It would take a few days for my new employee to show up with the crystals so I sent some frames of the new construction drones to be built. They were incredibly cheep besides the requirement of a Mana crystal, that was actually designed to be replaced like a rechargeable battery. And some electric motors for the limbs it was pretty easy to make ten of these little bots. Though, they were probably the size of a large dog to a normal person. They even looked like dogs, with a multitool on their back and their jaws as a way to carry things around. They looked weird without ears, which I took the liberty of adding. They were purely aesthetic but the metal head looked like less of a skull with the ears added.

With that being made I started on designing my resort, while it was just a cover to get these mana crystals delivered it would be a good source of income. It would also be a good front for loading myself into the back of a truck if I wanted to move. For that I set an indoor unloading area that was probably way too big, but I did the calculations and if I laid down my metal body I would be able to fit inside one of the large cargo transports they use.

Speaking of cargo transports... I forgot to get one... I quickly hopped to the internet and spend the last of my money buying a single automated truck. I would repaint it and rebuild it once it got here with the Mana crystals. I sent that truck to pick up the crystals and wait for my employee the next morning.

With that done I went back to designing the resort. Right I was working on the indoor unloading garage, I couldn't help myself I might have also made it an automatic unloading dock as well. It also doubled as a mechanical refit bay that would be able to rebuild the truck or even make a completely new one if I gave it the materials. It could also help load me into the truck so I wouldn't accidently smash into it. I could just imagine trying to explain why there was a crash in the night and the only delivery truck I own was a pile of scrap over the phone. I would have to find a way to get a more physical presence sometime, people get twitchy when they don't actually know who they are working for. It's one thing to see a name and a picture hear them over the phone but another to actually see and speak with them in person. I added that to my to-do list and kept designing my resort, I wasn't proud of it but I made sure there was cameras everywhere. Including the restrooms. I was probably being a little bit paranoid but I wasn't going to risk anything bad happening in my resort. While I was at it I thought about the coming invasion and the lack of preparation by the coalition, there was going to be ground fighting eventually. So all the walls got a massive upgrade to metal with stone and wood facades, this made them a bit thicker than normal but I could just claim it was for sound-proofing. I made sure to leave places that weapons could be placed on the interior and exterior, so if any ground forces made their way through the exterior turrets they would have to deal with interior turrets.

When I was done I had a fortress that didn't at all inviting to stay at, despite it's wooden walls on top of a stone foundation. Right it is probably a good idea to hide the obvious turrets, much more inviting when there aren't guns bristling the entire surface. I had implosion cannons on the roof, hidden of course. but they would be fore anti-air, laser turrets for ground targets getting close. Inside I used machine guns. The best part was that all the turrets ammo supplies were disguised as thick support pillars so I just had to build a corresponding factory underneath with a 'belt' up to feed them. It wasn't really a belt though, it was more of a tube that didn't really have walls. The tube had rings ever few feet that pulled the next items and passed it along to the next. Hiding the interior turrets was a pain. I had to rework the machine gun turrets to reduce their size, they were no longer the size of a building but the size of my hand. Which was still quite large, but much more manageable to hide. This did make them much less structurally sound, they wouldn't stand up to as much of a beating.

In the end after my rework to hide all the obvious emplacements I was left with a much more inviting resort. Though it looked to be missing something... Right windows, the forest around the area was actually quite beautiful with the mountains around it. It would be better if I could include the waterfall but that is out of the picture for now with the coalition still making camp there. I had the dining area be one large windowed room. The entire wall was just a window that looked out, I also added a deck to the outside and a door incase people wanted to eat outside. When it came to the kitchen I found people used something like a food replicator. I refused that categorically, only real food here thank you. Luckily it wasn't too hard to design a cooking robot. It ended up looking similar to Mister Handy from fallout. But It was actually a decent design if the kitchen was designed with them in mind. They'd be able to multitask cook meats, chop veggies, prepare soup, and clean all at once. It wasn't so hard to design a kitchen around them. Of course they used a Mana Crystal. I used an actual conveyor belt for the delivery system, so once they finished a meal they'd be able to just be able to place it on the belt where it would go to the counter and be picked up by whoever ordered it.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

