How to Beat Fried Worms
Disclaimer: Worm is owned by Wildbow, and we're all thankful for that.
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Chapter 4: Character Creation
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Get up, charge the van, go to work, eat lunch in the van and drop a few charges into it, go back to work, then go home.
And charge the van.
It was a simple enough schedule.
Admittedly, work was... less than pleasant. He'd made a few calls about that but he didn't know if anything would come of them. For once, Alec's unfortunate trait of being mistaken for a woman over the phone might actually work in his favor!
Alec had worked through Saturday, January first of two-thousand and eleven through to Wednesday, January fifth of two-thousand and eleven. Thursday and Friday seemed to be his 'weekends'.
The man was reasonably sure that Taylor would have gone through her trigger somewhere in between all of that. However, if that had already happened? He hadn't heard about it and the girl hadn't been brought to Brockton Memorial.
Which... he vaguely felt bad about.
Taylor Hebert was an idiot with a martyr complex and a strong sense of how the world should work, regardless of how it actually did. An image that she was willing to beat the world into, using monstrous, mutated limbs and countless, skittering claws and chattering mandibles. She was a monster that represented Earth Bet and everything that was wrong with it. She was a Hail Mary, a last ditch effort, a final, expensive success built upon a mountain of failures.
Alec wasn't sure he could actually do better than her, honestly. He thought he could, maybe, but it'd been a week and things weren't really coming together for him.
Sure, nothing had really gone wrong during his week. He'd experimented a bit with his new system. His inventory wasn't an unlimited list, like his last one had been. Now he was saddled with a grid system, five blocks down by ten blocks across. Some things stacked, mostly food and small items like mouse traps and the like. Other things didn't, such as clothes or tools. Some things only took up a single block, such as food or bottles of water. Other things took up more, like a backpack that ate a two by two block all by itself.
Empowered Investment had leveled up reasonably quickly until it hit level five, then it slowed down pretty hard. That didn't stop him from using it, not at all, it was just tedious. Alec needed more SP, more regeneration or, ideally, both.
His twenty year old bread van ran like it was brand new, now, and the various tools inside of his multitool seemed to be just a bit better than they should be. The pliers never slipped, the screwdriver never stripped the head of a screw and the knife cut through most things like they were butter. Thankfully, the power could be somewhat directed, so he'd been telling it to leave the Chevy's paint job alone.
Leveling up? Alec had managed, by spreading out quite a few mouse traps throughout the hospital, underneath of the dumpsters and around his own apartment complex, to pull up a grand total of three-hundred experience and change. Mice only gave 1 experience but rats actually gave 5.
That endeavor had started slowly until the Gamer had unlocked a Trapping skill-
Trapping: Traps inflict 5% more damage per level. Traps are 5% harder to notice per level for unalert targets. Traps are 2% harder to notice for alert targets per level. Bait is 10% more effective per level.
Synergy! Homemade bait is an additional 5% more effective per level of cooking!
-and then he'd been stuck having to empty out and rebait his traps a few times a day!
The bait Alec had settled on? He'd debated using poison, thinking on the merits of letting the vermin die, be consumed by their brethren and then the poison killing them as well... but that had the potential to cascade well outside of his control. And probably end up killing some of the local cats or dogs.
So he'd ended up buying a small convection oven at a thrift store and making banana bread, substituting vegetable oil with applesauce. Mice and brown rats, which were plentiful, favored grains. Black rats, which were far too common for Alec's comfort, actually preferred fruits.
And, like the vermin, Alec had been enjoying the banana bread himself. It was great for lunch with a little bit of butter!
What was the man going to do with the multiple stacks of dead rodents in his inventory?
He... didn't know. He hadn't exactly been intending on collecting all of the corpses. It was just a side benefit that he'd discovered from his inventory; the ability to combine and separate some objects. Like removing a mouse from the trap without having to actually touch the dead animal. Once separated, everything just stacked up neatly. Fifty mice to a single block, twenty rats to a one by two block.
But that was what he had done. The road that led to his current situation. He'd worked, he'd toiled and he'd improved, if only marginally, and he wanted to do something... personal, really.
"We're off on the road to Rhode Island!" the man happily sang from behind the wheel of his van as the vehicle merrily chugged away, eating the countless miles on the long road trip. "We're having the time of our lives!"
From Brockton Bay to Boston, it was about a thirty minute drive. Given that his van's fuel efficiency had been going up and up with every charge he invested into it, Alec had been considering looking to Boston for work.
