Museum Core Chapter 113: Buy It For Me?

One of these days, Thomas seriously needed to find his way into the company text chains, proverbially speaking.

Because by the time he learned about what had gone down in the US, it had already been over for nearly half a day.

Of course, at the same time, that delay didn’t mean he couldn’t turn this to his advantage.

An anchor beast had died, and there would almost certainly be a deal to be had. After all, he just needed a large and important enough chunk of the monster, then he’d be able to give it right back, or give it back five-fold. Or ten-fold. Or a hundred-fold, though that might be pushing it, considering the mana cost of creating something that powerful. And there were probably other things someone might want more than a metric crap-ton of monster replicas.

Several shipping containers of healing potions, ranked metals, power leveling hall-passes … all they had to do was ask for it, and as long as it wasn’t too egregious, he’d pay. Honestly, it was far more likely to be an issue involving him not wanting to set too high a precedent for what he’d be willing to pay in exchange for borrowing a monster’s corpse, than him actually being asked for something he couldn’t provide.

Although, of course, it might not be the worst idea to ask Frye to buy it instead. The more he could do to maintain that “mysterious stranger” vibe, the less inclined anyone would be to try and mess with him the way they might have with a fellow human.

As much as he might have liked, appreciated, and trusted individuals, as a whole, his general opinion of humanity boiled down to “people suck.” Granted, that had been born from a combination of the pessimism drip-fed to him by the news cycle pre-merge and his “new” status as an inhuman murder machine, rather than experience … but pessimism was still how he felt about it all.

Thomas then composed a letter to that effect and had a monkey hand it to a soldier outside, who then immediately began the process of passing it along to the BPA’s headquarters and the director who ruled over the whole affair.

He still had six weeks left to acquire two more anchor beast hearts, and while there were two aquatic transformation areas he could easily get at, cutting that number down to one would make his chances of success a hell of a lot greater.

Maybe it was about time he told Frye, too, of the deadline. The hope had been to fix things on his own, with some slight help on Abrams’ part, whom he’d revealed a small part of the truth to … but that didn’t seem realistic, sadly.

And perhaps it was time to start working in earnest towards creating a variant of the Belfast for the land and/or sky.

War machines meant to be deployed on the water could be a hell of a lot larger than anything meant for either of the other two mediums, since the ocean both supported a lot of weight and was infinitely maleable so a ship’s spine wouldn’t snap if it went over a hump or hill, not that that would ever happen anyhwere but on dry land.

But he couldn’t shrink the ship too much when changing its shape, and while he could compensate for that issue using magic, enchantments needed to be fueled, and he had to keep that up for the entirety of the ship’s deployment.

Making something that could go clomping over to the Natural History Museum to help in an emergency was perfectly possible and should be sustainable for the duration of the opperation, though the design was complicated enough that it was taking forever to actually get to building.

However, since he could only change the Belfast’s shape while she was in her berth, any active effects required to keep her operational would devour magic without end. And not the ship’s magic, but his magic, since he had to power it. Even with the mana bank velociraptors he was making, it would still be a significant drain.

Unless … unless he gave the ship a proper power. Which would require him to rank her up. Not that that was presently possible, as that would require him to reach B-Rank himself.

And even bringing her up to the peak of C-Rank would require him to find something he could fight with it ...

The solution was obvious: go back to the manatee grove and pick a fight with some more kaijus.

With a thought, Thomas sent that message and began preparing the Belfast for departure.

It was this point that one of the guards drew his attention by knocking on the frame of the main entrance, something that had become the agreed-upon sign for “pay attention, but this isn’t an emergency.”

And when that happened, it was Thomas’ job to send out an avatar to demonstrate that he was, in fact, listening. Which he did, using a jaguar as an avatar for once, just to switch things up. Though just like the raptors, he’d also given them the “inoffensive existence” power, which made them look adorable and non-threatening.

“Just for your information, there’s a guy coming from the American embassy. HQ says his qualifications check out, he’s official, but not someone anyone seems to know …”

Thomas was fairly sure that last part hadn’t been intended to be passed along, but he was grateful to have been told it anyway.

And then, well, all there was left to do was wait. He hadn’t quite put together how long things would take, though.

Bristol was the new capital, and that was where the American embassy was guaranteed to be located now. So, assuming the message being sent out had coincided with the “guy” leaving that city … it could easily be hours.

But Thomas was near-certain that it had, since “credentials check out” meant that someone had provided those credentials to whomever had then passed the message along to him, likely so that he wouldn’t dismiss the “guy” as a scammer when he arrived.

After all, that did seem like a workable scam: announce that you were the one who was selling a valuable item the whole world knew to have been retrieved. Throw on a proper outfit, put on the right persona, and Thomas most likely wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. Nor would he have been able to tell whether or not a given piece of paperwork was genuine, or a forgery, not even worth the paper it was printed on.

