Shot and dropped six more. Then he called the shotgun back into storage and took off running.
Stairy could outrun the bats—for awhile. His endurance was well above human—but it was nowhere near being on the same plane as his super-human strength.
The bats were fast enough to keep him in sight and when he began to tire within a couple of miles, they would catch up to him.
He paused long enough to fire an occasional round from his .357. He had only managed to kill three bats with six-shots though. He couldn’t maintain his pace and reload the revolver and he wanted to keep the horn-handled .357 in reserve, so he holstered the empty stag-handled revolver and took off running once more.
“What are you doing!?!” the system demanded.
“Every second that I pause to shoot—while panting like a steam locomotive—is about 1.1 more seconds that I can run at full-speed in the near future,” Stairy explained.
Of course, all the shooting and other commotion summoned zombies.
Stairy concentrated on trying to run under sun awnings to keep the bats from being able to attack too freely. While he was no longer in the walkway area, awnings that shaded the sidewalks weren’t that uncommon.
While he ran under the awnings, he did his best to dodge and elude zombies. The task was made harder by the fact that there was a solid building to his left and if he went too far right, he would run out from under the protective awning.
He ran with his Bowie sword in his left-hand and his 9mm pistol in his right. When the 9mm was empty, Stairy stowed it and called out the Colt Diamondback.
He kept looking for a building that he could teleport into. Unfortunately, they were either boarded-up or they had very heavily tinted glass. He couldn’t teleport blind. It wasn’t just an incautious practice—it wasn’t physically possible.
“WTF Might!?!” Stairy quoted the animated Aussie cartoon kangaroo. The kangaroo always gave the word “Mate” the idiosyncratic Aussie pronunciation—and so did Stairy, when he was quoting the cartoon kangaroo.
Then Stairy saw something that gave him hope. There was one of those window-washing movable gangways about 60-foot up the side of one of the town’s very modest high rises.
Stairy burst into sprinting speed while calling everything that could impede him into storage.
He had never tried to create a vertical set of teleport coordinates. Of course, that would mean that half of his teleport points were under the ground. Even if there was a fortuitous basement or tunnel under the ground, Stairy couldn’t teleport there blind.
That didn’t matter. What did matter was that Stairy was a heart-breaking few feet short of being able to reach the window-washer’s elevator.
“Damned nation!” Stairy panted.
The world high-jump record was close to 8-foot. Stairy wasn’t sure, the exact figure. The thing was, high-jumpers leapt 3 or 4 feet into the air and then rotated their body around their center of gravity to clear the bar.
A standing vertical leap was largely a matter of brute strength in the jumping muscles divided by mass. High-jumping with a run-up was more a test of skill.
Stairy could squat with about 1000-pounds now, for well over 50-repetitions—before adding in his extra quadricep and calf strength—and he only weighed a bit over 230-pounds. Say 260-pounds with his gear—though he had called his Bowie Sword into storage—260 was a bit high.
Also, gravity was a bit lighter here than on Earth—about 65%. Lighter gravity would increase one’s standing vertical leap—somewhat. The verdict was still out, whether lighter gravity allowed faster sprinting on the straightaway.
Even if the light gravity made Stairy run a bit faster, it was a very open question whether the inexperienced Stairy could parley a faster run-up to a higher vertical leap.
“Ain’t nothin for to do it, but to do it!” Stairy screamed as he ran up to the jumping point and gave it his all.
He leapt and came up about 3-inches short. If he teleported now, he might be able to grasp the edge of the walkway—but maybe not. If he missed being able to get onto the walkway he wouldn’t be able to get a new set of teleport points for 2-Minutes and 59-Seconds.
He didn’t teleport and he fell right atop a zombie.
“Knob-Gobbler!” Stairy cursed at the zombie as he called his Bowie sword out of storage and hacked at the zombie viciously.
Stairy had to cut his way through several zombies to get far enough away from his landing zone to do another run-up.
Stairy called a “Claxon” out of storage. It was an aerosol can full of high-pressure gas. It was meant for women to summon help when faced with a fate-worse-than-death. Once you triggered it, it let out a 175-decible fog-horn roar.
Even if the client wasn’t afraid that the Claxon would summon help, who was in the mood for forced sex when their eardrums had burst?
Stairy had bought the Claxon model that would vent continuously, once it was activated, until it was out of gas.
He threw one as far to his right as his super-strong arms would allow. Then he triggered another Claxon and cast it far down the street to his left.
That should draw some of the zombies away from him.
