CWD: GA ~ Eight

Crossing the threshold of the Satiation Shoppe, Nacho received a variety of messages.

Greetings, Player!

Congratulations! You not only did well on your evaluation, but you scored in the top one percent! That’s not easy to do. Your reward isn’t all that great, sorry. You do have the chance to become a Satiation Player!

Do you like chopping onions, dicing peppers, and standing over a stove for hours and hours? Or maybe you’d like to burn yourself on an oven rack in the same place, every time. Or perhaps you want to make your own hooch or concoct any number of intoxicating cocktails. Or maybe farming? Farming is fun.

The Satiation Shoppe is the place to get your cook on! Be the life of the party! Throw amazing wedding receptions. Steam cocktail weenies to impress your friends after they’re done throwing lightning and calling down meteors!

Any questions, just ask the Cinnabunny herself!

Note: As it will become abundantly clear, the Cinnabunny isn’t human. She’s a bunnicorn. She can’t talk, and she’s actually an herbivore with a very limited diet. So you’re on your own, Player. Good luck! May your future be delicious!

The proprietor of the shoppe stood behind a counter near the back, with all kinds of brightly colored candies arrayed in bins behind a glass display case. She was a big fluffy pink bunny with a single pearlescent horn sticking out of her forehead. A white apron covered her chest and belly. She might be an herbivore, but Nacho had a sneaking suspicion that she’d been snacking on her own sweet supply.

Like the other shopkeepers, she gazed at him with cool pink eyes, as though she could care less about his existence. She must’ve been the surliest bunnicorn in all of creation. Nacho glanced around. The place was part candy store, part diner, part post-apocalyptic stage play, and perhaps just a dash of backyard barbecue. In the far corner, things got fancy with shiny knives and cooking utensils that baffled Nacho. “Sometimes kitchen folk come up with the weirdest solutions to the simplest things.”

Unlike the other shops, Nacho was going to review every class and get a good sense of the skills, because if he was going to commit to such a lame character class, he was going to make absolutely sure there weren’t any hidden ‘gotchas’.

Over each class area hung a sign.

• Survivalist
• Scavenger
• Farmer
• Harvester
• Butcher
• Brewer
• Common Cook

Nacho immediately noticed that there were no price listings. Was this a case of ‘if you have to ask, you can’t afford it’? The Cinnabunny half-hopped, half-slumped its way to stand next to Nacho, as if prompting him to hurry the abyss up.

He did not hurry up, instead languidly browsing, starting at the front corner of the shop. It looked like an army navy surplus store with lots of camouflage, netting, green canvas, and complicated-looking backpacks that were as much about the straps as they were about the pouches.

This display was way different than the other parts of the shop, to a crazy degree. Nacho was inundated with the informative message as he got close.

Survivalist Class! Including two isolating and slightly paranoid skills of your choosing! Yes, they are out to get you, but you’ll get them first!

To be a Survivalist is to live with a capital L-I-V-E! You’ll be able to eat most everything you come across. While you won’t have access to many combat skills, if you’re careful, you just might end the day with a full belly and the knowledge that while other fools are dead, it won’t be you, hearty survivalist. You’ll outwit, outplay, and outlast your opponents!

Base cost: 1000 Evaluation Points

Browse for more info?

Y/N

Note: Additional skills can be purchased at Saavi’s Skills Stall. Blah, blah, blah, you won’t see this note again.

Nacho was shocked at the cost of the class. No wonder the store hadn’t been here before. His measly two hundred Evaluation Points wouldn’t have bought him a sack of jelly beans. A quick browse through the Player information revealed that the Survivalist class could eat things with Putrid Mana and drink unpurified water with no ill effects.

That would’ve been a huge bonus if he were going to be alone again, and the list of skills available included everything from camouflage to trap construction. At higher Tiers, the traps were very deadly. There was also a ‘Good Doggy’ skill, which made it possible to tame a monster and keep it as a pet, and that was the extent of combat for the class.

If Nacho had been alone and had known what he knew about the way food worked in the Juxtaposition, he’d have been tempted. Instead, he moved on to the nearby display of the Scavenger, the station appearing as nothing more than a tableau of a highway—complete with cracked asphalt and the leftovers of a Styrofoam deer.

When Nacho drew near, the introductory information box appeared.

Scavenger class! Including two rank and smelly skills of your choosing! This is the ‘are you going to eat that’ class.

To be a Scavenger is to live on the hunt for leftovers! Like the Survivalist, you’ll be able to eat above your Tier, but unlike that paranoid person, you’ll have to carefully prepare your meals. Half line cook, half killer, the Scavenger is perfect for people who like to beat half-dead things to full-dead while not being too picky about their basic hygiene.

Ever wanted to be a laughing hyena? This is your chance!

Base cost: 1100 Evaluation Points.

Browse for more info?

