The next two days were full of movement. Everyone in the upper city was shuffling around, getting themselves settled into their new homes, while the Commanders of the Arks issued day passes to ten percent of the population daily to go up to the surface and go shopping.

The businesses were still just getting started, but there were goods to be had, and the city wasn’t operating on money yet.

Instead, they had an "as needed" policy, which was generally one item per person.

Need new clothes? Go ahead and go to the shop and get an outfit. Hungry? Head to a shop and grab lunch. But no extra meals to take back, with a few compassionate exemptions.

The goal was just to stop people from hoarding more than they could use, and to reduce waste, not to make those waiting back in the Arks suffer. So, those in town all had lunch, and dinner, and brought a snack back from another shop to share with their friends.

That helped spread the load, and the unawakened humans learned very quickly that you simply could not overeat.

Not with these new plants.

The energy level on them was so high that they couldn’t even finish a regular portion, and ended up walking it off then finishing the takeout leftovers.

That made the fried tubers shop the most popular one in town, as everyone wanted to bring them home for a snack. You couldn’t finish more than one or two fries if you weren’t awakened, so they could bring the box home in one of the city’s newly produced cloth reusable shopping bags, and share them among a large crowd.

One in ten, with everyone bringing back fried tubers, meant that there were very few people who were reliant upon nutrient paste and tuber soup that evening.

But it also meant that the new shopkeepers got to test out all their recipes, and see what spice blends everyone liked best.

That level of shopping, nearly twice the surface’s population, would normally be considered a stress test for the shops, but it was becoming their new normal. More shops would open soon, as more people trained skills that would let them do what the System called "Skilled Work", and the shops would fill.

But for now, they were still three quarters empty, and lined up out the doors.

The only ones truly suffering were the workers at the textile mill.

Everyone needed shopping bags, as nobody had them. Most of the Ark residents needed new clothes, as they had often arrived with nothing at all. At best, they had been allowed a backpack, and most were wearing Ark issued jumpsuits, looking more like convicts than refugees.

The look makes them all blend in, though. There are really only two different looks in the entire city, the jumpsuits and the composite armour bodysuits. Tight suits for heroes, loose ones for everyone else.

Casual wear is beginning to spread among the level 0 crowds, as they aren’t going to be on the front lines, and don’t see the need to spend all their time in armour, even though they’ve almost all purchased a set from Kalli, in case something happens inside the city again.

To them, it’s a bit of a shame, spending the points. But it was that or getting regular clothing from the shop to expand their wardrobes, and the armour is simply more practical.

Especially when working the fryer.

The thought of wearing actual body armour to work the fryer or the grill at a fast food stand was more than a little amusing to the residents of Marimgar the first day. But when they realized that they could shift the clothing to their backpack at the end of the day, and leave with perfectly clean clothes, and not smelling nearly as much like work?

Priceless.

The only issue was that the smell of fried tubers and meat stuck in your hair, so no matter how fresh your clothing was, you still desperately needed a shower to not smell like work.

Not that the warehouse workers had it any easier.

Heavy lifting and low ventilation left you with an entirely different scent that was no less urgent to remove after work.

Kalli feared no such things.

The temperature in the Hall of Heroes was perfect, and she was willing to overlook the scent of the chicken coop as long as she remembered to change boots before entering.

But that coop was going to need to be expanded soon.

Her plan of keeping a portion to expand the flock was working well enough that they were becoming crowded, and soon she would have enough chickens to start harvesting some of the plumper ones for the kitchens.

One small chicken coop wasn’t going to change much, not with so many people in the city. But for the heroes who still lived and ate in the Academy area, it would give them a bit of flexibility to the menu at the cafeteria.

There was another chicken farming effort in town, as she recalled.

The request had come in this morning, to renovate one of the warehouses for raising egg laying birds. But she didn’t know how many they actually had, as the stock either had to come from her supplies, or from the dungeons.

None of the other eggs that they got were fertile.

Kalli decided to spend another 10 points and expand her chicken coop, which gave it not only more space but a nice upgrade to the interior, with a heat lamp and fan that would help control the temperature better than the original setup had.

That greatly pleased the rooster.

Then, Kalli decided not to send the portion of the eggs over to the kitchen for the day, and instead put them all in the incubator that the coop came with. It was a pointless addition, as the moment that she rearranged the eggs a chicken came to sit on them, naturally doing the job that the incubator was designed for.

She wasn’t quite large enough for the number of eggs that they had today, even though the chicken monsters were big enough they could have passed for turkeys in the old world.

But that was also a good thing.

When they sent one to the kitchen for processing, it would go much further than a regular sized chicken would.

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