Book Five, Chapter 1: Grocery Shopping

I walked through the aisles of the general store with a purpose.

I was making a mental shopping list. The shelves were stacked with a meager supply of canned goods as well as all the staples that you might expect, such as flour and salt. Did we need kidney beans? Did we need beets? Did anyone need beets?

The refrigerated section was even less impressive, but it had eggs and milk and bacon. What more could we ask for?

As I rounded the corner of the aisle, I came across Dina. She was doing much the same as I was. We made eye contact and didn’t say a whole lot.

“They have a lot of really old candy,” was the only comment she had.

I nodded.

We heard a noise from somewhere beyond the refrigerated doors at the back of the store. It sounded like a scream. We couldn’t see what was happening because the glass of the refrigerated unit was fogged over, but there was a single handprint visible and conspicuous.

As long as we didn’t open that door, we were safe.

As long as we didn’t eat from the cracked glass container of pigs’ feet (and the creature that infected them) on aisle 3, we were safe.

As long as we didn’t steal from the store, we were safe.

As long as we didn’t… and the list went on.

“You need help finding anything, you just let me know,” Corduroy Patcher called from the front of the store.

He was an older, rotund man with blue eyes and pupils like little dots. He watched us every step we took. His words were friendly, but his tone was not. He was the proprietor and sole employee from what I could tell.

“We don’t have much as you might be used to back in the big city, but we got plenty. We got all a family needs,” he added.

He was right. He had everything we needed at that moment. He had very little of what we wanted, but we weren’t in a position to complain.

You would think that in a haunted world based on horror movies, death by hooks or teeth would be the biggest worry, but it turned out that death by slow starvation was a bigger threat once you started to get the hang of things.

Sure, if you went into a storyline, you could eat your fill, but as soon as you got to the end of the story, your body would reset to being hungry again. It was a small price to pay for healing all your injuries, but it presented a problem.

The only way to create a sustainable base of operations was to find a source of food that could keep players sated and satisfied when they weren’t out on storylines.

The Vets, when we got here, had it all figured out. They could go clear a storyline at Eternal Savers Club and then load up shopping carts to take back to Dyer’s Lodge. Even when we were trying to outlast an apocalypse, we never went hungry from their stores of food at the lodge.

But we were not high-level enough to clear the storyline at Eternal Savers Club, so we had to find somewhere else to shop.

Our money was running low. We needed a storyline that ended with a scene that we could pillage and loot for food. Before I actually had the responsibility of making it happen, I thought it would be easy.

Practically every storyline had food accessible, and some of them had really good food, but that wasn’t enough.

You needed that food to be accessible to be looted after the final battle where most stories no longer had food available. Normally, all that was left at the end of the movie was destruction.

We were in luck, though. The Carousel Atlas contained all the solutions that players from years past had come up with for this very problem. Eastern Carousel General Store was a great place to loot. Sure, the pickings weren’t great.

Of course, the food was old. Not old as in expired, but as in the type of food they ate in the ’70s.

All we had to do was clear one of the three storylines in the surrounding area, and then we could raid this general store to stock our pantry for weeks. We just had to make sure ol’ Corduroy Patcher bit the dust by the end of the story.

The question was, what were we going to take when we got here at The End? That was today’s mission: to get a list of what was offered to make sure that this storyline would be worth the risk.

As I looked at Dina, we both nodded in agreement that this place would do very well. We couldn’t keep spending our money at the restaurant downstairs from Kimberley’s Loft.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

As we walked around, Dina kept picking things up off the shelves to rile up the storekeep up front. Maybe she was messing with me; I couldn’t tell. Of course, she put everything right back. I cracked a smile, hoping that would satisfy her and she would stop with her little game.

It was my fault, really. I had told her specifically not to shoplift because that would trigger one of the many Omens in the store. She might have taken it personally, but really, I was talking about her stealing trope, which only worked in the storylines.

I wasn’t going to cause a fuss about it.

Corduroy Patcher was, though.

“I can see what you’re doing back there,” the man said. “I ain’t nobody’s fool.”

He stared us down like we were trying to rob him blind. To be fair, we were going to rob him blind, just not yet.

I went to the back cooler and avoided the glass window to the refrigeration unit with the handprint. I grabbed an ice-cold glass of some off-brand cola and walked to the front of the store. There was one good thing to say about Eastern Carousel. The prices were cheap.

The shopkeeper eyed me up and down and sneered at my hair, which desperately needed a cut. Fortunately, most of the length had disappeared whenever we finished The Die Cast storyline and my body was reset.

“You folks are from the city, I can tell,” he said.

I nodded. “Downtown,” I said, confirming his suspicion.

He was just an NPC as basic as any other.

“People often forget how different Eastern Carousel is from the big city,” he said. “It’s a million miles away. My family’s been here since the first war, and we’re going to be here till the last war. Nothing ever changes over here, and we don’t need any of your nonsense.”