Scientific Chronicles 7

BOOM

Tanya cackled as her enemies panicked at the sudden introduction of artillery. Her hands flashed over her command console, selecting small groups of her clank army and issuing them commands. 

The Military Recreation club held meetings every Sunday, from eleven in the morning (which is when the local churches let out their congregations) to seven in the evening (where you can fit in a dinner with a show and maybe some clubbing before going to bed). Sometimes the meeting was to game a specific historical battle, but more often it was just an excuse for sparks to construct armies of clanks that fight each other for sport. 

The only restriction is that each clank was required to be no more than two feet tall. There were exceptions when recreating historical battles that included exceptionally large machines, as they agreed a 1/10th scale model was usually sufficient. But only in that case. 

Most armies were around 20 units, with some particularly rich members fielding much larger ones, the largest being 200. Tanya wasn’t poor, per se, but her budget was limited: she only fielded a squad of ten. Well, twelve in this battle. The artillery clanks were new. 

The battles were held in the wilderness surrounding Paris, just far enough to be inconvenient if you missed the 11 o’clock departure of the club’s small airship. It came with free lunch, too, so there was no excuse. 

The airship was moored above the battlefield, and both her and her opponent, one Dante Corradini, were controlling their armies from above, watching the foothills carefully. She had drawn on her experience with real time strategy games to allow for more precise controls, but it limited the number of units she could command. Given that she had problems fielding many anyway, this was not a large issue. 

Currently, she had two artillery clanks, three rotor copter clanks that acted as aerial bombers with their grenade launchers, and four infantry clanks. Dante had started with twenty-six units, but he was down to six now. She was, however, out of heavy ammunition. Her artillery clanks only had two shots each, and sighting them was such a pain that she uses all four in quick succession to get spread. 

Besides her artillery, she counted on one more advantage: her superior command console. While he had a relatively simple remote control, about the same size as a personal arcade controller with two joysticks and two dozen buttons, she had a much larger setup that contained instruments that tracked each of her unit’s statuses, with enough controls to allow her to command each clank individually if she had to, although she had shortcuts to instruct more of them at once. 

The drawback of doing this, of course, was the larger demand on the controller’s attention and skill, while the mostly-automated army of Dante only needed relatively simple directives that their programming could process and execute without much micromanaging on his part. 

She managed to split her infantry into two fire teams of two clanks each, and successfully executed a flanking maneuver by distracting Dante with a fly-by of her aerial drones, unable to close the distance to drop her very last grenade in favor of making the one that held it take evasive maneuvers. The other two were swiftly destroyed by Dante’s clank’s anti-air fire. Only to be cut down in turn by her land-bound clanks. Yes, one of the fire teams got destroyed before all six of the enemy was dispatched, but that still left her as the victor with three clanks remaining to his zero. 

“NOOOOOOO!” Dante shouted in despair as Tanya pressed the button on her console that started the victory music. She set her last rotor clank to land near her surviving infantry, and stood up to dance to the music, letting the speakers pound with the beat. 

Neena, who had decided to check out the club on her recommendation, cheered and started dancing along. “That was so cool! Mama runs war games sometimes, but it’s always naval battles, never with soldiers.” After about one minute of dancing with the spunky princess, the music ended and she started packing up. 

“Reminds me of an old joke.” Tanya replied as she finished locking down the controls and powering it down. “The Storm King’s-” She has to localize it, of course. “-at war with England, and has been battling at sea and in the air for months. Then, the General gets a report that the English have deployed their entire army right outside the capital. He is asked how they are to respond.”

Neena was helping pack up, mostly by handling the luggage. “What did he do?” She asked. 

“He immediately ordered the capital’s police force to round up the hooligans, ask for their visas, and then stick those trespassers in the drunk tank until the war’s over with.” Tanya said, giggling. She will never apologize for turning that old joke on the Dacians. It was hilarious. 

Neena laughed despite herself, smacking Tanya in the arm. “Tanya! That’s horrible!” She scolded between giggles. “Our army is not that bad!”

Tanya shrugged. “I mean, your covert forces are assuredly competent, but I doubt Queen Albia has any intention of developing a strong conventional army.” Also, law enforcement can be rather powerful in this world; one just needs to look at Paris to see the potential. “It’s not like she needs one, except as an occupation force. Without a need for that…” She waved her hand vaguely. “There’s no shame in desiring peace.” As much as your average Spark may disagree. It was why Baron Wulfenbach was able to keep hold of so many vassals; he imposed peace. 

