The Outlands

Tess chuckled and finished her cereal, then drew the magic circle that would bring her to the realm of the gods and activated it. Her mother met her with the usual hug, then led her over to one of the tables in the room, where a laptop open to some sort of spreadsheet was sitting.

“So…where are these requests being received?” Tess asked. “I don’t remember setting up the company thing.”

“That’s because you didn’t.” Fortune replied. “I set something up using my church and Evan. And I say company, but it’s really just a website and a bank account-slash-PO box with the guild. It’s not actually anything big yet, just something that exists so people can contact it. I’ve been making it part of my morning routine to sort the mail we get, so I’ve got a list of places that are ready for us lined up.”

Tess nodded. “Right. And the process was just going to be using my Blessing to determine whether or not they’ve cheated anyone within the last year or so, then…I guess giving them some sort of certificate?”

“Yeah, I have a design drawn up.” Fortune replied. “And after they’re accredited, we’ll give them the okay to purchase our machines. I think eventually we’ll want to expand the accreditation requirements to include having at least a certain number of our machines, but I think we should wait on that for a few years, until there’s been enough time for our machines to saturate the market.”

“Thanks for taking care of that.” Tess said guiltily. “I really should have remembered.”

“It’s fine.” Fortune laughed. “I have to do at least this much, otherwise it’s less of a partnership and more offloading all of my work onto you. Besides, you’ve been busy training and working on Mael’s integration, it’s not like you’ve been idle.”

“I guess.” Tess said. “So…how are we going to start on this? Just start flipping coins?”

“I think so. It’ll go faster if we split up the work, I’ll read off the candidate, you flip the coins and I’ll record the result. Heads if they’re okay to be accredited, tails if they’re not.”

Tess reached into her pocket and pulled out a gold piece. The coins that dropped from monsters had a very barebones depiction of the monster they dropped from on one side, which allowed them to be used for coin flips. And, fortunately, the depictions were vague enough that Tess didn’t have to worry about whether or not the coins came from a monster that the public knew about; all humanoid monsters just had a small picture of a person, a catlike monster just had a cat, and so on.

“Alright, first up is the casino Ava took you to a while back, the Vermillion Arc.” Fortune said. “Give it a go.”

Tess flipped the coin, and it came back heads. “Looks like they’re clean.” She said.

“Not a surprise.” Fortune said. “They’ve got a good reputation and serve a lot of high-end clients. Alright, next is one of the other big casinos in the City, the Lucky Dog.”

They quickly started to cut out the extra chatter, with Fortune just giving a name and Tess saying yes or no, and proceeded like that for another fifteen minutes. They made it through about seventy-five different casinos during that time, but Tess’s voice was getting a little sore so they decided to take a small break and grab a drink before proceeding.

“This is…going to take a while.” Tess said. “But I think I might know a way to speed it up?”

Her mother perked up. “I’m all ears.” She said enthusiastically. “This is mind-numbing.”

“Is there some sort of true random number generator in that spreadsheet?” Tess asked.

“Should be.” Fortune replied. “Are you suggesting we use that to autofill the rest of the entries?”

“Yeah.” Tess said. “Theoretically that should work, right?”

“I don’t see why not.” Fortune said brightly, leaning over and ruffling Tess’s hair. “The thought hadn’t crossed my mind, I’m really glad to have you here with me! Let me make a copy so we can confirm the results will line up with what we’ve done manually so far.”

“That aside…is this about what you expected?” Tess asked. “We haven’t had many fail yet.”

“Just about.” Fortune said. “This isn’t the full list, just the biggest ones on there. We’ve got about ten thousand in total, so I figured we’d do it in batches and start with the big ones, since that’ll affect the most people. It’s gonna take a few months to get through them all, but things should calm down after that. Or…at least, it will if the RNG thing doesn’t work. That should only be the case if the program doesn’t have any sort of magic in it and is just math-based RNG, but basically everything uses magic-based RNG nowadays.”

“Are we going to hire anyone?” Tess asked. “I believe there was a vague plan to like…hire people to handle recertification and they’d like…use a lie detector to see if people are being honest, and then we’d just audit them every so often. Did we ever make a final decision on that?”

