15 - Chapter 14
Tasha lay in bed in her hotel suite. She was too wired to fall asleep. She hoped that the funds would transfer today and that would complete her first quest.
In the meantime, she checked out her status.
Name: Tasha Andersen
Race: Human (Tier 0)
Class: Rouge (Tier 2) - Level 0
Profession: Technocrat (Tier 2) - Level 0
Strength: 21
Dexterity: 21
Proprioception: 21
Constitution: 21
Intellect: 21
Will: 21
Charisma: 21
Soul: 21
Luck: Locked
Quest Points: 920
It now showed her stats at 21, and showed a new line for Quest points. She had spent 80 to add 1 to each stat, she decided to use the time to add more stat points maximising her stats for whatever was coming. Getting stronger could only help.
She opened the shop and chose to add stats to her strength stat, knowing that it would make her add the same stat to all anyway. She kept adding the stat one at a time and seeing the total go up, at 9 it was priced at 90QP, but when she went to add the 10th point it jumped to 120 and was greyed out. So the 10th point that would go over 30 stats would cost her 30 QP and not 10. She reduced the stats back down to 9 and total showed 90QP. She selected to confirm her choice. Unlike last time she received a very familiar warning.
Stat points needed to reach 30 in all attributes 80 - will require 8 hours to assign.
Please ensure you are in a safe space and a comfortable position before proceeding.
Assign now? Yes / No
She took a deep breath, made sure she was comfortable and mentally clicked on yes. The pain rocked her body as it locked up to prevent any movement. She eventually passed out, but the body remained locked.
After exactly 8 hours her body finally unlocked, leaving her in a sweaty heaving mess. She dragged herself out of bed and dragged herself off to the shower. It took her some time to get used to moving again, as the massive increase in all stats knocked out her control. She slowly built up her control by trying small motions while under the hot shower. It took her the better part of an hour to start feeling better.
She still needed to work on her control, it was just enough for her to start moving somewhat normally, anything where she reacted was still a lot faster than she expected. She dressed in a tracksuit and went down to the gym. At 4am, thankfully the gym was empty.
She started with movement exercises to see her flexibility. She had no issue with any position or range of movement. Next she tried the treadmill, at the fastest setting, she couldn't even feel the burn, nor did it make her sweat, it was like she was going for a pleasant stroll.
Finally she moved on to the weight machines. She tried them all on the max settings, and again could barely feel the weights. This system was making her superhuman in every respect. She just wondered why the system felt she needed to be this strong. Finally really wanted to push herself,she tried to lift up the whole machine, the weight wasn't an issue, it was just awkward to pick up. She did some squats while holding up the whole machine, and finally felt something. She would really need to go back to the gym, hopefully when it was empty and really push herself. The world record for a deadlift was just over 500Kgs, could she beat that now? She wasn't sure, but she would sure have fun finding out.
She looked up the location of an old aerodrome, and found one in north london. She called an uber to drop her off. She needed the space to test out her speed in privacy. All through the journey, she just kept thinking about what she would do when she got to the bottom of the mystery surrounding her family. It felt so close now.
She was finally dropped off outside the closed off aerodrome and jumped the fence to gain entry. She spent the next hour running around the abandoned runway. She wasn't sure as she didn't have a way to measure herself, but she felt her top speed was significantly above olympic sprinters, not only that, but she could maintain that speed for extended periods of time without getting winded. Even when she did push herself to the point she felt the burn, it didn't take long for her to recover. She again asked herself the question ,just what was she becoming,
On a bit of an adrenaline high, she decided to test out her other abilities, and found a piece of metal that had been abandoned in the control building. She tried to make a cut on her arm with it. It took a significant amount of force to cut the skin, but what was even more astounding was that the cut stopped bleeding within a minute and started to heal in real time. Within 20 mins or so the small cut was gone, not even leaving a mark behind.
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She called herself another Uber and returned to the hotel. She got ready for the day and went to the restaurant for a late breakfast.
The team were still busy building out the company portfolio. She asked James what he needed her to deal with. He gave her a list of payments to send and a stack of contracts to sign. She spent some time reviewing the contracts, and happy with what the team was doing, signed them all. They had just acquired another 5 companies covering recruitment, HR, tech, gaming and real estate. She made the request to Anita to process another batch of payments totalling £50m. She also sent off the payment to buy out the debt that Sally’s old firm had accrued. So far she had spent just over £100m of the original £1Bn.
