41 - Interdimensional Garbage Merchant

Day 5

Ko Samui Island, Thailand

Sword Rat Level 2 - Defeated

35 EXP

10 Credits

“Behind you!” a voice cried out.

Maria Valdez, turned to face another mutated creature tearing through the jungle ferns. It was dog sized and hairy, with a long serrated horn on its head. The sword of the sword rat.

She slashed down with the metal pole she carried; it cracked hard against the extended horn, pushing the oversized rat’s head down and forcing the horn into the ground. The mutant rat gave a bitter squeal as Jacob, who stood by her side, lashed out with a fire axe. The heavy steel buried its head into the neck of the creature.

Maria didn’t waste anytime, she smashed her pole dow upon the creature. She was rewarded with the sounds of cracking bones and the whimpering death rattle of the mutant monster.

Sword Rat Level 2 - Defeated

18 EXP

5 Credits

Maria breathed heavily and swiped away the notification. Those things were a hazard, especially in the middle of battles. She didn’t have to look at the screen to know that the credits and experience points were divided between Jacob and her.

It was a clumsy system, Maria mused. Even if Jacob had barely touched the monster and she had killed it, the experience and credits would still have been split. But like everything else in the world right now, Maria didn’t have much of a say in how things worked. She was just trying to survive.

“He’s still bleeding pretty bad,” another voice said.

Maria looked behind her, at the small group she lead. They were sunken faced men and women, only five left in their group now. They were all filthy, hungry, and most carried wounds that would begin festering if they weren’t taken care of.

Jacob Patel, a Singaporean, glanced at Maria. His dark eyes held no worry or pity for the wounded. They were expressionless and devoid of life. They had found him three days after Integration, still cradling his dead wife and surrounded by dead sea creatures that had attacked the beach resort they were vacationing in. He followed them to kill monsters and Maria had to admit that he did it very well.

The wounded was a man named Vale Viddayakorn. He had the unfortunate luck to have been ravaged by the new murderous seagulls that filled the skies. The once pest birds had mutated, growing long talons and needle like teeth. They weren’t terribly dangerous one on one, but they moved in flocks that numbered in the hundreds.

Most of Maria’s four levels had come from bashing in those horrible birds. The hotel she had been staying in was an upscale one along the north beach, it hadn’t lasted more than two days before the seagulls smashed into rooms and killed everyone still trapped there.

The three others of the group were Solada (Vale’s wife), Nim, and a young European boy named Charles. They all huddled around the dying man, bleary eyed and exhausted. The sword rat attack had been only one in a dozen attacks they had suffered since escaping the beach hotel.

Before Integration, the large island off the coast of Thailand had been a major tourist destination. Hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors had arrived to enjoy its brilliant beaches and the large manicured island.

Maria Valdez hadn’t been on the island for fun. She had flown in from the Philippines for business. Her father’s company had sent her to the island to meet with a representative from an Indian company, who was vacationing there. It was her chance to prove to her father she was a capable employee and dedicated to their company.

All her future plans and dreams had died that night as she turned in for an early sleep. Integration had occurred and all hell had broken loose.

Maria looked down at Vale and tried to steel her emotions. There was nothing they could do for the man, but Maria didn’t say that. She had Vale to thank for her continued existence. He and his wife had been workers at the hotel, both of them had been maintenance staff. It was Vale who had raided his tool room and armed them as best as he could. Without him, they would have been eaten by the seagull swarms.

Maria crouched down with the group and pulled out the crumpled map she carried. She wasn’t familiar with the island and had only found a tourist map in a hotel room. Their plan had been to move away from the coast, the sea gulls and the sea creatures were becoming a problem, but as they moved into the interior, they were discovering that it was just as bad there.

Monsters swarmed the island and Maria didn’t know what to do anymore. There had been signs of holdouts, people fighting the monsters, but she had also seen some signs of violence between groups. She wasn’t one for post apocalyptic movies, but the small island was becoming a cliche.

“If we move here. I think we can set it up as a defensible place,” Maria said. “We obviously can’t make it to-“

She stopped as a pressure filled the air. It suddenly became hard to breathe and she glanced around in panic. She had felt this sensation before, it was a build up of mana and that only lead to one thing.

A Mana Render.

Vale would have to be abandoned. If they ran now, they could find safety from whatever horror came out of the Render.

She rose to begin shouting orders, when Jacob’s voice stopped her.

“What the fuck?” he asked.

Maria caught what he was looking at and stared also.

“What the fuck?”

***

There was a freestanding metal wall in the middle of a small open glade, where a wall hadn’t stood before. In the center of the freestanding metal wall, there was a red door. It wasn’t the sudden appearance of the wall or door that shocked the two, but the writing upon it.

