"So you got the stuff we need?" Kate said over the phone.

She flashed Ashley a thumbs up. It sounded like everything was falling in a place. Or that they were doing a drug deal. Honestly, Ashley would have taken either one base off her recent trials and tribulations.

"The Scottish man succeeds again," Kate said. "We're going to be able to do that expansion now. We just need to wait for the drones to get back."

Ashley pumped her fist. "Now help me with these thigh highs. This sailor scout uniform isn't going to put itself together."

"Of course."

---

"So what I'm thinking it that we need to make a trip to the docks," Bagel said. "If we can establish something there then we can use that to lower in these cruise ships and use them to move people around."

Gladys was sitting next to him as well as Meatball. Janet was floating over with them. She's been with quite recently. Gladys had filled in a lot of her roles so maybe she was really thinking about what was appropriate. I need this snarky artificial intelligence drone to run his shop while they had this meeting.

"If we're really talking about getting new territory then maybe we need to talk to Copernicus," Meatball said. " Do we need some sort of buy-in from him for this kind of thing? Because I think he's going to want some sort of buying, isn't he the head of the cartel?"

Gladys crossed her arms. "He thinks that he's the head of the organization."

Meatball blinked several times. It was probably understanding that crossed her face. "If we start expanding we have to make it sound like it was his idea? Is that what we're doing?"

"You've got the heart of it."

Meatball sneered. "This is such a great idea. How could I say no. I would obviously love to come with this myself but clearly you are the ideas guy."

"I'm going to take that in the spirit that was spent that you are actually involved in this and want to be a whole partner in this endeavor."

"So you agree."

Gladys covered her eyes. "Cats are so weird."

Bagel turned to his primary assistant. "Look we're only as weird as you guys are because you guys made us all fucked up in the head. That's it."

But you at a point. Cats could only be so weird. If there weren't humans? He might be intent to just sell shop items to other cats or animals that had become awakened and. They were vanishingly few of those in comparison with a large amount of humans on the planet. Or at least there were far more humans with any sort of money than there ever were cats or dogs. And this was despite the probability of New York to be a very walkable City which was good for dogs and bad for cats.

"You know at one point in my life I used to think that I might have been an outdoor cat?" Bagel said. "I heard that it's a problem the amount of birds that died because of outdoor cats, but I don't really think that that will be a problem. I could only kill so many birds."

"It's the only problem because we want some biodiversity. There's only so many cats that could be supported by a population of birds," Gladys said. "But this is an exploratory meeting to see if we can figure out which building we would get a warehouse at. And the assumption here is that meatball is going to be the one with a warehouse card, which means that we're going to have to back her up some way."

Bagel nodded. There was logistics of the thing which included getting people to actually go there and clear out the building. And then there was the secondary logistics of getting credits over to her so she could buy more stuff. She can start with a lot of money too but it was very far away.

"How many blocks away did you say that was?" Meatball said. "Why can't we just buy up one of the roads between here and there?"

"We can't defend the road between here and there. The only thing that would do would be to push the mobs spawns further out."

Bagel raged. For as much as he had spent time buying up locations with the eye to create a safe corridor, he wasn't going to be able to do that if the rate of mob. Spawns stayed constant. True, people could be assured that mobs wouldn't spawn directly in the spot that had been bought up by him, but around there, according to the city, mobs had been spawning more often. Or the spawns that would have gone to places he bought up were now moving up a little bit.

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It would like the system had a design that meant that you could make a safe zone, but you couldn't get rid of the onslaught of mobs. It made him worry about what would happen when they finally got everything in New York City.

There was an option to buy and then enable spawns in that area and he thought that that might be the best option to go with. If you did that then he would be able to keep mobs spawns in certain areas until they bought up everything around it and cordoned off the sections. That was the plan the NYPD had provided to him and he was trying to stick to it as much as possible.

"It's still over fifty blocks away no matter if we go across town then down or even with the best pathing," Gladys said. "Maybe there'll be other options when we have enough money, but if we want to satisfy the city's request then we're going to have to have two separate enclaves. I don't even know what the mob is at spawns over there. I really should know this, shouldn't I?"