When Stairy saw an opening, he jogged to a point under the end of the walkway and then he executed a near-standing high-jump. With his poor command of momentum, he could probably jump higher without a run-up.
Success!!!
‘Congratulations, I’m now stuck on a window-washer’s elevator six-stories above the ground!’ Stairy bitched to himself.
He could teleport back to the ground—for the next 80-Seconds or so. That would just put him back in the zombie horde, with the Mutant Vampire Bats also hot on his trail.
He could see into the office on the other side of the glass, but he couldn’t teleport there, since all of his teleport points were strung out on a vertical plane…
And nothing kept the bats from attacking him here…
While the bats were momentarily confused as to where Stairy had vanished to, Stairy reloaded his weapons. The shotgun and the .357 might come in handy. The 9mm—not so much. Still, it was easy to drop the magazine and insert a fresh one. He now had beaucoup magazines, so there was no need to bother reloading a magazine, at this point in time, Senator.
A couple of the bats had spotted him. He quickly cut them down with the Bowie sword and then called out his Lever Action. He shot three zombies on the ground and them fired the last .45-70 round at a bat before he swapped the .45-70 for a 12-Gauge.
Stairy fired the shotgun dry. He teleported to the far end of the catwalk and he had time to reload two shells into the pump before the bats were upon him again.
When the shotgun was empty again, Stairy called it into storage and teleported to some sort of pipe that was sticking out from the wall about two-stories down.
It seemed to be a hollow pipe. They probably used it to put a flag pole in to fly a flag on special occasions. He noted several poles along the building, though this was the only one that he could teleport to.
Stairy’s feet had scarcely touched down for an instant when the pipe collapsed under his weight and dumped him.
It didn’t matter that he was falling. He could still teleport to any of his eligible spaces. He called the single-shot 12-Gauge that he had found in the bookstore into his right hand.
He had turned it into a single-shot 12-Gauge pistol with a 13’’ barrel. He shot one bat as he fell—just to get them headed this way—then he teleported back to the catwalk.
He managed to reload the single-shot pistol before the persistent bastards recalibrated his position. He shot one more of the turd-garglers.
Ding!
He had accumulated enough points to level up to Level-25.
That was one of his goals. Now, if he could just live out the next 8-seconds, everything should be okay in his little world.
He drew both of his .357’s. Musashi had said that it was false to die with a weapon yet undrawn. He teleported back and forth three times as he fired at the bats at point-blank range.
He saw his teleportation clock hit “Zero.”
“Yes!!!” Stairy shouted.
He holstered his revolvers hard—to make sure that they were seated firmly. He grabbed a dead bat in each hand, quickly transferred both carcasses to one hand and then grabbed another.
Then he called up his emergency Level-1 set of teleportation points and teleported inside the office. He couldn’t use the Level-1 emergency reserve until his Level-24 teleport was on cool down.
He called the spider and the hound out of his safe space. He pitched one of the bats to the little spider. Its abdomen had already grown to the size of a large grapefruit.
Stairy started to pitch a bat to the hound.
“He would almost certainly prefer his food cooked,'’ the system told Stairy.
“Whatever,” Stairy said.
“Y’all done need names. Your kind hunts like Wolf Spiders—so your name is ‘Wolf’,” He told the little spider.
“The first time that I saw you, you were fighting a spider—so your name is ‘Spider’,” Stairy told the hound.
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Post by texican on Oct 28, 2021 21:51:32 GMT -6
rvm, Good long chapter. Seems like Stairy likes to put himself in danger on a regular basis or is it his author? Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 29, 2021 7:29:04 GMT -6
EE…
I'm playing my cards close to my vest for the next few chapters…
But basically:
Lora-Ah bequeathed him a suicide rescue mission—should he choose to pick up the gauntlet…
So, instead of finally getting to go to the wilderness like he has been obsessing about since before he transmigrated to this game—He needs to level up FAST or else when he confronts the Evil-Doers, it will be like attacking a rock with an egg.
…..RVM45
BIG PS: Did you note the neat way that his dog is named "Spider" and his spider is named "Wolf"!?!
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Post by NCWEBNUT on Oct 29, 2021 8:34:44 GMT -6
By chance do you sell your stories in some type of format? You Sir have a unique ability to tell a tale, that I would like to possess to peruse at my conveniences.
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Post by rvm45 on Oct 29, 2021 8:46:42 GMT -6
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Post by texican on Oct 29, 2021 21:04:42 GMT -6
BIG PS: Did you note the neat way that his dog is named "Spider" and his spider is named "Wolf"!?!
