Chapter 75: The Earthlings

Rules Governing Inter-Competitor Combat

1. Within the village proper, no combat is allowed.
2. Attempts to strike, shoot, impale, burn, or otherwise wound a competitor will inevitably fail at the attempt stage.
3. As various attempts to harm other competitors will fail at the attempt stage, no punishment will be issued for attempts or threats to harm another competitor.

Imagine a scenario in which one competitor is particularly disliked, and is faced with one competitor who is attempting to strike them with a sword, another aiming an arrow, a third trying to push them off a cliff, and a final competitor who is using these distractions to arm an anti-tank mine outside the hated competitor’s home.

In the first and second cases, the attempt to stab and shoot each represent a single attempt to break a rule, and the offending competitors will find the physical motions necessary to complete those actions closed off to them. While the third competitor’s shove is intended to be non-damaging in and of itself, the fact that they sought harm to another competitor means that they will be similarly restricted.

The fourth competitor is the most restricted. Since their mine creates a general hazard that any competitor might trigger, they would not be allowed to arm the mine even if they didn’t have a particular target in mind or were somehow arming the mine without intending any harm at all.

As this manual repeatedly states, it is the Apocalypse System’s intent and desire that each competitor experiences weeks of competition at this stage and can enjoy their rest times safely and with feelings of confidence and security.

Please reference pages 1-10 of Appendix A: “Definitions” for additional information and more granular definitions of terms used within this section.

Villager’s Manual, General Rules and Regulations, Page 2

—

They probably would indeed come back to the noodle stand quite a bit. Giving Brett an allowance for food only seemed fair, and Sean was pretty sure he’d pay at least one visit to the hamburger stand. But a glance around showed mostly weird alien food carts of various kinds, stuff that wasn’t interested in.

What the glance showed outside of possible meals for the next few weeks was that they were still being watched.

Sean had noticed a man watching them when they first sat down, and while he had left a few times, he had always come back to continue his surveillance. Sean had let him, for several reasons. The first was that he had clocked him early, and whatever skills the guy had didn’t seem to include being able to effectively hide. If he was going to have a test of the rules this early, he’d rather see it coming than not.

The second was that, to the extent Sean could be sure, the guy seemed at least as afraid of Sean as Sean was of the guy. He wasn’t touching his armaments, which seemed to consist of a very small buckler and a relatively simple looking short sword. When Sean looked around the main plaza of the town, he could see the guy almost ducking in response to it.

The third thing, such as it was, was that the guy wore an Alf t-shirt under his armor. He could see the top of the pig-like alien’s brown head peeking out, and he refused to believe that anyone who would choose to wear that could be all bad.

“Hey, Brett. There’s a guy watching us. He looks human.”

“And? You think he’s hunting us?”

“I don’t think so.” Sean fiddled with his chopsticks and tried to keep looking nonchalant. “Something else, maybe. I’m going to go see if I can catch him. I doubt anything bad even can happen, but get ready to run if it does.”

Sean thanked the noodle guy, then stood up and walked down a side street end-capped by a building with a sufficiently sharp corner, ducking out of view behind it. Just as expected, Alf Shirt came moving around the corner at a pretty fast clip just a few seconds later, and looked startled as he almost ran straight into Sean, who was waiting with his hand on the hilt of his dagger.

“Um. Huh,” The man said, startled. “So I guess you knew I was watching you after all.”

“Yeah, you aren’t great at it, honestly. Nice Alf shirt, by the way. At least what I can see of it.”

At the mention of Alf, about half the guy’s visible tension evaporated away.

“Oh, thank god,” He said. “You actually are from Earth. I was afraid you were just something that looked similar.”

Sean nodded, waiting.

“Oh! Sorry. You’re still worried about the whole me-following-you thing. That’s reasonable. It’s just that there aren’t a whole lot of humans here. I know one of them, he’s from my time period, about thirty years post-apocalypse. And we’re trying to scour the town for other humans, you know, to sort of put together a team.”

“A team to do what? There’s no fighting in the town, right?”

“Well, sure. But…” He hesitated for a second, as if trying to figure out an argument that would get Sean to see things his way. “Listen, would you at least walk with me for a second? I want to show you something.”

As much as Sean was starting to learn to distrust people, he nodded. Everyone had got to this town at the same time, as far as he knew. Even if this guy had traps and whatnot, he couldn’t imagine anything too elaborate being set up in the last hour or so.

“Okay. But don’t do anything weird? If I get a bad feeling about this, I’m bolting.”

“No problem!” The man held his hands up, in front of him. “I’ll walk in front. Real slow. Let me know if you need to stop or anything, I will. I promise.”