“I don’t think we ever formally did, but that’s the plan I was assuming we’d go with.” Fortune replied. “Outside of the initial process it’ll be far too much paperwork to handle every renewal ourselves. I’ve been looking through my clergy and picking people I think will be both trustworthy and willing to fill the roles, I’ve got another list of them. We’ll start going through them once we’re through with this initial pass.”

“Speaking of, are we just going to send them letters or what?” Tess asked. “And are we going to stagger their renewal dates? It’ll be a bit much if ten thousand casinos all apply for renewal all at once.”

“Yes to both. I have a bunch of letters drafted containing the current standards they’ll need to maintain as well as a certificate, and I’ll take the data from this sheet and spread out the renewal dates evenly over the year, then new ones after this will just renew a year from when their application was approved. It’ll mean some won’t have to renew for almost two full years this first time, but that’s not a huge deal.”

Tess nodded. “So…how are we going to handle the first round of machine sales? I can’t imagine we’ll have enough for everyone who will want some.”

“I think we give casinos the opportunity to buy via a lottery of some sort, with some set aside for the biggest casinos.” Fortune replied. “That’s pretty fair and not showing too much undue favoritism. And, of course, we’ll only sell to people who have gotten our accreditation.”

“Do we know what the rate of production is expected to be like?” Tess asked.

“In general, no, but I know that we should have roughly five thousand slot machines in three weeks, with the other machines to finish a couple weeks after that.” Fortune said. “I haven’t looked at any of their documents in detail, just made sure things were moving. We should talk with Alice, she’d know.”

“Let’s go use those terminal things to see if she’s busy.” Tess suggested. “If she’s not, we can pop down to where she is and talk with her about it.”

Fortune hesitated for a moment. “I’m not sure I should be going down there.” She said. “It’s one thing to be in your house or a specially prepared venue, it’s another to just be out in the streets.”

“Oh, right. I wasn’t thinking about that.” Tess said. “I can just relay your words for you.”

“Sorry.” Fortune said apologetically. “Um…you haven’t used one of the viewing terminals before, right?”

Tess shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay, follow me.” Fortune said, standing up, stowing her laptop, and beginning to walk towards the room’s exit. “So, we’ve got pocket ones via apps on our phones and full-size ones, and since you don’t have a pocket one yet, let’s get you to a full-size one. I’ve got one in my quarters, we’ll use that one for now.”

Tess followed after her mother. “Should I ask Amy about getting that app?” Tess asked.

“No, she’s working on getting it integrated with our messenger thing. If you remember, you can use the map mode but none of the others.”

“Map mode?” Tess asked. “So, does it like…project a map onto a screen or is it like a hologram or…?”

“Either.” Fortune replied. “The ‘camera’ mode is the same way, except the hologram is like you’re really there. It’ll probably be easiest for us to just use the screen to find her, though.”

They reached Fortune’s quarters shortly after, and Fortune guided Tess inside into a room she hadn’t been in before. Inside was a terminal much like the one in the monster archives, a TV mounted to the wall, and, oddly enough, a neatly-made bed.

“I like to sleep in here with the terminal on sometimes.” Fortune explained, nodding at the bed. “It’s soothing, you should try it.”

“I’ll have to, yeah.” Tess agreed, walking over to the terminal. The screen had two large buttons on it, one that read “random”, and one that read “focused”, as well as a small button in the corner that said “settings”.

“You should start by checking the settings.” Fortune advised. “Just to make sure it’s in the screen mode and not the hologram mode.”

Tess nodded and hit the button, scanning down the menu that popped up until she saw “mode” and switched it from “hologram” to “screen”. “Okay, done, what next? I assume the focused thing?”

“Yeah. Press it and focus on what you want to see, in this case Alice. It should go right to her.”

Tess obediently did as instructed and, sure enough, the TV lit up with a view of Alice, eating breakfast at a table. “What would have happened if she was in the shower or something? Would it have showed her anyway?”

