23. Gotham: Dynamite
31.
“You, you, you…” Lewis looked like he was about to faint from anger.
His screams were so loud that patrolling guards knocked on the door to inquire about his whereabouts.
"Mr. Mayor," the conscientious guard asked, "What happened? Are you safe now?"
Lewis glanced at the farmer - if he opened the door at this moment, the guard outside would undoubtedly see a strange man in purple shorts in his office. By then, no matter how many mouths he spoke, he would probably not be able to explain it clearly. Rumors would fly like flies, and the good reputation he had accumulated in more than 20 years as mayor would be destroyed!
"Actually, I don't think I have a good reputation." Aria muttered, earning a glare from others.
"Mr. Lewis?" After receiving no response, the guard raised his voice: "If you don't open the door, I'm coming in!"
The farmer wisely shut up, put his hand across his mouth, and became completely obedient.
The mayor walked to the door, afraid that the guards would actually burst in. He put his hand against the door frame before speaking: "Nothing, I was just scared by the rats. God knows why there are rats here!"
He emphasized the word "rat" as if it really meant something.
After finally fooling the guard, Lewis sighed, turned around and saw Aria still smiling at him, and he immediately became furious.
"Take off that...that thing on you quickly!" How disgraceful!
Aria pretended not to hear anything. Smart players must learn to skip some NPC dialogues.
She pulled out a leek she had picked up on the ground in Smallville earlier and handed it to Lewis.
The mayor's expression froze for a moment, like a robot stuck in a pause for two or three seconds. Finally, he stiffly accepted the gift and said, "That's great. Thank you, AAA Agricultural Products Distributor."
Aria finally felt like she was in the game. After playing so many miscellaneous mods, she had been seeing new plots and new NPCs since she started playing. Everyone was incredibly agile. Now she finally met an old clumsy NPC. The sense of security she felt was not something that could be expressed in a few words.
Seeing that Lewis no longer pursued the matter of purple shorts, the farmer decided to take care of the main matter first.
She broke down her experiences in the sewer into something Lewis could understand, and told it again, talking about the children wearing ill-fitting clothes and living in the sewers and going hungry, and the new mayor of Gotham City was furious.
Lewis: "That's outrageous! Nothing like this has ever happened in our town!"
"That's right."
"What's the use of the welfare institutions here?"
"That's right."
"So, we need you, the wise and brave new mayor, to lead Zuzu City into a brighter future!" The farmer offered a starry eye, trying to provoke Lewis. "Hold a charity dinner to raise some funds for the orphanage, or conduct a thorough investigation into the background of the management of the Gotham Orphanage. For a veteran servant like you who has been through countless battles and dedicated to everyone for over twenty years, that shouldn't be difficult, right?"
Lewis looked embarrassed. He clenched his fists and coughed twice, as if he had gone through a mental struggle, and finally told his concerns to the farmer.
"Little A..."
"Mr. Lewis, I'm listening."
"Gotham is a very complicated place."
Lewis walked over to the glass curtain wall, his hands behind his back, and looked down at the bustling crowd below the City Hall. He said earnestly, "I've only been here a few days, and I already know there are big problems here."
"The crime rate is high, gang fights are endless, and the police here alone are far from enough. I haven't been in the mayor's residence for a few days, and I've been woken up several times by gunfire and explosions at night."
"You know, in our town, it might be a little noisy before two o'clock, but after two o'clock you can definitely sleep soundly."
A trace of guilt flashed across the farmer's face, and Aria nodded, pretending to listen hard.
"I've heard the rumors. The previous mayor died in strange circumstances. I'm worried I'll end up in the same boat..."
"Then don't get close to that window. The view outside is wide and there are tall buildings. It's easy for someone to snipe you."
“…”
Lewis turned back again.
"So after much thought...I think I should have someone I can trust and be reliable to help me solve this problem."
As expected, Aria thought, relying on Mayor Lewis to resolve these issues was basically impossible. It had been like this before when they built the town, and it was the same now when they came to Zuzu City.
Lewis had his back to the office door, so naturally he had no way of noticing a small yellow shadow coming out of his sample book and slipping out through a crack in the door.