Big bold neon purple letters announced:

Maya’s Emporium

- Best deals in the Dimensional Plane

- No Necros

- AI friendly

- All sales final

The group crouched behind a bush and stared at the metal wall.

“What is it?” Jacob asked.

“An advertisement?” Maria wondered. Her family’s business was in marketing, well, one of their businesses. This wall looked like some kind of billboard stuck into the ground, but the writing on it was sloppy and almost illegible English.

Charles looked at it and then nodded to himself. “It’s a trader,” he said.

‘What?” Maria almost laughed. Charles, who was from the Netherlands, was sixteen; his parents had died protecting him and since then he had been withdrawn. She had heard him talking with Jacob about games and how the Integration was like a game, but Maria figured it was just him dealing with his loss. “This is not a game, Charles.”

“What else could it be?” he asked.

“A trap?” Jacob said.

Nim, a local girl, scooted up to them and looked at what they were staring at. “Are we in danger?”

“From a wall? No.” Maria stated. “But we should get the hell out of here before- Charles!”

Charles had left their hiding place and strode toward the wall. Fear and dread overwhelmed her, she caught the look that Jacob and Nim shared. She was a coward, they knew. She had hid when the others had fought, she was the defacto leader because no one wanted to be in charge. Vale had been keeping them alive until he had been wounded and someone had to decide things.

But a leader, she was not. Even with all her education and business dealings, she had never actually lead people. It was all paperwork, phone calls, and meetings with other people in high positions. There was never a need to inspire anyone or take care of anyone; she was a leader only in title, not action.

Maria closed her eyes and muttered a prayer. She rose up and rushed after the boy.

“Stop,” she hissed.

The boy didn’t heed her orders, instead he moved faster. Not a run, but a quick stride that ate up the ground. He was only sixteen, but he was well over one hundred and eighty centimeters in height, towering over her one hundred and sixty centimeter frame. Maria tried closing the distance between the two before he reached the red door.

She didn’t make it, instead Charles pulled the door open and stared for a second, before entering. Maria cursed and rushed in after him.

There was a pop and a shower of something colorful upon her skin. Maria grabbed Charles and pulled him down with her, for the moment his larger frame and height didn’t matter. Instinct and fear overwhelmed everything and she covered the boy with her body, fearing some kind of attack.

“Oh, shit,” a voice, female, cried out. “Oh, shit. Tender! Who’s idea was it to throw confetti at our new customers! Don’t you know what they’ve been through!”

“It was your idea, boss,” another voice, male, replied.

“They appear to be frightened,” a third, female, voice said.

“Hey, hey!” the first voice called out. “ I totally didn’t mean to do that, okay? I’m sorry. I was thinking, y’know, grand opening, first customers, confetti, yay times…” the voice petered out and Maria finally looked up.

A dark skinned woman was looking down at them. She was tall and muscular in an athletic way, but Maria immediately noticed her missing left hand. It ended in a stump with a pair of purple eyes drawn onto it.

Maria stared at that in shock.

“What the hell?’ she muttered.

“Oh, this is Stumperella. Still brain storming better names. Nan says she could have fixed it, but that required ‘additional resources and time you refuse to allow for’. Pfft, like I’m gonna lay around for forty hours to regrow a hand.” The woman talked fast and seemed insane. Maria could barely keep up and she had been taught English since she was eight.

Charles moved and Maria remembered she was still laying on top of him. She quickly got off of the boy and then helped him to his feet. The woman, watched them with a smile and leaned against a counter.

Maria looked at the other two voices in the room. One was a male, mid twenties, with dark skin and strange red eyes. He smiled as she looked at him, revealing straight white teeth. Something seemed odd about him, but Maria couldn’t put her finger on it.

The second woman was sitting on a wooden chair and looked bored. She also had dark skinned but blue eyes. She wore a white coat and had a red cross over her breast. A doctor? When she opened her mouth, it seemed to be filled with small sharp teeth.

Maria looked at the three and realized they all shared a family resemblance. Were they siblings, cousins? Maria didn’t know, but they all seemed strange and she wasn’t entirely at ease with them.

“Hi, y’all!” the woman cried. “I’m Maya Sullivan, owner and proprietor of Maya’s Emporium, a subsidiary of the Sullivan Survival Society. These are my lovely compatriots, Tender and in that corner over there, Nan.”

“Tender?” Maria asked.

“Short for Tenderdronicas Gaius Tendermillian, but we prefer Tender.”

“It’s actually short for Bartender,” the man, Tender, replied.

“Oh, my god! Really?” the woman cried out, shocked. “I thought it was just because you were so squishy and malleable!”

“Are you a trader?” Charles managed to squeeze in between the insane conversation.