He turned on his heel and walked away. Sean followed, half-waiting for the guy to try something. He didn’t. If anything, he kept his hands much further from his sword than he actually needed to, walking a bit puffed out like he was trying to signal an extra-high amount of confidence. Soon, he slowed and pointed at a nearby building.

“It’s here. Check it out.”

The building was, unmistakable, a fairly nice hotel of sorts. Sean watched as a not-quite human figure walked in, carrying some kind of heavy bundle, then as another left to walk somewhere else in town. They were clearly working to some kind of plan, and doing so at double time.

“They’ve been like this since we got here. They buy things, move them to the hotel, and then go out to do other tasks. Like they’ve planned this before. There’s about eight of them if I’ve counted right. When I left while you ate, this is where I went. They haven’t stopped the whole time.”

The door to the hotel opened as he spoke and suddenly the species of the not-quite-humans was no longer in question. Eike stepped through the door, a bit taller and a bit better armed than Sean had ever been comfortable with.

“That’s the leader, I think. Big guy. I saw him yell at one of the others earlier, like he was in charge.”

“Yeah. I know him actually. That tracks.”

“Anyway, I just thought, if they see some value in teaming up, if there’s some advantage for them, then maybe we should, you know, try to do the same thing. I know you don’t have any reason to trust me or my friend, but…”

Sean interrupted.

“Don’t worry about it. I’m sold.”

“What?”

“I said I’m sold. I’m in. Let’s do this.”

—

Alf-Shirt’s actual name ended up being Justin and after a quick stop to scoop up Brett and bring him along, he led them to a small manga-trope-adhering tavern on the opposite side of town from the Eike contingent.

A few drinks were bought, unsurprisingly not doing besides warming him slightly. The alcohol made seriously ineffectual attempts against Sean’s heightened VIT score.

“Thanks for coming. Really.” Justin seemed almost unreasonably relieved to have convinced Sean to come. “If you wait a bit longer, Spike should be here. He was trying to talk to two people, I think. He’s better at it than me, but it still might be a minute.”

“Spike?”

“Yeah, Spike. I don’t think it’s his real name. He told me it’s because he uses a spear and something about a cartoon I didn’t understand.”

“Got it.” Sean’s curiosity about whether or not this guy was imitating a space ronin or a wordless dinosaur was almost instantly satisfied when a tall, slender man wearing a thin-fit suit walked into the room smoking a cigarette, holding an eastern-style spear. He was trailed by a shortish muscular man carrying a longbow and a small woman with a surprisingly large sledgehammer.

“Hey! You got him. Good.” Spike walked up to Sean, extending his hand. “Good to have you. I’m Spike.”

“Sean,” Sean said, shaking his hand back. “Good to be here.”

“I’m Brett.” At the table, Brett lifted his mug of beer and nodded.

“Good to have you, Brett. You two already met Justin, and this,” he said, nodding behind him, “is Brendan and Hayden.”

Everyone milled around greeting each other and getting set up with beverages before they sat down at the table to hash things out.

“I’m guessing you guys have worries, and that’s completely understandable,” Spike started. “I want to be clear from the beginning that I’m not looking to be a leader here. I don’t even think we should have one.”

Justin chimed in. “We talked about it a bit before. It seems like the system is going to keep us working solo for the most part. So what we are looking for isn’t so much, you know, us being a rigid organization so much as a sort of loose alliance. We offer each other a chance at loot we can’t use and we defend each other and work together where it makes sense. That kind of thing.”

Spike nodded.

“So what about if we end up head to head? The Apocalypse System might put us in a race against each other or a killing-things competition,” Sean asked.

“Or,” Brett said, “It might ask you to kill each other. Or me. It doesn’t seem likely, but it might.”

“I’ve thought about that a little,” Spike said, frowning. “I think my thought on that is that if it’s just a straight competition against each other, everyone does their best, no hard feelings. And if there’s any way to avoid hurting each other at all, we take it.”

“But if we have to?” Sean pushing. “I don’t want to kill anyone, but I’m not that keen on laying down and dying, either.”

“We just do it,” Hayden, the sledgehammer woman, said. “There’s no other solution. I’m not thrilled about it, but if it’s one of us dying or both of us dying, we compete.”

Brendan nodded behind her. He hadn’t talked much since the beginning of the meeting which seemed to stem from a natural inclination towards being a quiet person as opposed to shyness.

Spike looked around the room, trying to get a sense of general agreement.

“If we can all agree on that, I’m fine with it. In moments of necessity, we defend ourselves. I wouldn’t ask anyone to give that up.”