Neena huffed, but smiled as she saw the wreckage of the destroyed clanks get hoisted back up onto the ship: it wasn’t much of a prize, but salvage rights were hers, as the victor. “So what’re you gonna do with all that metal?” She asked conversationally. 

“Well, I’m going to rebuild my forces, mostly.” Tanya said, “I should be able to muster another one or two clanks above replacement rate if I sell the excess metals to Vaughn.” Vaughn Oublenmach was the son of a Baron and a spark, he had built a reclamation machine that could quite efficiently sort through and separate metals from broken clanks into bars suitable for turning back into machined parts. As part of his family’s “generosity”, he pays above market rate for scrap from the broken clanks, and sells the results at a discount. It was a move she could respect, gaining only a small amount of money but a large amount of good will. If only he’d stop trying to flirt with her… “I don’t have the funds to do much else.” She’d be in worse straits if she was making proper clank control cores instead of just the coordination aids she had installed, unlike everyone else’s clanks she needed to control every movement. She had turned this into an advantage with her skills, but she’d need to sink expensive upgrades to her command console as well as each clank’s CPU if she wanted to grow her forces above two dozen. 

That was fine, though: this was just a little bit of fun she got to have a few times a month, so while she was competitive enough to enjoy her successes when they came, there was also a certain amount of pride in doing so with limited resources. 

Gerald Cannonhat, the Club President (the son of a General in the Wulfenbach army, not a spark himself), sauntered into the conversation. “That makes your record 4-2, Degurechaff.” He said, pleased. “No one expected such excellent military command skills from a rural Countess raised on Castle Wulfenbach, and I must ask how you picked it up.”

Tanya waved off the compliment. “The military tutors on Castle Wulfenbach weren’t that bad, Major Cannonhat.” Her eyes flashed dangerously. “But seriously, I was taught small unit tactics at a young age back home, asymmetric warfare is my specialty. I’m sure I, a mere Sergeant, wouldn’t perform as well as yourself if I was to command a substantially larger force.” As Gerald wasn’t a spark, Tanya demurred rather than boasted, switching cultures to the humility expected when interacting with a higher military rank. 

“I should hope it’s your specialty, because making clanks clearly isn’t.” Jabbed Eustace Barbiaux, who was a local spark. “Ramshackle tinker toys, every single one.”

Huffing, Tanya took a glance at Barbiaux’s own clanks, as he was setting them up for deployment. Switching back to the constant spanner-measuring required when interacting with other Sparks, she immediately shot back with her own insults: “At least mine have some standardization. You can’t make an army with a bunch of individual unique models like your collection of dolls.” She wouldn’t dare insult a Parisian by implying they spent too much effort on the aesthetics of their inventions, those were fighting words around here, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t needle the actual drawbacks his artisanal one-off clanks provide in terms of military practicality. 

“Mademoiselle! My clanks are a single mosaic of beautiful violence!” Barbiaux shouted indignantly. “Each one a masterpiece in service to the greater whole!”

Tanya rolled her eyes, walking over and starting to sift through the wreckage to try and find intact components. “Neena, you can watch the next battle, I’m going to be busy with this for the rest of the day.” 

Eye gleaming with interest, Neena instead kneeled down next to her and started to sift through components herself. “No, this looks interesting. What are you doing?”

“While most of the other club members just sell the lot as scrap and buy new from the machine shops, it’s more economically efficient to sort through the wreckage yourself.” She fished out an intact laser rangefinder from one of her infantry clanks. It was one of the pricier bits, so every laser she can salvage was good news. “It’s rare for a destroyed clank to have everything damaged. Just disassemble as completely as you can, putting things without obvious damage over there, things that are clearly destroyed there, and anything in between there. Beyond that, sort them by material.” 

Neena nodded, and after walking off to get a set of tools, as well as recruit a few besotted club members to help, she came back and started working, feigning ignorance on how to salvage things so that the boys would jump over each other to teach her how it was done. Tanya sort of envied the girl her shamelessness; manipulating men by their hormones always made her feel ill. 

