Chapter Forty-One - El Baile de los Pajaritos

When I had thought running four girls through one bathroom was a nightmare…those were the good times. We now were ten people, as Gamma, Alessandra, and Wynter had woken up from us not being exactly quiet. The only saving grace was that nobody was treating Paul any differently than the other girls. He tried to be a gentleman when Gamma sat down on the toilet right in front of him to pee, but she waved him off, setting an example.

I probably should talk to him at some time. While at the moment, he was riding the good feelings of being accepted into a group, his body issues would come to the surface again. And then, treating him like one of the girls would be the opposite of what he needed. I wondered for a moment why the system hadn’t given him a male battleform or something like that, but then I was distracted by having to fight for my toothbrush.

Marco showed up halfway through our cleaning chaos, i.e., about an hour after we got up, with a stack of plastic containers containing mixed Spanish goodies from the restaurant, some even aimed at breakfast. This caused some initial concerned glances, but nobody jumped into their bathrobe to hide from him. It would be quite unfair to treat him differently from Paul, wouldn’t it?

But this communal showering, and the lack of desire to get into clothing after, gave me a chance to take a closer look at Wynter. She was clearly emaciated, but I could already see her filling out again. Not quite to the level she had been when I had seen her first, and that didn’t look healthy either, but she had been eating all evening, albeit in small portions. The way her waist looked, thin as an hourglass to a point where I expected to see the impressions of her spine in the front, she probably couldn’t eat as much in one sitting as she wanted.

We finally settled to eat a while later. I took this opportunity to address Wynter. “Thanks again for saving me,” I started. “I was really lucky you were in the area.”

“Yeah, thank that sucker who decided hired escorts were just the perfect murder victims and dumped me in those woods for that,” she said with a clear grudge. “Reminds me, I need to call Silvie and have him blacklisted. Can’t really go to the police to report my murder, can’t I?”

All eyes turned to her, and the other chatter stopped. “You were murdered? By a client?” Livia asked in disbelief. “When? How?”

“Tuesday evening, um, what day is now?”

“Sunday,” Livia replied. “How are you still alive? I mean, yes, murdered, resurrectionist, I get that. But your dialysis every other day?

“I don’t need that anymore,” Wynter said with a wide smile. “I got a race change to compensate for all that missing shit.” She pointed at her waist. “Even removed all the scars and gave me hidden belly muscles, look.” She bent forwards and backwards in a way she shouldn’t have been able to without those to show off.

“That is great,” Livia said. “Some major quality of life improvements for you.”

“Yeah, almost beats being murdered and wasting away to heal my wounds for days in the woods. That spine injury was the worst; I didn’t have the upper body strength to drag me anywhere, and I didn’t know if it would heal at all…”

“That must have been scary,” I commented, remembering my own spine severance, when I had not been alone and not had any doubts about it healing. Life was unfair, even with the system.

“I’ll survive,” she said, then laughed. “Naturally. I mean, I’ll be fine; I got an anti-trauma skill I also can use on myself. I’ve been running it nearly nonstop since we got here, and it really helps.”

“Then let’s hope this skill is worth its salt and not just some temporary bandaid,” I remarked. “By the way, have you heard about the guild?” Players got that information from a notification, but I had no idea about wild talents.

“I got that notification the moment I arrived at your corpse, and I read it last night. Some kind of player organisation that hands out quests?”

“More than that. It may be player-run, but it is fully part of the system. We don’t make or hand out the quests; they come from the system. We only put them up at the guild hall and give people a place to meet up, find groups to join, hang out and get access to the guild hall upgrades we can purchase from guild taxes. We already have an alchemist who sells potions, and we’re planning on adding a training room and a brothel soon.”

“Sounds nice, but…why a brothel?”

“I second that question,” Livia said with a raised eyebrow.

“Half the guild members are either regulars at the apartment or work there, but we have issues scheduling our shifts with all the guild business and everything else that’s going on. I thought about making it all a bit more efficient,” I admitted sheepishly.

“Makes sense,” Charlie chimed in. “I already see scheduling issues for me, and I joined the playerdom, playership, whatever, just yesterday.”