“There’s a setting to that gives you a confirmation if they’re in the bathroom or otherwise are in a private situation, and I leave it on.” Fortune replied. “If you look down at the interface, you’ll see options to read their mind, check their status, and even their soul and Mana, but you shouldn’t need to use any of those right now.

“What’s more immediately useful is the option to teleport down next to her or teleport her up here. It’ll take some of your Mana, but it’s a lot more efficient than regular teleportation so you shouldn’t have issues with it. I’ll pay for you now I’m just letting you know for the future.”

Tess nodded. “Let me give her a call.” She said, pulling out her phone and calling Alice. She watched in fascination as the sound of Alice’s ringtone came through the screen, and Alice picked up her phone a moment later.

“Tess, good to hear from you!” Alice said cheerily. “What’s up?”

“Sorry for interrupting your breakfast, do you have like…fifteen minutes to half an hour to talk?”

Alice blinked. “How did you know I’m eating right now? You’re not spying on me, are you?” She joked.

“Uh, kinda, sorry. Mom and I came to check and see if you were in the middle of doing something before we called.”

There was a momentary flash of confusion on Alice’s face, followed by understanding. “Ah. You want to talk about the machines, I take it?”

“Yeah. It’s not super urgent or anything, so if you need to be somewhere don’t worry about making time for us. We’ll just need to talk some time in the next few weeks.”

“Well, we’ve taken some time off to celebrate making rank ten, so I’ve got time now.” Alice said. “Where do you want to meet?”

“I can be down to your place the moment your breakfast is done, if you’d like.” Tess offered. “What I’m using to watch you provides a way for me to teleport there.”

“Of course it does.” Alice muttered. “Alright, give me like five minutes to finish here, I’ll call you when…you know what, no, just head down now, it’ll save us some time.”

“Right. See you in a sec.” Tess replied, then hung up and turned to her mother. “How are we doing this? Since you said you’d be the one to pay the Mana I assume it’s not as simple as just pressing the button.”

“Yeah, you’re right. One sec…” Fortune replied, walking over. She tapped away at the menus on the terminal for a second, then stopped, looking at Tess. “Ready?”

“Yeah.” Tess confirmed. Her mother pressed a button, and then Tess was standing on the other side of the table across from Alice.

“Make yourself at home.” Alice said, motioning at one of the seats. “So…what do you want to know?”

“We were wondering if you knew roughly what the rate of production for all the types of machines are projected to be.” Tess said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “We’re planning for the next few months as we start rolling them out.”

“Oh, that.” Alice said. “Yeah, I’ve got the reports on my company laptop, I’ll make some copies and send them to you later. Right now, we’re in full production mode, and we can pretty comfortably pump out about fifteen hundred slot machines a week, and five hundred of each of the other types. We can shift around those numbers as we need, too. This is just roughly the ratio we figured would closest match demand.”

She took a bite of egg, then continued. “We’re planning to keep this up until the initial demand dries up, then we’re going to build up a stock of them and just make more whenever we sell any. We’ll also be selling replacement parts and the like, and we’ll rent out technicians to fix machines too.

“Fortune’s given us a list of guidelines we’ll need to follow and audits we’ll have to perform, and we’ll be following those strictly. Just every so often make sure to do your divination thing so that we can catch people if they’re trying to game the system. We don’t imagine there will be many, people are a lot warier of being corrupt when they’re risking a god’s wrath, but just in case, you know?”

“Yeah.” Tess replied. “That’s…uh, basically all we needed to know, I think. Mom?”

“She says that’s all.” Tess relayed. “Thanks a bunch, that was a lot quicker than I thought it would be.”

“No problem.” Alice said. “I’ve been watching over this personally, so I’ve got most of the important stuff memorized by now. If you need anything else, just let me know.”

“Will do.” Tess said. “I’m gonna head back now, it was good talking with you!”

“You too.” Alice replied, waving her fork in farewell.

Tess waved back, and a moment later she was back in the terminal room with her mother. “Well, that was quick. Shall we get to that spreadsheet?”

“Oh, yeah, we never actually finished that.” Fortune replied, pulling out the laptop she had been using. Give me a moment to make a copy of the sheet and get the macro made…”