Rylia stood in the middle of the third largest scrapyard on Nevos and smiled hugely. Not the normal reaction of someone surrounded by massive piles of junk. Not even if it was junk they owned. Which, in this case, was in fact the case. Then again, most people didn’t have the Omniversal Marketplace.
“Alright, Jen! Are the privacy measures all set up and online?”
The droid hovering on its repulsorlifts behind her and a bit to the left was a JN-66 analysis droid she’d nicknamed ‘Jen.’ Jen was the point droid of several such droids she’d set up to assist her in running everything she was juggling. It responded in a crisp female voice.
“Yes, mistress. The security droids have secured the perimeter and report all countermeasures are in place.”
Rylia nodded, pleased by the efficiency of the GU-Series police droids. They weren’t much to look at and their combat abilities weren’t fantastic, but they were still a step up on most Mass Effect mechs. Most importantly, they wouldn’t look too out of place compared to said mechs and had very solid security routines. Including, since she’d paid for the package, the ability to run the broad-spectrum jammers and a broad-area holoscreen that would hide what was actually going on out here.
She’d needed to risk a few trips to places on Illium, guarded by a much more capable KX-series droid that was acting as her personal bodyguard, in order to ‘liquidate’ a fair bit of ‘possession is 9/10ths of the law’ items back on Illium. Doing so in sites that had been held by gangs prior to busts, were part of poorly secured junkyards, and similar mildly risky endeavors, had funded her droid and privacy tech purchases from the Marketplace. All without draining her in-universe funds farther.
She’d also, pointedly, left Illium with a bunch of her new indentured minions afterwards. She’d only acquired Jen and the KX bot she’d nicknamed Kix before leaving for Nevos, which is where she’d set up her manufacturing lines for her new brand of sex toys from the start. All others had been purchased on planet, so as to minimize the risk of someone realizing how advanced the droids actually were via scanning as they came through planetary security.
For better or worse, once her contract with the strip club had run out, she’d decided to leave Illium behind. As much business as flowed through that planet, it wasn’t really a manufacturing center. Nor was it overly safe for an Asari who had recently proven herself a potential ‘rare asset.’ She didn’t have any big names in her family that could protect her from some of the more unscrupulous Matriarchs trying to ‘recruit’ her by dubious means. So removing herself to somewhere those Matriarchs didn’t have such a firm grasp on had been a matter of basic common sense.
Thus, she’d relocated herself and her new, and newly grateful since she’d redone their contracts, indentured minions to Nevos. The planet was one of the nicer Asari colony worlds, with a population of under two billion. More importantly, despite amazing beaches and a thriving tourism industry, it was also a decently large manufacturing center. One that, as it happened, had a more limited version of Illium’s reputation. Unlike Illium, it was firmly within Asari space, so there were far more general protections and properly enforced local law, with a comparably lower chance of getting her gloriously pert ass kidnapped. Yet, despite how long it had been colonized for, Nevos was still something of a frontier world, and that came with a lack of truly serious regulation or oversight on its businesses.
The planet also included a number of large junk and scrapyards, which were the inevitable result of any major manufacturing base, and which were kept pointedly far out of sight from most other development on the world. Mind you, these were Asari scrapyards, and they actually did care about ecology of their garden worlds. So she didn’t have to worry about chemical or biological waste. Instead, it was mostly things that legitimately did have value. Old sky cars, outdated or worn out omni-tools, ship parts beyond their service life, broken industrial machinery, etcetera. There was profit to be had in processing it for scrap material, but the margins were low enough it hadn’t been too hard to convince someone to sell.
Rylia had claimed she wanted to develop the land after clearing out the scrap.
Which, to be fair, she did.
The locals just didn’t need to know how fast that was going to happen.
“Right! We’ll get started with the sky cars to clear up some space, then use the Market credits to buy the first builder bots! Let’s get to it, Jen!”
After an affirmative from Jen, with the bot providing a map of the best place it had analyzed to start from, Rylia mentally rubbed her hands in glee as she started selling an entire scrapyard of stuff to the Omniversal Marketplace…
… … …
Rylia leaned back from her desk, stretching in a limber way that would leave most cats green with envy. A lesser, but enjoyable, feature of Asari bodies. Certainly, it was much superior to the joint-popping that her human self had earned after a couple of decades stooped over sketch books and drawing tablets.
She was happy with the pace of the expansion she was managing.
