Book 2 - Chapter 4: Deluxe Magic Reverse Recycling Bin

I don’t care who you are, what your skill set is, or how many survival shows you watched before TV stopped being a thing, you can’t make everything you need alone. If we were just talking about core items your class needs to run, it might be a different story. I’ve seen bomb girls who can make bombs and arrow guys who can make arrows and bows.

But where are you going to get your food? Your body might work a bit differently now, you aren’t going to starve as quick, and you won’t see the downsides of starvation too much. But you still can’t go forever without food, and you’ll also find that you’re just like everyone else in that you really, really don’t want to forego eating entirely.

The point is that you need someone who grows tomatoes. You need an armorer to make you protective gear, and even if you don’t, you still need someone to sell your excess drops, the raw materials you can’t use, and a dozen other things.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a team, but it does mean you need to maintain mutually beneficial relationships with other human beings. Even the most versatile of us still needs people skills.

The Guide, Navigating the New World, page 38

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The nicest way Sean could describe his crafting skills would be “weird and inconvenient.” It wasn’t so much that the finished products were terrible, although he strongly suspected they were worse compared to products made with proper crafting techniques and real, weapons-grade materials. But some of that particular deficiency was made up for by the versatility allowed by the system’s expansive definition of “shank.” He couldn’t have the best weapon but he could deal a lot of different kinds of damage at different ranges and speed.

The hard part is finding the materials in the first place. It’s not like they have to be crappy, but…

Sean hadn’t completely neglected experimentation related to his crafting. He had at some point bought a steak knife and wrapped duct tape around the handle. The system didn’t consider it a shank. The same thing went for a simple brick he had picked up and put a strip of tape and a bit of glue on. There was some minimum level of modification the system wanted to see, in addition to some maximum amount of supposed-to-be-a-weapon-ness it would tolerate.

That said, the last few weeks had been so frantic he hadn’t exactly given any of his crafting, weapons or otherwise, the amount of attention it really deserved. He had made some good weapons that he liked, sure. But he had a serious suspicion that he had only scratched the surface of what his class would do, and that was before he considered the exactly one time he had used his alchemy skill.

Luckily, the Apocalypse System, at least superficially, didn’t appear to be a price-gouger as far as garbage went. Some of the ways it proposed to provide Sean with rubbish were refreshingly fair in their pricing, so long as he took the sheer convenience of literally instant delivery into account.

Bag of Earth-Typical Garbage (5 Points)

A surprising amount of Earthling garbage was suitable for various kinds of re-use. I’m not just talking about durable goods y’all threw out, either. Some things, like wine bottles, would have lasted you dozens of years in various uses, but by the time you were born, bottles were so cheap and normal you never had to think about that.

Plastic was, for better or worse, pretty magic stuff. It was cheap, durable, could be washed, and resisted all sorts of weird chemicals. You folks made TONS of it, used it once, then threw it out. Like, think about it. Did you ever see a sports drink bottle that ever actually wore out? You didn’t, but with your weird customs, you also wouldn’t have been caught dead using one as a water bottle after you emptied it of all its sweet, sweet fruit punch flavor.

Well, no more. Now that there’s an Apocalypse on, you are humble and contrite, crawling all the way back to the rubbish piles with tears in your eyes and a hat in your hands. And even though you don’t deserve it, your garbage never stopped loving you. Like big mountains of velveteen rabbits, the garbage has been waiting for you to notice it again. To love it. To give it a name, a purpose, and an identity.

This bag full of unrequited garbage love is reasonably priced, and contains a randomized selection of actual Earth garbage thrown out the week before the Apocalypse System arrived on your planet. Yes, I’ve been saving it. No, I won’t tell you how or where it comes from. Just buy your garbage and be glad I kept it for you.

Five points really wasn’t that bad, but Sean could see the costs adding up over time, since the bags themselves could contain literally anything and he might end up rolling and re-rolling them like filthy, bulbous scratchers tickets until he got something useful. That was especially true with the better-graded bags of garbage, which were apparently a real thing he could actually buy.

Deluxe Bag of Earth-Typical Garbage (10 Points)

This upgraded bag of Earthling cast-off material includes industrial and commercial garbage in the random trash-draw pool I’m filling the bags from. Otherwise, it’s still just a big bag of trash.

Oh, is that description not good enough? You’ve become used to a certain level of information? Listen, man, this is a bag of garbage. There’s only so much I can do with it. Besides noting that there’s a very, very small chance you could get actual nuclear waste in there, there’s not that much that’s interesting to work with here.

Besides, if you are actually scrolling through the “can I buy garbage” part of the shop in enough to detail to even be looking at this, you probably have a good idea what you want out of this. Frankly, I don’t necessarily want to peer into your particular box of fetish too close. You do you. I’ll just be over here keeping my eyes clean by not rubbing them all over your weird business.