All tedious tasks were improved with the help of friends, and after a mere two hours the busywork was all done and she passed a few of the intact bits she wasn’t going to use from her opponent’s clanks to her impromptu assistants in thanks. 

They got to soak in the last match of the day, a luxury she couldn’t previously afford, with Gerald running his fifty-clank army against the thirty-clank army of Luigi Consolmagno, who was the sparky son of some professor in Italy that was out on expedition. 

The ‘MILWalky’ Mechanized Infantry Light Walker Mk II will be substantially improved over the Mk I with all this scale model testing…

--------------------------

It had taken seven weeks for her to finish her project turning the Absolute Safety Mecha mk. IV into a karaoke stage that she doesn’t really need to observe or personally perform at anymore. All of the karaoke bits were isolated from the rest of the systems, and while a lot of them were physically attached to the mecha, they were easily removable as long as you had a good wrench. So she could put the thing on lockdown mode safely without fearing someone using the vulnerability to steal the thing. 

She still had to fear people trying to scrap her beloved mecha for parts, but the University did have security guards, and everyone knew that the mecha was hers. After the first example she made of the spark that tried, she had noticed no other attempts. 

Anyway, the massive amount of time in her schedule this freed up was a boon, right on time for her end of term projects. Only two of her classes had them, but that was still a fair amount of work. 

First, she had Introduction to Abominations of Science. It was a simple assignment; all she needed to do was to create a bespoke replacement for a maimed volunteer. One of the University’s many services to Paris was providing free health care to the poor, as long as they were okay with student doctors and sparks handling their problems. 

Her own patient had several lower vertebrae missing; apparently the only reason they survived was because they were a test subject for someone attempting to replicate the jagerdaught. A tricky case, but she had selected him from the catalog due to the nature of the injury. He had been a relatively successful result for months before he took damage that his master abandoned him over instead of attempting a fix. The spark in question wasn’t Parisian, of course; he was actually from Albion. Or so he said. 

After examining him, Tanya had concluded that whatever attempt was had, it was maybe a quarter as effective as the jagerdraught. At best. She did have a chance or two to take a look at jagerkin biology, mostly through examining blood samples that had splashed on her, or teeth that had broken loose. She had also made an attempt to treat a few serious but not dangerous injuries, although they had only acquiesced to that much after substantial persuasion; she really did need the practice with stitchwork. 

As such, she felt that she was qualified to claim that the person didn’t even come close to cracking the mechanisms in which the jagerdraught functioned, and instead created an otherwise unremarkable gene therapy for regenerative soldiers. Unfortunately for the poor man, he was likely going to suffer organ failure at fifty, and she’d consider him lucky to even last that long. Most such treatments accelerated aging, it was why the process that created the jagermonsters was so coveted. 

That doesn’t mean she can’t help him, though: “Monsieur Shepherd, it is time for the operation.” Tanya announced proudly, “With God as my-” fearful “-witness, you will walk again!” Installation wasn’t, strictly speaking, required for the grade, but Tanya had always sought to excel. It was a pretty basic surgery, all told. Anyone who learned under Dr. Sun would say the same. 

Shepard was a grizzled man, with scars all over his face. They strained as he gave a wide grin. “Izzat so, Doc?” He asked, his fake Mechanicsburg accent as atrocious as ever. “Goot. Mebbe I git to fight some more instead of playing stupid piano.”

“Gilgamesh!” Tanya shouted, pointing dramatically at her partner in medicine. “Prep the patient!”

Tanya went to work sterilizing the implant she had created, before spraying it with the coating that made the surface biocompatible. It was one of Professor Berlichingen’s formulas, a quite novel hydrocarbon mixture that insulated the metal of the prosthesis from erosion and oxidation from contact with biological systems, while also disguising the object from the immune system. It didn’t help the parts that were actually supposed to interface with the rest of the body, but there were other solutions for those issues.

The implant was an artificial spine, half of one anyway. In theory, it was a simple replacement, allowing his brain to communicate with his upper body again. His regeneration would mean that he needed limited physical therapy, assuming they gave him a good drug regimen. Which was Gil’s project. At least, that’s what she told the professor. 

