Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other 4 (Patreon)

Syringe in One Hand, Gun in the Other

Chapter 4

-VB-

I scratched the back of my head and realized both of my bodies did that. Looking around, I didn’t see Contessa trying to drag me along to her tunes. Did that mean I was no longer part of the Path of Victory?

Do I just … leave?

And then I remembered that there had to be people still evacuating from Earth Bet. I could help them.

“Umm, Door to Earth Bet?” I tried.

No response.

Well, there went the easy option.

I looked around. A few Doormaker portals were still open because not everyone had finished their evacuations.

So I reached into my inventory for a Wooden Hammer, used its pick-up function to pick up all of the workbenches, and then picked up all of the scraps and components nearby until both of my bodies’ inventories reached capacity, and jumped through one of the nearest portals.

We came out of the other side of the portal to a bunch of people, and quickly realized that not everyone here were Tinkers who left the Tinker Street (what I was calling where I just left).

There were rows upon rows of tents, RV campers, and even some freight containers turned to houses, but it was clear for me to see that this entire place was a refugee camp that hadn’t been properly planned.

“Can anyone tell me where we are?!” I shouted, hoping someone would answer despite the frantic nature of the Tinkers fleeing and people becoming wary.

“Earth Nun!” someone in the crowd shouted back. “This is supposed to be where Americans are supposed to be, yeah? Who the fuck are you?”

“Just a cape,” I grunted back.

I observed the mood in this tent city for a bit before I realized that people were starting to get riled up. Some people already heard the fleeing Tinkers talking about how the Oil Rig Battle was lost, and that’s why they were here. Some people saw more people coming when the situation here was downright horrible. And a few… they saw a chance to take over. I could see one cape, not a Tinker, looking around with those eyes. The eyes of an investor. Of a would-be conqueror. I knew those eyes. I’ve seen them in the past thirty years in one cape or another.

Staying here was not going to work in my favor right now.

I looked and saw a lot of wilderness beyond the immediate area of the tent city. The tent city itself was in a wide valley between two low rows of hills. Thick, green forest decorated those hills. There was also a river on the far side of the valley.

… Wasn’t this a prime real estate?

First off, I needed to get out of this place.

-VB-

And get away from the locals(?), I did by crossing the river and walking up the hills. At that point, I got into the rhythm of the Rust player. I brought out metal hatchets and just chopped into the trees.

A building plan came out in one body’s hand and a hammer in the other body. I had enough metal fragments for a full metal base, too.

Nearly fifty square yards worth of twig foundations got laid in under thirty seconds, and those foundations became sturdy foundations of concrete and metal sheets in even less time. Walls and doorways went up. Metal doors got slammed down. A tool cupboard thunked into the center of the base. Boxes ka-thunked each time I shoved them. Workbenches clunked, cracked, and croonked when I placed them. The second floor got built at an equally fast pace. Industrial light fixtures got hooked up, a drum barrel battery fizzled as I placed it down, hooked it up to solar panels I also placed on the roof, and hooked up all of the light fixtures to it. Then I placed beds in three rooms along with lockers behind garage doors. Finally, I placed primitive furnaces along the inner hallways of the base.

(The entire process sounded something like a Middle Eastern repair shop ASMR…)

With the base finished, I looked at it from two different angles. It was a sore thumb in the middle of this green forest, but it was low enough that no one would be able to spot it easily from afar. On top of that, the forest itself provided cover for the base. Of course, this also meant if anyone was lurking out there, then I would have a hard time seeing them.

But that wasn’t the awesome part. The awesome part was that in under ten minutes, I constructed a base that would have taken your average housing developers months of work as they waited for materials, workers, concrete setting, architectural checks, and more.

With my beds secured and the knowledge that I couldn’t be killed and thus will respawn here in my base when any of my bodies died, I felt better about this.

It was about at this point that my power flared up and I saw a chance to make another clone. So I did. Another body “stepped out” from the original body with the same gear and … inventory. ‘Did I just find out a way to dupe material?’ I thought. A quick check later, I realized that the clone only had the “hot bar” inventory and gear he was wearing.

I still got a decent gear set (a US army gear, M4A1, a few magazines, and medical syringes) from the cloning process, so it wasn’t anything to scoff at.

‘Note to self, test this out with tinkertech when I can,’ I thought.

With my base established, I thought about what I was going to do again, and realized that I didn’t have a food source.

Well, for a Rust player, that was easy to solve. There was a river nearby, and I had enough materials to build a farm base.

A farm base in Rust could be one of two things: a minor base for resource exploitation drop-off or a base built specifically for agriculture. A Rust player could farm potatoes, corn, hemp, and four different kinds of berries. Potatoes and corn were food, obviously, but hemp, once harvested, provided cloth, which was a crucial resource for armor, clothing, medical syringes, and a lot more items. Berries, on the other hand, acted as ingredients for teas that provided buffs. These teas could provide a resource-harvesting buff or a health buff, depending on what ratio of berries was used.

I also wanted to test what other plants I could grow in Rust planter boxes. Would they just behave normally? Did the growing time remain the same for me as in the game?

So, yes, I should set up a farm base for not just food but also cloth and berries. If agriculture doesn’t work out, then at the very least, I might be able to turn the farm base into a water filtration station.

Two of the clone bodies gathered the necessary resources while the original body walked into the forest to gather any sort of seed and vegetables we might be able to find.

… And that’s when Contessa showed up again.

Motherfucker, will you leave me alone?!