So, assuming that I was here for some entities' personal amusement, I wonder if they can read my thoughts right now. Read the thoughts that basically went 'you might be wondering how I got into this position', and then, assuming there was a camera, it would zoom in on my face.
In the year of 2991, I was being punked by a higher power.
Zoom in and then rotate around to show the person opposite me. The one that held power over life and death for me.
The person that was leaning on the desk in front of me, my desk actually, how did she even get here was a question I tried not to think about since there were more important things to worry about.
Like her words.
"You present an opportunity for me Mr Vu. Some might say opportunities are someone else's problems but I do not like to think like that." She said.
The woman that held my life in her hands.
Or so I was told later, apparently she was very close to do doing violence on me.
Not that I would have ever known that without someone telling me.
But as for how we got here?
That would have to go back to yesterday when things kind of culminated in something just a little insane.
+Break+
"How… how did this happen?"
The mutter from the man to my right was copied by seemingly everyone else in the stands.
They were looking at the horde of vehicles driving across the plains. The white streamlined trucks looking so vastly different from everything else that they had seen on the battlefield.
The smooth lines, the lack of massive bulk and random chunks that popped out of nowhere made them look very… civilian compared to everything else.
And really, they must have been comparatively at least.
"Seriously, there's a 30 Fusion Engine in there?"
"That's 108 kilometres an hour, on a truck!"
"5 tons? That's nothing!"
They continued to call out from where they were spectating.
Why not get down there and get hands on with everything? Why just… stand here and stare at the machines?
There were example models down there on the ground, ready for anyone and everyone to crawl over and gush about.
They could have been fake expo models after all, you needed to get into the guts to tell the truth.
The new machines that I had somehow designed and then got into production.
Running on 4 wheels, powered by the smallest portable fusion engine in the Inner Sphere and mounting a back tray that allowed up to one ton of cargo.
In short, a Ute.
A Holden Ute.
Just Ute even, which was its name actually.
Inspiration that had been drawn from my own history, back in my first life before this, my decidedly middling second life.
All of this commotion because some system had shoved itself into my head.
Watching as the Utes, dozens of them roamed in the plains in front of everyone on the spectator stand.
Some of them were carrying cargo with the modular attachment at the back (or the bed of a truck as some might call it).
Some mounted a Support PPC.
Some mounted benches to carry humanoids (I don't judge what a man does with the benches of his Ute).
Some had nothing at all, a naked truck bed with short walls to keep whatever that could hypothetically be added, inside.
One truck, multiple uses.
Bouncing along at high speed, looking for all the world like a reenactment from a thousand years prior on the plains of North Africa, the jungles of Myanmar, the mountains of Iran and Iraq. The only difference from my memories from those documentaries being that it was Utes painted default white replacing horses and the horse archers that rode on their backs.
All being produced out of the factory that had taken me eight months to build.
4 turns of time in the strange system that had stabbed itself into my brain.
A page filled with tabs, endless fucking tabs in that annoying windows 95 style.
The interface was something from the 1990s, something from 1000 years prior, well, that was difficult.
Seriously, it reminded me of SIS from the Department of Education in Australia. Where you had to use your keyboard to move up and down, press to move tab, press to locate individual, press to open up individual's profile, press again to confirm, press again to act, press again to withdraw from individual's profile, press again to confirm, press again to move to next individual.
Fuuuuck that was horrific.
Not to mention shutting down SIS required three different shut down commands in order. If they weren't or if you forgot one? Your account was locked and calling the network administrator to unlock your account was your only recourse. Imagine the principal calling the network admin at 2am because his entire account was locked because of 2 wrong key presses.
Seriously.
The interface in front of my face, the one that had been brought up when I pressed on Tetersen, the planet that I lived on, was reminding me of that horror.
Tabs for development, tabs for recruitment, tabs for deployment, tabs for actions to be taken and so on and so forth. Tabs after tabs, each tab as I 'pressed' with my mind through them… each filled with even more information and actions to take.
The worst part was that most of them were greyed out… but nothing indicated it to be so until I tried to action whatever it was offering.