In fact, she had… tinkered with it a bit. Professor Berlichingen was surprisingly strict with the sparks in his class; he was quite clear that the goal for the project was healing, fixing, not improvement. But this was a soldier! A battle maniac whose greatest regret was surviving his last battle instead of dying with glory. A sentiment she knew well, even if she never subscribed to that belief herself. No, her years post-war, which were spent blissfully without violence, were far more enjoyable than military life. Sure, the ending sucked, but that was all Being X’s fault. That death couldn’t have been anything else but his hand. 

Shepard was strapped down, of course, face-down. Gil had given him some anesthetic gas that he had formulated just a few minutes ago, tailored to the patient with a blood sample taken a half hour ago. “Begin pre-operation checklist!” Tanya announced, and Zoing, a construct of Gil’s that had a surprisingly large amount of personality for something less than a year old, waddled over and held up a checklist as she washed her hands. 

Implant? Check. 

Sterilization? Check

Scalpels? Check

Forceps? Check

Retractors? Check

One by one, she made sure that she had every single tool required for the operation on hand. She had checked this before, but it didn’t hurt to be sure nothing vanished between there and here. Hands clean and tools finished, she huffed from behind her facemask. 

“Begin the operation!” She commenced cutting away the flesh, making sure to reveal the two vertebrae both above and below the intended replacement area. Every time she needed a tool, she named it and received it from Zoing, and after she was done she handed it off to Gil for cleaning and/or disposal. 

This was long, careful work, and the instruments monitoring the patient’s vitals were constantly checked between breaths. The vertebrae directly next to the removed sections were too damaged, she needed to remove those too and use the fresh connection to the next to attach the prosthetic. 

One of the things that the medical magic of the Empire had that Tanya had always thought the most impressive was their understanding of nerves. They had to be; the reflex enhancement formula wouldn’t be nearly as safe as it was without understanding the underlying physics of nerve transmission. Not that she studied medical magic seriously, but the Spark provides. The replacement spine was designed around these principles of more efficient transmission, allowing nerve impulses ten times the rate of an ordinary spine. 

Sure, because it only replaces half of the spine it won’t be nearly as effective as a full replacement would be, but her work needed testing, and if the Professor noticed the superiority of her design, he didn’t say anything about it. 

After the four hour operation was concluded, every attachment secured, and everything else insulated, she applied the counteragent for the regeneration inhibitor she had sourced from an upperclassman that had a much greater understanding of pharmacology than her: Seffie had introduced Martellus, albeit she called him Tweedle, to her as incentive for Tanya to continue relaying Gil’s evening plans to the besotted Princess. While it will be unfortunate to lose him as a capable subordinate, as she had plans to offer him a job post graduation, gaining connections among Parisian high society on top of their influence among the Fifty Families would be a nice consolation prize. 

As expected, once he was recovered Shepard was incredibly satisfied with his new prosthetic, and he was back on his feet before the day was even over. She already knew that his regenerative treatment heavily reduced muscle atrophy, but he adapted to the new spine far faster than anticipated. 

Great Success! 

-------------------------

Gilgamesh had taken to college life like a fish to water! In the sense that he became something of a party animal. His favorite nightclub was the Island of the Monkey Girls, and she had to admit, it really knew how to attract clientele. 

“So then I lifted the hat proudly and placed it squarely upon my helmet, to the cheers and jeers of the crowd.” Tanya narrated as the hostess refilled her drink. “Of course, Fanger then hid in a parts shipment headed to my workshop and ambushed me two days later, reclaiming his hat, but I broke his jaw and knocked out most of his teeth with a wrench, so he had to spend the next two days drinking all of his meals before he regenerated enough for the teeth to be reinstalled.”

“Wow!” Zola La Sirène Dorée said in wonder, clearly angling for a bigger tip as she subtly emphasized her cleavage. “I didn’t realize life on Castle Wulfenbach was so… rough!”

“After you’ve experienced von Pinn’s tender loving care, a barracks full of jagermonsters are a bunch of fun uncles.” Tanya boasted, “Back me up here, Gil.”

“I still don’t know how you get those bloodthirsty monsters to like you so much.” Gil said instead, terrible wingman behavior. “Von Pinn always let you off so lightly, too.”