All in all, part of Thomas was seriously regretting knowing that this was coming this far ahead of time, as it had left him pacing like a cat on a hot tin roof for hours. Until eventually, the envoy finally arrived. With an appearance like that, it could be no one else.

White shirt, red tie, dark blue suit jacket, and pants that was nowhere near the American flag in terms of color, but still somewhat completed the “red, white, and blue” combo. Of course, a stars and stripes pin resting above his heart. And the leather briefcase he was hauling along was exactly what important documents were always hauled along inside, in the movies at least.

The man had blond hair, blue eyes, and the kind of face that simultaneously made you want to buy whatever he had to sell, however much it cost you … or feed him his own teeth.

After considering for a couple of seconds, Thomas decided to send Jan out. After all, the spider monkey champion was his most well-known avatar, and felt appropriate for a meeting with a complete stranger.

“Good afternoon,” the man said, offering his hand to the monkey with a surprising lack of hesitation. “My name is Jason Miller, I work for the American government. Would you have time for a meeting, perchance?”

“I do,” Thomas announced. “How about we take this to my office?”

His “office” lay at the very top of the original main building, between the two towers, set behind a large window overlooking the jungle. It wasn’t quite as over-stuffed as his core room, but still heavily decorated with furs, dino skeletons, and other things that could at least be interpreted as hunting trophies.

And, most importantly, there was a large chair behind his desk that functioned as a booster seat without looking like one.

Miller nodded and began to follow, only to then ask, “Would it be possible to see the core room? I feel like this is a conversation for a secure environment.”

“Unfortunately, my core room doubles as my laboratory, and can’t be made safe for humans in a timely manner,” Thomas replied, though the truth was he simply didn’t feel comfortable bringing anyone down there.

And, quite frankly, even if he had, it was a mess down there. Well, not “mess” in the sense of a whole bunch of random crap lying scattered across the floor, but it was still pretty far from a professional-looking place you’d invite strangers to.

One corner had a massive aquarium/swimming pool, the entire wall next to it was stuffed with both books and jars of alchemical products that were too expensive to summon based on immediate need, Elias had his own fairy-sized library in another corner, then there was the “armory” that was also overflowing with all sorts of precious and semi-precious gemstones and the sofa corner he loafed around in when he wanted to use a human avatar … and throughout it all were flowing the raptor-sized habitrails he’d “decorated” everything with.

All in all, it looked like someone with zero interior decorating skills and functionally infinite resources had completely jumped the shark … which was exactly what had happened, to be perfectly honest.

But in the end, the main reason was still that he didn’t want any other living thing, other than Elias, in his core room. That wasn’t the equivalent of lowering his guard around someone, but of him giving them a knife and then guiding it to rest against his own throat … if that had still been a part of his anatomy, at least.

No one would get that much trust from him.

And so, he instead led Miller to a semi-concealed set of stairs and up to the fourth floor.

“So, Mr. Miller, what do you do in the embassy?”

Thomas had picked up on something: most people he dealt with on this level had some kind of title and used it as a part of their introduction.

Granted, there were only so many officials that would make the trek into the jungle to talk with a “man-eating monster” in its “lair,” but several had. Frye, mostly, but there’d also been a few ambassadors from the EU countries who’d already been sending in their people due to existing alliances with the UK and wanted to clarify some things.

And they’d always introduced themselves as ambassador so-and-so from this nation or that, or, at the very least, an embassy attache or something. Point was, he usually knew exactly who he was dealing with, or, at the very least, who they were claiming to be.

“Mr. Miller,” on the other hand … well, no title, and with a surname that was barely less of a cliche than “Mr. Smith.” Now, this was probably not some kind of CIA nonsense or something equally “dark,” but the end of the day, this was the man who’d been sent by the embassy. And yet, he most likely did not adequately represent the interests of the American people.

“Well, I suppose ...” Miller broke off to suck in a huge gulp of breath. “I think maybe we should wait until we’re in your office?”

Oh, right, storming up four flights of stairs in a row wasn’t something people normally did.

But it was only a couple of more steps before Thomas could finally plop Jan into the office chair, and Miller could likewise sit down.

“So, what do you do?” he repeated.

“Oh, I’m a tradesman.”

If Thomas had still had eyebrows, they’d have shot off his head at that statement, though Miller continued to clarify in a normal tone as though that description didn’t sound corrupt as fuck.

“I make purchases on behalf of my government, and occasionally sell as well, if there’s something to sell.”

That still sounded kinda weird to Thomas, but then again, he wasn’t really a part of that world. He could be wrong. Hell, he probably was wrong.

And either way, he waited for Miller to start the conversation.

