A Bar a Vampire and the Apocalypse

After finishing my meal and burning off some much needed steam I walked back into the bar. It looked like they had finished the explanation and the parents were digesting the situation quietly. Looking at their faces I regret my outburst, there is a slight look of horror on their faces. I guess that's what I get for not having a meal in almost two weeks. My temper gets a bit shorter when I don’t dine regularly.

I walked back over to my seat at the head of the table and sat. Sarah and Edward, who were sitting closest to me, flinched. It looks like I messed up a bit more than putting off the parents.

“Sigh, well sorry about my outburst there. It was uncalled for and I could have handled that reveal better. To start with I will not harm any of you here without cause.” I looked over to Sarah and asked. “Have you finished explaining to them?” She nodded and I turned back to the group.

“Well if you have any questions now is the time. That goes for the rest of you as well. If you have any questions I will answer them within reason.”

Midnight’s Perfect Assassin has leveled up 3→4 +4 strength +6 agility +2 constitution

+6 dexterity +4 stamina +3 intelligence +3 free stats.

Well that was random, I must have gotten some experience from my “children”. Hopefully Lilith and Zack are doing well. Alfred’s question then broke me out of my musing.

“Why are you doing this? It is clear you are more than strong enough to live on your own and thrive. Or you could just get stronger in the dungeon by yourself. So why.”

“Well there are a couple of reasons. To start with, I am weak.”

“What really?” Alex busted out. “From what Sarah told us it would take an army to stop you and that's a maybe.”

“Oh compared to humans I might as well be a demi-god but even if I'm in the 0.000001% of strongest beings on this planet I am nothing in the face of the beings in the 0.0000001%. There are beings that have a good chance at living through a full power nuclear bomb, and that is not something I can do. There is a saying that reality is crazier than fiction and you have no idea how true that statement can be. Funny enough some of you fiction is reality

But yes I have lived alongside these powerful beings for all my life so I could most likely continue to do so, but why not take the opportunity that is given to me. That brings me to my next point. I will never be the most powerful. No matter how hard I try, even with the help of this system I will never be able to beat a dragon who worked even half as hard as I have for the simple face they are naturally more powerful than me. But just like an army can take me down an army of significant power can take down a dragon.

Numbers are a powerful thing. But that does not mean we can send an endless army of humans to take down a dragon as they are now, no we need to train and gain power to do so. But to create an army I need people and to support and train the army so it grows in power I need a city or country working together. So my main long term goal as it stands right now is to become at least a city state, whether we become a whole country or not depends on factors outside of my control. But as it stands now if we use our time properly no human only group could challenge us. There is also the ticking time bomb that is the dungeon but that can be discussed at a later time. There is no reason to add more for you to digest at the moment.

Now I am only using dragons as an example. I have a fairly good relationship with the dragon clans and all my examples only imply we are facing one dragon. To be frank, if they wanted and none of the other major powers stopped them, dragons could wipe out 95% of the human population in a week. The only reason I don't say wipe out humans is because they would have to close to burn the whole planet to ash with how widespread you are and there's no point in destroying the place they call home. Also some of them have relations with humans. But that is not my business to discuss.”

The room was dead silent, I had not expanded in this much detail on how powerful the apex predators of the planet are, and they are all trying to absorb it. Looks of dread and fear crossed their faces so I gave them a minute to digest it before I moved on.

“But with this system coming into play a lot of the hidden races and beings will come out of hiding whether they want to or not. Such as the dragons have already done. Yes, that notification you got was about the current ruler of the dragons. I'm sure quite a few dragons are rather mad at him right now. I wish I could see the look on Esmeralda's face.” Shaking my head I got back on topic.

Anyway if I am being fair the human race will soon go through a major culling and how that will turn out I don’t know. A lot of old and powerful beings are going to be forced out of hiding like myself. Now I could have stayed in hiding but that would have involved me doing some things I didn’t want to do.” I glanced over to Sarah and smiled.

“But staying hidden will not have the same effect as it once had. I won’t be able to seamlessly meld into a human city if one of them has a skill to identify who or what I am. The same goes with all the other races, the power of the system makes it so we can no longer hide in plain sight. It may also make it so we can hide in other places. For example some fay hide in mountain sides by making glamor's that hide the entrance to their homes. The system may give people the power to see through those or strengthen them even further time will tell.”