From Brockton Bay to Rhode Island? It was a two hour drive.
Why was Alec driving to Rhode Island?
Guns.
To be more specific, gun prices. The markups in Brockton Bay and Boston were absurd and Alec could only assume it was because of demand. Driving four combined hours would still end up saving the Gamer something along the lines of five-hundred dollars, if he got everything he wanted.
Considering he was currently sitting on two-thousand, two-hundred some odd dollars in legal currency, that five-hundred was going to matter.
"In five hundred meters, take the exit on the right," Alec's flip phone demanded. The man flipped up his turn signal and checked his right on the big side-view mirror before smoothly merging over.
The whole trip had been... rather pleasant, when everything was said and done. Alec pulled into the parking lot of a gun range slash store on the outskirts of Providence. He backed into a space, slipped out of his van and walked on into the building.
The sales floor was large, open and had glass counters filled with handguns along the front and back walls, next to the doors. Along the walls themselves, well behind the counters, rifles hung on racks for display.
"Well hi there!" a sales associate called out, friendly and pleasant and a massive contrast to the people of Brockton Bay. "What can we help you out with today?"
"Looking to get a few guns," Alec explained as he walked up to the counter. The spot in front of the sales associate held Glocks but the next panel over had the ones that Alec was more interested in, the collection from Springfield Armory. Even further down was Ruger. "Something for home defense and something I could take to the range."
"Well, we'd be happy to help you find what you're looking for. Is there a chamber you're aiming for, or...?"
"9mm for both," Alec told the man. The sales representative was taller than Alec, probably by a good six or seven centimeters, and balding. "I'd like to be able to afford my hobby."
"Yeah... a 5.56 or a .223 are both pretty fun to shoot but the bullets can add up pretty quick," the sales rep, named 'Tony', agreed with a wince. "Tell you what, go ahead and sign our waiver and you can take an hour or two and try some of our rentals. You'll need to purchase the ammunition here but I'm sure we can find something that'll fit your needs."
Alec... may have spent an extra hour, shooting a few different guns even after he'd selected the ones he would be getting. It was just fun for him, really, and oddly relaxing. Something he just hadn't been able to do throughout the last week.
Walking back to his van, twelve-hundred dollars poorer, Alec felt a lot better about things. Once he was back inside of his little, mobile base he got to work unboxing everything. The pistol he'd bought was from the same manufacturer as the carbine he'd bought, an intentional choice on his end so the magazines would be interchangeable.
The small rifle took up a four by two block in his inventory. The pistol, after being given a charge from Empowerment, took up a two by two. The three boxes of target ammunition took up only a single block and the magazines, one that came with the rifle while two came with the handgun, took up a one by two and stacked.
Curious, Alec slid a finger over the stack of ammo boxes and slid one over the magazines. The image blinked for a moment and a new block was taken up by... two bullets. And all three magazines now said 'Loaded' if he focused on them.
Well... that was handy.
Alec slid a finger over the image of the magazines and dropped one on the pistol, where it disappeared.
The pistol now read as being 'Loaded' as well.
That... was very handy. Very handy indeed.
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Worm Version 0.0.4: Character Sheet
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| Stats | Details |
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Level: 1
HP: 100
SP: 200
-STR: 1/20
-VIT: 1/20
-DEX: 1/20
-AGI: 1/20
-INT: 2/20
-WIL: 1/20 |
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Empowered Investor 5/20: You can invest your energy into an object, repairing it by 5%, empowering it by 5% of its original value and investing 5 points into it. Once that investment value reaches 600, the empowered object will develop a special trait. Another trait will be revealed at 1000 investment, then they will be improved or added to for every 1000 points after that. Cost: 100 SP
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ERROR! Previous skill levels not allocated!
Axe 1/20
Hand to Hand 1/20
Short Blade 1/20
Long Blade 1/20
Pistols 3/20
Rifles 3/20
Cleaning 4/20
Repairs 3/20
Cooking 2/20
First Aid 1/20
Sneaking 1/20
Running 1/20
Driving 4/20
Mechanics 1/20
Metalwork 1/20
Carpentry 1/20
Trapping 4/20
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None!
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Weapons
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9mm Pistol (+5%, 5)
9mm Carbine
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Equipment
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None!
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Miscellaneous
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1990 Chevrolet Step Van (Exceptional) (49)
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