“Guys, I think we broke Lessie,” Sam said and pointed at the woman who sat in her seat like she was frozen, spoon halfway to her open mouth and eyes staring into the distance.

“Na, she’s just paused,” Gamma said. “It’s easier for the system to pause a single norm than to smack you all around for talking about the system in front of them. Just don’t make it a habit.”

“But she healed you yesterday, isn’t she…?” Wynter asked.

“She’s a natural magic user from pre-system times,” I explained. “Like Livia and I, just that we got ‘in’ with the system in the first batch. Alessandra is still on the waiting list, so to say.”

“And will stay there until we finally have figured out how to properly integrate magicals into the system. It’s a nightmare…” Gamma added.

“Gamma is a system AI here on vacation and to keep an eye on us because of that issue,” I explained when I saw Wynter’s confused face. “She’s also in love with Alessandra and addicted to strip-match-three.”

“I see. So I landed right in the middle of it all?” she then said.

“Pretty much yes,” Geri said. “And to make things even more confusing, here’s the cliff notes. Jane runs the guild, She, me, Livia and Sam are guild officers and the first player group. Marco, Rune, Paul and Megan, the one with the fake legs who needs a wheelchair in normal life you’ve seen yesterday, are group two. You and Charlie are new and the first healer types we’ve seen.”

“Healers were scheduled for later this year, once people got used to how to be players without dying from stupidity,” Gamma explained. This was news to everyone but me here. “Groups can have five members, but so far, the fifth spot has been blocked off, so there’s space to slot in healers later. When one of you two wants to join a group, give it a couple of tries; the block should be lifted by whatever AI is on watch duty. If that doesn’t work, give me a call, and I’ll give them a rude awakening.”

“I don’t think I can be of much use in the field,” Wynter said sheepishly. “Most of my skills are more hospital like, long care, rehab, regrowing limbs, and the like. And even those that are not are more ER-like, for example, resurrection. I can stabilise the soul at any point during the grace period, which is about 20 minutes per player level.”

“If you want, I can see to add an emergency room or hospital to the guild hall, but I will not pressure you to a desk job,” I said.

“I think I’d like that,” Wynter said.

“About that,” Rune asked. “Do you have the coin for that? I can’t imagine our taxes having amounted to anything substantial yet.”

“We still have most of the starting capital,” I said, “boosted by the quest reward for establishing a guild.”

“But isn’t that quest reward yours?” Marco asked.

I shrugged. “The guild is our baby, so…”

“Make it now,” Geri said. “I’m sure something will happen the moment we leave this flat, and you’ll be distracted for a week.”

As cheeky as that was, she wasn’t wrong, so I pulled out the pad. “Ok, should be quick.”

I went into the extension shop and looked at our options. Then, I filtered it to only show stuff we could afford. An air-defence mage tower for 20 million coins was nice if you needed one, but now it was just clutter.

There were still plenty of options for training rooms left, but after looking at the first couple, I found a common caveat—they required staffing. A dojo needed a martial arts master, a boxing ring, a boxing trainer, and so on. One round of filtering later, and I was left with two options.

“We can have an arena-style training ring where people can spar without having to worry about injuries, as the system prevents those, or an exercise room where you can use your skills against indestructible dummies. Any suggestions on which one?” I announced.

“What’s the cost of those? Can we afford both?” Livia asked.

“Cost-wise, yes, but we don’t have the spare space for both. I already checked,” I said. “They both don’t take up the whole of the storage floor, so we have space left with one, just not enough. And another big space is out of our guild level.”

“Then go with the arena,” Livia suggested. “We don’t need to hone our skills as much as we need to learn to fight with them.”

The others concurred, so I bookmarked the arena. The hospital option was easier as I could filter by the person staffing them. I had to onboard Wynter first, but that took only seconds, so I did Charlie at the same time, too. After that, I was left with a straight progression of emergency care and patient rooms. “Second question, should I also buy a patient room or leave that until we do have inpatients? It’s not expensive, but it would use up our last workshop room.”

“I’d say leave it,” Marco said. “Unless patients cannot be cared for on a couch?”