This also let me open the kitchen up and have it also be a show for anyone, they would be able to their food being cooked with mechanical precision. The second floor was for standard rooms, 20 of them. Each with their own bathroom. There was one extra room that was for recharging the cleaning robots, though I didn't actually have a way to automatically charge them. For now it was more of a storage room for them to go when they needed to have their Mana Crystals replaced. I added one of these rooms to the first floor, right next to a gym. I had gathered beastmen liked to work out a lot, it wasn't explicitly stated but when I looked at a map of the nearby city there was over two hundred different gyms and all of them had people regularly using them. So I made sure to have a decent selection of equipment. Nice relaxing music that reminded me of the music in the game Dyson Sphere Program. I thought about pulling up a window so they could see outside, but I thought better of it because there was already a huge weakness in the structure from the big windows in the dining room. I instead decided on a large video screen that would get its feed from camera's I put up around the wilderness. To help mitigate the security weakness of the windows I made sure all of them were installed with metal shutters I could activate incase of emergencies.

I also set up a thick wall around the entire perimeter. I wasn't going to put a wall around it but I remembered how monster attacks were still a thing somehow. So I made sure they were metal covered in a layer of stone. I didn't want people to feel trapped so didn't use spikes, but I did make sure that they were angled outwards. Each pillar was actually a disguised laser turret so when it came time to defend I would have more defenses.

The bot frames had long finished so I sent one of my flying construction drones to clear the trees in the area and place the materials needed for all the construction. My automated systems started drawing power as logs were being processed into planks, iron ore was being turned into the thick plates for the walls, Stone was being turned into bricks. I also included a small single roomed building that would be placed by the drone for my employee and his daughter when he arrived.

That also made me realize that the truck had no way of getting here. The trees were too thick and the terrain mountainous. I sent another drone to start to clear a road for trucks and... Customers? Clients? Resort goers. That sounds better, not perfect but better. It was going to just be a bare dirt road, but it would be flat and clear of trees. I can only hope that my drone isn't spotted clearing the road. The other drone had already started constructing the hidden entrance to my underground cave and laying the foundation. I added a temporary covered area for the materials that were going to be used for construction. With the drones out doing things and my replicator making materials I was quickly draining power, I sat down to conserve power. A massive building was being constructed inside myself right now. Well at least the parts of it were.

I started working on furniture, especially for the third floor suites. Being in the Beastman Kingdom I was going to have to deal with tails, that meant stools or some other kind of specially designed chair. Turned out stools were traditional, and chairs were actually a thing introduced by the Empire. I made sure all my chairs had a big missing section of the back so the tail would not get in the way as people sat down. This would also mean that they were still comfortable for people without tails. The showers were a but more difficult. I imagine having ears that were probably sensitive on the top of their heads would make showers rather annoying. So I went with baths, with an showerhead that was reachable from a sitting position. They'd be able to hold the showerhead themselves, though I did leave an option of a fixed option incase they wanted to stand. That got me thinking about people that want to sit and weren't able to due to medical problems, so I made a bench built into the walls that they could sit down on incase they had problems sitting down in the bath.

It was important to remember that this was a resort. That meant I had to keep in mind the kind of people that would visit meaning old people in retirement, rich people on vacation, and people on their honeymoons. In my mind a resort was a place where people went to get away for a while and just enjoy themselves, so the better the people felt when they arrived was important. I set up a table in the entrance hall. In the table was a projector displaying a holographic real time representation of the system. I would have loved to leave all the ships and satellites in the orbit, but all it would take is some ex military spook seeing it and then I'd have this place swarmed by Coalition forces. I'll have to think about the staff later, but so far I'm going to have to get a receptionist and my current employee could remain as a technician to maintain the various robots maintaining the building. I'll have to get more than just two else there would be a weird atmosphere in this large empty building.

Thoughts for later though as I waited for materials to finish being made.