“Mr. Daedalus, I’m here to offer you … actually, do you prefer ‘Mr. Daedalus’ or just ‘Daedalus’?”

“Just Daedalus,” Thomas said.

“Well, Daedalus, I’m here to offer you the chance to buy the body of the Winter Queen, the anchor beast from the Transformation Zone of Eternal Winter.”

Really? Transformation Zone of Eternal Winter? Weren’t those things normally just named after their geographic location?

Thomas had Jan steeple his fingers and lean forward. Miller, to his credit, did not burst out laughing at the sight of a spider monkey with the fur pattern of a tuxedo cat playing at being a boardroom CEO.

“Actually, I don’t need to keep it,” Thomas pointed out slowly. “I just need to borrow it for a few minutes, then I’ll happily return it … and pay an appropriate remuneration, of course.”

“That’s something we can work with,” Miller nodded. “Would it be possible for you to deliver a copy of the Winter Queen’s body, perhaps even a complete and intact one? Based on the information I have available, the dragon of London is only available in pieces as loot.”

“That was a part of my agreement with the British Government,” Thomas explained. “In exchange for their help against Alaxia Mystscale, the various alchemically interesting dragon organs have been permanently added to the Dungeon’s loot pool, within reason.”

“I see,” Miller said. “I hope you understand why that wouldn’t work for us, though.”

Thomas nodded. “A functionally infinite supply of something is a lot less valuable if it’s on the other side of an ocean and in the middle of another nation.”

He nodded. “Just for completeness’ sake, though, what are the limits to something becoming loot?”

“It needs to be dropped from something of the appropriate power level, with potentially increased rarity if it has an absurd mana cost, and when I change up the monsters for an event, specific loot might become unavailable for a brief time,” Thomas explained.

“Interesting,” Miller said, surprisingly convincingly, though Thomas wasn’t sure he bought it. “So, assuming we come to an agreement, when would you need the body?”

“How quickly can you reasonably bring it?” Thomas said, avoiding saying something like the actual timeline or “as soon as possible,” which would have let the man across from him jack up the price to a ludicrous degree. Because that might easily happen.

“A day,” Miller said. “If we airlift it. Or can you wait three weeks for it to be shipped across the ocean?”

Thomas shrugged. “Assuming the American aviation industry hasn’t been shattered by the attack, I’d think that you should be able to swing an airplane. Though I can wait.”

Three weeks were more than okay.

“I suppose that’s true,” Miller replied. “So, we’ll airlift the Winter Queen to you, assuming we can come to an agreement.”

He pulled a large sheath of paper from his briefcase and slid it across the desk.

“This is what we’d consider a fair payment.”

Thomas grabbed it and began reading through it.

“Just to confirm, this proposal is the remuneration for borrowing the body?”

Maybe it was the fact that Thomas was speaking through a literal monkey that prevented Miller from picking up on his annoyance, simian expressions being surprisingly dissimilar to those of humans, but that was a very generous assumption to make.

“To be entirely honest, there isn’t a difference,” Miller said. “Whether we permanently give you the body and are given a copy as a part of the payment, or ‘lend’ it to you and a copy is immediately returned along with payment … isn’t it all the same, in the end?”

Shit, yeah, that was a good point. A really good point.

“Sure,” Thomas nodded slowly, cursing himself internally. “But still, this is the proposal, the whole thing? You don’t want one of these, or any two of these, you want the entire list?”

As he asked, his eyes flew across the pages, grimacing. Ten F-22 frames made from C-Rank alloys, exact ratio attached, 1 ton of weapons-grade uranium for each rank, from F- to C-Rank, elements across the periodic table whose uses were or were not obvious to him, an entire case of B-Rank healing potions … and that was not even the entirety of the first page. Holy shit.

“Yes,” Miller said.

Fuck me …

“I have to ask: is this about starting at a high price you can ‘let’ me negotiate you down from, is your intelligence on my capabilities genuinely that bad, or are you just that greedy?”

Honestly, Thomas assumed that it was probably the second. The only information they had was, at a bare minimum, second-hand, but more likely third- or even fourth-hand, acquired through intelligence channels that were only distantly related to the BPA, all of which ultimately combined to form this request.

But even so, this request for repayment, the sheer fucking amount, was so utterly beyond the pale that he had to draw a line in the sand. Later, he could

“What are you saying?” Miller asked.

“I’m saying we’re done here,” Thomas said, making his avatar stand and jab a finger at the papers he’d dropped on the desk. “This … this is several months’ worth of production, and by that, I mean months of only summoning materials, doing nothing else. And that’s talking about the stuff I actually have, because I don’t have a decent chunk of this list.”

Mostly the radioactives. He hadn’t made any of those because he didn’t want anyone to start building magic nukes, and that was likely exactly what those were for.

