After the contract is signed, which lies outside of the HCP’s scope, Billerica puts a job listing for a property manager because he feels like Wonderlic’s rental property portfolio is going to expand. Meanwhile, Karine appears to be wondering how she’s going to finance the construction of all five buildings in the contract, and the number of duplexes required to get all five buildings built, notwithstanding the final duplex, which is one of the buildings covered.
Given that the whole neighborhood has been devastated over the explosion at the power plant, I think the priority is the eco-center, Karine starts thinking while she double-checks the costs of building it. And, of course, whether the HCP’s blueprint supplier even have one. But she suspects that other communities with ongoing HCP projects would need similar amenities, and certainly eco-centers and police stations. No, wait! No police force worth its salt would lease its stations! Maybe, if I sold the police station, some of the money would go towards repaying our debts and the rest would be used to build the neighborhood!
And yet, after spending the rest of the day interviewing unemployed locals that might have a clue as to how to manage properties, he ends up hiring a local female that might have been overqualified for most jobs available locally.
“I’m Yenaleda, and I will be responsible for dealing with the tenants from now on”
“I’m Karine, I deal with the construction aspect. For a while, we’ll be working out of the boss’ cabin in the swamp”
When the 3 return to the boss’ cabin in the swamp, Karine realizes that she will need to sell a duplex just to get the necessary money to get the police station built, and that’s just the blueprint and materials. She realizes there are other needs to fulfill.
But before they go to sleep, Yenaleda cooks them some soup that reminds Karine of her own cooking of soup.
As they start eating the soup, Karine feels like one of the key ingredients of the soup has the consistency of sticky rice cake. The soup also contains other seasonings and ingredients in thin stripes. One of these ingredients feel like meat, another one like seaweed.
“Is that… tteokguk?” Karine asks the two Taladuans at the table.
“What exactly is tteokguk?” Yenaleda asks her, rolling her black eyes.
“Tteokguk is a soup that’s prepared more or less like what we are eating right now” Karine answers her coworker, while she eats the Taladuan equivalent of tteokguk.
Maybe I should cook myself some Korean stuff upon returning here, just not tteokguk. I ate jeyuk bokkeum a while ago, so maybe I could eat it again. But who am I kidding? I might not return home for a while, Karine seems to have some suggestions for eating. However, she seems to treat the Taladuan version of tteokguk as a meal like any other.
“Just a bit of caution about Karine: sometimes she makes me feel like she wants to become caliph instead of the caliph, but she’s the kind of person who will look beyond the project itself” Billerica, facing Yenaleda, tells her before taking a call from Xerrid.
“Hi Billerica, this is Xerrid from the employment agency. Are things going well with Karine?”
“Karine’s intellectual disposition made her very vulnerable to wanting to become caliph instead of the caliph! She had the gall to even suggest building homeless refuges, thinking that more housing starts won’t be enough to solve homelessness, and that a mayor’s official residence would be better used as a homeless refuge, if it was to remain town-funded!”
“Billerica, don’t be too harsh on her! She probably has a deep understanding of the social dynamics of housing, which is a breath of fresh air in our construction industry! But does she get the job done?” Xerrid asks him.
“I mean, yes, she gets projects done on time and on budget!”
And she seems to take a growing role in the company’s orientation by now… whereas her predecessor simply built high-end housing, feeling that we could earn quick money, market conditions made it difficult for us to sell it. Karine might have been instrumental in paying down T115k of the debts incurred, T115k would be enough to pay her for several rent cycles on top of the employment agency’s fees billed for her, Billerica muses, while watching closely over the company’s cash reserves. And yet, emerging from insolvency generally means older debts are senior to newer debts, within the same class.
Meanwhile, Yenaleda has her own set of discussions with Karine about how she viewed the housing crisis and its consequences.
“He never told me about why he feels I want to become caliph instead of the caliph, or even what the caliph is on this world!”
“The caliph is the title borne by the head of the Senate. Maybe you seemed to approach construction projects from an angle that’s too wide for him” Yenaleda answers her. “Maybe you seem to think too much about the project’s end users and where they fit in the world they live in. You see, people here are often accused of wanting to become caliph instead of the caliph when they feel like they want to enact changes that are too far-reaching for their abilities to implement them”
Bulbs start flashing in Karine’s mind. This description reminds me of activists of all walks of life. They all had their ideas and opinions on the issues of the day, but could only act on themselves for the most part, Karine’s mental light shines brighter upon realizing what could have caused her to come across that way to him. Especially in the homeless refuge dossier.
But then, the following day, she checks her stock of construction materials as well as her cash reserves. At this point, she has a little over a hundred tons remaining, and barely enough cash to buy more to get one duplex built.
That part seems straightforward to her, but at this point, all she can do is wait. Or, more accurately, what they can do is wait.
“Phase one of Plan Iznogoud: sell the first duplex, buy more materials to get a second one built” Karine then proceeds to buy the police station’s blueprint for T60,000, with Billerica growing more distant from the day-to-day operation of the company, and just looking for the next opportunity.
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“Plan Iznogoud? What’s the meaning of this?” Billerica asks her.
In the meantime, she runs calculations in her mind of how much she will need to spend in materials and how much to spend in blueprints. However, she hasn’t considered the cost of additional construction bots.
“Before I do anything stupid, boss, I wonder how much construction bots cost” Karine asks Billerica.
“The only supplier willing to rent some to us cost a fortune, so maybe we would be better served buying used bots, especially since we might undertake bigger projects later. But first, you must tell me what Plan Iznogoud is”
“Rebuilding the neighborhood according to the specifications of the town administration? Because, while we can use HCP blueprints for that, I can’t build it because they require at least a certain number of construction bots we don’t have yet!”