A,
Missed it. Will have to pay more attention to the little things.
Texican....
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Post by rvm45 on Nov 6, 2021 15:22:47 GMT -6
Chapter Eight
21 111
Stairy sat and brooded morosely. He had used his emergency reserve teleportation.
He had already teleported at Level-25. He couldn’t even hope to refill his empty reserve slot until he advanced from Level-26 to Level-27. Recent events had impressed upon him the importance of having the reserve teleport and he wasn’t going to be happy until he replaced his reserve chute.
He wanted to examine his gains, such as they were, from advancing to Level-25. However, he was in a rather large 17-story building and he was almost positive that there would be zombies somewhere inside.
Right now, his progress bar was at .27%. Unless this building was chock full of zombies and other reindeer haints, he wasn’t going to level up on the strength of clearing the building—but once he cleared it, he could cook a meal and have a peaceful night’s sleep.
Stairy tossed the hound a can of SPAM…
Well, he took it from the can first. Then he sliced another slab of SPAM and made himself a couple of thick sandwiches, adding several slices of Swiss cheese to each sandwich. He also fished out a few pepperoncini peppers and a big fat whole-pickle to eat alongside the sandwich.
While he had a toaster, he didn’t want to take the time to set up the toaster and to toast some bread. He was also leery, lest the smell of toasting bread lead zombies or other nuisances to his location.
One of Stairy’s pet peeves in life, was people who when told:
“We have a toaster,”
Would fatuously say:
“Duh, Nope! Nope! I’ll eats it raw!”
He would go the extra mile to try to preserve civilized dining practices and offer:
“I’ll toast it for you!” Hoping to prevent such an egregious gaucherie.
“Duh, Nope! Nope! I’ll eats it raw!”
He would have felt far less scandalized and disgusted by people that preferred their meat raw, to people that preferred their bread untoasted. Actually, he wouldn’t care if people chose to eat their meat raw.
Now, Stairy was eating his own bread raw—like some kind of Ubangi, head-hunting, cannibal. Granted, there were extenuating circumstances, but he couldn’t help but feel that he was violating the rules of civilized dining.
He was afraid that in his next stage of de-evolution, that he’d start feeling an unaccountable urge to pierce his septum and wear a bone through his nose—and maybe file his teeth to points.
After a moment’s thought, he tossed a 3-pound package of Frankfurters to the hound. He liked wieners, but Frankfurters had always seemed grainy and relatively tasteless to Stairy. It was better to let Spider eat the Frankfurters.
“O, I’m Glad I’m Not “An Oscar Meyer Frankfurter…”
He hummed silently to himself.
‘Did Oscar Meyer even make Frankfurters?’ Stairy asked himself.
“How Do the Lights Shine, “In the Halls of Shamballa…”
He swapped tunes.
He had read that Shamballa came from Theosophy. It was an invisible and immaterial domain that floated above the Sahara Desert—not that Stairy had ever wasted time studying Theosophy.
But he had also read that Shamballa came from Hindu mythology and it was a city at the Center of the Earth like Agartha.
Maybe, the area just above the Sahara was actually the Center of the Earth.
When he had heard the Hippy song as a youngster, he’d assumed that Shamballa was a real place like Kathmandu or Macersville. He’d felt cheated when he found that they had been singing about a non-existent place—like The Kremlin or The Vatican.
‘HMMMmmnnn…?’ Stairy wondered.
‘Could The Kremlin really just be The Vatican in drag? Or maybe The Vatican was The Kremlin in drag? But if the Vatican was as imaginary as Shamballa and The Kremlin—then WHERE was Michelangelo doing his ceiling painting?’ Stairy mused.
‘Maybe Michelangelo ran around like a Renaissance graffiti artist just painting wherever the urge led him.’
People would say:
“Let the poor delusional fellow alone. He thinks that The Vatican is a real place and he’s painting the ceiling of a place called ‘The Sistine Chapel.’ He ate too much raw bread as a youngster and got a zoonotic brain parasite. Always eat your bread well-done, children—so that you don’t end up like that poor man.”
************ *************** *********************
Stairy quietly climbed the stairs to the seventeenth floor, taking out three zombies in the stairwell along the way. He didn’t bother with using the suppressed .22 LR in the stairwell, because the firedoors should muffle the sound of his shots.
Coincidentally, there were seventeen zombies on the 17th floor. There were none on the roof. Stairy checked—first, because he didn’t want to pass up any easy points and secondarily, because he wanted to scout the city with his own eyes, from such a high viewpoint.