Seeing Junimo, the farmer quickly felt relieved - looking at it in a positive way, it was fortunate that Lewis's becoming mayor gave her more gaming experience. She could play two games for the price of one, so she still made a profit.
"No problem," the farmer patted her butt and stood up from the floor of the mayor's office, gladly accepting the task: "You know I'm very willing to help." If Lewis would give out lottery tickets after completing the task, her desire to help others would only burn even brighter.
"But before that, I have a request."
Lewis was very confident and waved his hand: "Tell me, as long as it is within my ability, I will definitely satisfy you!"
Aria put her toolbox and ladder neatly in the mayor's office and smiled, "I think it's okay to just wander around City Hall and get a feel for what's going on here."
“Of course!” Thinking that the AAA agricultural and sideline products distributor would ask him to pay, Lewis quietly wiped the sweat off his face and hurriedly agreed: “From now on, you can come and go in my office as you please. You are my confidant here!”
As soon as Lewis finished the last word, Aria opened the door and slipped out. It didn't look like she was there to visit the city hall, but rather to steal something.
She wanted to see where Junimo wanted to lead her.
…
Junimos come in many colors, and Aria has always distinguished them by color. The little yellow apple walked ahead of her, looking back from time to time to see if she was following. She had no choice but to take big strides to reach it.
Although the Junimos had always avoided the townspeople in previous games, seeing their fearless demeanor now, Aria reasonably suspected they had recently developed some new magic that could render them invisible to other humans.
"Don't you like living in the community anymore?" Following the Junimos forward, the farmer couldn't suppress his desire to chat with the cute little creature. "I didn't see you gathered on the map of the farm, and Zuzu City doesn't seem to be a very livable city."
She reasonably speculated, "So you usually live in the forest, and only come all the way here when you need to offer a sacrifice to me?"
Thinking of the image of Little Apple packing her bags and leaving her hometown, the farmer sounded very sincere: "Isn't it a bit too tiring, baby? Can you send a Junimo embassy to my farm..."
In fact, she felt that this method of sacrifice was a bit troublesome, but if she could really convince the other party, it would be a great thing.
Junimo was walking very fast, his little butt was almost twisted to pieces. Aria didn't get annoyed when no one answered her questions. She was led straight through the entire corridor to the other end of the third floor.
——Standing in front of the men's restroom sign.
...Well, some issues still need to be clarified.
"Be good, although your race may not be able to distinguish the genders of humans."
The farmer, like a parent giving sex education for the first time, scratched his head, trying to find words that would both make sense to the child and convey his meaning accurately: "But I'm a girl, and in our human society, girls use girls' restrooms, and boys use boys' restrooms."
"So it's definitely not possible for you to let me in."
The Junimo squawked anxiously. It jumped onto Aria's head and grabbed a few of her hair like Ratatouille, trying to get her to go to the bathroom.
A small question mark popped up in the farmer's head, but seeing how anxious the dog was, he walked over and knocked on the toilet door, shouting, "Is anyone there?"
She raised her voice: "Cleaning, clean up!"
No one answered.
Perhaps this was the perfect opportunity to get into the men's room—although it sounded strange, Aria believed the Junimo had his own reasons for asking her to do so.
Aria tried pushing the door, but the swing door, which should have been easily opened, did not move at all.
No one? But it's locked from the inside?
Junimos's urging became more urgent. Aria raised her eyebrows and without hesitation, she elbowed him—
Bang!
There was a big hole in the toilet door made of synthetic wood. She reached in and gently hooked her finger to release the restraint, and it seemed that something else fell to the ground.
Aria didn't care where the metallic clang came from. She quickly opened the door and, following Junimo's instructions, successfully discovered something hidden in the inner layer of the broken ceiling.
——A large bag of explosives with a timer, and a handsome man at a loss in the toilet cubicle.
His blue eyes looked like a tranquil lake with a bright moon hanging upside down above it - Aria realized that it was probably the reflection of the bathroom light in his eyes. One can only say that he was so good-looking that the light in any environment shone on him like a soft light with its own atmosphere.
The man looked much taller than Aria, and spoke with a nasal tone that sounded a little aggrieved, which sounded quite pitiful at first.
"I saw someone sneaking towards here, so I followed him out of curiosity. I didn't expect him to lock the bathroom door and run away, leaving me here alone..."
