Museum Core Chapter 24: Incoming

“Morning!” Teddy called out when he caught sight of Elias at the cafe’s entrance. Apparently, he was a bit of a morning person.

And judging by how she was eyeing a nearby coffee cup, seemingly on the verge of chucking it at her “roommate’s” head, Bethany was decidedly not.

“Morning everyone,” Elias responded, gesturing to the cart that was being pushed in by one of the “enforcer” jaguars behind him.

“I know those things are supposed to be adorable, but you overshot into horrifying,” Teddy commented when he caught sight of the cat.

Hm, it was possible he had a point, Thomas considered. He thought they looked adorable, like a life-sized plushy, but for another person, it might fall into solidly into the uncanny valley. After all, they were the very definition of “unnatural”.

Bethany cocked her head to the side as she observed the cat in detail.

“I can see that,” she yawned, stumbled over towards the cart, snatched up one of the premade iced coffees Thomas had placed there, and downed it in five seconds flat.

Yep, definitely not a morning person.

“No, they’re cute!” Lea declared with all the force of certainty and determination a six-year-old could muster, hands on her hips in a power pose she’d definitely copied from her mother. And with that, she charged towards the cat.

“Agree to disagree,” Teddy sighed as he snatched a croissant off the cart.

The baked snacks were in much better shape than the coffee had been, simply because they’d been made with the goal of being displayed for hours without becoming gross, though the humans would likely become heartily sick of the few bits of food Thomas had rescued from the cafe.

In the meanwhile, Bethany dropped her third coffee to lunge after her daughter, bringing her up short.

“Sorry,” she told Elias as she shooed Lea away. “She … she isn’t good with animals. She gets excited, then she gets rough, and then, well, you can guess what happens after that.”

“We saw,” Elias told her.

“So, what’s on the docket today?” Teddy asked around a mouth full of food. “Are we going back to the archives?”

Thomas didn’t say anything to Elias as they’d already talked about this to death.

“Honestly, if anyone’s still alive, we’re expecting a flood of refugees,” the fairy said. “Food is going to be running low for anyone who didn’t get trapped in a store or restaurant, so people are going to start looking, and when they see the smoke signals, they’ll be coming here.

“Also, I don’t know what your military is like, but one day should have been enough to secure at least the border, so they should start sending in expeditions, no?”

“Honestly, I’m shocked that nothing like that happened yet,” Teddy commented, his mouth still stuffed with food.

“Please don’t talk with your mouth full,” Bethany finally sighed. “And we saw a fighter jet crash yesterday, I don’t know how well they can operate in here.”

Teddy winced, dropping the hand that still clutched a half-eaten croissant into his lap.

“Well, shit,” he muttered. “So, another dive into the archives?”

“If you’re up for it?” Elias shrugged.

“Any monsters are going to have to go through the Dungeon, aren’t they? The way I see it, the deeper I am, the safer I am,” Teddy announced, before suddenly looking sheepish, lowering his voice. “The toilets still work, right? Or is this more of a bucket situation …”

“Toilets still work,” Elias reassured him before turning to Bethany. “Do you think you could prepare some things for new arrivals? Beds, proper meals, signs?”

So that was how the morning was spent.

Elias and Teddy tore their way through the archives while Bethany worked while under the supervision of a monkey possessed by Thomas. He might not be able to directly talk to her, but screeching and waving would still effectively convey the message of “monster coming, run”.

First, she updated the signs written in blackberry juice to reflect the new path to the cafe.

Second, she wrote up directions on a few large pieces of heavy cardstock, including warnings about the monsters within, and how the monsters weren’t going to be an issue unless you attacked them. There was also an additional section about how the museum was now a Dungeon, including a brief overview of the idea of “it’s dangerous, only walk in here if you’re prepared, but you can get a ton of rewards”.

And third, she managed to use a small pot as a hammer and a few nails to attach the instructions to the front door, while Thomas looked out for monsters.

Lea “helped” in the meantime, which meant she brought her mother food even though she’d already eaten more than enough, got underfoot, and all-round made quite a nuisance of herself while believing herself as integral to the process. Typical six-year-old, in other words. But it was adorable and kept her out of trouble, so no one did anything.