Drones were, but they were beyond Stairy’s means. He wondered if he could salvage the parts from this and that and create his own.
Stairy had went to trade school in his fifties, thinking that he could make more money in Industrial Maintenance—and spare his aching back. Along the way, he had taken a few courses in Robotics.
Actually, he was rather surprised to find that he’d earned a second degree in Robotics. When he told one of his instructors that he was nowhere near being qualified as a Roboticist, he was told that much of the skills were learned on-the-job.
Stairy had never worked as a Maintenance Technician. No one would hire him. He was fifty-six years old when he graduated and the only job experience he had was as a manual laborer. Shortly afterward, his feet, knees, back and hands started to fail him and he spent his last thirty-some odd years on disability—with a net income of about $1000/month.
He hadn’t worked as a Robotics Technician either. Ordinarily, the classes that he’d taken in Robotics would have dimmed greatly in the decades since he’d seriously called them to mind.
However, his memories had been digitized and then digitally enhanced.
There are many memories trapped inside a human brain that aren’t forgotten. It is like a huge library and what is forgotten is the call-up codes.
When Stairy was a boy, several times he’d gotten a “stack pass” to browse all the library books stored in the tall bookcases in warehouse-like rooms in the back portion of the library, not generally available to the general public.
There wasn’t any such thing as a stack pass to view the tucked away memories in the human brain. Scientists who studied the mind, knew there were vast stacks of tucked-away memories, because once in a great while, a long-forgotten memory would surface—one that could be verified—since the brain could also fabricated false memories upon occasion.
All of Stairy’s memories were opened and then…
Stairy had watched old films from the late 1800’s or early 1900’s. Hackers digitally enhanced them—filling in miscellaneous blank spots. If that jacket was red in frame 1189, there was every reason to believe that the baseball-sized blank spot on the same spot on the coat at frame 1193 was also red.
Some of the old films were something like 12-frames-per-second and they were jumpy as all Hell. A powerful computer could interpolate the position between frame 1100 and frame 1101 and interpose an intermediate frame.
The new films flowed at 24-frames-per-second and looked much more lifelike.
It was the same with digital enhancement of memories. If there was a small gap here and there, a very, very powerful computer could extrapolate or interpolate the missing data—with something like 98.6% accuracy.
Sure, there was that 1.4% possibility of false data being created—but the gains far outweighed the possible losses.
Anyway, when the forgotten material was simply electronic, mathematical or scientific formulas—or maps or memories of areas for which the super-computer had data or even photos—it was simply supplied without any serious attempt to weave it into the narrative.
Consequently, Stairy who had lived on Earth for eighty-seven years and had dabbled at a great many fields of endeavor in his life, was a dangerous repository of knowledge.
Stairy had used his teleport, so he sat on the roof and waited for his cool-down to end. Taking on seventeen zombies in a closed space had proved rather strenuous.
The zombies were far fewer and farther between on the other floors. One floor had nine zombies, but the average was closer to five. Some of the zombies were in offices with the door closed. He even found one in the private office latrine in one palatial suite of offices
Stairy had called Spider and Wolf back into storage before he’d started his ascent.
“Why don’t you call the hound out of storage, to help you sniff out the zombies?” the system asked.
‘HMMMmmnnn…?’
“Look for zombies,” Stairy told Spider.
Spider may not have understood his words, but the mental image of a zombie that Stairy broadcast was plain enough.
Things were going much faster and smoother with Spider’s mutant Bloodhound nose sniffing out the zombies…
Until they got to Floor-7, just one floor above where they had started.
Stairy had just opened the firedoor and let Spider in, when he heard a godawful racket that felt like it split his head—with his enhanced hearing—clean in two.
Spider had seven ears—including his additional five mutant bat-like sonic ears. He was far more susceptible to auditory overload than Stairy. He collapsed on the floor like 100-pounds of potatoes in a 200-pound sack.
The sonic attack was more than just an assault on the ears though. Stairy’s lungs instantly filled with pinholes and he coughed a huge mouthful of blood.
Stairy’s hearing had been enhanced and he positively obsessed about the fact that loud noises killed auditory nerves. Brynlee had soothed his concerns by giving him auditory nerves that were far more resistant to damage in the first place, and they could fully regenerate within a matter of hours.
The regeneration had no time to help Stairy in this instance, but his vastly more robust inner ears did.
His superhuman strength made his muscles tougher and more resilient as well. His enhanced pectorals, latissimus dorsi, abdominals, diaphragm, serratus and intercostal muscles shielded his internal organs to a degree.