“I realize that starting high is a negotiation tactic, but I daresay that you seriously, as I believe the saying goes, ‘jumped the shark.’ If … if you think that it’s acceptable to make this kind of offer, you obviously don’t have a very high opinion of me, and I have too much self-respect to just ignore that.

“I won’t buy the Winter Queen from you. Not now. And probably not ever.”

There wasn’t much that would have made Thomas drop a statement that broad. But this was it. Because this was not a price he could pay, in any way, shape, or form. It was actually an amount greater than what he could realistically produce in time, but even if the US government, or whoever Miller was directly working for, would give him the body in exchange for an IOU, that anchor beast corpse would be the very last thing he ever bought. Everything else … the price would be ratcheted up well past what he was able to pay; that was simply the way of things.

But he also made a mental note to try and buy the body anyway, for whatever price was offered, a week before his deadline was up. If he was still short at that point … price wouldn’t matter anymore.

“I …” Miller sighed. “I don’t suppose there are other things we can offer you?”

Thomas nodded. “Making deals in general is not off the table. We can do that later. As long as we can trade on a basis of mutual respect, I’ll make any deal you want. But you’re going to have to show that respect. Or would you in any way entertain someone who marched into your house and asked to buy it for the price of a stick of gum?”

“Like you said, we didn’t exactly have a good overview of your capabilities …” Miller suggested, trailing off.

“And nevertheless, you went ahead and jerked up the price to something that could probably buy this nation we’re standing on. I can imagine how this happened, but I also know how easily this could have been avoided with just the barest sliver of caution on your part.”

Then, Thomas summoned a crate of potions between them.

“For what it’s worth, it’s not the entirety of the American nation, or even its officials, that I have a problem with. It’s specifically those who are responsible for, well, that.”

He jabbed his finger at the stack of papers.

“Please, distribute those potions between the people who fought the Winter Queen, but make sure they go to those they’re addressed to; others wouldn’t be able to handle them.”

The trick was simple, but powerful. He’d gotten a list of elementalists available to the Americans alongside the information about the Winter Queen’s death, so he’d created healing potions that worked specifically with those elements, and only those. Well, one per element, at least.

The process was simple, enchant the bottle to infuse the potion within with energy to adjust it.

And as for the Marines, he didn’t actually have a fancy trick to make it impossible for someone of a different system to drink them, those he’d simply mixed with a few high-rank stamina potions that would practically give a heart attack to anyone under C-Rank, as he knew that had been the minimum Rank of the reinforcements that had actually arived.

Which just left the regular healing potions, for the regular soldiers, which he couldn’t monkey with … so he’d simply added a complete breakdown of what potions he’d sent to every “specialized” potion’s bottle, and numbered them all, which would make it easily apparent if one was missing.

Thomas’ feelings about the United States as a whole … those didn’t matter. He was dealing with the current administration.

“I see,” Miller said, sighing, then set his jaw. “I’ll report this to my superiors, and perhaps we’ll meet again.”

“If we don’t, I do hope that this won’t reflect too badly on you,”  Thomas said, simultaneously fully aware of the fact that he’d likely just obliterated Miller’s career, which he may or may not have deserved.

“Bye,” Miller just said, and made his way down the stairs.

Well, that could have gone better. And the combination of knowing that someone high-up in the American government was being greedy and a lifetime of knowing just how avaricious humans could be told Thomas that there was no real way to properly deal with them. This once, maybe, but to do so repeatedly … and even whether or not he’d be able to close this specific deal was in question.

He needed to hold fast, stand his ground, and hope the firm shutdown ensured that the next trade would be for an amount he was actually able to pay.

If he used the British government as an intermediary, maybe that would let everyone involved save some face. Offer to send some valuable supplies as a down payment, then a second payment that depended on how cheaply they managed to acquire the anchor beast’s core, since he’d be reimbursing the cost, within reason. Or something. Just, in general, ask them to buy it for him and tell them they could come to a proper agreement on what he’d do for them in exchange.

So Thomas sent along yet another message to Frye, wishing there were a better way to communicate. Cell phones wouldn’t work, and the radio power he’d added to a couple of monsters was the very opposite of secure.

Although … what about a secure landline? Those had existed before microchips, right? Something along the lines of the red telephone.

Well, he could ask, right? And perhaps even send the request quickly enough that it was added to the communication he’d sent mere minutes ago?

Oh, and if he was already in the middle of getting everything off his chest, why not ask for a message to be passed on to the embassies belonging to the nations who had designs on the Divine Huntinground?

He wound up sending it as well.

Was that it, though?

Thomas thought that question over for a bit, then decided that it was, though with his luck, he’d come up with something else five minutes hence.

And he did. Because he wanted to share the information about the countdown to armageddon in person, and that required Frye to either come to him, or make a way for Jan to reach Bristol safely and without causing a kerfuffle available.