Actually, scratch that, the only tab that hadn't been disabled was the production one.
Hence, why I had, staying awake for what must have been literal months in the dreamscape, designed an entire fucking truck from scratch with the designer (which was thankfully much more intuitive).
Basically the modern education system in a nutshell wasn't it? A modern UI stapled onto the rotting, somehow alive carcass of the old system.
Waking up to that had been fucking horrifying.
Waking up to that and not being able to leave until I had worked out how to navigate the menu and complete an action?
Like, seriously?
Who the hell designed it?
Probably some contractor for some government department.
Ugh.
Being greeted with nothing but the name of my planet, Tetersen and a list of the planets that were within jump distance.
Thuban
Donegal
Gibbs
Tharkad
Eutin
Westertede
Forkas
Greenlaw
Oh.
And there was a little nameplate under the name, 'Other World'.
Not even minor world, other world.
A world that was so useless that it couldn't even contribute to the overall capacity of the Lyran Commonwealth in anything except a peripheral way.
A measly 2 RP per turn according to this system.
Really.
Tharkad next door with 120 RP and Tetersen with 2 RP.
That was it.
I was going to do something about that, Tetersen would be great!
I needed some kind of motivation to get through the months of isolation after all.
I had to, over the course of what felt like weeks that were probably days, I finally figured out how to actually finish a turn.
Design a vehicle for a factory to produce, and then start it.
Then, I wake up.
Not being allowed to wake up until said vehicle was done.
Over the course of the two months, people move, regulations are approved, laws are written, construction resources are shifted… and the foundations of a factory are built.
Over the course of 3 more turns, employees are hired and trained, resources for production are shipped in and stockpiled… and by the end of the 8 months I am looking at a factory producing vehicles and weapons.
Somehow I had managed to wrangle it, somehow all of these people moved because of me, somehow I had changed the course of history for Tetersen.
I had no idea how, my body moved on its own, making calls here and there to people that I had no idea existed, or to suppliers on different planets that were so niche that they didn't even have a contact on Tetersen.
My entire body just… did it, my mouth moved to say the right words to the different audiences that my feet shuffled me to. Again and again, I did it.
If you asked me how, I would say 'No idea'.
But I did.
Now I had to deal with the consequences.
Like, for example, the fact that I had no idea what I was doing then, I have no idea what I am going to do now.
Never mind the fact that I was just some small fry on this planet, not even a noble. Which meant that I couldn't exactly get away with just winging it like I had been until now. Trusting this System and its puppeting of my body to prevent my head being lopped off or, more likely, people crowding me to death asking to buy all my stuff (which shouldn't be that hard anyway. I could do it in 8 months, what's stopping other industrial concerns doing it themselves?)
I needed help.
"Mr Vu, can we talk about purchasing your vehicles?"
"I noticed that these vehicles have fusion engines, the smallest military grade engines that we have even. Can we talk?"
"Thirty thousand C-Bills for just one? We'll take all of them!"
I really needed help.
+Break+
Ah, this was not optimal.
I kinda, just a little, forgot that I lived on a planet that was filled with people that have their own government and people in charge and their own opinions on what was important and what wasn't.
In other words, I was in a bit of a pickle here.
"Mr Vu, you present an opportunity for me with your new Ute trucks." The woman opposite me said, the woman that was the Duchess of Tetersen.
As in, the person in charge of this entire planet was right here in front of me.
But, well, the word opportunity was pretty great right?
I was an opportunity.
Nice.
In fact, I could feel the tension leaving my body, an opportunity, yeah, I could do that.
"Thank you! How can I help?" I asked, sitting down, on the wrong side of my desk, but I wasn't thinking about that right now.
Ha! I was getting a compliment from the Duchess of Tetersen, that was pretty good right?
I loved getting compliments for my work!
She was quiet for a bit, likely thinking up another compliment before she started talking again.
"Yes. Mr Vu, I would like to ask you how you did this to begin with."
She said these words and I nodded my head, it wasn't that hard… if you knew who to talk to. But if you did, well, it was just a few words right?
