About a week after I escaped from prison, I was flying over the forest, looking for good spots to place towers, when I noticed a huge mass of people moving in my general direction. I’m not the smartest cutie in the world or anything, but I figured there weren’t many things they could be here for. So I called Team Apple together, and we had a meeting.
“They’re sending an army after you? The insolence!”
Yeah, Ringo was pretty upset, and it sounded like the rest of the group wasn’t super happy about it either.
“Maybe the troops are there to help deal with the monsters, and they just want to talk things over,” I suggested. “Those monsters are really nasty, right?”
“Your Majesty, it would be lovely if that were the case, but I sincerely doubt it,” Mela said. I could see her point, but I still wanted to be optimistic.
“Okay, here’s what we’ll do,” I decided. “I’m gonna use whatever points we have saved up to connect some towers together and make them a nice, safe passage. That way, if they’re here to talk, we can do that. Before we let them into the main tower, I’ll have a huge room filled with Sprigumdrops. We’ll take advantage of their numbers and have a massive battle. If they’re only here to fight, they’ll retreat after they take a certain number of losses. If they’re willing to talk, they should stay and fight them.”
“How does that work?” Pomme asked.
“Good question, Pomme. You see, humans tend to believe that other people think like they do, so if they’re here to kill us, they’ll assume we want to kill them. If they’re only here to talk, they’ll think we won’t hurt them too badly.”
“That sounds really stupid,” said Pomme. But she was about the only minion I had who was ever so blunt with me. Meanwhile, Ringo was more of a blind loyalist.
“Pomme!” he exclaimed indignantly. “Don’t disrespect Her Majesty!”
“It’s okay, Ringo. I asked you all here to talk this over with you and gather your opinions. Besides, I’m not planning to leave myself defenseless. I’ve been meaning to get you all some better gear for a while, and I should have the points to upgrade the outfitter.”
So I finally got to give Team Apple the makeover I wanted. Normally, at around level ten Sprigoblin Irregulars upgraded to Faegoblin Irregulars and started to diversify their weapons a bit. They also became more slender. Team Apple pretty much already looked like that, so I didn’t know what would happen once I boosted their levels. So, I tried it out. I raised them to level ten, and boom: Their class changed to “Fairy Queen’s Royal Guard” and they all got a little bit taller. I was now really short in comparison. These new forms also came with some serious muscle. Even the girls were ripped. Pomme had abs, a whole eight pack of them. The definition was crazy.
So instead of becoming Faegoblin Irregulars, they became royal guards... I wonder how their paths would diverge if I leveled them up even higher.
Once I’d finished my upgrades, we all went to the outfitter, and they each picked out some new gear.
Since I’d upgraded the mine and outfitter as much as I could while I was away, Hammer was able to produce some seriously awesome gear for Team Apple. They looked so cool in their black metal armor. Apparently it was made of a material called Sprigiron, and it had magical properties.
Ringo was using a bigger sword now. To a human, I suppose it would only be a broadsword, but it was almost as long as Ringo was, so to him it was more like a great sword. Before you say, “Such a big sword wouldn’t work if you drew it from the back,” calm down. The scabbard here was special. Most of the back side of it was open, and once the sword was just a little bit out, it was easy to pull the rest free. I asked Hammer how it didn’t just fall out while he was moving around, and apparently there were these little spikes at the top that held the guard in place. So it wasn’t going to come loose unless he was turned upside-down.
Anyway, Pomme got herself a spear and a sturdy shield, and I put her hair in a side-pony. The blade of her spear was made of Sprigiron, while the shaft was made of ironwood, the same material Hammer and Herc were made of. Her shield was a composite of those two materials as well. Mela was still rocking a regular ponytail, and she got a short sword and round shield. Manzana got a huge battleaxe along with some spiky armor that was a lot like Ringo’s. After their makeover, the two boys looked so macho.
Even though Manzana didn’t really talk a lot, from observing the way they were behaving around each other, I got the notion that he and Pomme might be romantically interested in each other...
“How do I look?” she would ask him, cheeks full of maidenly blush, as she tried on each new piece of armor. Her eyes were clearly looking for his approval.
