DakotaKrout

CWD: OE ~ Thirty-One

Nacho found himself overlooking a kitchen version of the Grand Canyon. He and Brie had emerged onto a wooden shelf that spanned the entire upper wall of the gargantuan room. The shelf held various knick-knacks, plates, an odd spoon collection, and some picture frames that were too far away for the actual pictures to be visible.

The floor, more than a mile below, appeared to be cracked yellow linoleum. To the left sat a little kitchen table and chairs next to an unmarked door. That likel...

CWD: OE ~ Thirty

Two hours into their run, even Brie was showing signs of mentally wearing down. As Nacho tried to gauge the distance they still needed to cross, he felt his heart drop. He could still see the Pantry door rising up in the distance behind them. There was nothing but an open hallway stretching in front of them. At this rate, they might walk two days and still not reach the next room.

Brie screeched to a stop, Mr. Lacrosse Stick appearing in her hands. Taye pulled out his bow, prep...

CWD: OE ~ Twenty-Nine

Welcome to the Pantry, and to Active Combat! You’ll have to tell your people the rules after this session of Active Combat, if you survive it. No Store. No Regens.

No eating!

Happily for Nacho and his team, they had the benefit of having just eaten, and he’d put all of his Stat bonuses into Fitness. The cook raised his skillet shield just as Arriod’s ghostly blade hurtled across the cavern, only to ram into his shield and rend his ...

CWD: OE ~ Twenty-Eight

Nacho ignored the blinding light of the portal as he scrambled over to Jennifer. He slid to her side and was relieved to find that she was still breathing. He helped her sit up, noticing a vial of lime-green liquid still clutched in her hand. It must have been the Missile Margarita she'd been attempting to create. “What happened?”

Jennifer’s eyes fluttered open, and she looked around deliriously. “I’m so hungry, thirsty, and everything in between.”

“How about some bi...

Reverting!

Hi all, at the start of March there was a small change to new chapters that I find hasn't worked well. The software really can't seem to handle it, so I'm reverting it to where we were last month. Should be fully fixed by Wednesday!

CWD: OE ~ Twenty-Seven

Nacho helped Jennifer get her mobile brewery set up and started a fire, which was easy because the wood was dry and dead. He was deeply missing his own mobile kitchen, and he tossed a glare in Reuben's direction each time he thought about it. Being so far away from the government buildings and their bioluminescent light, the fires were necessary for both peace of mind and security, but unfortunately, all the flickering light might have been the reason the monsters came in full force.

Si...

CWD: OE ~ Twenty-Six

Brie interrupted the Archer before he could go any further. “Is everyone in the Breakfast Club okay?”

“Yes, for now.” Taye swallowed and gestured back the way he had come. “We jailbroke Kristie, then ran for the entrance to the Welcome Dungeon. We had to kill… a lot of CrossHumans. It was… we were killing actual people, and we earned a lot of credits for it. But I hated it. I hated it so much. They were going to eat us!”

At that, his stra...

CWD: OE ~ Twenty-Five

“This is awesome.” Jennifer focused on her screen, then spent credits like a lake being evaporated with a single flash of light. She went from level eleven to level eighteen for the princely sum of two million, one hundred thirteen thousand, eight hundred credits. Since she wasn’t crossing Tiers, it was a much faster process. She was clearly happy with the results, as she was smiling even while wiping sweat off her face. “Yes! Much more Mana. Much more Health. My Fitness is u...

CWD: OE ~ Twenty-Four

As they made their way down the stairs, Reuben explained that his new Skill had cost him seven thousand and five hundred credits, and Brie paid the same. Jennifer had paid twenty thousand credits for her new Skill, proving to Nacho that Satiation Players' Skills were considered more potent.

Exiting the stairwell, they found themselves in the entrance to a room that could have easily been the Internal Revenue Service’s main lobby, or any standard DMV. Nacho carefully ran his eyes over ...

CWD: OE ~ Twenty-Three

Welcome, Cookie, to the Skillz Box! Not to be confused with the Skillz Cube, which you had to move to get here. Fun fact: this room is also cube-shaped, and it contains a variety of Skillz, so it’s kind of like a Skillz Cube as well. Anyway, would you like to go over what you can already do?

Yes / No

From the other room, he heard Brie yell, “I’m not reviewing my Skills. I know what I can already do. I’m just going to cut to the chase.”

“Same!”...

CWD: OE ~ Twenty-Two

Nacho hurried over to the iron cube, trying to glean as much information about it as possible. It wasn’t flat on the ground; instead one tip was set into the floor, with the opposite corner pointing at the ceiling.

Dealing with the stress of the situation in his own way, Reuben waxed eloquent about drinks. “I would’ve loved that soda you made even if it had been fruit punch or grape or lime, but you really knocked it out of the park with the cream soda. If you can do root beer, or...

CWD: OE ~ Twenty-One

They fought their way down several additional levels of the fry pit dungeon cells. On the third floor, they started encountering ‘Extra Crispy Prisoners’. Those weren’t lightly breaded, instead having layer upon layer of batter that provided them with decently thick armor.

The new batch of fried monsters had fifty Health. They were also exponentially faster than the earlier versions, and their chains were able to deal damage through the humans’ mana barriers. Each ECP hit for a ...

CWD: OE ~ Twenty

Nacho watched nervously as Jennifer choked down her first real sample of his cooking. For some reason, the fact that she had eaten a peanut butter ball first made it even worse for her when she tried to bite down on the fried millet circle. The cook could only wince as her expression went from excited, to confused, to grim and determined.

