It wasn't every day that Bagel helped a fellow cat set up a niche coffee shop. It was a day though.

He hadn't expected the cart. But it had been an idea. For his part he supported it.

"We got the coffee machine from a different closed shop. The cart... Khaleesi helped us build it."

"With the amount of anime characters on it, I would think so."

There was a lawsuit threatening amount of anime waifus on the cart. Bagel had no idea where Copernicus had even gotten them. He just had one overarching worry.

"Where are you going to get water from? That coffee maker is good for what... 100 cups?" Bagel could have asked Janet but he was instead going by the amount of cups. There were a lot but he carried that particular item. In fact basically everything except for the cart had come from his stock.

"I was hoping that..."

"Fine. But who is going to stock it then? Who is going to actually run it? Someone that is taking credits? That has to be a deck bearer. I'm busy running this shop and..." Bagel looked over his shoulder. "We've got our own coffee machine. If you're trying to compete with me...?"

"I'm not trying to compete with you, Bagel. I'm just trying to get more credits flowing to the safe zone. Right now the four boroughs are trying to hold their ground as the enemies keep getting more difficult. There's some money to be made in between what they're making out there... and what's actually happening in here."

Bagel sighed. "Are you trying to build morale? There's a few humans in the guild that also do these kind of things."

Copernicus nodded. He clearly wanted this to sound like some grand plan, but it was sounding less and less like a plan and more like a cats daydream.

"How long did it take you to come up with this plan?" Bagel said.

"Two days. I ran it by a few council members."

Bagel had reservations, a whole delivery truck full of them, but he wasn't going to stop the cat from doing whatever it was he wanted to do. No one could stop a determined cat, least of all, another cat.

Copernicus brought out his companion mob and gathered up a few things for his cart. The eyes alone made it worth looking at and he was sure that Khaleesi would say something, if not Raul. He had never seen so many cartoon women in one place not in a television screen.

"All I ever wanted was a damn coffee cart with shounen women on the side," Raul said as he entered. "I swear that that's got to be the realest thing I've seen all day."

"It got a chuckle out of me," Bagel said. "Jellyside Layer is funding it."

Raul walked to the door. "Ah yeah-I see the butler mob dude."

"It's got to be something weird when the cats... He knows what that looks like right?"

Bagel watched through the door and Copernicus tried to get his valet to move the cart around. It was large and unwieldy; the perfect size to be pulled by a car.

"Do I need to hide my sister from him? No he's..."

"He's not like me."

"I feel like he needs some help but...he already has a line of people. He definitely needs a sign."

"Let him cook. Cat selling coffee? Sounds like a battle barista. I don't know what else he is doing, but he needs to do something. He's basically never leaving the house. I understand he has a different deck."

A line of humans queued up to grab coffee. It was only about five of them, but still perhaps Bagel needed to advertise himself better? Or maybe it was a human thing. They would drop what they were doing for the new thing.

"Do I need to keep making gimmicks like this?"

"Bagel, you're basically the only game in town. I don't know how the other neighborhoods are doing it, but I've been talking to some of my friends and... it's bad out there. People are really hungry. The faster we can get these were-houses connected up, the faster we can get some semblance of normalcy. There's no other way that we're going to get back to anything."

Not only was it no way for them to get back to anything, Bagel wasn't sure that he wanted to get back to whatever Raul wanted. That wasn't a world that he'd existed in and even though he'd been aware of it at some level, he couldn't affect it the way he could. Now. Now? The world relied on him.

He felt powerful. He wanted to protect people. But most importantly, he wanted to protect his people first and then protect all the other people that we're trying to muscle in on his territory.

"Sorry about that."

Bagel had been staring off into the distance. "I understand. This has been a trying time for all of us. I'm just glad that I could help your family in their hour of need. We might not be able to get back to where things were but..."

"Bagel, have done more than enough. Keep doing what you're doing."

Stolen story; please report.

Bagel's stomach felt warm as if somebody tried to pet him and succeeded. He let out a little contented purr.

It felt like enough. The block that he was working buying up was clear of enemies and he just needed to one by one by the buildings. But it was difficult to keep them clear so he kept sending people in to clear more mobs and they would get money which she would then give to him which let him... Get more people on payroll.

Already, Gladys had five people underneath her.

"I think that's a good idea. It would be a shame if I quit now," he said. "That reminds me. Have we seen any NYPD officers today? Specifically someone who is carrying funds for the TSA?"

Raul shook his head. "Let me pop out real quick and I'll see if there's anyone there."

Sergeant Parvo had been really good about delivering the taxes that the city collected. There really wasn't any other way to use money in such quantities. Them bring it to him simplified it. Sergeant Parvo had gone on about how they required about four people to collect it and then each one had to pass it on through a series of intermediaries to make sure that it finally got there. In fact, Parvo wasn't the only person that was authorized to make the final payment. Three other sergeants were but all of them were busy collecting the fees.

Perhaps it was his turn to start taking in collection fees. That would definitely fill his coffers that much faster.

Because at the end of the day it really was their money and it was their problem. The city went down. His part of the city was now resilient. And if they kept feeding him correctly with all the credits they got, he would be able to affect other parts of the city. But until then, they couldn't really say that they were doing all they could.

They obviously wanted to say something like that, The optics of them not being able to fully control the city was bad. It was especially bad after Staten Island had been finally evacuated and overrun with mobs. So his heart went out to the NYPD but he ran a business; or rather several shell companies that operated his businesses now.

If you could incorporate one of his companies in the Caribbean, he would have but since the system let him just do everything off the books, he was taking advantage of that. No all the big transactions are on the books. It showed exactly what he wanted them to see which was the numbers prior to him selecting his level fifty perk.

Raul came back in smiling.

"The sergeant will be here soon. Now what's on the mind of the block's handsomest cat?"

Bagel flicked his tail. He didn't want to vent about copernicus's. There was scheme that was almost certainly just into failure. He didn't want to talk about Khaleesi 's insistence that she needed more money for drones. He didn't even want to talk about how guild recruit would have been just slow causing him to make less starter decks. That had a knock on effect of him making less money because people didn't owe him anything.

But that wasn't really something that he wanted to trouble Raul with. Let the boy think whatever he wanted; Bagel was physically fine.

"I haven't seen Meatball around during the day," Raul said. "Has she been doing alright?"

"I haven't seen her much either. That's odd. I would have thought you'd have a lot to say about that..."

Bagel indicated the coffee cart with his tail. Because of course that would make more sense to the human. Meatball hated not having thumbs but she was happy to spend her days fighting mobs. It was more like a moving office job except sometimes the job made you go into a dungeon.

"She's been slammed."

"She can still drop by for dinner though."

"The dungeons are a bit more advanced than that were. We need to figure out how to make her take time off."

"I'm open to whatever you think will actually work."

Raul shook his head. "My mom is on that. She thinks that we can get her after the next Jellyside Layer meeting. One tomorrow, right?"

They were interrupted by The honking horns of several cars.

"Earth is healing," Raul said. " I cannot believe I missed that."

The honking now became insistent. Bagel and Raul both looked at each other and then walked to the door.

Someone was laying on a horn. Raul let Bagel get on top of his shoulders as they left. He opened the door. The honking was coming from the other side of the fence, uptown on second avenue.

"Do you want to investigate that?" Bagel said.

The horn was loud and they kept moving.

"Probably some asshole thinking we can take down the fences and..."

"Holy shit."

A citybus was stuck behind the wall. A packed city bus full of people.

"Well this ought to be good for business."

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