The woman, Maya, turned and grinned at the boy. “Hell yeah, I am. Not licensed or insured and more self proclaimed, but yeah.” She strode forward and stuck out her hand. “We don’t have the biggest selection, we don’t have the best selection, and we don’t promise it’ll save your life, but we have stuff to sell.”

“What is this place?” Maria demanded. She looked around the room, the wall she had seen was about only five meters wide and three meters tall, but the room they stood in now was at least ten meters by ten meters, with a five meter ceiling. “Why is it bigger on the inside? Why does it look like a free standing wall outside?”

“Does it?’ Maya asked. She shrugged. “I guess it’ll stick to a wall if there is a wall. Where are we anyway?”

“You’re on Ko Samui Island,” Charles said.

Maya shrugged again. “Dunno where that is.”

“Thailand.” Maria clarified.

Maya shrugged once more. “American education. I can tell you the pre-Integration exports of vegetables from Texas, but I wasn’t the biggest geography nerd. I guessed lucky with Anisa.”

Maria shook her head.

“Ah, well. Welcome to Maya’s Emporium. Tender over there will grade and check out any monster bits you are carrying around, he’s good at that. Nan over there will heal you up quicker than you can say ‘I don’t have insurance’. And me, If you have coin I have wares.”

***

“Wait, what? We’re in the middle of a jungle?” The woman pulled a tablet out of somewhere and looked at it. “Well, that’s embarrassing. I thought this was a high traffic area. Tender, our aiming system is messed up.”

“We don’t have an aiming system, boss. This is all random.”

“Well, that explains it then.” The woman turned to Maria.

“You still haven’t explained to me what this place is.” Maria demanded. Her hand clenched around the metal pole she used as a weapon and she glared at the woman. She was taking this all as if it were some kind of joke, but they were dying out there, while… while she was safe in here.

The manic grin that seemed plastered to the woman’s face faded, replaced by… sadness.

“This is a poor attempt to help,” she said. The woman looked around at the near bare and utilitarian empty room. “The whole world is pretty shitty right now and will probably get worse. But I have some stuff, I have a way to move around, and I’m doing the best I can to help.”

“Selling to the poor and desperate is helping?”

“I’m an American,” Maya gave a fake grin. “Profitting from disaster and misery is in our DNA. Capitalism, baby.” Then the expression changed to exhaustion. “There’s this thing called a Settlement Outpost Deed. You scrounge up a million credits and you can buy it. It’ll prevent mana renders from forming and keep the local mana surges down, so that animals aren’t mutating like crazy.”

“A million credits?” Maria marveled, that was a hundred thousand sword rats.

“I got a System Title that allows me to purchase it for half price. Way overpowered, if you think about it. Anyway, the only way I can help is to make credits and then buy deeds to give to people. I can’t make credits from fighting creatures like you can here, I can only make it by taking it off the dead or finding it, which are all rare. So the only way to make credits is to sell stuff.” Maya grinned again. “Therefore, I sell.”

“There’s also other aspects to it, Abilities, Skills, and levels I can gain by being a [Seller], [Vendor], [Trader] and other occupational abilities like that.”

“What are you selling?” Charles asked excitedly, the first time Maria had seen him excited about anything. “Do you have swords, magic weapons, guns?”

“Easy there, bud,” Maya said. “Do you know how to use any of those?”

“I can learn.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“I need to talk to the others, they’ll be worried.” Maria turned to the door, making sure to grab Charles’ arm first.

“Don’t worry about it. Time in here works wonky, it goes twelve times faster in here than outside, so your friends will probably have just seen you enter the door.”

“What?” Charles and Maria cried out in unison.

***

For a small group, there was a lot of noise. Maria sat down on a plush chair that appeared out of nowhere, something about tech and how cool it was. Jacob, Charles, and Nim were with Tender, passing around a tablet and talking with the red eyed man about weapons and what they could do. Solada and Vale were with the doctor Nan, who worked on healing the injured man.

It was a dizzying change of pace and Maria needed a moment to herself. The proprietor, Maya, walked up to her and using some magic made a chair form out of the ground. It still shocked her with the ease the woman used her ability.

“This is all… too much.” Maria said.

“You’ll be safe here for a while, but then you’ll have to go back out there.”

“I know.”

“I hope you’ll take up my offer.”

“Be a Chosen Representative?” Maria asked. The woman had filled her in on the details about the ‘job’. Be a leader, run a community. That wasn’t who she was. She was a middling business executive, raised in wealth and privilege, and through other people’s bravery and sacrifice was she still alive. “I’m not the right kind of person to do that.”

“No one ever is.” Maya mused. “We all have to nut up and do the best we can. Your pal Vale over there is going to be healed, but even with Nan’s help, it’ll be a few days before he’s back to full health. Apparently there’s some venom in those bites, plus the sepsis. They say he was in charge.”

