Back in her lair, Flora entered her workshop.
At Sunday's party, Flora had hammered out the details of the training facility with Lana, the Riverstones CFO. The old gym would stay, and she would create the new one next to it.
All buildings on the compound had to look like bamboo huts, with no exceptions made. Thankfully, Lana had transmitted the exterior plan to Flora, so she wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel. Flora's printer had churned out the components during the day. Lorky and Torky, her forklift robots, had packed everything into containers.
Lana's next request regarded the energy consumption, and she had voiced concerns over the utility bill. Flora would solve the issue by building mana generators. Her most space-efficient model needed an external energy source and was as big as a ping pong ball.
As the power source, Flora would utilize the same toxic waste she had used for her training mech suit. It emitted a mixture of poison and radiation. Team Four-One had come through and delivered several tons to Flora's printer.
Her mech suit had been a spur of the moment thing, for using the toxic waste as a building material, Flora had to test it more. She took the mana-generator ball with extraction rune schemes, connected mana wires to it, and slotted it to a 1 MR/min lamp. She had bought the little buffet lamp during her first crafting spree to test whether the generators worked. Then she surrounded the ball with the toxic waste until the light bulb started to work. For stability reasons, she added 15% more waste.
Like every mana generator, it needed clearance. To ensure the required distance of one meter, Flora created a support frame. The final product was a 1-meter high column with the ball on one end and a construct to connect to the ball of another column on the other end.
Flora's biggest concern was that the material would lose its toxicity with time. She grinned−a refreshingly new problem.
The workshop included the simulation grounds. A virtual environment to test creations. After sifting through the endless options, Flora found what she was looking for: a feature for long time tests.
To prevent side effects, she had to destroy the unholy cliff.
"You served me well, and I'll miss you," Flora mumbled. She hoped Eddie had saved the rubber duckies in the controls. She would miss their company in the hot tub. Even more concerning was the loss of Deriga's workshop.
The stacked training of lair + workshop + simulation grounds + Deriga's workshop was the key to her stat growth, especially the growth of affinities and abilities. She trained the other stats at five times the speed of other persons because of the SSS Rating she got during character creation. On the other hand, her affinities had only the average C rating except for Faith. Sleeping in Deriga's workshop gave her four times the growth for them and twenty times for Attributes and Skills compared to other players.
Flora laughed. It was the first time she put a number on her advantage. No wonder that her attributes exceeded expectations. Her growth in one week was as much as twenty weeks training for her poor fellows. And only twenty weeks, if they worked out as much as she slept.
Shaking her head, Flora deleted everything and created a cement plain.
She connected three columns and five columns vertically and put them together with a single column and enough lamps for the maximum produced mana into the simulation grounds. Because she forgot to construct something to fasten them, she went back to the workbench and created a base. After loading it into the simulation, she erected three pillars, with the height of one meter, three meters, and five meters, each surrounded by glowing lamps.
"We'll adjust the time dilation such that one minute here is one week in the simulation. Aidan, monitor the lamps and tell me when they stop working." Flora paused. "Burned toast! The simulation ground has time dilation! Why haven't I exploited that yet?"
"There is a warning about the time dilation and its use for humans in the user-manual, Milady. It may cause sleep problems, mental exhaustion, physical exhaustion, hallucinations, and anxiety. The System prohibits entering the simulation on any dilation higher than the factor five."
"Those spoilsports." Flora half grumbled and half chirped. "But five times is still great. Now to the exciting part, what kind of equipment do we get our peers? Do you know what affinities they need? Probably Faith. Robby and Hub have classes in the divine branch and surely influenced the rest of the clan. Ask Camus if he has a list. Oh, and find out what abilities they want to train as well."
Next, Flora researched gravity-field generators. She appreciated the effect in the TA, but thought it would be better to assist activities that are not focused on strength. If you train strength, you could just raise the weight, but knitting in increased gravity might give excellent results, too.
Flora raised her eyebrows when she saw the prices. A field with a diameter of ten meters cost 1000 VirDos. Nonetheless, she ordered it.
"Don't mess with it. You have no time now. Resist!" she encouraged herself while fetching it from the mail-box. "Just a quick look, only a minute, maybe ten. No, resist!"
Flora's will grumbled, and she activated XYZ-Ray to look at the shiny black box. Instead of interesting machine guts, she received a system message.
This product is protected by CentralTank Anti-Spy Measures™.
" Horrible! Worst feature ever! Or maybe? Excellent! Best feature ever!"
Flora logged into her workshop and put the generator next to the dummies, then logged out again and installed it in her lair. No point in feeding it to the printer because she would transfer it tomorrow to Clan Riverstones.
While she was fiddling with the mana grid, Eddie arrived.
"Hi, dear." Eddie sounded cheerful, but Flora knew him too well. Her friend was faking it. "How is the gym progressing?"
"I'm behind schedule. The church business was long and nasty and unfortunately far from being over. The Training Academy took longer than necessary as well. I'm sorry, love. Can we cut our meeting short?"
"Sure, but at least have dinner. You probably ate nothing but toast. That can't be healthy."
"Heretic!" Flora giggled. "Sorry, I'm still on the church lingo. But how dare you say toast is unhealthy! It's the most wholesome food, ever!"
"Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." Eddie hit his chest, grinning.
Both chose a treadmill tunnel and went into the workshop.
"No! What have you done to my hot tub?" Eddie exclaimed when he saw the cement covered simulation grounds. "I loved the vista of the sea while soaking in a natural pool."
"MY hot tub had to give away to science."
They squabbled with practiced ease while preparing a picnic blanket. Eddie produced kale rolls with different stuffings: minced meat, fish, rice, and vegetables.
"Delicious," Flora said, dipping her second roll in sweet and sour sauce. "Please hit me with the bad news."
"Engineers," Eddie sighed jokingly. "Can't even enjoy a meal without wanting to solve problems… At the banquet, I spoke with other customers. Most are satisfied with the clan, but a lot grumbled about not getting good enough equipment."
"What equipment?" Flora asked. Her mind produced pictures of shiny home appliances, which, of course, were the best equipment a household needed.
"You know, weapons, armor." Flora's face fell when Eddie answered. Those people had the wrong priorities. "The clan works like this: You pay a monthly fee in real-life money, in exchange you get services like consultations or players who help you with quests or dungeons."
Flora nodded. "Right. I have understood that you are allowed to sell your work for RL money, but not virtual items because they belong to CentralTank even if you created them yourself. A ridiculous distinction, in my opinion."
"Of course it doesn't make sense, it's the law. The crux is the bill on the pricing limit of virtual goods for consumer protection. Work is not virtual. Therefore the law doesn't apply to it. Nonetheless, Robby's customers want the sweet, sweet loot for their RL investment, too."
"I see the problem. You can't say 'no' to your customers unless you want to get rid of them. However, I'm sure we can find a way around the problem." Flora bit in another roll. This time it was salmon and lemongrass.
"Indeed, Robby already has a system in place. As a customer, you get contribution points for utilizing the services of the clan. With the contribution points, you can buy equipment from the clan store."
Flora nodded. She received points from paying clan taxes and had spent them on furniture and raw materials in the clan store. "Nice, my son is a genius. The VIPs pay in RL Money, get the services, and, additionally, get contribution points for even more goodies. They should adore the clan and not complain, ingrate dolts."
"It's not that easy. The items in the store are subpar. The demand for good items exceeds the supply."
"So, Robby should hire more people to get more items?"
"The clan has enough employees, but they are unable to procure the good stuff because they can't defeat the high rated dungeons." Eddie bit into his roll. "The quantity is okay, the quality is insufficient."
"Oh, wow. They were looking competent in my eyes. I would have never guessed that his people are duds. Okay, an employee like Ressa smells like trouble, but the others made a professional impression."
"I'm not sure about the reason for lackluster results, yet. My assessment is similar to yours−they look motivated. Maybe they rushed through the lower levels, and their foundations are shoddy? Or maybe their equipment is bad? You need good equipment to get better equipment."
"The training hut will help them to shore up stats. Do you think filling up the store with robots would help?"
"Both are steps in the right direction. How high level can you make robots? The unsatisfied customers were mostly in tier 4."
"That's level 100-200, right? I don't know, I have only produced tier 1 stuff and didn't even try to go higher."
"What? You surely exceeded tier 1 crafting by now. How have you leveled your crafting? When your ability reaches a higher tier, you get reduced crafting XP for lower tiers."
Flora gaped, and Eddie laughed at her.
"That explains why my crafting abilities are rising so slowly. Mechanics is level 80 and Electronics 69." Flora admitted sheepishly, and Eddie laughed even harder.
"Only you would be able to raise them to tier 3 with only creating tier 1 items!" Eddie's smile faded as he started the next sentence. "Robby worked around this issue by buying equipment. He uses virtual money from the sponsorship of the PVP team. The sponsor, SandalSneaks, is not happy with the results and will quit if we don't win the next match."
Flora raised her eyebrows. "When is the match?"
"Tuesday Two and it's not looking good. BrooklynBowling is ranked three in the league, while the Riverstones are ranked eleven of the twelve teams in the Tier 5 B League. We are dangerously close to being relegated in the C League. Only two games left before the season will conclude."
Frowning, Flora took another kale roll. "Aside from building the new hut, I can't help with PVP. However, I can produce nice equipment and put it in the store. Do you have other suggestions?"
"Actually, you don't have to be over level 200 to participate. The system can level you up for PVP. You get all the free points, 3 attributes, 1 affinity, 5 skill, and 3 ability points, but no new skills or abilities. And of course, players who reached the level organically have all that and have trained a lot. Nonetheless, Robby is considering Mia for the team, but her batticle is tier 3. Equipment gets transformed as well, but the method sucks. Maybe you could build a batticle for Mia."
"I could join the team, too!"
"Do you even know how the competition works?" Eddie laughed.
"No, but I'm strong." Flora flexed her biceps. The coach dude had rubbed off on her. "Look at those guns, bro."
"Respect, dudette." Eddie whistled and winked. "We can watch the match on Tuesday together. You'll see what the pro teams are capable of, even in the B League."
Flora nodded and smiled.
"Do you need any help with the training hut?" He added.
Flora's smile grew bigger. Eddie gulped.