Not to mention that she was in charge of this entire planet, which, really, meant that she would know who to talk to which solved the biggest problem.
Really, if more people did this, wouldn't Tetersen have more industry and thus, be better?
Right?
"I have a System." I said honestly, smiling at her. The best part of it was that it was the truth. I was really bad at lying after all. Just tell the truth in the beginning and you won't get caught out later.
"A system?" She said, or asked, probably inviting me to speak further on the topic.
"Yup, a System. I know what I need to do, who to talk to, and what to say." I tell her honestly. After all, without it I would be completely lost.
…
"Anyway, I need some help." I said, interjecting, needing to get this off my mind before I forgot. Forgetting conversational threads because the other person was speaking and distracted me was too damned common.
"Specifically, I need someone to handle the business side of this. I can do the building and the planning of the infrastructure, but I am really, really, really bad when it comes to selling the stuff. Or even, like, you know, trying to market the product. I just know how to do the whole building thing." I said to her, completely honestly.
The System didn't care about anything except the production of things (and raising troops from what I could infer from the interface). Selling things didn't matter at all, which left me on my own.
Like, if I wasn't being forced to do this whole infrastructure design and build thing, I wouldn't even be doing something so… entrepreneurial. Talking to people, selling things, trying to understand human emotions and facial expressions… the kind of thing that could be called hell if I was being honest.
I didn't understand people, I was gullible, I was predisposed to believing in the inherent good of others. Things that would leave me high and dry in conversations with others. Having someone else, endorsed by the Duchess would really help me out here, she was the boss of the planet after all.
That meant people couldn't go over her head.
+Break+
Olivia Randolph, Duchess of Tetersen looked at the guileless face of the new complication on her planet.
One that had upended decades if not centuries of planning.
His factory producing fusion powered civilian trucks had been looked at with amusement at first. That had quickly turned into shock and then horror as the development continued.
It was a first.
A civilian fusion powered small truck at 5 tons.
Rated for 1 ton of flatbed cargo.
A cost of 30,852 C-Bills
108 kilometres per hour cruising speed.
162 kilometres per hour flank speed.
30 rated Fusion Engine.
In short, something small and quite useless in a military sense.
Or so they had thought.
Then the farmers had started talking about purchasing one for the farm, then the industrialists. It wasn't just a matter of the hobbyists anymore, it was everyone.
After all, it was a fusion engine on wheels for 30,000 C-Bills.
One that was being produced on their planet.
Revolutionary was the word that was being thrown around.
Who did not need power? Who did not want power that could be provided without worrying about the power grid collapsing?
Who did not want cheap fusion power that could move itself around?
She held back a sigh.
It was too late to do anything, not after the furor of the unveiling of the Ute as he called it.
Now it was a matter of damage control.
Huu Vu had to be co-opted or managed, to let him do whatever he wanted was unacceptable. There were too many plans that his Ute and anything else his mind vomited out would disturb. They couldn't afford to allow him to move unguided.
There had been a great deal of contingencies in place, until he had smiled at her and asked for help.
It was then that Olivia understood.
He was… not quite all there was he?
The way that he responded to her words in what should have been a threatening scenario.
He wasn't acting, or, if he was, he was the best actor she had ever seen.
No, he… just wasn't picking up on the heaping dropship-loads of social cues she was putting down.
Which, would explain just why he had done what he had done wouldn't it?
He didn't think there was anything wrong with what he had done and brushing off the oblique attempts to get him to stop. Well, he wouldn't have seen them that way would he?
Not people telling him to stop, merely problems that needed to be overcome.
She sighed mentally.
It really did seem that she was going to need to approach this from an entirely different angle than she had prior.
He was clearly hyper focused on this specific subject. Building vehicles, not the strangest thing she had seen to be honest.
Which meant that she was going to need to focus that mental effort.
Managing him in other words.
Not what she thought she was going to be waking up to this morning, that was for certain.
+Break+
Total RP Turn 6 2991 + 8 Months
8RP 8×1 Ute Factory
Lyran Bonus = 1 + 0.3
Total RP = 8×1.3 = 10.4