Rylia was in complete and total awe as Momo vanquished her foe. A foe that frightened and intimidated Rylia to the deepest and darkest depths of her soul. Both her souls, as Hazel had possessed a visceral terror of the beast as well. Even more than spiders. More than thresher maws. Possibly even more than Reapers! Many were the epic battles waged against her timeless, immortal and unkillable foe, which now seemed to pathetically whimper before Momo’s determined expression and skilled hands.
Apparently, Momo was really good at paperwork.
Well, technically Omnitool form work and emails, but same things, different tech base.
“You’re seriously done already?! Is this some secret aspect of your super powers?! You must teach me, sensei! Even if I have to buy powers from the Marketplace!”
Momo’s lips twitched in amusement as Rylia knelt before the Paperwork Goddess and plead earnestly with hands clasped together.
“It, unfortunately, requires the one thing which is your greatest weakness, Rylia. Attention span.”
Urk. Rylia fell back, slain, as Momo’s shot pierced both her lives with vicious accuracy. A moment later, she did her best to rally.
“Attention span is the bane of creativity, Momo! If you focus on just one thing for very long, you’ll never have time for all the new thoughts!”
Momo’s twitching lips were joined by a snort, before breaking out into a proper grin.
“I suppose there is some truth to that. I struggled with more creative uses of my Quirk, and training it to be usable at all was mostly an exercise in extremes of focus.”
Rylia pointed dramatically.
“See! It is part of your superpower! Your Quirk clearly warped your mind towards extreme focus!”
Momo rolled her eyes, but a small smile remained as she moved onto a new topic.
“Now that we’ve got you caught up on your formwork and handled critical decisions, we need to talk about production efficiency.”
That…sounded very boring, but probably important, so Rylia sighed as she waved for Momo to go on.
“Honestly, you and the small team you put together did a fairly decent job of setting up initial production lines, at least for amateurs. The analysis droids helped, as did the fact you had a couple of decent logistics people among those you hired or picked up from…indenture.”
The word ‘indenture’ came off Momo’s lips with an odd note to it, but Rylia already knew Momo was struggling to process that bit of culture clash. The younger woman had been appalled when she first learned about the indenture thing being common, but once she’d examined why the system worked for the Asari she’d accepted it for them. She’d had a much harder time with the fact the company currently held indenture contracts for members of other species. Ones that were up to twenty years long in some cases, representing a significant portion of those individual’s lifespans. Going over how generous Rylia had been when she’d rewritten those contracts had eased Momo’s discomfort, but she was still struggling a bit with the concept.
“Nevertheless, I spotted several ways you’re not taking advantage of things like common components between toy models, or common doping steps for some of the meta materials in use by virtually all of them. If I spotted a half dozen such places things could be tightened up, then a real expert would find double that number. We just need to find an expert we can live with, one that sticks to hardware recommendations rather than trying to idiotically trim fat by treating the workers like drones. Find the right experts and we can probably get at least a 15 percent output increase across all lines with virtually no negative impact on the workers.”
Rylia grimaced at Momo’s acid tone as she commented on ‘trimming the fat,’ though the opinion behind it was one she honestly agreed with. It was, in fact, part of the reason why she hadn’t hired such an expert yet. Rylia wasn’t informed enough to be able to tell where good sense suggestions bled into the sort of well-poisoning and worker abuse that Hazel had hated getting caught up in as part of corporate America. Self-destructive bad business habits like trying to squeeze worker time management to the point your employees hated your guts.
Asari corporations were less prone to that, in some ways, because of how social the species was. But if you were unlucky enough to work for one of the Matriarchs that tended to see younger Asari as lesser? It could legitimately be worse, too. Rylia hadn’t trusted that she’d be able to tell the difference between needed changes for better efficiency and changes that went too far and abused her work force. When she explained as much to Momo, the younger woman nodded.
“I’d hoped that was the problem. You’ve put a strong focus on worker loyalty, for reasons I can completely understand given long-term goals. But you do have someone who can spot the difference now, and it would be better to get on top of this before we talk to investors.”
Rylia grimaced. That was probably the biggest bubble of hers that Momo had popped. With brutal efficiency that hadn’t been all that pleasant. Rylia had wanted to keep everything privately held by her, and Momo had encouraged her to retain at least controlling interest in the various businesses so no one could pry into their operations. But she’d also disabused her of the notion it was a good idea to stay entirely held by herself personally.