As much as Sean hated to admit it here, he had certain garbage goals that likely needed the industrial waste in the deluxe bags. But if he was reading the system right on the matter, he’d just be getting a portion of Earth’s total trash, and that meant he’d probably have to go through a fair amount of trash and points to get stuff that was useful to him.

Luckily, the system seemed to have anticipated his troubles, offering a more complex product that solved most of his problems.

Deluxe Magic Reverse Recycling Bin (400 Points)

Real recycling bins are all about putting in garbage, then sending it through a long journey that results in the materials being re-used in new, non-garbage products. This is that, except in reverse, confusing, and juiced by magic in a way that makes even less sense.

The basic upshot is that you, as a garbage aficionado, are looking for a more efficient, streamlined refuse experience. This box lets you put in useful items, and it down cycles them to make garbage. Like the Garbage Bag family of items, the results will be Earth-typical pre-Apocalypse stuff, and the deluxe version of this product includes a chance of pulling industrial and commercial waste.

Any unused garbage can be recycled through the machine to regain a tenth of its value in “new” trash.

Sean immediate bought the bin. Eventually, he was going to find a magic sword on a corpse, or something, and he had to acknowledge he’d have almost no use for that kind of thing. But he imagined the sheer value of it would produce almost limitless trash, and he actually could use that. It was weird and backwards, but it was how his life was. Bemoaning the fact wouldn’t help him.

The recycling bin materialized, and turned out to be slightly misnamed. It was actually two bins, chained together. The bins were labeled “in” and “out” respectively, which Sean appreciated. He didn’t have much extra besides a broken Tell arrow, so he tossed it in and closed the bin. On reopening it, the arrow was already gone, and the “out” side of the contraption was suddenly filled with various kinds of garbage, mostly paper and food trash.

Sean carefully separated the items out and fed the useless parts back in. He ended with about a dozen soda cans, a few threaded plastic bottles and an only slightly collapsed milk jug by the time he ran out of materials to drive more garbage iterations with. He set them aside for later experimentation.

The next purchase was, somehow, a bit weirder.

Mad Scientist’s Tool Set (150 points)

Have you ever wanted an entire bag of tools, but hesitated to take the plunge because conventional tools don’t threaten your sanity? Well, hesitate no more, because this stuff is mental in a lot of ways.

In one way or another, every tool serves a slightly different function that you might expect a mad scientist to understand. There’s a corkscrew made of lasers that isn’t for drawing corks, for instance. There’s more than one tool made out of bones. Some of the tools work even better than their conventional equivalents, while some work much worse.

Broadly, though, they all work weirder. Again, this is a mad scientist's tool set. If you at some point find yourself driving a screw with a complex Rube-Goldberg machine made out of reclaimed mouse parts, don’t say we didn’t warn you.

There were equivalent normal tool sets available for less cost, but Sean decided on this one anyway. The Apocalypse System wasn’t exactly consistent, but it did run on a sort of consistent principle. It was chaotic, yes, but it usually seemed to honor a good-faith effort to play by its weird mass-media-tainted rules.

Since Sean’s crafting skill seemed to work best when he actually made an effort to keep things janky, he was guessing that using a conventional file to sharpen a knife would make the system less likely to accept it as a shank. He hoped that using a mad scientist’s laser-file would work better, particularly if that laser was bad at its job and might blow his hands off in the process.

All those purchases left him with 395 points in the bank, just enough for his last purchase, with a little left in the kitty for incidentals. As much as the system rewarded jankiness in his crafting, he still needed a place to work, and he still wanted normal, conventional tools for projects that didn’t directly interact with his weird class. Only one item he could afford appeared to do all of that at once.

Multi-Purpose Work Table (350 Points, Staffable)

The Multi-Purpose Work Table is, despite its name, not a table. It’s an upgrade for a pre-existing table in the form of an assignable enchantment. Once enchanted, the table will gain the ability to materialize and dematerialize any of a large variety of conventional hand tools, containers, crude calculating tools, various measuring tools (scales, rulers, etc.) and various simple cash register-like items used for commerce.

The table is unable to materialize most class-specialized tools, but still greatly streamlines any work performed at it by facilitating thought-driven tool selection. It is, overall, the best foundation you could lay for your work as a would-be craftsman.

Any tools removed from the direct vicinity of the table will dematerialize. Note that this includes containers, and further note all the hilarious danger that implies.

An explanation for “Staffable” was not in the description for the item, or any other place Sean could find. That said, whatever it meant didn’t seem to preclude him from using it, which was all he really wanted it for anyway. He bought the item, which materialized in the form of a large bronze coin that he almost immediately applied to his long-suffering, remarkably well-preserved steel table.