“You know, that mess on the front lawn is going to give people the wrong impression,” Bethany commented as she hammered the nails in.

Thomas winced at that, though he wasn’t entirely certain that was visible on a monkey’s face. The “front lawn”, meaning the relatively clear area in front of the museum, looked like the sight of a massacre, covered in blood, guts, and puddles of acid that were likely still dangerous.

He could clean up his Dungeon with ease, no matter how badly it was damaged, either by invaders or one of his experiments gone awry, but this was outside his domain. Maybe he could send something out there to drag the wyvern corpses away?

The monkey he was possessing nodded, and Bethany went back to hammering, while Lea was tugging on her pants leg because she was bored.

Thomas ended up sending a few monkeys into the big museum shop next to the hall of marine fossils to go fetch some toys. The plushies and simple plastic toys from the dino section weren’t exactly bad, but the big shop had cooler stuff.

The monkey lured the kid in with that stuff, Bethany finished her art project and followed soon after.

And now that there were no humans outside to distract his creatures, Thomas sent out the Landwyrm to drag the wyvern corpses into the museum. There wasn’t much he could do about the blood unless he wanted to destroy and thereby replace it with the Landwyrm’s far more dangerous acid, but he could drag the corpses inside and dissolve those.

That would certainly reduce the amount of ick out there, but not completely eradicate it.

With a thought, Thomas reached out for his wyvern pattern and added “air” as its loot. That made it useable as a kamikaze unit without causing a mess.

And now that that was done, things settled down into a somewhat comfortable quiet. Bethany alternated between playing with her daughter and drawing on a huge canvas that Elias and Teddy had found somewhere in the archives to create a banner they could later hang from the ceiling, while the other two continued to raid the archived.

A lot of the things they’d found weren’t necessarily game-changers, but they were all interesting in some way. Several rainbow lorikeets added a beautiful splash of color, plastic foliage and old branches that must have once been a part of an exhibit would later become wonderful decorations, and so on, but not everything was so trivial.

First, there were the snakes, tons of them. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to what they grabbed, Elias and Teddy just saw “snake” and brought it up, but that was ok. Teddy apparently wasn’t very knowledgeable beyond “Taipan dangerous”, with the Fer de Lance and Boomslang apparently having been lucky hits, and Elias obviously wasn’t familiar with Earth’s fauna.

Second, there’d been the sharks. A thresher shark that Thomas would later turn into a power for devastating tail swipes, a tiger shark that should be able to create a “can eat anything” ability if Thomas ever found a need for a creature that was good at foraging, and so on.

And maybe, just maybe, if he ever expanded his domain enough, he’d put in an aquatic section for shits and giggles. Cause, you know, everyone just loved water levels, that was just an objectively universal fact. He wasn’t in a position to put any of this into action yet, but he could plan.

***

Thomas wasn’t entirely sure if people had just been waiting for him to clean up, or if people were just now getting up after having found it almost impossible to go to sleep last night, but from ten am or so onwards, people began trickling in.

Elias and Teddy were still in the archives, so it fell to Bethany to play tour guide, with her introduction largely being comprised of “that area is death, here is where you get snacks”.

Thomas thought about ordering them back so that the fairy could act as an interpreter, but in the end decided against it.

Bethany was largely already doing the things he’d have asked her to do, and the archive raids were important.

Mainly, she was giving the correct instructions, warning of dangerous areas, and asking people for intel.

By noon, they had almost thirty people in the cafe, and they’d all told basically the same story.

Jungle came, hunkered down, got hungry, saw smoke, came looking.

Some had seen the man Elias had described as a cultivator, others claimed to have heard gunshots in the distance, but generally, there were very few people who did more than hide and eventually come running towards the promise of safety.

Things largely kept going like that until two pm. That’s when stuff got interesting, as Thomas’ wyverns spotted a freaking military convoy making its way through the jungle, everything short of a tank crunching through the underbrush.

Ok, now was the time to recall Elias.