Once the payment to the university cleared, she would have spent just a tad over £300m. She sent Anita another email asking if the operating accounts for the foundation and the business were open yet. Once they were open, she could transfer the working capital of £100m into each account then leave a lot of the day to day expenses to the team. She would just ask for a weekly report.
As she was finishing up her tasks, Hanna came in, and they discussed the direction for setting up the private intelligence agency. Hanna thought that would need an initial investment of at least £200m to start building out and recruiting as well as the tech they would need. Tasha agreed, they wanted to build out the most modern centre of operations of any intelligence agency in the world. The only issue was location. Hanna pulled in Sunny, and they discussed how to lobby to get a SEZ assigned to them and more importantly, just how much would they have to invest to get the government to give them the rights. They agreed that they could use the satellite tracking station as a good, high tech business, as the reason for requiring their own SEZ. Also they could float the idea of building their own launch pad. That would also give them additional revenue streams down the line.
By the time all the meetings were concluded, it was getting close to lunch time. Tasha decided to take the team back to Roka for lunch, since everyone seemed to love it. The people at Roka now knew the whole team on site and welcomed them and made space for them quickly.
It was during lunch that it finally happened. Tasha received a message from Anita confirming that the payments had all been processed and approved. She confirmed that the payments should reflect in the receiving accounts within the next hour. Tasha couldn't hold herself back. She checked her quest immediately.
Quest: Make your first significant investment
Make your first significant investment with a stated objective.
Reward: Quest points, Quest to find out more about your family
Status: In progress (Initial contract signed, fund transfer in progress)
It still wasn't completed. Tasha was getting frustrated by the wait, she just wished that the quest would give her the benefit of the doubt, but no the quest system was a real stickler for the details it would seem.
After lunch Tasha spent time reviewing what the teams were working on. They were still looking at adding a bunch of businesses, and the interviews with potentials were progressing, as were the due diligence princesses to close out the already signed deals.
It wasn't until the late afternoon that the quest system provided an update.
Quest: Make your first significant investment
Make your first significant investment with a stated objective.
Reward: 200 Quest points, Quest to find out more about your family
Status: Complete (1800 bonus quest points awarded for first investment)
New Quests available
So it looked like there would be 1 QP per million on significant investments. Tasha wondered if she would get more items in the shop, or more bonus QPs on quests. She decided to check out her new quests, wondering what she would find.
Quest 1: Book a flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for seven days time
Book a flight and hotel for exactly seven days.
Reward: Location to further investigations into your family accident
Status: In Progress
Quest 2: Commission a cold steel weapon
Commision and receive a high quality cold steel weapon
Reward: Location to further investigations into your family accident
Status: In Progress
Quest 3: Get as strong as possible
Use your Quest Points to purchase as many stats as possible before your travel for Quest 1
Reward: Location to further investigations into your family accident
Status: In Progress
Quest 4: Learn to wield a cold steel weapon
Learn and practise the art of wielding the cold steel weapon you commissioned for Quest 2
Reward: Location to further investigations into your family accident
Status: In Progress
Quest A1: Self sufficient (Chain Quest)
Purchase land to create your own self sufficient town
Reward: Quest Points
Status: In Progress
Quest B1: Make your second significant investment (Chain Quest)
Make your second significant investment
Reward: Quest Points, more items in shop
Status: In Progress
Quest C1: reach for the sky (Chain Quest)
Finalise designs for the satellite monitoring station and break ground in the location picked for quest A1
Reward: Quest points, technical knowledge
Status: In Progress
Seven quests, seven, after waiting so long for the first quest to complete. She quickly reviewed the quests again. The chain quests were straight forward. It seemed like the system liked her idea of having her own town and would reward her. It also wanted her to get the satellites launched it seemed. The last quest was to continue to invest. That all made sense, as did the fact that they were all chain quests.
The other four quests were more difficult to understand. The system wanted her to get as strong as possible, with her points total, and assuming that the stats remained at 30QP each, would mean an additional 9 in each stat. That she could complete tonight. The booking a flight to KL in seven days time, was also straight forward. She was being sent to a location that would allow her to get somewhere, presumably local to KL that would give her more knowledge about what happened to her family.
The other two quests made less sense, in the world of firearms, why would she need to commission and train in a cold steel weapon. What was the quest implying? Taken together the only conclusion she could draw would be that she still wasn't strong enough, and that firearms would be useless. She didn't like where that conclusion led. If there was a person or worse a group that was stronger than she was now, and on whom even high end firearms would be ineffective, that only led to very strange places. For now all she could do was to follow the quest.