“It says it provides a bonus to recovery time, so I take that as they can. Bookmarked for later.” I got back to the list and filtered for “ sex ”, listing me, Livia, Geri and Charlie as workers. Brothels weren’t in the drop-down list, but it was a text field, so I was guessing here. And with the guild software run by AIs in the background, it was quite smart, as I had noticed before.

To my surprise, the list of results was way bigger than I had expected. It included taverns and bars with backrooms as well as inns and guest rooms, but there also were simpler options. I liked the tavern, but it came with a whole lot of additional requirements like serving staff, a chef, a kitchen and so on. It also needed a big or large room, so it was out. Then, at the very end, I found the ideal compromise—generic bedrooms that could be rented out.

Here, I again had multiple options, and they all came with customisation options of their own. The simplest one was just a room designation where I would have to buy furniture, as I had done with the staff room. The other end of the spectrum was a guest wing. At first, I wanted to ignore this, but then I noticed its space requirement—it had none. Tapping it for more details, I saw why. The necessary space was included. It was a wing, after all, not a room usage. The only thing was that it was a bit pricey as the minimum size wasn’t that small.

“Are you trying to stare holes into that?” Geri asked. The conversations had started again, as people had become tired of waiting for me, but she was looking at me like a hungry tiger.

“I’m thinking about blowing half our capital on the brothel,” I said. “It feels lavish, but it would set up much more than just that.” I handed her over the pad with the customisation screen for the guest wing open.

Geri started tapping around in the submenu, and I continued eating. Marco had provided food for an army, which meant I needed to hurry to not go hungry. After a while, Geri handed the tab over to Livia, who went over it and made some more tweaks. She then handed it to Sam. From there, it made a complete circle around the table, skipping only Alessandra before Geri placed it back in front of me.

I put my spoon down and took a look. The price had gone up to three-quarters of what we had left after buying the other two rooms, but the blueprint had transformed massively. Somehow the girls had managed to triple the floor area, and add furnishings without blowing the price into high heavens. I now was looking at a two-storey area, with a reception desk in the hallway of the lower floor, a bathroom, a urinal room with two urinals, one of them tagged “universal”, whatever that meant, a communal shower, and two simple bedrooms with twin beds.

The real shocker was the upper storey, where the stairs ended at a door leading into the centre of a U-shaped suite. Both ends contained bedrooms, each with a truly oversized bed. The back wall of the centre area held a row of identical wardrobes with a full-size wall mirror in the middle, opposite the door. On one side of the central area was a dining table with twelve chairs; the other side had a couch landscape of movable couch elements that also had space for twelve. A tiny kitchenette awkwardly sitting in the corner between one of the bedrooms and the dinner table completed it.

“What’s this?” I asked, puzzled.

“The new living space for the guild officers and their guests, paying or otherwise,” Livia explained.

“It is a bit basic,” Geri added, “but we can expand it as needed. That’s the real trick with the wing. It’s not static.”

“But a whole suite just for us…”

“Why not?” Marco asked. “You’ve earned that quest reward, and it isn’t as if having you live at the guild would not be good for it.”

The others concurred.

“Also,” Sam added. “We can recoup some money by getting rid of that terrible old bathroom. Maybe we also could move the staff room to the lower area?”

“Later,” I said and confirmed the design. Buying it all was just the usual 3-step procedure of proposing it, confirming the purchase and confirming the expenditure. Then I had to place the new rooms. For the arena and the treatment room, that was easy. The arena had no options anyway and I put the treatment room into the second craftroom. I would have preferred the second downstairs office, but that was “tiny”, not “small”.

“Where should I connect the new wing?” I asked. It came with a door, so it was quite flexible to be placed.

“How about between the counter and the quest board?” Geri suggested.

“Next to your office?” Paul said.

“Below the door to the office wing,” Livia said.

“I like the latter, but the second story would collide,” I mused but moved the icon anyway. The blueprint shifted, adding a turn to the stairs and moving the bathrooms and showers over, then snapped between the office wing and the training room, with the downstairs rooms lining up next to the old bathroom and kitchen. The geometry still didn’t make sense, but the system was happy with it. It even proposed a second door from the suite to the office corridor. “Never mind, it fits,” I said and confirmed the changes.