Collide Gamer

Friday had come and passed with everyone just having fun. While a worthwhile experience, it was also not greatly different from the others, and John was pretty certain that, a few years down the line, those days would mostly just mash together into one hazy stream of sex, jacuzzis, sunbathing, silly games, dates, dumb jokes and everyone making fun of Salamander for her stupid idea when it came up. In other words, it had been a worthwhile vacation.

However, that was over now. Right now, John was mostly alone, just him and the elementals in his head, watching over the show-pirates preparing to take off.

“After all, you weren’t that much of a scumbag,” Senior said once they were finished. “Can’t believe you let us go with all our stuff. We have a radioactive polar bear cub that is worth millions!”

“I don’t have anything against you people, you just manoeuvred yourself into a position where I could exploit you for something that I wanted,” John loudly spoke, standing on the walkway between the two halves of the dry-dock, gesturing with one hand before putting it back into the pocket of his suit pants. The times to sport trunks were over, for now. “No reason to take more than I wanted.”

“Mhm,” Senior didn’t have anything to add until the side of the ship parted. In an automatic sequence, the safety vessel was angled and began to pick up speed as it slid outwards. The octopus-man screamed all throughout his goodbye. “YOU ARRR NO LONGERRR IN CHAAAAAARRRGE OF ME, ARRROGANT LASS! I SHALL NEVER FORGIVE YOU!!! ARRRRR!!!!”

John just waved them goodbye; the guy was making a grandstand, but Observe put his relationship at a mild -16. The fact that John had been largely respectful and allowed them to clean out their personal belongings had made them more complacent than they would have otherwise been and also meant that he didn’t leave large enough an impact to properly hate. He didn’t ruin anybody’s life, just their week. They would put that down as a bad job experience and maybe throw some shade when they ran into each other again. There was nothing to declare a genuine vendetta over though.

Minimal amounts of sea water ran into the yacht. The opening’s floor was maybe a metre below the sea level, if that. Barriers of metal around the other vehicles prevented them from being swept away. There was a way to change the layout of those barrier, but John didn’t have the need to do so right now. Once the walls shut again, the water was pumped out, and that was that.

John made his walk back to the conference room. There, everyone else was waiting. It was the indoor one; on the 20 seats of the central round table sat most of his girls and Maximillian. The elementals quickly spawned in to fill their own seats; John took the one that had the giant screen on the wall behind its back. If he decided to put something on the screen, he would be seeing what was on there with his laptop, hooked up wirelessly, anyway.

“Okay, we make landfall tomorrow around noon, so it’s about time we finally get together what we do once we are there,” John began the meeting. “Starting not with us, but with you, Max. You going to stick around or what?”

“No, as I said I wanted to go to Hollywood. I am not here to take a ride on your coattails or anything,” Maximillian answered, leaning back in the chair. The rest automatically adjusted itself to go lower in response to the pressure. “So, once this meeting is over, I will return to the Rising Tide and just take the seven girls I managed to flirt into my room in one final orgy. Then you probably won’t see me again for a while… but I will leave with this.”

He picked a card out of his breast pocket, also having changed back to his suit, and placed it on the table. With a quick move of his hand, he slid it across. It didn’t land before John, but before Rave. “Why ya giving me your phone number?” she asked.

“I want you to also give it to your mother.”

“GROSS!” Rave shouted out. Darting out of his seat, John fished the card out of her hand before she could destroy it or anything. It was a pretty well-designed business card with the Austrian and Habsburg flags as the background.

‘I should probably get something like that myself,’ John thought as he threw it into his inventory. He would save the number into his phone later. “…I don’t see you leaving,” he noted as Maximillian leaned even further back, putting his feet on some stool underneath the table.

“Do you want me to?” he asked, folding his hands behind his head. “I wanted to see what idiocy you would be planning… Aclysia, why do you stare at me like you can make my head explode?”

John cleared his throat to repress a giggle. “Sure, you can stay, buddy, although I have to ask to keep it confidential.”

“Not my country, I don’t know anybody here, so sure, my lips are sealed,” Maximillian confirmed, and John got on with it.

“The first things we are going to do once on land are one very short thing and one long thing. Namely, I want to create the Guild Hall and then I want to grind until we have some money. That will likely take some time.”

Eliza raised her hand, “How much money are we talking about here? Some fucking pennies or what? It’s not like you need to get a shitload of it.”

“Actually, I do need a shitload of it,” John said. “We are currently broke. I only have exactly a thousand bucks.”

“What the fuck? What happened?” Eliza wanted to know.

“Gift shops happened, lots of barbeques happened, the dates happened,” he summarized for her. “To answer how much money I want, one billion dollars, baseline. We are about to enter a guild territory where money is everything, which is important for Step 2, observing the situation on the ground. Let me give you the rundown.”

The map was put on the screen behind him. “That’s the rough of the borders of the organization called Thorne, with its base in New York City. Basic information about the area is easy to find: it is a highly capitalistic society where nothing but money is holy. Funnily enough that did create Thorne, rather than Thorne creating it; the Bearings Inland Trading Company, or just Bearings, and Rethropes are both guilds of high significance within this super-capitalistic society, although still too weak to challenge Thorne.”

