(Virtual Room in NERV HQ)
Morgan looked over to Isaac, frowning. “Can we really use copies of the TV shows in the game?”
Isaac nodded. “Cleared it with legal. As long as they are ‘historical archives’ that require work to obtain, and we pay a corporate-level subscription to a streaming service carrying the titles, then we’re golden. Our corporate Amazon Prime account was enough for the old stuff. That new one, though, is only on the network’s proprietary stream, so no joy on that.”
“Fine. I never watched that one, anyway. No way I’m buying a streaming service for one show. So, how’s the fallout from his adventures messing with the Senate?”
Isaac shrugged. “Tough to say right now. Black Star will likely be in as good a position or better. Probably better, since he’s building new ships, actively recruiting, and even has new designs coming down the pipe. They’re going to start work on an actual battleship! First player-owned battleship in the game. It’ll be nasty as all hell.”
Morgan frowned at that. “But so far he’s done fine with the ships he’s had. What’s changed?”
“Apparently, he didn’t like getting smacked around by the X’thari. And he’s got a whole address book of addresses that can be checked out, but the X’thari are probably on the other side of at least a couple. So he wants to have more ‘boom’ before doing serious exploring.”
“All right, that’s fine. But with him being the first mercenary company to have battleships, and even be able to throw down at the same level as actual militaries in a fleet action, that’s going to cause some people to start complaining more and more.”
Isaac shrugged. “Tell them to get off their butts and build themselves a battleship, then. Nobody handed our boy his toys. He went out and took them, or made them himself. “
“Oh, and I’ve gotten another set of complaints from one of the players that has crossed his path before. You know a player that goes by ‘Lord Kickass’?”
Leaning forward in his seat, Isaac smiled. “Really? Oh, this should be good. What did the idiot do?” At Morgan’s questioning look, Isaac shrugged. “The guy was a complete moron. Remember, he’s the one that Mollen framed for the Major’s murder way back when? And since then they’ve run into eachother once, and Kickass got sent down some rough roads because he kept making bad choices, until he finally reset his character. So, what happened?”
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“Apparently, his notion of a good idea was to get work as soon as he had reset, and then enslave the people he worked for, spacing the men and keeping the women as sex slaves. When he saw that Mollen was on the same planet as he was, he freaked, and tried to attack him. Mollen’s people took him down, and then kept him drugged until he woke up in an escape pod already entering the Amazon planet’s atmosphere. He’s trapped on the Amazon world, same as all the others, and he’s trying to say Mollen cheated.”
“Well, I guess idiots are the same all over. Did Mollen actually cheat?”
Morgan shook her head. “No. He simply didn’t fight fair. Instead of a freighter to freighter smuggler battle like Kickass wanted, he had Shadowdancer watching in stealth for anyone to be stupid, and they took down his ship without blinking.”
Isaac nodded sagely. “Proper planning is not cheating. Sucks for Kickass, but the idiot should have known better. Anyways, tell him that he will be eligible for a reset in three months, real world time. Until then, there are Amazon women available for snu snu.”
Morgan snorted. “Ok, maybe I won’t say that last bit, but yeah, his complaint is getting denied. So anyways, on to better things. What is the situation with the dungeons?”
Isaac leaned back in his chair, and propped his feet up on the table. “People couldn’t be happier. There has been too many people with traditional MMO expectations and nothing to vent them on until now. The Ihm dungeon is already popular enough that the outpost is growing into more of a small town. Which is hilarious since it is on top of a mountain, and Ihm are generally cold-blooded.”
“And other than that one?”
“A second dungeon has been discovered in the Ihm Imperium, three in the Empire, two in the Free Worlds Alliance, and two in the Confederacy. That’s for inhabited systems. There’s 2-6 dungeons per polity that haven’t been discovered, either because they’re in interstellar space, or in uninhabited systems. We’re also seeing divergence from the Deus and human clones routine in the newer dungeons, which are being blamed on ‘corruption’ in the code caused by whatever reason, allowing there to be different enemy types in some dungeons.”
“That’s great! I can make sure that people know that there are dungeons which are variants, which will get people out there, exploring more, and bringing in new stuff.”
“Yes, I can’t wait until someone goes and finds the Chimera homeworld. That will be an eye opener, and make no mistake!”
“Chimera homeworld? They’re all artificially created! How can they have a homeworld?”
“Well, it seems that after the last war were chimeras were used (and were declared to be off limits by pretty much everyone) some managed to escape quarantines and containment zones, and they banded together in order to survive, moving out away from established colonies so that they could live without being hunted. The more unstable ones all got themselves killed, while the smart ones stayed hidden on their homeworld.”
“But they can’t breed! Wouldn’t they have all died off by now?”
“Well… it turns out that Chimeras with functioning anatomy are capable of breeding, but the rate is something like two percent of normal human fertility rates when breeding with other chimeras. When doing cross-species pairings, that jumps to 30% of normal human rates. They’re the only species in the galaxy that has more trouble procreating with their own species than with an alien species.”
“Oh my. I can only imagine the problems if they get discovered. When do you think that will happen?”
“Considering that there’s a dungeon on their planet’s moon? Probably sooner than we’d expect.”