The prudent thing to do, would be to back out the door and take a healing pill and recuperate before proceeding—but that would have meant abandoning Spider. He wasn’t about to sacrifice the giant mutant Bloodhound.
Stairy staggered forward.
“Try that again, galloping llama,” Stairy managed to chumble out of his bloody mouth.
“CHEEP!” a giant voice boomed.
Stairy gaped in amazement. The booming sonic attack came from a Giant Mutant Canary with a 3-foot wingspan and glowing red eyes the size of golf balls.
He felt his lungs rip further. He drew his .357 Magnum and shot the giant canary six times.
The canary hummed in an odd way and formed a sort of sonic shield that destroyed the .357 bullets about 18-inches away from its body.
Stairy’s head had already been rocked hard twice. The odd humming caused both of his retinas to detach and he instantly lost his eyesight.
“I have no body; I make endurance my body. “I have no eyes; I make the flash of lightning my eyes. “I have no ears; I make sensibility my ears. “I have no limbs; I make promptness my limbs. “I have no strategy; I make “unshadowed by thought” my strategy…”
Stairy had time to think…
All that was well and good, but Stairy didn’t need “The flash of lightning” for eyes. He had powerful telepathy.
He called his shotgun out of his space and shot the canary three times with magnum loads of buffered, plated 00 Buckshot.
The canary vibrated once more.
‘Ach Ja! The knob-gobblerian is melting the lead with that sonic field—kinda like a sonic welder—only faster and more powerful,” Stairy thought.
The sonic shield didn’t have the offensive capability of the direct sonic blast—but it attacked Stairy in a different way than the outright blasts and his structural integrity was already compromised.
Stairy had a mild stroke that left his right-arm and right-leg nearly paralyzed.
Stairy exchanged the shotgun for the double-barreled Howdah pistol.
‘These bullets are hardened, turned bronze and they’re coated in Teflon. Let’s see you melt these bullets,’ Stairy thought.
He used his mental powers to line the barrels up with the giant canary and he pulled both triggers simultaneously.
Stairy aimed center-of-mass. The sonic shield failed to stop the bronze bullets, but it did throw them off course a bit. One slug broke the canary’s left humerus while another slug grazed its head.
The canary fluttered to the ground, but it wasn’t dead yet.
Stairy wasn’t sure if the uncanny mutant could spontaneously regenerate or not. While he hadn’t encountered spontaneous regeneration yet, if the canary had it, and he passed up a one-time-only opportunity to make the canary good—and the canary revived and slew Spider and him, then who would be stupid?
Stairy teleported to just behind the fluttering canary. He drew his Bowie sword into his strong left-hand and he let himself fall to add momentum to his sword-stroke.
He probably couldn’t have continued to stand long with his right-side paralyzed anyway. Might as well use his fall to gain momentum.
To his surprise, with the canary semi-stunned, it was no harder to behead than a big turkey.
Stairy knew his client had died when he saw his progress bar advance to 81.18%.
‘HMMMmmnnn…? For some reason, the canary is only worth 21 advancement points—less than a Giant Underground Spider. Tight-ass TPTB!’ Stairy thought.
Stairy called an energy restoration pill, a pill that sped coagulation greatly and super healing pill into his left-hand all at once. He popped them into his mouth, swallowed, and then called out a small 10-ounce energy drink.
His right-hand was almost useless, but he managed to seize the plastic cap hard enough with his molars to turn it off. If he ruined a tooth or two—they would heal. Cracked or broken teeth were the least of his worries at the moment.
With the 10-ounce drink being a down-payment on replacing the bodily fluids that he had spit and vomited onto the floor, Stairy teleported Spider to the inner space. Then he teleported there himself.
While he could have teleported Spider earlier, he was too hard-pressed to do so. He couldn’t teleport to the inner-space when he was actively engaged in combat—though he could if he had definitely broken off contact and was fleeing his client.
His inner-space had a number of rules.
“You can stay in your internal space for 5-Hours and 35-Minutes now,” the system told him.
Stairy called out a super-healing drug in IV form and injected it into Spider.
“That is extravagant to waste a super-healing injection on an animal,” the system remarked tonelessly.
“He’s not an animal. He’s my compañero,” Stairy said.
He pulled a pad and a pillow out of his storage and he lay down beside the Bloodhound. He passed out with one arm around Spider.
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Post by texican on Nov 8, 2021 20:34:44 GMT -6
rvm,
A screaming canary that wreaks damage. Was the canary edible once dispatched?
Spider will be ok.
Thanks for the chapter.
Texican....
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