Apocalypse: Generic System by Macronomicon (shoe dog free ebook TXT) 📕

gentle hand on his wife’s shoulder. “If someone tries to hurt us, and we give them a slap on the wrist and send them on their way, there’s a good chance they’ll try again, forearmed with knowledge from the first fight, and the belief we’ll go easy on them if we win again. That kind of thinking could get some, or all of us, killed.”

“Can’t we just take their weapons and send them away?”

“That’s basically killing them, except we feel better about it.” Brett said with a shrug.

“I don’t think it’ll come to that,” Jeb said. “We outnumber them and they know me and Jess beat Eddie. They don’t want to die. They’re a lot more likely to ask to join us or just avoid us outright.”

Jessica didn’t seem to like the sound of that, but she didn’t say anything.

“What if Eddie comes back?” Amanda asked.

“Then he’ll die.” Jeb said with a shrug. “We can’t afford to take it easy on someone who comes back for more. Like Brett said, that will get some of us killed.”

“In any case, I’m gonna need to work on the traps for the next dungeon run, I’ll start with the bouncing betties. I’ll put a few of them up around the camp in case they decide to sneak back in the middle of the night.”

“I’ll be shoring up Myst. Need to rebuild my store for more zombos.” Ron said.

“I spent a lot too,” Amanda nodded.

“I’ll fix our gear and work on making my Core,” Brett said.

“I’ll confirm the three stooge’s location and…not kill them.” Jessica said.

Once the plan for the night was decided, they settled down for dinner in the fading light of the sun. For the nightly story, Jeb paraphrased the plot of Fight Club as best he could, with help from Brett and Ron.

Brett played Tyler Durden, because of his model body, while Ron played the narrator, and Jeb shifted between roles, trying to keep the story flowing as smoothly as possible.

By the end of the night it had devolved into pure silliness, but the girls seemed to love every second of it. The comradery and the sound of women laughing did a lot to ease Jeb’s mind. Even Jess broke a smile a couple times.

After dinner, they broke off to their respective tasks. Brett retired into the cave to snooze and try to form his core. Ron sat cross-legged in front of the fire beside Amanda, while Jess stalked off into the darkness.

Jeb, in the meantime, tried to figure out his ‘bouncing betty’ design.

The first step was to ensure he could make a safety mechanism. The if/and statement.

If I am holding this rock, and no other person is within twenty feet, the rock will pop up.

Mystic trigger

Jeb held the rock in his hand then took a few paces away from the fire. The moment he was twenty feet away from the closest person, the rock popped up out of his hand.

Success. Now the hard part.

Jeb’s spell didn’t inherently know what direction was up or down when it fired. That meant he had to make something that could orient itself. At first he’d thought of a bobber, but that was too complicated. Eventually he stumbled on the idea of a bop bag.

Like one of those clown punching bags that kids punch that always right themselves.

All he had to do was make a sphere and hollow out one side of it, the sphere would always orient itself with the heavier side down.

Of course it wouldn’t have worked for his ejector seats, because they were being carried by a person, but for making bouncing bettys? Hell yeah, it worked.

In his furnace, Jeb took a large rock and melted it, then squished it down and stamped out sixteen hundred identical thumb-sized spheres. Once that was done, he formed sixteen hundred needles connected to a press and injected a little bubble of air into the top of each of the glassy pebbles with some help from Casey’s mannequin.

Once that was done, Jeb just had to wait for the glass to slowly cool inside the furnace, to limit the amount of fracturing.

Somewhere during that time, Amanda slipped away from the rest of the group, and a few minutes later, they started hearing the sounds of passionate lovemaking coming from the cave.

It started quiet, barely noticeable at first, but eventually the grunting, slapping and moaning were pretty much the only thing the three of them could hear as they sat around the fire.

Jeb ignored it, too focused on mass producing his bouncing betties. If he let them experience temperature shock, he might even lose the whole batch.

Ron listened to the increasingly loud noises coming from the cave, staring at the entrance for a good ten minutes before he stood.

“…I gotta go take care of something,” Ron said, walking off into the darkness with his Death Knight as backup.

Casey scrunched up her nose. “Why are they doing that?” she whispered to Jeb.

“Brett almost died.” Jeb whispered back with a shrug. “Almost dying makes people horny.”

Casey blinked at him disbelievingly.

“I didn’t write the rules for human biology,” Jeb whispered.

After another couple minutes, the sounds came to a climax, and Brett walked out of the cave with a shirt wrapped around his waist. He stooped over to grab a water bottle and drank nearly the entire thing before heaving a huge sigh.

“Goddamn, that hits the spot.” He glanced at Jeb and thumbed over his shoulder. “You wanna finish her off?”

“I’ll take a rain check.” Jeb replied.

Brett frowned. “Why?”

“As long as I’m the leader of the group, I can’t afford to.”

“What does that mean?”

“Some day, something I tell you to do might get you hurt. I can’t afford Amanda to even have the shadow of a doubt that it