“Hello, hello, my faithful minions! Thanks for checking out this new side-channel for the stream! It’s thanks to interacting with a lot of you that I’ve become aware of just how little certain aspects of either Asari or Citadel culture are understood. Which, not to be too alarmist, is occasionally outright dangerous, rather than merely leading to embarrassing social faux pas. Thus, along with splitting some repeatable experimental projects off to the Tech Projects channel, I’m also going to cover some things the galactic traveler ought to know, here on this sub-channel!”
Rylia paused to let the title of the video ‘Indenture Contracts of the Asari Republics’ play, then brought the focus back to her. She was wearing a ‘sexy secretary’ sort of look, instead of her usual indolent casualwear or nothing at all. Just a little bit more ‘professional’ looking, while still giving people a very pleasant view.
“This first one is something Asari take for granted, and it was only when I recently spent a year on Illium that I properly understood that other species don’t get it. Trust me, it took one hell of a mind warp to properly see it from someone else’s perspective, which I think is also probably why there doesn’t seem to be a lot of information out there on the extranet designed for other species.”
It had, in fact, taken Hazel getting shoved into Rylia’s brain for the Asari to understand the problem. Indenture contracts had been baked into Asari culture for thousands of years. More like tens of thousands, actually. They didn’t quite date all the way back to Prothean times, but they’d been developed long before Asari took to the stars. Which was, itself, something that had happened over 2,000 years ago. They were considered normal, by Asari, as a result. To the point that no one really thought about them. Oh, not the exploitative versions from Illium, of course. Those were heavily frowned at, on any proper Asari world. But the more traditional ones that let the system exist at all were just…part of life, for any Asari.
“I’m sure many of you have heard horror stories of people arriving on Illium and ending up scooped up into contracts that are ‘effectively slavery.”
Rylia included air quotes with that. Even if this was a serious topic, she was keeping her delivery light.
“So…sadly, that does happen. Before I get into why and how to avoid it, though, let’s talk a little bit about what the Indenture System actually is, why it exists within Asari culture, and why normal indenture contracts are not slavery. So, a lot of this has to do with long Asari lifespans and our cycle of maturity. Starting there with a brief overview…”
Rylia continued on, making sure to throw in plenty of humor, deliberately sexy shots of her and other Asari, and other things that would help hold attention on an educational video. This particular channel wasn’t obviously one of the ‘main’ splits she was doing with her stream. The Tech Projects channel was the first of those, with a couple more planned to eventually launch as well. Including an ‘Asari After Dark’ channel that would include more content directly related to the Erotic Delights product lines as they expanded.
Despite it not being obvious, though, this particular channel might possibly be one of the more important ones. At least, if it worked out the way she and Momo hoped it would…
… … …
Momo hummed thoughtfully as she looked over the numbers Rylia had passed her. Only Rylia herself could interact with the Omniversal Marketplace system, Momo not even being able to see it, despite her own connection to it. This was more than a little annoying, in truth, even if it also made the system incredibly secure. As for what Momo was looking at, it was the extensive breakdown that Rylia had done regarding their attempts to map what granted her ‘Karma’ points. They were going to need more help eventually, even if not immediately, and other projects were going well enough that taking the chance to figure it out now had been deemed a productive use of time.
“I have to admit, Rylia, these numbers are confusing. I can see some patterns, I think, but I suspect I’m missing something. Thoughts?”
Rylia sighed, swirling a glass of Thessian whiskey in one hand. It wasn’t all that common a drink, most Asari having a strong preference for wine. Yet Hazel had been a whiskey snob, and Rylia had gained some appreciation for it as a result of their merger. The content of the tumbler likely would have horrified a human whiskey critic, since the ‘hints of fruit’ in it were so strong even a layman could taste them. That, though, was simply the result of Asari taste buds running strongly to sweet things. The drink was something of a compromise between her two halves.
“I’m almost certain I’ve figured out the rough formula, actually. As we suspected, deliberately going out to earn Karma Points negatively impacts the rate they are gained. The system is clearly designed to prevent you from just, well, farming Karma.”
