Guess What The System Took Away – Chapter 150

Akhier

Ace sighs, “Check early and check often, got it.”

Lily giggles, “You could say that. Though after a certain point, things should stabilize to the point you only need to check after new boss floors pop up. After all, it isn’t like you are controlling the dungeon’s internal space with this. You’re just poking at whatever the dungeon can outside of itself.”

Ace frowns, “And am I the only one that can see this?”

Lily nods, “At the moment. You could give others permission but you don’t have to. Not that whatever dungeon you have is going to need much. The controls tend to be worth more when dealing with things like volcano dungeons and what not. Being able to control when it erupts and in what direction any active lava flows are moving is quite powerful. Not only to prevent unexpected destruction of any nearby settlements, but also so the entrance is always open during business hours as it were.

Ace sighs again, “Well I guess we are some kind of lucky since we don’t have to deal with that. Now before I start poking around my new system stuff, is there anything interesting in here?”

Lily lifts the counter next to her revealing a hidden door. “Follow me and I’ll show you around.”

Once Jason is behind the counter, he can see there is a staircase up against the wall. It wasn’t hidden, but unless you were right up at one of the counters near it, the structure is less than obvious.

Lily hops down from a small stool revealing she is actually only about one and a fifth meters tall. Not that Ace had thought she was particularly tall to begin with but that one piece of furniture really helped make up the difference when much of her body was hidden behind the counter to begin with.

Lily just laughs at Ace’s shocked expression. “If you want a tall bunny girl, you’re going to have to find a harekin. While most humanoid races tend towards two meters, the system only does so much. Now let me show you the basement levels.”

She guides him down the stairs, which lets off onto a hallway that is shockingly similar to a hallway you would see in an office building. Seeing Ace’s reaction Lily sighs, “Yeah, not much to look at. There are only so many ways to make offices and still have them be efficient. Now I know you’ve probably already have an office space set up somewhere else, but this first room straight across from us is now yours as well.”

Lily opens the office’s door to reveal a desk surrounded by empty bookshelves and filing cabinets. “If anything you should probably move your boring but important paperwork into here. It is mostly theft proof but honestly the biggest benefit is the system keeps things under control down here. Temperature, moisture, and even light is controlled to maintain any documents that get stored. Though if you have something really quirky, like an agreement carved into a block of ice, there is a storage room right next to this one with a bunch of special storage options.”

“Oh, and even if everything else has caught fire, as long as the town exists and people live here the documents will be kept safe. From what I’ve heard, it used to be that the system provided buildings would not burn at all but too many places would spread them out and use them as fire shelters instead of fixing the fact their towns would burn down. So now while still much harder to catch on fire, you aren’t going to find a place burned to the ground with a handful of pristine buildings still standing. Now let’s continue.”

And Lily guides Ace down the hall to where another staircase is. Once down, a new scene is revealed, though there isn’t much to see. Unlike the previous floor, this one has the hallway go down the side of the building instead of the center. Not the oddest thing, as sometimes you might need more space. The difference is that the wall is made of metal and the doors look like something, but Ace can’t quite place it.

Lily smacks the first door, “These coolers and freezers can fit so much food. Now, of course you have a gruel shop up top but for some reason people don’t like eating gruel all day, every day. With this, you can set a larder quest for people to hunt some meat and what not. Of course you have to provide any cash rewards but stuff kept here will last much longer than normal even with the temps.”

“Of course you can keep anything in here that needs to be kept cold or frozen. This is especially help with any emergency potions that aren’ shelf stable. While they won’t last forever, keeping a supply in here will make it so you don’t constantly have to cycle the stock. Even better is the fact that receptionists are capable of storing and retrieving any of the items in here from their counters up top. A handy feature that lets them keep the lines moving on a busy day.”

Lily smirks, “Plus, who would suspect you used the system anchor for the town as a light source in your larder?”

Ace shrugs, “Well, we didn’t exactly plan for it to be a freezer. But I expect most would think it was at least on the bottom floor.”

Lily really smiles at that, “Yes, the bottom floor. Let me show you what the system decided to do with that!”

She guides him over to another staircase, except this time there is a gate blocking the way. Lily’s hand glows without color for a moment and pokes a ten digit number into a pin pad. After that, it takes a moment but the gate eventually swings open. Lily looks back, “only step on every other step. It doesn’t matter which you start with, just that you are skipping a step. Oh, and remember which one’s you skipped.”