After they digested all the information Alfred had an understanding look and spoke, “Correct me if I'm wrong but what your saying is that its either hide in obscurity and slowly watch as the whole world catches up to you in strength and in turn makes it harder for you to survive, or make some sort of stand and see what comes of it, be it what you are doing now or more publicly making a stand.”

“That’s not all my options but those are the options that let me be the ruler of my own life and don't compromise my morals. I am really old and in that time I have done a fairly good job at making friends who are much more powerful than me. If I wanted I could make my way to one of these friends and live under their protection and help them in their ambitions for this new world order we are on the cusp of, but doing that I would not be the one in the driver seat and I don't really like that. I have lived according to my own will for a very long time. Of course I have to be smart not to step on people's toes and the like or at least not get caught doing so. Then there are some rather… less than moral things I could do but I would rather not talk about that scenario, I will not walk that path so there is no point in talking about it.”

Samantha then spoke up. “Who is Esmeralda and what does she have to do with the Dragon king?”

I blushed slightly. I was hoping they would ignore my little tangent. “His mother”

With that declaration everyone blurted out “WHAT?!?!”

“I did say I have some powerful friends, did I not?”

After that little side tangent the rest of the conversation went much like the first one did with my employees. We also convinced the parents to accept the system was now a part of life and helped them pick classes and skills. Samantha got a tech geek class that helped her with programming and working with technology. Alex got an electrician class and Alfred got a carpenter class they both help with their job. Alex is more resistant to electricity and can mend wires so we will be able to reuse a lot more of the wiring in the buildings we are renovating and scavenging. Alfred can do something similar with wood but from the wording of the skill it does not work on a very large scale. It seems like it can help you if you start to miss cut something you can fix it but melding boards together seems to be outside of his ability. The classes also come with a handful of other helpful skills but nothing of too major of note. But in the end all three of them will become a lot better at what they are doing and get levels in the process. I was hoping that my ability would help them more but maybe they still don’t trust me or something of that sort so the ability did not affect them. If that is the case it is a shame.

We talked a little bit more about the state of things and light discussion during the meeting, but nothing else major happened. After the meeting me and the parents discussed the things they needed as well as recruiting more people to help them. We also decided that after they recruit some more people they will start working on scavenging the fallen buildings behind us, until they are either properly gone through, we run out of room in our new storage room, or a more pressing matter comes up.

With that discussion finished I worked on putting the chairs and tables back in order and cleaning up the room in preparation for the bar to open. Once I was done with that I played pool until people started arriving and once they did I played waiter and socialized trying to get a feel from people.

“Hey Vivi, what happened to alcohol?” one of the long-time patrons said.

Smiling, I said, “What else you drunks’ drank it all there is not even any left for me.”

The group he was with laughed as I walked by. All of the normal patrons knew that all of the women that worked for me were off limits, me included but some of the new ones did not know this. So more than once someone went for a feel of my ass. But I trained my patrons well and anyone who did was quickly grabbed and told not too.

I had conversations with all kinds of people, from new people here to long time customers, young barley drinking age to people well into their twilight years. From what they have been saying there seems to be a lot more gang presences and not just the old ones but new ones. There also seems to be people just looking to start fights in hopes of leveling up. The cops seem to be stretched thin along with people now being more powerful thanks to the system, law and order seems to be breaking down rapidly. But they also say that the area around my bar is mostly left out of this. Im guessing mostly from the dumb fucks who came over the other day. I bet it will be even quieter after what happened earlier in the day.

On the other hand people are all thankful for this place. It is a place of relative safety that is away from the chaos. Hearing this I know that we will need to expand into more family based attractions soon. If people feel safe here we should capitalize on that. I will talk with Sarah about this tomorrow. Maybe we can have something set up in the next couple days. I wonder if we can get a projector and have a movie night with some dream works or Disney movies. I feel that could work out well.

There were also an endless amount of questions about the dungeon. I did my best to brush off the questions. Before we let people know more about the dungeon I want our combat group to be stronger. Along with coming up with a set of ground rules. We will have to see where we are next week after I talk to Gareena. I don't know how much longer I will be able to keep the tide of questions at bay.

Over all the night went well. Here's hoping we get many more like it.