Bringing in at least private investors would allow them to expand operations far faster than they could otherwise, and they weren’t exactly blessed with an abundance of time. Not for the sheer scale of the task at hand. The fact that many of the rich investors would have political connections they could leverage later, when they expanded into military markets, also made it a form of networking. As Momo had walked her through it all, Rylia had realized just how right she’d been to pick a business/politics specialist as her first ‘Help’ purchase.
There were a lot of things like that, behind the scenes maneuvering to get far better purchase deals, sales contracts, and access to hiring pools that weren’t available just by accessing the extranet. Momo had already managed to trade minor pieces of technology that Rylia wanted shared out anyway, in order to open doors for buying more manufacturing capacity that had started closing here on Nevos. Rylia had bought up everything that people were actively looking to sell, plus a little more she’d managed to haggle for, and then hit her limits without having to build from scratch. She hadn’t had an understanding of how to leverage what she had to pry loose more of what existed from those that didn’t want only money. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
Apparently, it was a lot easier to get big corps to sell you existing manufacturing space if you were making under-the-table deals with the owners. Deals like allowing them to privately invest in your wildly profitable business. Since Erotic Delights wasn’t publicly traded and never would be, it wasn’t even an insider trading issue. Cutting some ambitious Matron about to hit her Matriarch stage into a massively profitable business if she could ‘just see her way to letting us buy that one factory from you?’ Apparently a very effective way to pry lose more of the existing manufacturing capacity than Rylia had been able to get at.
Deals like that, as well as some doing those previously mentioned tech trades to pass off the secrets of new ways to use Mass Effect fields to various corporations, stood to increase their production capacity by something like seventy-five percent in less than two months. Most of that spent retooling the new facilities for what they needed. Even with losing some profit to the new investors, the ability to get far closer to meeting actual demand would still increase their own profits by several hundred percent.
Momo was much better at this build-a-business in detail thing than she was. Thankfully, Rylia wasn’t overly devastated by that, as she’d found that she was still far better than the younger girl at creative vision. It had been Rylia who came up with a list of uses for the various bits of tech at Momo’s request, even if Momo had then sweet talked the various corporations in the required fields into wanting the tech. Such as selling the Security Field generation tech she’d employed in the Cyber-Tentacle Bondage Frame to actual security companies that made prisons and police holding cells.
That had been an obvious use, since it was something the Protheans had used it for. More creatively, Rylia had pointed out that the same fields had massive usage for construction, and Momo had leverage that for something like forty percent of their new deals. Some for acquiring more factory space, others for getting much cheaper deals for raw materials that increased their own profits significantly without lowering quality.
“Alright. So we need an efficiency review of the production lines, presumably before we retool the new factories for more production. I take it you have an idea who we should get to do it?”
Momo nodded and launched into her explanation of several options…
… … …
As she watched the ASP-19 labor droid accept yet another in the stream of blasters that had come down the production line and run it through basic firing tests, Rylia had to admit she was both impressed and pleased. With Momo having taken on more and more of the day-to-day high-level management of Erotic Delights, Rylia had been freed up to work on conversion of other technologies into something the local tech base could mass produce. With a lot of thought and more than a little lively debate with Momo, she’d selected two areas to expand into.
The first was for public consumption, or would be eventually anyway. Medical technology was both relatively inoffensive and tangentially related to some of the second-generation sex toys that Erotic Delights was starting to put out in limited numbers. Specifically, Rylia had managed to adapt direct nerve stimulation taken as a relatively minor purchase from Star Trek’s tech base, and use it in a sex toy that could directly trigger nerves to send specific signals to the brain.
The reason that it hadn’t been a huge cost, despite coming from a much higher tech base was that, technologically, the Mass Effect universe already knew how to do that. Direct nerve manipulation, or at least communication, was required to make even vaguely decent cybernetics work. Even as Hazel, whose memories ended in the early 2020s, several cybernetics projects had managed to map and connect to nerves well enough to allow something like an artificial arm to achieve a sense of pressure. In 2167, with access to far more than just humanity’s cybernetic tech, prosthetic limbs that could achieve near-total fidelity in reproducing sense of touch were readily available on the market.
Oddly enough, currently it was one of the few areas that Turian medical science legitimately outperformed everyone else’s. Though the Salarians came a close second. More normally it was the Asari and Salarians who were usually at the top of most medical fields, if for very different reasons. For cybernetics specifically, however, the Turians were king. When you dug down into why, it even made sense.