“I was always very safe.” Tanya protested, “The Jagermonsters are a bunch of battle maniacs, I know how to deal with the type.” After a moment, she realized that Zola didn’t know her other connection. Turning to her, she added: “Also, my Great Aunt married into the Heterodynes, so that got my foot in the door, metaphorically.”

“Really?” Zola asked, her interest reaching her eyes that time. 

“Not the main line, mind you.” Tanya elaborated, “But apparently Titania Heterodyne got on rather well with the jagerkin, so that positively predisposed them to me.” If by ‘got on rather well’ you meant ‘rode with them as Saturnus’ 2nd-in-command’. Honestly, the stories were rather eerie at times, despite the jager’s compliments as to her bloodthirstiness, she was also apparently the top authority when it came to the Heterodyne’s logistics during the raids, and quite skilled at it to boot. If she didn’t know that her personality developed through another life, she’d be genuinely questioning whether or not she was really the daughter of Count von Degurechaff. She still might be, those journal entries that the Baron gave her might be genuine, but she had the feeling that it would be better for her if she put on the impression that she was genuinely convinced by the Baron’s evidence, even if they were fake. “You have to be tough to befriend a Jagermonster, though. It’s not something I’d recommend to a delicate flower like yourself.” She took Zola’s hand and gave it a kiss. “No, when I’m with you it’s best if the armor stays off.” 

Zola flushed at the flirtations, playfully batting Tanya away from her. “You dog…” She half-whispered, “Gil, save me from this hungry beast!” She faux-cried as she flounced onto her friend’s lap. All three of them laughed. Ah well, Zola was cute but hardly anything Tanya would regret missing out on. Besides, she shouldn’t be spending money on private dances anyway. 

Of course, it was the very next day that the Comte de Terracciano decided to unveil his ‘Ultimate Endgame’ chess set, catching Gil, her and Zola into his machinations, but that’s just what happens when you let sparks fan the flames of their creativity, like Paris does. 

It wasn’t anything that couldn’t be solved by judicious application of violence. 

-------------------------

The second of her final projects was no less ambitious. 

…In the sense that it was a miraculous feat from the perspectives of her past lives, but was a relatively modest accomplishment by the standards of Spark Academia. 

Monster Making 101’s final project was, as one would think, making a monster. Points were assigned based on several factors, from complexity, demonstration of the principles covered in the class, application of advanced techniques, novelty, the fit to purpose, and finally economic viability. Ten point scale, only counts your top four categories of the six, worth forty percent of your grade. 

She found the techniques of monster making… relatively opaque. Her understanding of medicine was fine, but developmental biochemistry was… complex. VERY complex. It was commonly understood that Sparks tended to have specialties and styles, in the sense that there were fields of science that they had an easier time comprehending, and thus they had fields of science that they had difficulties wrapping their heads around. 

For example, Tanya had never successfully made an autonomous clank. She’ll make piloted vehicles all day, but every time she tries to make a computation core to function as a clank’s brain… she just makes a computer. It made no sense to her how those shitty little computation engines with barely enough processing power to run basic astrophysics calculations managed to run artificial intelligence, even if clanks weren’t particularly smart. The optical processing alone… 

Anyway, she found similar frustrations when dealing with the creation of custom life forms. So there was no way she was getting any kind of good result in the ‘application of advanced techniques’ score, and she was probably doomed to only a middling rating of complexity, even if she strained her capabilities. 

So she needed, if she wanted a good grade (of course she did), to create a monster that was novel, profitable, suited well to its intended purpose, and demonstrated that she had learned Professor Yungbluth’s gene editing techniques well. 

It had taken a little while for her to think of something acceptable, but after the esteemed Professor was prompted by a local hostess to show off his unsettlingly large acidic snails, causing them to escape and wreak havoc until they could be dealt with, Tanya had gotten the idea to work on a small, simple, but chemically useful life form like those. 

Granted, if she simply made some useful snail, perhaps using them as tiny pharmacological factories to make insulin or opium or whatever, that wouldn’t be terribly novel, even if she had them make a new drug, so she had decided to go even simpler: she was going to make a slime. Well, a giant amoeba, to be more precise. 

“Behold!” Tanya shouted as she lifted the curtain “The fruits of my genius!” She laughed maniacally, to the approving nods and polite applause of her peers. 