Rylia paused long enough for Momo to nod at that. They’d both expected that might be the case. Rylia had gained her first large batch of Karma entirely unintentionally, when she’d rescued a bunch of people from shitty and unethical indenture contracts.
“I noticed two major variables, which I think account for the bulk of the variance. First, the less directly and personally I’m involved, the less karma I get out of doing something. Simply donating a few hundred thousand credits to a charity netted embarrassingly small returns. Then again, we suspected it wasn’t going to be quite that easy. It’s supposed to be a measure of your nature, after all, and such donations are almost more a business transaction to the wealthy, than they are anything meaningful.” Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
Momo nodded again, as it was one result they’d expected from the start. If it was that easy to convert credits to Karma, there wouldn’t be much point in having the Karma points separate in the system in the first place.
“With that in mind, getting involved with volunteer work personally produced significantly better results. Nevos isn’t the best place for that sort of thing, but there’s still enough call for it that I was able to figure out that I can earn noticeable amounts of Karma by putting in the time and sweat directly. Doing so was also, however, what clued me into the second limiter.”
Rylia took a sip of her whiskey, enjoying the pleasant burn and taste of adjuju berries. Very nice, smooth and well-aged. which it ought to be considering Asari tended to consider a hundred years a reasonable time for even lower-tier whiskey to age, and this wasn’t a low-tier whiskey. It had, in fact, been laid down on September, 2 1945CE by the human calendar. Rylia had recognized that as the official day World War II ended and had figured it was a very appropriate date to lay down whiskey for aging. She’d bought two dozen bottles after sampling the first she’d tried. They weren’t even close to the oldest in her possession, but they were a great sipping whiskey.
“Specifically, how much I personally care or am enthusiastic about something? It matters. A lot. More even than putting the physical blood, sweat and tears in. When I volunteered to help with a 3-day Bioti-ball camp and got really into helping the young Asari that were learning? Waaaaay more Karma, way faster, than virtually any of the other time I ‘donated’ towards causes. Even ones that objectively seem more ‘worthy.’”
It had legitimately been fun, too. Enough of her was still Rylia to love Bioti-ball, and teaching a bunch of twenty-something Asari kids a few tricks had been immensely enjoyable.
“Which is where I came up with the idea of the channel split, which you can see has spiked the Karma income far more than anything else. Less than if I was personally teaching every person about the topics, I’d guess. But I got a lot of Karma for the video I did about the Indenture System and how not to get screwed by it, no matter if you’re an Asari or not. I’m still getting a steady trickle more from that one video, too.”
Momo nodded, looking pleased. She was still a bit uncomfortable with that system, even if she could logically agree that it made sense…for the Asari. Her chief minion was of the opinion that it ought never to have been extended outside the Asari at all, which Rylia couldn’t quite agree with. There were, for example, something like fifty Quarians on their pilgrimages that she now had 5 to 15-year contracts with.
Those contracts were more than fair, with the pair of fifteen-year contracts in particular rewarding the two Quarians jointly involved in it with a ship. Not just a shuttle, but future market-value of a small frigate. The contract would easily award them with the equivalent of around fifteen million credits…each. That sort of money wasn’t something a normal person could earn, even working solidly for fifteen years. The two Quarians in question were immensely talented, and absolutely worth it as far as Rylia was concerned. Both of them would return from their unusually-long pilgrimages in a position to start their own crew among the Migrant Fleet. A huge status jump for the pair that they considered worth the time too.
Contracts like that were ones she considered perfectly acceptable, even with non-Asari, whereas Momo just flat out wasn’t comfortable with them at all. Educating the rest of the galaxy on such contracts, how they worked and why, was something they’d both agreed on. Asari took them so much for granted that they were barely talked about, and most of the existing literature, at least for humans and Quarians, consisted of very dry government-issued explanations that could bore a thresher maw into taking up knitting as an alternative to reading the details.
“I have enough Karma after the various experiments for another Tier 2 summon, but I think we should hold off for now. I’m honestly doing fine with the scale-up for the blaster weapons on my own, the medical Think-Tank doesn’t really need help just yet, and most of the other industrial capacity we have right now on the hidden side of things is working on the new droid production lines. I already adjusted the models we’re making now for the tech base we have, so those can run purely on auto for a while.”
