Chapter 8

AE 312.4.04.

The Williams family was in the middle of moving. After the incident with the kids a few weeks ago the decision was quite easy to make.

They were moving to a small town named Ambolt. It was relatively close to the capital so Anthony and James didn't have to travel a lot and while it wasn't the most secure of places it was far better than most of the surrounding cities.

The place was recommended to Anthony in the past by multiple co-workers who had enough of life in the big city and wanted some peace and quiet.

The kids were helping out with the procedures, packing up and taking things to the moving truck. They found it quite fun, although for Peter it had to be cut short.

[Warning: You have been infected with Influenza Type G]

[Achievement unlocked: Get sick.]

[Reward: END +0.05, STA +0.05]

This was bound to happen eventually, but it should have happened years ago. In the first few days there weren't many problems but after a while it got so bad that Peter ended up activating energy conservation just to make it go away faster.

Eventually Sarah caught it as well but she, predictably, handled it a lot better. The only serious symptom she showed was her skin getting unusually dry.

Peter's only joy in this situation came from the fact that nights were extremely long around this time of year, making him recover by the time they finished moving to the new place.

The new house was nothing too extravagant. It was a two floor building with a decently sized yard around it, located at the edge of the town. Unlike their old home, this one was chosen with four people in mind so everyone got their own room.

Anthony allowed the two kids to go outside during the day. This decision was made because of the relative safety of the surroundings and because the two's condition seemed to be improving in spite of their recent illness. Making him convinced that the institute's treatment worsened the children's problems. He was indeed right about that, although for the wrong reason.

The first thing Peter did while exploring the town was checking around shops and looking at their prices, hoping to figure out how much money they had to spend.

They got 40 Universal Currency for the bounty, or UC for short. This currency was given terrible exchange rates by almost everybody, it's main advantage was that it was, well, universal. All bounties had to be paid in this due to the international nature of the system.

After looking around for a while, Peter came to the realization that they really didn't get much. A standard meal packet cost about 5 UC and a bag of treated apples was 12 or more, depending on the type.

A while later the two came to the conclusion that there were a lot less interesting things to. There were a few new things like a squirrel that was flattened by a car, which Sarah seemed to be drawn towards, so much so that Peter had to drag her away so they could get home before sunset.

But before Peter was successful in removing her from the corpse, she managed to pocket one of its broken claws, which she ended up storing in her new nightstand's drawer.

A few days later James gave the two of them their own phones. They were older models, ones that still had glass in them, but they were fairly durable and more importantly, cheap enough so he could buy them with his allowance.

Sarah, while enthusiastic, wasn't really sure what to do with it. James explained to her that he bought these for them so they could call home if they got into trouble, that's why his and Anthony's number were already saved on them.

Peter was similarly confused about the phone until he discovered that it had internet access and along with that, access to the public list of bounties. He really wanted to make use of it as soon as possible, mostly to get money so he doesn't feel like a leech, but also because he wanted to use Absorb more and bounty hunting gave him the perfect excuse.

Obviously there were multiple problems with doing that, least of which was him being too weak for it. With the way things were, Anthony would immediately find out what he was doing if he planned on getting money for his troubles.

To effectively start his bounty hunting career he would need his own bank account and after that was done, he still needed actual targets to hunt.

So the plan was made, Peter would find a bank as soon as he could get to one alone and then try to hide his activities as much as possible.