Only three and half months into merging with the original Rylia, Erotic Delights, the company she was using to establish the manufacturing and sales for her sex toy product lines, was doing extremely well. Production was ramping up, credits were rolling in as orders still outpaced that ramped up production, and she’d managed to vet enough mid and high-level managers of various species to absorb most of the paperwork side of things. Better yet, her acquisition of a lot of manufacturing facilities served a secondary purpose of making a few of those facilities vanish, adding to her more concealed holdings. No one would question all the buying in bulk just yet.
After all, her sex toy empire was wildly taking off, and clearly needed the capacity.
She’d been pretty darn confident that the products would sell well, but she’d admittedly failed to wrap her head around the sheer numbers involved. Trillions of Asari, a species known for high sex drives, being introduced to something new in the field of sex toys was turning out to be…hilariously lucrative. Doubly so since she’d already had several additional toys prototyped. Direct nerve stimulators, adapted from a combination of Star Wars and Star Trek tech to make something that could be created with the local tech base, were proving to be just as popular as her initial trio of products. As well as just as hard to keep up with the demand for.
Frankly, Erotic Delights was likely to continue struggling for enough manufacturing capacity for years if she didn’t sell out to a major company at some point. Not because it wasn’t expanding rapidly, but just because the demand was that high. Of course, she didn’t really want to sell out, even if it would mean a massive infusion of credits, simply because having such an innocuous cover for manufacturing other things was so useful.
Already, her scrap facility had been emptied onto the Marketplace and construction bots had been purchased from the Market to build up a truly hidden and sizable facility for making other things. Combined with the facilities that were ‘disappearing’ underneath all her other purchases, she had a solid core manufacturing base she could use to mass produce tech from other realities.
Of course, she’d also used some of the System Credits to purchase other things off her ‘must have’ lists.
The most important of those was a rapid learning system.
Not that getting such up and running had been as easy as she had initially hoped. On deeper investigation, Rylia had discovered that the vast majority of systems which could pull the ‘download knowledge to your brain’ trick had…drawbacks. The Institute technology from Fallout had a nasty tendency to overwrite your personality. Flash learning from Star Wars was best used on a blank mind, as too many foreign experiences could cause a psychotic break. Warhammer 40k equivalents had a predicable indoctrination effect. Etcetera and so on. Ironically, Cyberpunk, for all that its tech level wasn’t that high in most fields, had one of the best and least side-effect prone systems. Even there, though, there were too many drawbacks. Like needing a neural port cybernetic implant to use skill shards in the first place.
Thankfully, others using the Omniversal Marketplace System had already solved the same problem. She’d found one of the cheapest items up for ‘Dimensional Barter’ was one such system that combined multiple tech bases to minimize drawbacks. Though it had meant spending over a hundred thousand credits to acquire some rare materials that someone was willing to trade it for. Still, she had the system now, and had been slowly using it to absorb technology breakthroughs from other realities. It took time, she couldn’t overuse even the hybrid system she’d traded for without consequences. But she was gaining the needed skills. She’d also pointedly used it to learn Galactic Basic, restricting most of her droids to using that particular Star Wars language as an extra form of security.
Of course, the learning system wasn’t a panacea, and she was now hitting new bottlenecks. Specifically, that doing so much herself was taking too long.
In more than one sense, too.
Not only did she need to learn the technologies in order to mass produce them, instead of just buying them from the Market and using them, she also needed to adapt what she learned to the Mass Effect tech base. Which, combined with trying to run her new Sex Toy Empire, was eating up too much time. Her new hires, combined with the JN-66 analysis droids, would remove many of the issues on the Sex Toy company front, at least. But it didn’t do a thing for her ability to handle the R & D aspect. She didn’t exactly have locals she could trust with the big technical breakthroughs just yet.
Leaning back and staring at the ceiling, she mused aloud.
“I clearly need to summon some help. I’ve built up some karma currency almost accidentally by enforcing fair hiring policies and giving preference in hiring to those who need work, even if it means training them. Not to mention buying out all those shady-as-fuck indentures when I left Illium and rewriting them as fair. Even a bit on the overly lucrative side, really. It’s not a ton, but I have karma credit built up that I could summon someone. The question is…who?”
Sighing, as she realized she was talking to herself now, yet another indicator she needed to grab someone she could trust with the full truth, Rylia settled back in for more work. Given she’d only get one shot at picking the right person for now, she just knew she was in for an extremely long night as she opened the Omniversal Marketplace and started flipping through the ‘Help’ section to earmark possibilities…