And she bounces down the stairs. At the bottom is an area marked out by a while line. Lily gestures to it, “Don’t cross that or we might have to decide on a new town leader.”

Ace nods as he takes in the rest of the room. Spread across it are a number of chests, no two quite like another and at the very back is one so big it looks to come up to his shoulders. Besides the chests, though, there are a large number of very sharp and shiny things spread out to make life difficult for anyone trying to move about.

When Ace turns back to Lily, she pulls a piece of meat out of thin air and tosses it into the room. Before it can even land, three separate things have whirled into action to slice and dice the meat. Then once the pieces finally land, they start to smoke and melt away, leaving a pristine floor behind.

Lily rolls her eyes, “A little theatrical but it works. There is only a single safe path to any of those chests and by that I mean each single chest has its own safe path. If you needed to put things in more than one, you would have to go to each one separately and return to this area before heading to the next. And unlike with the larder upstairs, stuff needs to be physically placed in a chest. So receptionists can’t just place and retrieve things from their counter.”

“While a silly place, it does its job well enough. If your town ever finds itself in possession of something nasty that you can’t or don’t want to hand off to someone else, this is the place to keep it. Whether that means cursed items, ancient relics, or whatever other nonsense people inevitably find when out adventuring, this is the place to keep them. If it wasn’t for the limited available space, this would be a lovely place to let the rich store things for all the money.”

Ace scratches the back of his neck, “A little on the nose for a high security storage room. Just standing here gives me the heebie jeebies. I think I can go without seeing this place again.”

Lily nods, “There is a reason I’m going to hand off storing items here to other receptionists whenever possible. Anyway, to go back up the stairs you have to skip steps again, except now using the steps you skipped coming down. Oh, and don’t think these stairs are that easy. The pattern you have to use changes after every use. The only way anyone can keep track of what you need to do down here so you don’t die is through direct system interference.”

Once up the stairs, the gate closes behind them and the two relax before returning to the ground floor. Back behind her counter Lily smiles, “That should be about everything the town hall has at the moment. Of course, like any of the system buildings, you can later improve them but as it is, you should focus on the new options you have. To check on your admin panel for the town, just do the same thing you would for your status but instead say town.”

Ace frowns, “What if someone is in control of multiple towns?”

Lily shrugs, “Once you control multiple towns you get forced into nobility territory. The steps have many different names depending on the local culture and whoever started the place but there it is. Anyway, you can’t directly control multiple towns. You have your town and then you have vassal towns who will have their own town leader. The options you get for that will be more generic and you would be better off just making rules like a normal government.”

“Beyond just own towns, though, you can own groups of towns and then someone else can own groups of those groups. At each new level, while a person keeps personal control of their main town, they can only control the next level down. That means a king can only have any significant system control over duchies. And of course, this keeps scaling up to worlds, solar systems, and so on. Though this tends to be limited after someone starts owning solar systems as it is practically impossible to control all of a galaxy, let alone two that would be needed to advance to the next step.”

Ace shakes his head and laughs, “We couldn’t even manage getting the world under a single government before the system came. I highly doubt we are going to get even a full continent under one government’s control anytime soon.”

Lily shrugs, “You would be surprised. In your history, there are already examples of various governments that have ended up controlling large swathes of land, even to the point that some have claimed to control the world. Just because the recent governments have been pussyfooting around because of nukes doesn’t mean that will continue to be the case.”

“Firstly, because the naughty system has gone and removed all the nukes and refined radioactive material when it took over. But mostly because they aren’t the high end any more and much easier to defend against. By the time someone gets around to making more people will have things like city shields and what not to protect against that kind of thing. Even the devastation left behind will be more easily cleaned up with the various nature based magics to help things recover.”

Ace thinks on this for a moment and frowns, “Once the bigger governments get back on their feet, things will be so much worse. I swear the only reason there hadn’t been another knock down drag out war is because of nukes. Now with that threat out of the way, big countries are going to start putting boots on the ground to take over other places again.”

Lily nods, “Quite possible. Though places like yours are going to be stumbling blocks as even on old worlds, dungeon towns tend to rule themselves. Nevermind the fact that all the oceans are going to be a problem once again. You had relatively peaceful whales before the system came around and so nothing except the weather could threaten your ships. That won’t be the case anymore. Oceans as big and deep as your planet has, always tend to develop kaigu as it were. Some worlds even have it so bad the only way to do trade between continents is through orbit.”

Akhier

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