Asari cellular regeneration meant doing enough damage to cause loss of a limb, without also killing the Asari in question, was somewhat rare. Said regeneration wasn’t the same sort of visibly-fast regen as a Krogan or Vorcha, but it still existed, and was actually more complete than either species on a micro scale. Even when limb loss did occur, that same cellular regeneration meant it was hilariously easy to clone an arm and stick the cloned arm on the stump. The regeneration would then kick in and, in a bare week or so, the cloned arm would be 95 percent of the way to a true replacement for the lost limb.
Asari just…didn’t really use cybernetics all that much as a result.
As a general rule, the only three cybernetics common to find in Asari were universal translator implants, omni-tool implants, and Biotic Amps. The first two were in use by virtually every species and so commonplace as to be unremarkable. Biotic Amps, on the other hand, were rarer than one might expect with Asari, as they were the only species known to not need them. Day-to-day biotics usage by your typical office-worker Asari wasn’t even remotely intense enough to demand an amp. Unless you were a seriously weak biotic by Asari standards, you could manage just fine with what nature gave you.
No, Amps were only installed by those whose life revolved around the use of biotics, as a general rule. Every Asari commando had an Amp, so did most Asari mercs, and Bioti-ball players almost always did too. That last fact was actually the only reason that Rylia herself had a Biotic Amp, and hers was an Armali Council model that was specifically tuned for Bioti-ball players. It was legitimately faster in activation than most military models, leaning into the reflex needs of an athlete, but didn’t boost power output as much as one tuned for military use would.
It did have to be said that the Asari were obviously the best at making ‘space magic’ amplifiers, as the Hazel part of her insisted on thinking of the bullshit that was biotics. That, however, was simply the weight of how long they’d been doing it for and how much larger their population was. Even if the average Asari didn’t have one, even the percentage that did likely outnumbered every single biotic of every other race in the galaxy, combined.
When it came to other cybernetics, though, the Asari had very little use for them. They weren’t, as a species, generally militant enough to have ever seriously gone into cybernetic augmentation for combat reasons. Nor did they have much use for medical cybernetics with how good their cellular regeneration was. The Salarians were better, having some pretty good cybernetics used for both combat augmentation among the STG and for medical purposes when limbs were lost. Yet, in truth, Salarian medical science expertise leaned more toward chemistry and genetics than cybernetics.
The Turians, on the other hand, were more than militant enough to have run hundreds of different cybernetic super solider projects. Something which had the side effect that they’d gotten very good with cybernetics in general. In fact, the laws currently in place in Citadel Space for how far you could go with such augmentation had basically been written for the Turians, so they would stop trying to make super soldiers.
So, the Turians had excellent cybernetics. Their tech was more than capable of mapping and stimulating nerves…with physical contact. The difference with the Star Trek tech she’d purchased from the Omniversal Marketplace was that it didn’t need physical contact. Requiring some sort of direct contact with the nerve meant that the only previously existing way to induce pleasure in nerves was with an implant. Those did exist and, as one might expect, some Asari did in fact have them. Being able to practically trigger an orgasm on demand was fun, after all.
Still, most Asari considered such things a little boring compared to doing it the ‘manual’ way, and there was a bit of a cultural stigma against cybernetics too. Not a strong one, but enough that generally getting an implant for that sort of thing was restricted to specific kink communities, even with Asari, let alone with the more inhibited species out there. Star Trek medical tech, which could generate fields that allowed remote stimulation of nerves? That was a jump up, and one Rylia had employed to make a second toy line. One that they were currently only selling to exclusive clients, on account of their already overstrained production capacity. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Even the limited production was mostly an excuse. They were using the new toy line as a supposed jumping off point to logically explain why they were getting into medical tech. Rylia had purchased knowledge of how to repair or rewire nerves from the same source, after all. Star Trek medical science was advanced, and the ability to repair, modify, or even outright regrow nerves was a more expensive but massively more useful medical technology. It would help in the treatment of hundreds of conditions…possibly even including the condition among Asari that created Ardat-Yakshi.
That particular problem was caused by a genetic condition, but its effects were on the nervous system. The ability to rewire and modify nerves would be quite likely to lead to a treatment that could both identify and cure those who had the condition. Which, while it definitely wouldn’t be shouted to the heavens since Asari collectively pretended the disease didn’t exist, would absolutely raise the proverbial stock of any Asari who pulled it off. Curing that and hundreds of other nerve and nervous system related issues in various species was a good excuse to push into the medical tech sector.
It was also, as an eventually public-facing project, something that she was largely handing off to actual scientists she’d hired. She provided them with the ‘breakthrough’ and how to make it work, they would go through the proper steps of using the tech to make cures and treatments. Which they would, honestly, most likely partner with major medical companies to actually manufacture and deliver, rather than trying to do it themselves.