Momo hummed, then nodded.
“I agree. There are certainly plenty of places we still need people, but most of those are on the public-facing side with Erotic Delights and the new Maiden’s Mercy Medical Group. We can recruit entirely normally for both. Until we decide on what the next steps are, exactly, for your plan to become Empress of the Terminus…”
Momo’s lips quirked. Rylia might have used that overblown title one or two too many times. What? Even as Hazel she’d been a little bit dramatic, and original-Rylia had been worse. It wasn’t actually ego, as she was really leaning towards the idea of propping someone from the Omniversal Market up in that role, rather than being the figurehead herself. In her defense, the whole idea was sort of ‘Go Big or Go Home,’ so she felt she was entitled to a little bit of melodrama! New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
“Right. Well, I suppose we really should actually…plan for that. You know, instead of just winging it and heading in that general direction like I’ve been doing. Maybe we need someone to do the planning?”
Momo, surprisingly, shook her head instantly at that idea.
“No. The loyalty from the Omniversal Market contract might ensure they don’t stab you in the back, but the very type of person best at handling conquests tend toward being…pragmatic. Unfortunately, that pragmatism also tends to express as ruthlessness. Much better to hand such a person specific objectives and limitations and let them argue you around if you’re too far off base, than to let them set everything themselves.”
Rylia frowned, finishing her whiskey and she considered that. Momo…wasn’t wrong. She certainly intended to find a moral individual to fill the role. Yet, that was almost more frightening than finding a monster to do it. ‘Demons run when a good man goes to war’ was a quote that came to mind. A pragmatic but good man might well decide that a brutal atrocity was the fastest way to take over a world. If that method was how you got the fewest casualties, shouldn’t that be what you went with?
Hell, there were still debates about the ending of the very war she’d thought appropriate to sip a whiskey from the end of. Strictly speaking, the numbers still said that more people would have died taking Japan conventionally than had died in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Something like 1 million versus under a quarter of that number. Yet, that quarter of a million had been ninety percent civilian. Making the debate a horrible quagmire with no true definitive answer, only lots and lots of philosophical arguments.
Would, then, a good but pragmatic man (or woman!) orbitally bombard a city, if the calculation said it would lead to the lowest total number of casualties on both sides? If Rylia was to take events of the Mass Effect games as plausible, and the DLC was real, then Shepard would be faced with that very choice regarding the Alpha Relay.
Which, she mentally noted, was probably something she should look into doing something about. Either a method of disabling the Relay, or creating a convincing reason to evacuate that planet. Something about that thought tickled her brain and she made a note of it. If there was some way to disable Relays, it might just be a major key to both buying time before the Reapers showed up…and not having to fight them all at once. Given that they’d arrived eventually, they presumably had more robust non-Relay FTL systems than the Citadel Races. Yet, forcing them to constantly use them? That might let them chop the fight up into smaller pieces.
Shaking off the odd string of thoughts, she returned her attention to Momo.
“Well, that’s true enough…but this conversation is waaaaay too serious! Have you seen the initial advertisement suggestions for the Neurostimulator product line? I bet there’s a lot of people out there who will squirm at the thought of a chastity belt equipped with a neruostim system! It’s a bit niche, maybe, but it looked pretty fun~!”
Huh, Momo going beat red was rarer these days than it used to be. Wait, was she one of the people that squirmed at the thought of it? Hmmm, it could certainly be a fun diversion if she was into the idea, though that was a bit of a far off thought. She was still working on getting Momo into the Unlimited Headpats zone, after all! She was certainly responding more positively lately. Maybe she should push for an actual date or something?
Eh, a thought for later, when she was less likely to just blurt it out…
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
A/N 1: Something that came up in Halfway Broken when I first introduced the Karma System was how knowing about it would affect earning it. It honestly wasn't really important to that story, with even that version of Luffy being very much a 'I will do what I want, not what some numbers tell me to do' sort of personality. I figured in this fic it made a bit more sense to explore the concept though. Hence Rylia being a bit scientific about it and figuring out the formula somewhat. While still making that formula something that CAN'T be fully cheated, as she needs to be invested in what she's doing for more than just selfish reasons.