341 Far Future, Ch. 51 – Second Generation, Part Three (1/2)
The mega-city sprawled out before them, with a tiny dot for my holdings, and literally thousands of other factions at work throughout the city, many of them in shades from the bottom third of the Alignment grid.
Naturally it also swiveled in 3d and displayed territories of the Undergangs and major players to the extent I knew.
I zoomed in, and in, and in again, and finally my personal holdings were a decent part of the display.
I briefly went through my blok holdings, factories and other assets, revenue streams, layouts, demands on time, expansion constraints, and what links I had, to who and what. They all had no problem filing it all away, as they all had a 22 Int, human supra-genius, and a Visual File to match.
”Biggest bottleneck?” I asked rhetorically as the view shrank off to the side.
”MARKED!” they all answered in knowing unison.
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”Three minutes a person.” I looked out over all of them. ”Your Grandmother gamed the system here. Ah, yes, she did!” My daughters all whooped in appreciation. ”She didn't want to just drop a Karmic Seven out of nowhere, even a Null, so she made sure that we all came in no higher than a Three... BUT, we have a +7 AB, both ranged and melee. That also means that our elective Skill Point limit is...”
”SEVEN!” they all whooped.
”And I'm hoping I just heard you hit Scout Levels and grab seven Ranks in Tattoo Artist so you can start applying Marks that can key to my own... and once you hit Eight, can be reassigned to yours.”
Their eyes all got that flicker of momentary attention elsewhere, and then they all flinched the same way.
”Yes, that's right, that is the last Level you will ever take. From now on, everything has to be bought piecemeal. Every point of Health and Soak, every PP, every Slot of Null Valences, every Stat advance, every increase in special ability. Let me tell you, only being able to grab one point of energy resistance a day is VERY annoying!” They all did the math and cringed. Better than half a year to complete our immunities alone... wait, that was forty days between early Rantha levels, minimum? Oh, yes...
”And money.” I held up a Belt in my hand. ”Guess how many Gravity Belts I have?”
”Ewww!” they all winced. They looked around, did the math on just how much money they were going to need to all get equipped...
”I've got reams of price lists in your Bands, and you can naturally go bouncing around and get some lists drawn up in the Boole and the Quanta, the local internets. I can tell you right now that while my Charisma mind-track is basically running my Markspace, my Wisdom mind-track is known as a terrifyingly skilled gambler online, and when not gaming, is endlessly trawling for useful stuff and working with my Goldilocks crew to take advantage of it.
”My Intellect tracks, now, are all over the place. I've got multiple lines of research going on, resource management and coordination, security precautions and faction monitoring, programming, and coding work being spun out constantly...” I sighed. ”I am inhumanly, impossibly busy all the time, and it is not enough! The scale of the problem is too big.
”I need all of you to get to where I am now, and I need to advance the stage, drive the tech tree up, compound our wealth, expand our authority, and just plain fucking grow like there's no tomorrow!
”The main bottleneck is people! We need to recruit people, and the only way to do that reliably, and get people we can both trust and who can improve, is to Mark them, get them to advance their Marks and their Stats, and raise their Level and the floor with it.”
It was my turn for my eyes to glow as I looked at them, and they all grinned despite themselves.
Oh, yeah, they were going to have a lot more sisters. Which meant...
Hands went up.
The image of Habberblok rose behind me. The information about it laid out, and they read it as fast as it scrolled down.
”All of these souls are tainted with Evil by the combination of the Warp and negative energy. The best of them are Neutral, although they can be brought into the light by bonding to a living person and eroding away the negative influences on them. Of course, a considerable number of them were total assholes to begin with, but the Curse eats them up just the same...
”So, if you want to have daughters, who will all be Atlantean Ranthas, there is a resource of souls here. If we manage to exhaust them... well, there's billions of people. Finding appropriate souls is really not going to be hard.”
They all grimaced and smiled at that. It was true, especially in a grimdark world...
”I'm not going to go into galactic history and how small we are right now. However, here is my current guess as to major events, which are naturally obfuscated by the official history.
”The Eternal Emperor sits on his throne on Tellus, empowering the Celestial Beacon which provides direction and temporal conformity to the capital of the Empire throughout the galaxy.
”Thousands of years ago, he ran afoul of the Warp Gods. Tales are murky, but yes, there was an insurrection in his own genetically-engineered legions of super warriors. He vat-grew the original Primogenitors of his Legions, and they all went stark fucking nuts, tore the galaxy apart, and tried to off him.
”Somehow, he had the pure raw power to keep psionics from being utterly corrupted by the Warp. Psionic power kept the Empire alive, and brought down many of the corrupted Legions, but not before Warp Sorcery wielded by the Primogenitors did the job the Warp Gods wanted.