He whistled.
The elevator once again made little chimes.
He stood there.
Hmm. Hmm.
He stepped into the cold lobby. Some NPCs turned to look at him. "Hey," someone whispered. "Ain't that the hotpot guy?"
Ah'Ming smiled at them, and then walked to the receptionist. He took out a massive box of random snacks, like Latiao and Chicken feet, and handed it to the receptionist. She beamed at him, and then told him to go check out the financial records from the 60s.
The other receptionist, who hadn't been there yesterday, looked very envious of the snacks. Ah'Ming felt bad, so he gave the guy a crate of cookies. He handed over a gold key.
Ah'Ming blinked at it.
"Thanks?"
The receptionists both turned back to their computers, and ignored him. Wow, the system had really harsh contracts.
The other players were once again envious.
Ah'Ming, following the useful advice, ended up going to the library. It was an evil, smelly place, full of evil books.
Disgusting.
Still though, Ah'Ming went around until he could see books with financial records. He opened the book, and paused when he couldn't read the writing. He gazed at the book, and asked the system "there's a shop, right? Can I buy skills from the shop?"
The system, helpful as ever, pulls up the right panels. The prices... are sky high.
"FOUR THOUSAND FOR A SINGLE READING SKILL? POINTS?!"
He closed the tab, traumatised for life.
Hmm.
Ah'Ming searched around a library, and found three players. It was easy to tell that they were players, because they didn't have a certain aura. One was wearing a full suit of armour, and the other two were like little gremlins.
He picked up a gremlin, and led the other two back to the section he was in. The books used the same numbering system, but different letters. Or characters.
"Here, read this."
He gave them a bunch of books.
They looked at him, all confused, and then got a system notification. Ah'Ming couldn't see their panels, but it was kind of obvious from how their pupils were moving.
They smiled at him.
"Okay mister! So, this bit says that there was like, a massive influx of money in the 1960s, but then after that there were no more town taxes. That's basically it!" Came from one of the little gremlins. It was another kid with red hair, but this one had alchemy bottles instead of flamethrowers.
The system piped up:
|Broadcaster has found all useful clues within this room! Keep working hard!
Ah'Ming didn't trust it.
Suspicious.
He started knocking on every door, every wall and all the floors once more. They were all solid. Most of them, at least; A few walls were hollow, but they all lead to empty rooms. All were dusty, but without clues inside.
Still, Ah'Ming thought it was suspicious.
Maybe... maybe they were the clues?
He envisioned a bird's eye view of the library, with all of the hollow rooms pointed out. It didn't really look like anything, though. Maybe it was something else in the other language? He drew a copy of it, and made a note to ask someone about it later.
He left the room.
The bad news was: He didn't find anything else for the rest of the day
The good news was: He did end up meeting Huipao in the end.
They finally added each other through the system, and agreed to start clearing instances together. By then, it was about 3pm, so they agreed to do just one short one: The laundromat.
Ah'Ming didn't know why Bianheng picked it, but he went along anyways. What could possibly be dangerous about a laundromat?
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So, it turns out that laundromats can indeed be dangerous.
Who would have thought?
The instance hadn't been very scary, but it had involved a lot of parkour. It was once again split into a two-world based instance, with the outer being half of the team working as laundromat employees, while the others were miniature and had to survive through a parkour around a haunted version of the place.
The customers were once again paper people. It was a wet dream for origami enthusiasts.
Whatever employees did would affect the haunted world, and the levers that the mini team pulled would also affect the washing machines in the real world. The main point of the miniature people was fixing broken machines. They didn't know which were broken, so they had to rely heavily on the system message tool.
Afterwards, Ah'Ming glared at Huipao.
"Seriously?" He demanded. "What happened to the easy substory, not much effort?"
He'd spent the entire time running, and fixing things. The fixing things was the hardest part for him, especially considering that he spent most of his time destroying things instead. The items that he'd gotten were all junk too! More paper scraps, random bits of detergent, newspaper cuttings, tide pods. A bunch of junk.
Huipao shrugged. "None of us are dead or injured. I say that counts as a great instance!"
Ah'Ming glared at him.
Bianheng tried to make peace. He opened his mouth to mediate.... and shut it the moment Ah'Ming sent him a glare.
Zhaoing snickered.
Huipao nearly had tears in his eyes.
The quadrio (I don't know what groups of 4 are called I'm sorry) looked extremely comical, especially considering the fact that the other players nearby were collapsed on the floor, doused in healing potions.
Ah'Ming looked at them, and questioned the members of the bladebladedarklance(?) guild.
"Where can I get magic potions?" He asked.
Huipao shrugged. "It's out of your price range, man. Plus, you heal fast enough that you don't need them anyways."
"Fine."
When they exited the instance this time, they were stopped by these weird shadowy figures. "Halt. We command you to halt."
Bianheng once again stepped in to mediate.
"Sorry, what's going on here?" He asked.
Other players were gathering around, wondering what was happening.
"One Broadcaster has been detected destroying resort property. Hand him over, and the rest of you can go peacefully."
Ah'Ming looked away, and whistled guiltily.
"Sorry, we can't do that. He's a temporary teammate of ours, you see." Bianheng held out his hands in a -what-can-you-do pose.
"Prepare to die."
That was the only warning that the group got, before the shadowy guards erupted into massive shadowy dog things. Or maybe wolves? Whichever one seems cooler in your head anyways.
It was the perfect scene for ominous music, until Ah'Ming beat them all up.
They were all dog-piled (get it?) in the middle of the hallway. ALl but one were beaten to the point of unconsciousness.
"Sorry, sir :< " it whimpered.
Ah'Ming smacked it again.
"Okay, what's the plot of the main instance?" He interrogated.
The dog thing opened its mouth to say something, but no words came out. Ah'Ming glared at the air. "Hey! I beat them fair and square! I deserve a reward!"
The system pondered for a moment, then allowed the dog to say some stuff. "The, the Xie family moved in and built this resort! That's all that I can say!"
Ah'Ming tilted his head, and considered this. Hmm. It seems that this is all that he's going to get. Oh well.
He knocked the last dog thing out, and then returned to the blackbladescythe(?) guild's side.
They blinked at him, and accepted that he was now a hooligan.
"So," announced Huipao. "Wanna come get dinner with us?"
What a great idea!