For his part, Manzana just smiled and nodded most of the time, but maybe that was part of what she liked. She blushed even more as he nodded at each aspect of her new look.
In contrast, Ringo was often loud and boisterous, and really liked to show off. Especially to me. He was like a kid who wanted his mother to put a picture he drew in crayon on the fridge with a magnet.
Anyway, once Team Apple had their new gear, I started working on the pathway to the main tower. It wasn’t really difficult. At first I just concentrated on making a big, long tunnel, but then I started to think about how the animals in the area might not be able to get around it easily. I ended up having it ramp upward, almost like a bridge, and then come back down once it got to the area in front of the main tower. The incline was very subtle; I knew they had carts with them, and didn’t want to overburden their animals. I just thought of it as making everything wheelchair accessible, but much wider, and that seemed to work out. I also added washrooms, drinking fountains, and places to stop and rest along the way. Moving a large group of people always took longer than making the same trip by yourself.
You might be wondering how all of that worked without indoor plumbing. Fortunately, it wasn’t really all that difficult to set up. First of all, when I added a water feature, such as a sink or a fountain, the root structure of my tower would connect to various underground waterways. From there, the water was filtered by passing through the tower’s internal structure, and came out nice and clean on the other end. As for any waste, liquid waste was filtered again and converted into nutrients for the tower itself, while the truly unusual parts would be deposited harmlessly beneath the tower to replace soil drained of nutrients. At least, that’s what the help section said when I looked it up!
I didn’t really have the points or the space to do anything too fancy with it, but the safe road to the tower was completed pretty quickly. Once that was out of the way, I needed to create a place for the soldiers to duke it out with some monsters. After all, if I wanted to give them some cool stuff, they needed to slay monsters worth an appropriate amount of points. So I linked about twenty or so towers together and raised them all up a floor, then gave the whole thing a mostly open floor plan. Since they were nice and cheap, I filled the area with Sprigumdrops. Without the memory limitations of the game, I was literally able to spawn thousands of them. Looking to maximize the points I gained, I kept about half of them at level one, thirty percent at level two, ten percent at level three, five percent at level four, three percent at level five, one percent at level six, and half a percent each of levels seven and eight. I was worried that the higher-level ones would be too tough, but I wanted to test how “strength in numbers” played out here—especially since you couldn’t have a literal army invade your tower all at once in the game.
As for rewards, I still wasn’t into the idea of weapons as treasure, so I arranged for another item instead. In the game, “Fairy’s Magic Bag” increased your item carrying capacity by ten spaces, but each of those spaces could hold an infinite quantity of a single item. I was really curious to see how they worked in this world. It would be a bummer if they worked like a normal bag, but if they were able to hold way more than it looked like they could, I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about setting potions as rewards in other chests. Plus, if they worked close to the way they did in the game, they wouldn’t be heavy no matter what was inside of them.
I created twelve bedrooms in the area past the battle arena, and put a chest in each one containing a single magic bag. The idea was that only the most important people in the army would get to use the rooms, so they would end up with the bags. I also added a wide area where the rest of the troops could take a break, complete with a healing fountain. You saw things like that in games sometimes—a seemingly ordinary fountain, but when you drank from it, your health was restored. This worked similarly to a normal fountain, plumbing-wise, but the water was imbued with healing properties just before it emerged from the spout.
Beyond the wide room was the main tower, which was now several ten-story-tall dungeons joined together. The facilities on the ground floor there were top-notch, and these guys would get to enjoy them as long as they played nice.
As it turned out, I could make just about anything if I had enough points. Even modern conveniences from my old life could be recreated to an extent using magic. The main reason there were so many options was that I could literally make almost anything I’d ever seen before, even if I didn’t fully understand how it worked. Thanks to that, the kitchen had some very modern looking appliances: a blender, mixer, juicer, grinder, coffee maker, dishwasher, burners—even a magical oven. I swear, I didn’t only load up the kitchen with cool stuff because I had a major crush on the chef. It was purely out of a selfish desire to eat things closer to what I ate back in my first life.