“Hey… kids…” Axton said with growing trepidation. Based on his current string of bad luck, he was almost certain that these kids were either cannibals or here to rob him. Possibly both.

“Mister, what are you doing?” One of the kids asked with a naïve look on his face.

“Uuhhh… digging through scrap?” Axton replied as he looked through his inventory for anything he could possibly use as a weapon in the event that he had to answer the age-old question of: ‘How many 9-year-olds can you kill before they inevitably take you down?’

“But, mister, that scrap pile isn’t good. Go use that scrap pile over there.”

The leader of the kids (or at least the one Axton assumed to be the leader) pointed at another pile. Axton cautiously checked the map that E-Va had so graciously given him and saw that the loot table for that pile was beyond abysmal. The pile he was currently at had a 10% chance of dropping rare-rank scrap and a 25% chance of dropping uncommon-rank scrap. The one the kids were trying to get him to use had a drop rate of 0.01% for rares and a 3% drop rate for uncommons. This was not a good deal, so Axton prepared for combat.

“Nah, I’ve had good luck with this pile,” Axton said, declining the request of the kids. “Maybe you should try that pile instead? Might have some good stuff for you.”

The kids seemed to grow annoyed and a few of them picked up debris to try and add to their intimidation factor. However, Axton had found something among the mostly trash drops he had been forced to collect and withdrew what he assumed was a pimp’s attempt to turn their cane into a nail-bat. This caused the kids to flinch and also, coincidentally, caused Axton to rethink his course of action.

After all, was he really going to make his first kills be a bunch of kids? Axton let the can fall limp in his hands and he decided to try and bite the bullet.

“Hey, why do you want me to scavenge somewhere else? Is it because you know that this pile has better chances of good stuff too?”

The kids shifted nervously in their positions. Axton had hit the nail on the head, so he went in for the ‘kill’.

“How long does it take for you kids to collect what you need from this pile to get food, water, and rest? I might be willing to help.”

The leader of the kids tilted his head quizzically as if to ask why someone would help people, they didn’t know with something like that, and his question to Axton only drove this home.

“About 7 hours, if we all work together. Why do you even care? The pile doesn’t have much, and we maybe find something worth 100 credits every hour or so if we’re lucky and work together.”

Axton smiled. He now had a bargaining chip. Being an Outworlder/ Player meant that he could shuffle through this pile at a bare minimum of 10 times an hour with the odds of him finding something easily triple the worth of what the kids made in an hour popping up every fifteen minutes or so.

“I need to make 10k credits a day for food, water, and sleep to be provided to me; do you each need to make that much?” Axton asked, which cause the kids to take a few steps back. “Being an Outworlder, I can dig through these piles faster than you kids can and have a much better chance of finding something good. Now, I know you’re afraid that I’m some kind of monster, but I got trapped here due to no fault of my own. I have never in my life hurt someone, physically, mentally, or emotionally, who did not fully deserve it, and I would still feel bad afterward. So, just hear me out and I think we can come to an arrangement.” Axton continued in order to avoid looking worse than he was.

“What kind of deal, Outworlder?” the leader of the kids asked with tangible skepticism.

“Simple. Due to an odd series of events, I don’t need to eat, drink or sleep until I get off this rock. As such, I can scrounge around all day and all night if need be without paying Mayor Moron a single piece of scrap. All I need from you kids is to take the stuff I don’t need off my hands and cash it in. If by some chance you can pay off whatever debt has you locked up in here, I just need you to send a few credits my way. I’ll keep sending you scrap via a system of mail that only Outworlders usually have access to, and all you kids need to do is keep the cash flowing in to me. Capiche?”

The kids looked at each other and had a smile cross their faces.

“Mister Outworlder, we don’t have a debt. We just come here to get stuff we can sell for what we need.”

“Shit.” Thought Axton, before the boss of the kids continued.

“But, we would like to have a more steady source of income… I’ll run it by the Boss and then come back to tell you what the Boss said. But it would be easier to get the Boss to agree if you gave us something to show him.”

Axton internally clicked his tongue and dropped the most expensive piece of rare-rank loot from his inventory onto the ground. The kids, who had likely been doubting Axton’s sincerity up to this point, all had their jaws drop to the ground with shock.

“Is this enough?” Axton asked the stupefied kids.

“Y-yeah, mister. It is… We’ll be taking it right now, so no take-backs, ok?”

Axton waved the kids off and returned to scrounging the most lucrative pile as if nothing had happened. Although, in truth, he had seen the looks on the faces of the kids and knew he had struck gold. It was now just a matter of time until they came back for more, possibly with their ‘Boss’ in tow.

What Axton had no idea about was the fact that the kids could identify the scrap Axton had been collecting. Axton knew that the stuff was valuable as the inventory system gave a rough approximation of how much each thing was worth. What it could not do was identify the more rare and valuable things. Like in some very hardcore games, simply having something valuable isn’t enough to know its true worth, especially if you didn’t know what it actually was.

The credit amount that had been listed in Axton’s inventory was, and I quote, ‘between 1k and 5k credits’. What the actual sale price would have been upon finding out the true nature of the scrap was something closer to fifty to a hundred times that. Axton had, albeit unknowingly, started a series of events that could not be stopped simply by turning over a communication array that could be sold for more money than these kids could have made in a month.

Whether he knew it or not (which, of course, he did not) Axton’s gift of ‘charity’ had just earned him a very powerful ally indeed.