As a result of that hand off, and getting back to why she was watching the end result of their first hidden production line being test fired, Rylia had personally put more focus on the second thing they’d decided to make. After lively debate and careful consideration, it had been decided that one of Rylia’s very first thoughts on how to combat Reapers was something they needed to start following up on, soonest.
Energy weapons.
Despite her mentally thinking of the weapon she’d engineered as a ‘blaster,’ Rylia had not reached into the Star Wars tech base for the design. Star Wars weapons were, almost universally, plasma weapons. While considerably less affected by standard kinetic barriers than traditional kinetic energy weapons, plasma did have enough kinetic mass that it would detonate against a kinetic barrier rather than bypassing it fully. The damage that got through would be heat transfer, but without physical contact, that heat transference would be somewhat mitigated. Not enough to save someone shot by a decent Star Wars blaster if you were considering current-gen kinetic barriers, no.
But…Rylia was not considering current-gen kinetic barriers.
No, she was remembering that Reaper main weapons were magnetohydrodynamic canons. The Thanix cannon that the Turians would eventually design was the same, being based on what they would learn from Sovereign’s corpse. The problem was that said weapon fired a stream of molten metal instead of a normal mass effect round. The Thanix cannon would prove effective against Reapers…but only with consecutive hits.
Worse, she also remembered there were upgrades you could get to shielding tech for ships like the Normandy that would help it shrug off such fire. The Reapers, logically, had developed a counter to their own primary weapons. Not a perfect one, but one that meant indirect heat transfer from something breaking on their barrier wasn’t a silver bullet.
A very large part of Rylia had wanted the Star Trek phaser technology instead.
Unfortunately, unlike the minor medical tech, phaser technology was apparently far in advance enough of anything in the Mass Effect universe to be ruinously expensive. If Rylia sold the entire arcology her penthouse was in, it might be enough to buy a single handheld phaser. It wouldn’t be enough to buy the knowledge of how the bloody thing worked. Which, sadly, meant that Rylia had been stuck looking farther afield for something more readily attainable.
She’d gone through an embarrassing number of other universes desperately trying to avoid the one that terrified her, even if she’d known it had the solution.
Finally, she’d gritted her teeth and risked acquiring technology from Warhammer 40k.
She may or may not have been audibly chanting ‘please don’t bring chaos with you, pleased don’t bring chaos with you, pleased don’t bring chaos with you…’ the entire time she was making the purchase. She also might or might not have made a few dozen warding gestures and prayers before she uploaded the knowledge of how Lasguns in their many iterations worked.
Thankfully, as far as she could tell, she’d gotten the technology without side effects.
She was still calling them ‘blasters’ just in case, though. Memetic threats from other dimensions are scary!
Thankfully, once she’d accepted her fate about the source, the option had proven to be exactly what she’d wanted. Not only did the ‘Lasgun’ technology produce what amounted to bolts and streams of massless photons that would totally ignore kinetic barriers, but it scaled extremely well. The current test production run of infantry weapons was a great testbed, but the tech could and would scale up to something suitable for ship use, easily.
Even better than that, it also wasn’t a truly radical departure from the Mass Effect weapons tech. Guardian Arrays on most military ships used laser technology to shoot down fighters and missiles, for example. The problem that no one in the Mass Effect universe had been able to crack was how to pack enough energy into a small enough space to make them viable at any other scale. For use as an infantry weapon, you needed a power pack that could produce a meaningful level of output, crammed into a man-portable gun. On the other end of the spectrum, you needed materials that could survive the output energy requirements to make a ship-based laser weapon viable.
The Mass Effect universe had not solved either problem, but Warhammer 40k had.
Which meant that the ‘blasters’ that her droids were testing, coming off the first production line that was being run by a mix of automation and hands-on assembly by ASP-11 labor droids, were everything Rylia wanted. They would completely and totally ignore kinetic barriers, deliver enough power to punch through hardsuit armor, and yet wouldn’t look like a radically alien technology. They would just look like some genius, be that her or a minion she might attribute it to, had cracked an old problem to make a known weapon type viable in new ways.
Rylia was extremely pleased with how it was all working out. Assuming that she really had avoided bringing anything else from that Eldrich Horror of a Reality along with the knowledge…
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A/N 1: Okay, Rylia is just kinda fun to write. The personality I gave her is just slightly crackish, so I can get away with a lot more ridiculousness :-p.