Y/N

This one looked promising. Curious, Nacho pulled up more details about the class. Basically, the Scavenger could process the Putrid Mana out of monsters up to a full Tier above their level and Tier. Instead of being poisonous, the meat would be fine—or the vegetables, since there were monster plants as well. The Scavenger class also included some combat skills, the ability to use blunt weapons, a recipe for bone broth, and instructions on how to make sausages out of intestines.

Nacho thought the class might be a good combination for him, though he’d spent the last six months practicing with small blades, and the combat of the Scavenger was limited to blunt weapons. If he was more of a club guy, he might’ve gone with Scavenger. So, he kept on shopping with the weird, silent, man-sized Cinnabunny following him creepily closely.

Farther into the store, the Farmer section consisted of several hay bales stacked next to a little end table with a lace doily placed on the polished wood. Of course there was a pitchfork, a kerosene lantern, and a little book on soybeans. Another glance revealed it to be a pamphlet on calming monster soybeans.

The Cinnabunny sulked next to him.

He decided to tease the thing. “Hey, Bunny, tell me about the Farmer class.”

The big pink unicorn bunny wiggled its nose—that was cute. The hostile look in its pink eyes wasn’t.

The information box did all the talking.

Farmer class! Including two skills of your choosing! Hope you like to get up early; a true Farmer gets up before dawn, milks the cows, feeds the chickens, slops the pigs, and squeezes the teats of their ogre cows. Warning: if you choose this class, you’ll eventually know so much about corn that you won’t fit in at parties. You probably won’t see much action, and you’ll have many lonely Saturday nights, but plowing the dirt is just as fun, right?

Base cost: 1200 Evaluation Points

Browse for more info?

Yes/No

Nacho skimmed the Farmer class details and let out a low whistle. This was powerful, not for him personally, but for his friends. Basically, the Farmer could grow Tier zero crops and raise Tier zero animals. Both would be free of Putrid Mana. That would be useful for the first six months or so, maybe even good for a year, but once Players leveled to Tier one, everything changed. The Farmer could provide Tier one products, but they would still have to contend with Putrid Mana. It appeared that the Farmer class was meant to work with other Satiation Classes, like the Brewers or the Common Cooks.

One aspect was extra useful: the Farmer could also raise monster animals and monster plants to protect himself and his guild, and his monsters wouldn’t attack him or his allies. That would be handy for someone building a base of operations.

The mainstay skills of the Farmer weren’t that exciting. It obviously came with the basic Oat Obsession, Monster Milking, Expert Egg Extraction, and other examples of skills necessary for a fulfilling life on the farm. If he became a farmer, his people would have a ton of food… but it wouldn’t help them long-term.

It did serve to make Nacho curious about the Common Cook and Brewer classes. Also, just from investigating the first three Satiation classes, he observed that the Patrons had specifically written the descriptions so as to discourage people from choosing a Satiation class. That was interesting, if not surprising—they had practically been pushing people into cannibalism back in the day.

If Nacho had been a normal Player, he would’ve spent perhaps five seconds in this store and left. However, he knew the value of food in the Juxtaposition better than anyone.

At the center of the shop stood a fake kitchen display for the Common Cook. If the order of class options was the same as in the other stores, this should be the most potent class available. Nacho approached it cautiously.

Common Cook class! Just like Mom used to make! Selecting this class will grant you two skills, a grilled cheese sandwich, and some warm fuzzies.

To be a Common Cook is to slave away for hours in the kitchen, to keep yourself locked for days in the garden to find that perfect tomato, and to get up early because the bread won’t cook itself. Tired? Too bad! Every night, you’ll be staying up late because those dishes won’t be doing themselves! The Common Cook is uncommonly boring, but hey, level up and at least you’ll eat well. That’s something, right?

Basic cost: 1599 Evaluation Points! Are we crazy? Yes, yes, we are, and so is this class. Crazy expensive!

Note: Yes, you can buy more skills over at Saavi Candoo’s Skills Stall; we’ve been over that. We just wanted to let you know that there’s no such thing as too much garlic. When in doubt, garlic is just like cowbell. We all need more cowbell.

Browse for more info!

Y/N

Of course Nacho wanted to browse for more information. It was clear the Patrons were not fans of letting this class out into the wild.

Common Cook class—Enhanced Description.

The Common Cook is able to cook anything, anytime, anywhere, and make anything edible. You know that one girlfriend you had who could walk into a half-empty kitchen and make a four-course meal in forty-five minutes out of the expired ketchup bottle in the fridge? The Common Cook is like that, but better—because your old flame, Hildegarde, couldn’t add buffs to her cooking. That’s right, not only do you get a gourmet meal, but your happily fed friends will be able to go out and kill dragons right after! Common Cook will only receive System credits from their kitchen combat, so you’d better like garlic. You saw the note before: garlic-haters need not apply.

Browse skills?

Yes/No

Nacho was definitely going to be browsing the skills in detail. He’d skimmed the others. Not this one. This one had him fully engaged, though he did have to wonder how many people had dated someone named Hildegarde in order for it to be added to the class description.