"We can pull it out. But I guess what we want to do is figure out how much more we can get from the adventurers guild and then hire some people on to just be around the clock support until we can get someone local on that side. It's near by the West village so there's enough people there," Bagel said. "The city hall is even close by there but they're not moving fast enough for my tastes."

If he went back to his console, he could see a map of the city and if he zoomed that far enough you can see basically a map of the world where everything had been bought up or where things were secured against spawning. It didn't give him much more information except it did tell him what the spawning creature was if they all of a sudden decided they wanted to allow it to return.

"Guys, did you know that if I toggle the option to have the mob spawn that they will allow me to use the original spawns? Not the Omega rats?"

Gladys looked like she'd been hit by a truck. "If we do that then we could have a newbie area. Do you understand that bagel? We could have a newbie area here and we could send people here. And oh God the power creep we can fix the power creep and holy shit..."

They had heard that humans debate about the power creep issue. He hadn't understood it until recently.

"The power creep issue?" Meatball said. "I feel like I missed something."

"Meatball gave you missed it, Omega rats are now spawning instead of pizza rats. An Omega rat will take a normal human down in one blow. A pizza rat can't do that."

"Okay so what?" Meatball said.

Gladys shrugged. "The Omega rats came in roughly thirty six days after the start. We're coming up on twice that. It's been 2 months but it's 72 days? A lot of humans are thinking that shits about to change in the great game. Some people are even calling it the great game which is it feels like it's an affront."

"And we've been tracking this?"

Bagel obvious absolutely need to take more care and listening to what was actually being talked about by the humans. There was a disconnect between what he thought they were going to be doing and what they thought was important and what he thought was important and he had been trying to reach that gap for a very long time.

"Well we think it's important so maybe you should think the same thing too. The government seems to think that we need to go on lockdown in roughly a week to see whatever is going to be happening through. I think it's going to be like hurricane Sandy or something like that again."

"Hurricane Sandy?"

"You probably don't remember it, but it was rough. The whole city got flooded or at least parts of it did. Did the system give you some knowledge about that?"

"It doesn't give me historical events. Is that the same for you? Meatball?"

Meatball purred. "I feel like I understand the concepts, but I don't have whatever this history is that you're speaking of."

"A couple years back there was this hurricane that basically stopped the city dead. It was like covid except it was a natural disaster. I mean I guess covid was a natural disaster as well but this one was one where you could see coming a lot easier and we took a lot of steps in advance to stop it from getting bad. There was just a point in time when the mayor said you got to stop going places. Only emergency services were allowed out."

Gladys sad and serious. Bagel didn't understand what that really meant. He understood the concept of emergency services. He even had a police which regularly filled and unfilled of police officers that were trying to keep the city safe. But he'd seen how much it took to just get taxi cabs off the street. And had taken hundreds of spawning mobs to stop the onslaught of taxi cabs.

"You think they're going to stop us from doing this?" Meatball said.

"I think that we need to start making a move. Otherwise, we're going to be waiting and we'll be probably in a worse position. If we're going to expand our operations that far then I'm going to need more money and we're going to have to start considering payroll. Now I understand you say that you got money and it's been proven. But if we're going to do what I think we're going to need to do then we got to make sure that we get enough money."

It hadn't even crossed Bagel's mind that he would ever run out of money. It made no sense. He could always just make more. Unless the way to make credits dried up and that was going to be...

"If we keep buying up all the real estate how are we going to be able to get more credits?" Bagel said.

"What do you mean?" Meatball said.

"What I mean is that every time that I buy something there are no response there. And if there's no more spawns then..."

Gladys sat bolt upright from her chair. "Oh that is ingenious. If we keep doing what we're doing eventually... The credits are going to slow down aren't they? Unless we pick special parts to be what? Spawn points?"

It's going to have to be something like that. Especially if they keep moving around faster.

Gladys smiled. "I think I know we could where we would can set up a good place for them to start spawn camping."

Meatball swished her tail. "Oh I do so hope you you're about to say what I think you're about to say."

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