“I guess I now understand why you all called it the ‘donut disaster’.” She eyed the tube of strawberry life-hack yogurt suspiciously ...

CWD: OE ~ Nineteen

Basic needs covered and tension broken, the group started heading slowly down the stones of the circular staircase. At first glance, the steps looked like regular stone rectangles, until Nacho noticed that the small platforms were actually a combination of triangles and circles that fit together well, but not perfectly. After descending down half a dozen of the unusual steps, Jennifer was the one that finally voiced her concerns. “Do the words ‘non-Euclidean geometry’ mean anything to y...

CWD: OE ~ Eighteen!

Nacho paused in hesitant contemplation under the blue sunshine of this other world as rivers of orange pollen, sweet and fragrant, filled the air. He didn’t know how he was going to get himself and his friends through the huge portcullis of the CruxTerran castle. There was clearly a welcome sign above the gate, but so far, nothing about this place looked very welcoming.

Surprisingly, as the party approached, the bars of the portcullis lifted with the sound of chiming steel chains and ...

CWD: OE ~ Seventeen!

Nacho led the way through the blazing forest, following the chemical stink to the CrossWorld Portal. Before long, they managed to find a road relatively clear of flames, though they had quickly learned that the ash and deadly fumes were more of a problem.

The forest fire had already burned through the trees around the Portal, so by the time they reached the source of the nauseating smell, they didn’t have to worry about hidden sentries. They even gained the unexpected luxury of being ...

Whoops, in your favor.

Due to a miscommunication error this morning, everyone got an extra week of content today. :P Happy end of the month!

CWD: OE ~ Sixteen

Firefly Potstickers danced overhead, lighting up the room as Nacho and his friends gaped at the ruins of a See’s Candy store. Shattered glass from ravaged display cases crunched beneath their feet as they eased across the cracked floor tiles, highlighting the fact that all of the candy was gone. Yet wrappers, boxes, and other packaging littered nearly every surface. The place had clearly been ransacked, even though the sweet, lingering scent of candy remained. Two oversized wooden doors off...

CWD: OE ~ Fifteen

Nacho still had plenty of health, so he assumed that the fact they were still in Active Combat wasn’t a big deal. He and Jennifer had already started down the path in the hopes of quickly reaching the strange dungeon his people had tried to explore.

The Satiation duo skidded to a halt and ran back to help Brie, who was currently facing off against the six undead CrossHuman soldiers that Nacho had seen escorting Nibbles. They still wore the cheap Juxtaposition helmets and sunglasses, s...

CWD: OE ~ Fourteen

Nacho darted along the path without being seen. Brie and Reuben were about two hundred yards away, and he raced up to them so noiselessly that he needed to avoid a reactionary blow from Brie when she finally noticed him. Motioning them to the side, they found three trees close together with enough foliage to hide among.

“Where’s my pack?” Nacho looked around for the mobile kitchen. The looks of incredulousness on their faces told him everything that he needed to know.

Reuben...

Meet Jennifer Ales!

She's a new character that will be with us until the end of the series!

CWD: OE ~ Thirteen

Nacho hid in a thicket of bushes and watched as the woman worked. He couldn’t believe it. He’d found another Satiation Player, and it wasn’t a hateful hermit who drank too much of his own hooch?

Or could this be… Nibbles? The person even the contemptible System seemed to speak deferentially toward? Nacho had heard of the Necromancer during both this version of the starter World and in his Probability Vision. Most of the gossip described him as a tall, very thin man with a unique...

CWD: OE ~ Twelve

Nacho threw another log on the fire, hoping that having extra heat in the air would let his skin stretch with less tearing or pain as his muscles writhed.

The hard oak rapidly perfumed the cabin, along with the sweet smell of Reuben’s root beer burps, as the man himself waxed eloquent. “I guess it’s fair that spending credits on small steps isn’t as exciting as getting those big, chunky upgrades. But those days are gone, unless we start earning and spending in the millions.” 2023-02-24 12:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post

CWD: OE ~ Eleven

They moved away from the guild as darkness settled over the land, following the *zip* and *snap* of his flickering Fireflies. He was down to eight little potstickers to light their way, and traveling at night in the Juxtaposition was a dangerous proposition. Beyond the standard threat of simply not seeing an ambush coming in, or stumbling into a dangerous terrain feature, there were also high-Tier creatures that came out of dungeons at night to snack on unsuspecting Players....

CWD: OE ~ Ten

Nacho had been cleaning for hours after this morning’s Great Donut Disaster. The Patrons had been right to warn him about the dangers of gluten-free cooking, and he was starting to understand the logic that Reuben used to explain what he had been missing. The cook muttered that advice softly to himself, “If the warning seems vague and throwaway, it’s deadly. If it’s over the top, they’re hiding a delicious secret.”

The problem was twofold. When it came to making the...

CWD: OE ~ Nine

The cook read through the latest message, knowing for a fact that he was going to buy the upgrade.

Okay, Cook, it seems you have fallen in love with this little hammer of worthlessness, so we’ll give you a break. Upgrade it to Tier 1 for 5,000 credits. Not only will you double the flour produced with each strike, not unlike your HungryCry Knives, but the flour you make will be reinforced with valuable nutrients and minerals. That’s right, the grain will be armo...