As all the things near the farm happened, our journey reached what once was Montana. Well, unless the system had pulled a very fast one and somehow moved us to Serbia or moved the city of Belgrade from Serbia to wherever we might be and gave it signs appropriate for Montana. By now, I wasn’t completely convinced that the second was impossible, but I considered the first possible option more likely. Namely, we had reached the town of Belgrade, Montana, wherever that might be.
What was it with all those replicated town names anyway? Where was the originality? How many Springfields, Bristols or Washingtons did the world truly need? If I ever managed to become Queen of the World, there would be no more than one town of each name. Any replications could be solved by Mortal Wombat or something along those lines. Maybe scrabble-offs, magic challenges or some sort of puzzle; I’d have to think about that if I were ever to be stupid enough to accept such a title.
Curiously, Belgrade was about as peaceful as a ruined town could be. There were a few Shattered, and a couple of Undead were still wandering the place, but other than that, there was nothing. No survivors, no small communities, not even large packs of dogs, rats or cats roaming the abandoned streets, just the largely broken town.
And even that wasn’t as bad as some of the other places we had seen, or not seen in a few cases, places completely overrun and buried by the forest thanks to some incredibly weird mechanism boosting the growth of vegetation to unrealistic levels, both in terms of speed and in terms of final size. Still, I wasn’t about to complain about a fairly undamaged and, at least at first glance, unlooted town; there could be some nice things hidden in one of the stores or some horrible monster. I wasn’t about to discard that second option.
So, with an abundance of caution and vigilance that any professional would have diagnosed as paranoia, we made our way into town and started to check out the stores. Sadly, it turned out that our first impression had been wrong; most of the stores had been looted, but luckily, not all of them. What the looters had targeted was fairly obvious; they had focused on supermarkets, taking all the food they could get their hands on, hardware stores for tools and equipment and when we came across an outdoor store, that one was looted too, almost to the foundation.
Still, that left us with a surprising amount of places we could go to, though it also notched my vigilance from the level of a casual paranoid to that of a true enjoyer. The kind of person who was religiously preaching about constant vigilance, installed multiple traps whenever they slept and never consumed anything not prepared by their own hand. But given that there had to be a reason why the people who had looted the stores they had didn’t come back and finish the job, despite there being some fairly interesting stuff left in town, I wasn’t about to take too many chances.
With that in mind, we retreated out of town and made camp to come back the next day, bright and early.
At night, I remained on watch for quite some time and in that time, I made sure to conjure a few scrying constructs and use them to get a look at the city at night, just in case something was creeping around within its confines. But no, nothing but the usual Undead and Shattered I had seen before, nothing to indicate any particular danger or some special foe. I could even see a few critters roaming around, confirming that there was no deadly magical effect keeping people out of the city, nor was there poison in the air, at least nothing I could find or which would inconvenience those critters.
When the next morning came, the sun hidden behind a layer of clouds, we returned to the city, still incredibly vigilant and our paranoia spiked to levels which would have seen us institutionalised before the Change but I preferred an unhealthy level of paranoia to the myriad of other dangers out there. Paranoia caused stress, sure, and stress could kill you, but lacking vigilance would kill you, and it killed you a lot faster. So, cautious, paranoid vigilance was the watchword of the day as we plundered a few of the remaining stores in the city.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Throughout the day, we initially visited a mall, only to find it ransacked before focusing on individual buildings and stores, especially those with intact walls and shutters. Not only were those more likely to be unlooted, but the goods within were unlikely to have been destroyed by exposure.
Like that, we found a furniture store, a mattress outlet, a fishing store and multiple bookstores, taking as many interesting and useful things as we could find. And what a haul we managed to find; I had to enchant a few new magic bags so that we could carry away all the neat things we came across. And yet, even with those, we couldn’t take everything we wanted, simply because some of the furniture we were interested in, beds in particular, were too large to fit our usual bags.
Not that this would be able to stop us; it merely meant we had to retreat out of the city, just in case something nasty I hadn’t been able to discover with my scrying stalked the area at night. Once outside, we made camp again to stay for a day or three, giving me ample time to come up with a better way to carry the stuff we wanted to take with us.
I considered trying to make nested magical bags, something I had seen on Mundus, but there were a few problems with those, and, more importantly, they wouldn’t be able to fix my actual problem, namely the limited size of the bag’s opening. No, I needed to take a different approach, with the initial requirement to be able to store large objects, or even objects of unlimited size, though I doubted that the second part would ever be possible, even if it would be amusing. Putting the entire planet into a bag, what could go wrong? Other than, well, everything…
Luckily, I didn’t need to store an entire planet, not even a moon, asteroid or even something as comparatively small as a building; I just wanted to store some furniture. For that, I didn’t need a bag of unlimited size, just one with a big enough opening. At that point, I started to wonder what the requirements were for counting as a ‘bag’. What could I enchant in the same way as my magical bags but without using a. well, bag or backpack as a starting item?
To figure that out, I did some experimentation, most of it done very carefully from a respectful distance after one of my early experiments ate itself and somehow poofed out of existence in a way I had yet to understand or replicate. Luckily, nothing but the bag and the stone I had put in it disappeared, though my hand shook for quite a bit of time afterwards, thanks to the realisation of how close it had come to getting swallowed up by the weird effect I had observed.
My experiments soon bore fruit in an almost embarrassingly simple way. To be considered a bag for the purpose of my ‘magical bag’ enchantment, the object merely needed to be made of cloth or leather, have an opening which could be closed, and, well, that was pretty much it. Objects crafted within the system had better durability, something I was quite eager to exploit as having the bags break was a great way to lose what they contained, but otherwise, I could exploit those requirements and craft something quite neat.
The result of that crafting was a fairly unholy combination of a bedsheet and a drawstring bag. It was enchanted to swallow up everything we could spread the sheet over, like some stage magician, just without the trickery. It allowed us to store items as large as beds without disassembling them, and once the items were stored, the bag could be rolled up for easier carrying. Sure, it was somewhat unwieldy even then, but it was only a small problem compared to their excellent performance. Maybe I should look into that nesting aspect of these bags again; it would make some things easier. Still, with a few of these bags, we could carry enough modern furniture to outfit an entire house with us without the weight or cumbersome size of the items slowing us down. It would be interesting to see the reaction of people once we set up for the first time and pulled these things out. I could hardly wait; just imagining the reactions made me chuckle repeatedly.