“What do you mean?” Billerica asks her.
“I know HCP blueprints are stupid, but they are what made the projects end on time and on budget! However, the police station requires five bots to build or it can’t get built at all”
“All right, you win!”
Karine then buys a derelict bungalow on the verge of collapse, along with a thousand tons of materials. Upon demolition, which is finished in short order, the construction of the duplex begins in earnest.
“This makes me wonder just how much debt this company have! And the so-called creditor proposal! We have been increasing in scale… but will rebuilding the police station and possibly power plant be enough?”
“Several millions very easily. Suffice to say that the police station might dent our debt, but it won’t be enough to repay everything” Billerica answers her, despite not have given her access to the company’s financial statements.
“About power plants, do towns usually operate them on this world?” Karine asks, while wondering if she might have been better off building the power plant first.
While water is usually a municipal utility, power companies, on the other hand, often operate on much larger scales. On Earth anyway. Maybe Taladuan utilities operate differently, Karine seems to be frothing at the prospect of getting the debts paid back faster than she believed possible when she first arrived on this world.
“Yes. How much material does building a power plant require? Or a police station?”
“A thousand tons each”
“It seems like the local used construction bot vendor sells up to three bots on a sliding scale. I might want to set some money aside for repaying the debt, and not just reinvest it into the company” the boss then shows her the prices of used construction bots.
“Are these construction bots as good as the ones we use?” Karine asks him while starting a new duplex, which is to be put for sale immediately after completion.
“Same model and specs”
And then all she has to do is wait for the duplex to be completed. So she has one of these discussions with Yenaleda about the core signs of Karine wanting, to Billerica’s eyes anyway, to become caliph instead of the caliph, namely these homeless refuges.
“Homeless refuges might seem like a good idea, but how do you imagine one?” Yenaleda asks the human.
“The residents are often low-income, sometimes had criminal records, sometimes have mental health issues even in the absence of criminal records. But in this environment where population growth outstrips housing starts, even law-abiding, hard-working people might end up in a homeless refuge, despite their financial discipline. Or having to rely on food banks”
“Karine, what services do you think a homeless refuge would provide, other than providing shelter?”
“I’d say rehabilitation, and also preparation for employment, since there are some people who are homeless in part because they are unemployable. So employability should be considered when servicing homeless, and, of course, mental health services, too”
She understands as well as I do that unemployment is only partially voluntary. And, of course, people who might have wanted to work, but can’t. And not just for medical reasons either, as she seems to imply, Yenaleda starts wondering what direction this conversation is taking. And, of course, the harsh reality of a world where they are made to feel like so many people look at the HCP as their only way out.
Once the duplex is sold, in a matter of minutes after its completion, Karine is then taken to the used bot vendor’s page. With three more bots, I can then build two duplexes at once. Or build any of the four commercial or industrial buildings in Plan Iznogoud… spending T120,000 will only leave me with T40,000, and hence I would be spending the last of the money we currently have to build the police station. Here’s to hoping the town will actually pay for the brand-new police station!
And the town does so out of the insurance proceeds for the disaster that took place in this town not long ago. Which Yenaleda knows comes faster than the senatorial funds. To the tune of 1.5 million talas.
“One and a half million for a police station? Is that a normal cost to build a police station that size on this world?” Karine, lacking a frame of reference, asks her native colleagues.
“Of which one million is to be used to repay part of our debts. You still have half a million to spend to get the rest of…” Billerica stutters. “Plan Iznogoud done!” he then makes his payment of one million talas.
And the point where I can’t rely on duplexes anymore has arrived sooner than I would have liked, too, Karine starts wracking her mind in search for the best way to spend the T500,000 remaining from the sale of the police station, at the neighborhood’s edge. Every talas counts to make Plan Iznogoud, well, any good. If I waste talas, then Plan Iznogoud will really be no good!
Here she examines the options available to her. For the time being, she believes the best way would start with building the eco-center next to the police station, and buy the blueprint for it, but the problem is that none of the derelict owners next to the police station appears willing to sell.
“I wonder if offering double the going rate for a derelict is worth the price… the HCP’s interface has a teal button called expropriation, but costs double the going rate to buy” Karine is even more puzzled about expropriation.
Karine’s blood pressure is mounting, as is the speed of her thought train. Especially since the trio doesn’t own any vacant lot at this point. I don’t think people would want to live near an eco-center, and building a homeless refuge next to it would cause security problems. However, is building the eco-center next to the police station worth the cost of expropriation? Or I should wait for a bit? Into the night even? As much as every talas counts, every second counts for this community, too!
By nightfall, running out of patience, she pulls the trigger on the derelict’s purchase and spends T45,000 on a ruined bungalow, whose demolition she orders immediately, along with the purchase of the eco-center’s blueprint for T60,000.
“I hope that spending double on the derelict makes you happy…” Billerica smirks while he goes straight to the waste closet.
“I’m just waiting on the delivery of the materials needed to build the eco-center and let these bots spend the night building it. They will awaken to a brand-new eco-center, which will help the town stay clean” Karine comments on what comes next.
“If I may, Karine, I’d say we make the town rent the eco-center, rather than selling it outright” Yenaleda starts negotiating a lease with the town about it, while construction is about to begin.
“You know much better the leasing aspect than I do; even the boss would do a better job than I of negotiating a lease!” Karine raises her voice, while the construction of the eco-center begins in a devastated town, which she deems phase 2 of Plan Iznogoud. “But it’s only now that I realize that sometimes I might need to compromise my budget to ensure a timely execution; I used to penny pinch past projects”