The dynamite had sixty seconds left before detonating. Aria listened to the first half, but found she had no time to continue listening to the chatter of those beautiful, kissable lips. She tried to stuff the dynamite into her backpack like last time, but found it was a large bag of various explosives. Following the backpack's custom of sorting each type of explosive into its own compartment, she had to urgently clean out the contents.
She took out the leeks, green onions, milking bucket and daffodils from the trash can from her backpack and gave them all to the man in front of her.
"This is for you, and this is for you too... Please hold this for me and return it to me later." Aria couldn't help but hand it to the other party and continued to stuff the explosives into her bag.
However, the few grids cleared were still not enough to sort the explosives.
Aria roughly estimated the remaining equivalent. By the time the timer reached zero, the entire floor would be blown to the sky. As the mechanical igniter silently counted down, Aria cast her gaze out the window.
She planned to jump from here.
The handsome man foresaw her intention and frowned secretly. Although he still looked extremely panicked, he unexpectedly offered some constructive advice: "Let's throw this thing out the window. It's work time now, there's no one outside, and I usually do extreme sports, so I should be able to throw it pretty far and make it explode in the air."
As he spoke, he had already reached out to grab the bundle of explosives that Aria had taken down, and his hands were quite strong - but unfortunately Aria didn't trust the arm strength of this man she suddenly met. She snatched the explosives back and held them in her arms, pushed him away, and jumped out of the window without hesitation.
The glass fragments shattered, and she lost a little blood when she fell from the third floor. But it was nothing for the farmer who had been chasing a train in Pelican Town and accidentally ran in front of the train and was knocked unconscious. She used the rolling action to relieve the pressure on her body that might be applied to the explosives, "borrowed" a motorcycle from the street, and drove at full speed towards Adams Wharf.
If only there was a horse flute! Looking at the speedometer that was about to explode, Aria missed her super-fast little black horse more and more - if she could summon Li Bao at any time, she wouldn't have to steal the motorcycle from the city hall.
Bruce Wayne watched the shadow moving farther and farther away. A few seconds later, a muffled explosion was heard at Adams Wharf - it was probably because the other party threw the explosives into the water to avoid as much damage as possible to the cargo ships at the wharf.
Realizing that someone had disrupted his bomb disposal plan, someone on the communication channel chuckled: "Looks like you can't use the excuse of 'being scared by the bomb in City Hall' to escape the new mayor's welcome party tonight."
"I'm not planning on running away, Alfred." Bruce Wayne used a scanner to record all the things the other party had given him. When faced with the milking bucket, he hesitated a little and put that thing last.
"In fact, I'm quite interested in the new mayor."
A person with no background was parachuted into this position when the Gotham mayoral candidates were ready to attack each other, but everyone's memory had no reaction to the legality and compliance of this "airdrop", and even thought it should be so.
Is it magic or something else? What is his purpose? And what is his relationship with this space-powered person?
The locator he had placed on her had never been removed by her, and had witnessed how she moved through the Gotham sewers and arrived at City Hall. Bruce Wayne reasonably suspected that either this person with superpowers was working for her, or that she had pushed someone with no political background into this position, just to control Gotham from a higher position.
"No matter what, I think it's necessary to continue investigating."
…
Aria came back panting on her motorcycle. After she "borrowed" the motorcycle from the city hall, she felt a little embarrassed to go through their main entrance, so she climbed back using various air-conditioning boxes as support points.
The farmer was obviously happy to see the handsome man still there - she thought that she seemed to have been rude just now, and maybe now was a good time to apologize.
But when the farmer saw that the other party's favorability had not increased at all, he fell into deep silence.
Maybe, perhaps, probably, the people in Zuzu City don’t like such worthless things.
————————
Aria: (Thinking of it in the middle of the night) Woo woo woo
I didn’t update yesterday so today’s post is longer (tea) Thank you all for your support, I love you!
Thank you to the little angels who voted for me or provided me with nutrient solution between 2024-07-08 23:57:28 and 2024-07-10 23:59:29~
Thanks to the little angel who cast the mine: Bobcat was shocked 1;
Thanks to the little angels who irrigated the nutrient solution: Verity 10 bottles; Liyedu 1 bottle;
Thank you very much for your support. I will continue to work hard!
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