“Do ya know why they are that dominant?” Rave asked.

“They have the strongest grip on the market, present in almost all walks of life and something approaching a monopoly on bio-mechanic enhancements,” John told her. “Do you remember the mall in Cologne I told you about? The one I went to with Aclysia?” Rave looked a bit confused, so he added something more. “Tube-like thing, local teleporters getting you to private changing rooms, very vertical, kind of like a bazaar?”

“Ah, that thing, yeah,” Rave nodded.

“Thorne controls the local version of that, so they are both retailer and marketplace in the heart of New York. I guess most of their funding comes from there.” With Abyssal populations largely mirroring local ones, just shrunk down, having such a strong business position in the heart of one of the most populated cities on earth was surely a source of enormous revenue.

With the Americas being, for the most part, ravaged by a lack of central authority, the factor by which the local population was related to the real one was a fair share lower than in Europe, so it wasn’t like that created an economic might that could have challenged anything gigantic, but it was still sizable.

“To run the numbers of their rough expected economic strength, let’s look at New York’s estimated Abyssal population,” John said and, despite barely anyone listening at the boring math part of the meeting, ran his theory. “New York City has a population of about 8,5 million. On average, countries in the Abyss of Europe have 1 Abyssal in every 150 people, but we can’t use that figure directly because cities are even more concentrated in the Abyss than in reality, with the lack of need for farms and the like essentially drying up the countryside.” The Abyssal Netherlands were a particularly ridiculous example of this from what John gathered, with more than a third of its population (approaching 120 thousand) concentrated in the city of Amsterdam and the surrounding areas. The 40’000 of that figure were then supplemented by another group of that size in the shape of magical races.

In reality, trying to math this out was entirely unlikely to lead to really accurate figures, but John had fun doing it. “Approximating that the Abyssal factor on average is 1 in every 300 people, Let’s slash that to 1 in every 150 for the big apple.” Ironically, as John noticed as he was speaking, that was the number he didn’t want to use initially. Funny how that worked out. “That would put the estimated human population around 60 thousand and the total population from 80 to 120 thousand.”

“To provide some context to the number, it would put it somewhere between the size of Amsterdam and London, which is impressive for something as disorganized as this… if it is true,” Maximillian chimed in.

Personally, John was still more coming to terms with those massive skews, both between city and countryside and Europe and America. Real Rome had less than a third of NYC’s population, yet the abyssal one was about twice as large. That went to show just how huge the advantage Europe had on this front currently was.

However, there was an advantage both real America had in the past and John had right now. Europe was a bunch of naturally grown places with things that didn’t quite make sense outside of their historical value anymore. All he had to do now was to do away with the things that were senseless and implement systems of governance, economics and infrastructure that were more fit for the modern age. In other words, he had access to a giant catch-up mechanic in the form of stealing experience from the people across the great pond.

That was putting the cart before the horse though; for now he was just a guy on a yacht.

“Anyway,” John ended his math ramblings, to the relief of most people, “Thorne has a lot of money; sadly I can’t find a whole lot about who leads them though. They are organized in cells that report to higher cells that report to higher people, very few of which are going about shouting who they are. Getting in contact with them will be hard.”

“Is that a problem?” Rave asked. “We can just waltz in and demand to speak with the boss. Not saying we take over by force or anything, but we can do that much.”

John hummed and drummed his fingers over the table for a moment, “True, that would work, but that doesn’t quite leave the message I want. It would be best if we started this whole conquest thing by building a reputation of being diplomatic rather than forceful. Also, I want to test the waters. I think the best way to go about this is to play within the system until Thorne notices us, not the other way around.”

“So, what are we doing then?” Rave still wasn’t clear on that.

“Honestly depends on the situation on the ground. Are the people happy? Is Thorne someone we can support or tyrannical? Can they be taken over from within or do we need to eradicate them? Ideally, I would want them to submit to a system we design, with laws and ethics and all that, without bloodshed.”

Maximillian wryly smiled. “Those will be interesting newspaper articles,” he commented.

“Glad to be of entertainment,” John answered somewhat sarcastically. “So yeah, Step 1 is us laying the groundwork. Step 2, we gather information and set up shop. Step 3, we begin taking over by whatever means adequate. That’s highly simplified, but I think it fits. Any more questions?”

Eliza looked at the map and eventually did raise her voice, “How long will this fucking egotrip take you?”

“More than days, that’s for sure, at least weeks, probably months, maybe years,” John told her. “I am not going to rush a takedown of a working system. That’s just asking for blood in the streets.”

Rave hummed a little tune, “Lots of long days ahead of us, gotta say that I am not really the type of person that thinks about getting normal work, but I guess it can’t all be beating up people?”

“Mhm, I do have some plans that will prevent you from getting bored at the normal job we are setting up.”

Nia raised her hand to indicate that she had something to say. John wasn’t even sure he had heard her voice in the last twenty-four hours, gesturing her to tell them what was on her mind. “What do you even plan to make the job?” she asked.

He smiled widely, “I think you are going to like this.”

Season 3 Arc 1 End.