“Yeah. I don’t know why they choose to follow me now.” Maria said.

Maya created a screen in the middle of the air. Maria would have been more amazed, but she felt the woman could pull a Rolls Royce from her backside and she wouldn’t be shocked. The screen was a recording of Maria. It showed the group as they hid behind the bush, looking at the wall. Then Charles left and she ran after him, trying to catch him.

The video changed to when they both entered the emporium, the explosion of confetti, and then Maria dragging Charles down and protecting him with her body.

“Protecting people will be your job and it looks like you’re already doing that,” Maya said. “You might not think much of yourself, but everyone here has good opinions of you. They say you’ve been fighting and trying to help them since you all met up.”

“They’re being kind,” Maria said. “They don’t… they don’t know that I hid for two days while everyone in the hotel were being killed. That it took Vale an hour to just get me to leave the bathroom I’d locked myself in, all that time they were fighting off those damn birds. I couldn’t do anything in those few hours when we were trying to escape the hotel. Vale was injured protecting me.” Maria shook and wrapped her arms around herself.

“We all suck at this in the beginning,” Maya said. She lifted up her stump, “I still suck at this and I’ve been doing it for nearly seven weeks now.” She laughed. “Things will get harder and more difficult. People will die. Shit will happen. But people need to have someone who’ll try to help them, who’ll protect them if they can. I need you to be that person.”

“But I’m not.”

“Then become it.”

Maria looked down at her hands. They were shaking. “What if I fail?”

“All you can do is try.”

They sat in silence for a long while, the babble of voices continued as Solada was crying with joy as Vale was being healed, Jacob was laughing as he swung around a new axe, and Charles and Nim were both talking animatedly with Tender. Maria stared at the faces and even though she didn’t know them a few days ago, they were the only people who she could depend on.

She never had that, she realized. All her life had been people trying to curry favor with her father through her. They had been nice so that she would tell her father, but the moment she didn’t reciprocate those wishes, she had been abandoned. These people, though, they had fought along side her and they had risked their lives for her. She had done the same in return.

That meant something, right?

“The world’s never going to go back to the way it used to be,” Maya said. “It’s gon; Integration, better or worse, is here to stay. People will have to rebuild and make a new one. Start small, find others, protect them, build up, expand the Outpost Deed. Gain levels and take back the island. If it helps, look at it like a game.”

Maria rubbed her eyes and looked back at the momentarily happy faces of her… friends.

“Okay. I will do it.”

“Awesome.”

“Boss?’ the man, Tender, said.

“Yo, what’s up?”

“Nim here wishes to purchase the Sullivan Special - Big Iron Shooter.”

“Oh, a woman with fine tastes, huh?” Maya hopped up from her seat and walked over to Nim. She manifested a bulky looking rifle from the air and presented it to the girl. Maria got up and walked over, interested in what she was purchasing.

“This is my newest creation. So new it gave me a boost to [Gunsmith] and the ability [Weapon Maker]. It’s a poor man’s version of a railgun, some low grade, Tier 1 tech components that’ll accelerate a slug of iron or buckshot with pretty devastating effect. Not good for close range fighting, but good for doing damage to bigger bastards or birds.”

Maria raised her eye brow at that.

“The ammo is just iron. If you can find a piece of rebar and cut it up into one inch chunks, this baby will fire it. Any kind of magnetic metal, as long as it fits in the hopper, the patented, not really, magnetic stabilizers will either shoot it or eject it. The mana battery will last up to two weeks at moderate use, it’s a standard tool battery so it’s pretty cheap.”

“It looks ugly,” Jacob stated.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, bud,” Maya replied.

“Where were you storing it,” Charles asked.

“I have a Dimensional Inventory. Like in a game, I can store stuff in it.”

“So you’re some kind of dimensional trader?” Nim asked.

“Interdimensional.” Maya grinned. “Plus I think I prefer the term merchant. It has a better ring to it. Sounds classier.”

“What is it made of?” Charles asked, eyeing the weapon.

“System tech. Low grade, Tier 1 stuff that a friend of mine used to call garbage.”

“You’re selling garbage?”

“Definitely not. This is my ultimate creation, besides the pulse stunner. It may be sourced from old trash, but it’s still a good, decent weapon that’ll outlive us all. You get the Patented Sullivan Promise on that. I come from a pretty short line of food vendors.”

“This isn’t food…” Charles said, confused.

“Slinging mashed potatoes or slinging guns, it’s all the same, son. As long as the customer’s happy and I don’t get sued, business is business.” Maya grinned at Charles obvious confusion.

“An interdimensional trash seller?” Nim giggled.

Maya laughed. “Interdimensional garbage merchant,”