After they got to process what, exactly, she had grown in the lab’s vats, the applause trickled off as they stared at her modest creation. “Miss Tanya, while that is quite the pleasing shade of blue, I’m afraid I’m going to need more to go on when it comes to grading your presentation.” Professor Yungbluth said as he peered more closely at the glass jar. “What chemicals create the color base, might I ask?”

“Mostly tar dye, through an excessively complicated enzyme.” Tanya replied, “The genetic markers that synthesize it function as an error-checking measure; any mutation or tampering would result in changes in the slime’s color.”

Professor Yungbluth’s eyes lit up at the concept. “Ah, I see! Don’t trust the patent office, I see. You’re quite the clever girl.” This part of the monster was pretty much her only chance of getting a non-zero advanced technique grade. “But what does it do?”

Basically? It was a blue jiggly roomba. “It cleans.” Tanya summarized. “It’s designed to be relatively helpless, not dangerous at all. It explores its environment, eating up dust, dirt, food scraps, any reasonable mess it can handle.” It’s reasonably resilient against a lot of chemical agents, but… well, she’ll admit that her precautions against the cleaning slimes rising up against their masters might have been a bit too thorough, but she was not going to get demerits or bans with extreme prejudice! Gil already has two of them, and he needs someone with a clean record to help him out when he’s in an academic bind. “It extrudes and recycles soap, so after it’s gone over your floors and carpets, they’re sparkling.” There were some issues if you had expensive rugs, but the sturdy, tightly packed fibers that inexpensive carpeting and rugs used would take years to noticeably damage. 

Professor Yungbluth blinked, as if waiting for her to continue. “...That’s it?” He asked. 

“I could go into detail about care and control instructions, the limitations I placed on replication, my business plan for commercializing it, and a few of the features designed to maximize the moe factor.” Tanya said, counting on her fingers. “But that’s all in the writeup I’m submitting. All it is is a cute little cleaning monster. Simple, it does what it’s designed to do and no more. It can’t even hunt mimmoths it’s so safe.”

“...Let’s see it in action, I suppose.” Professor Yungbluth said, gesturing for her to go on with it. 

Tanya took out a satchel she had prepared previously and scattered a combination of chalk dust, stray hairs, some sand, a rotten apple core, and other miscellaneous detritus. She took the slime’s jar, opened it, and poured it onto the floor, adding a line of chalk dust from its position to the mess. “It’ll go questing for food, but calcium carbonate is a vital nutrient for it, so it loves to eat chalk above all else. You do need to be careful about its fluids, it will develop some rubber-like deposits on its membranes if it becomes dehydrated, but I watered Sekken-chan well so this won’t be an issue.” Of course she named it. It was her adorable, helpless little slime. 

Over the next twenty minutes, Sekken-chan feasted on the filth, growing in size and leaving a soapy trail. After about ten minutes, the soap’s chemicals underwent a change that made it appetizing for the slime, and it cleaned up after itself, shifting its locomotion and membranes to collect the soap without depositing more. It did leave some water behind when doing this, but a third shift in their membranes soaked up the water on yet another pass. 

After it finished, Tanya waved her hand at the floor, cleaner than it was before she tossed dirt on it. “If you overfeed your slime, please return it to the pet shop for a complimentary trim. The pet shop owner adds a drop of this…” She took out a vial with an orange liquid, removed the cap to reveal a dropper, and let a single drop onto Sekken-chan. It rippled, and within five more minutes of slow mitosis there were now two substantially smaller slimes. She had overfed Sekken-chan beforehand, as the small cleanup she had brought was nowhere near enough mass to enable reproduction. It took a whole day of constant eating to fill a slime enough to split, and it was still able to do its job until it reached much larger than that, enough to split into 4 slimes safely. After that point, it becomes too heavy to move. “-and returns your original slime, with his own stock now one slime richer!” She lifted both of them, one in each hand, and presented them to the class. “You may praise me now.” Tanya said proudly. 

Several of the students applauded politely, but it was half-hearted. Professor Yungbluth, on the other hand, seemed quite impressed. “You are not the first of my students to abandon the complexity criteria, but this project is quite the novelty! I’m sure you worked very hard, Miss Tanya.” He picked up Sekken-chan’s clone and placed it in a jar. “I’ll be taking this for testing.”

“Keep it!” Tanya offered freely. She entirely expected him to steal it if she didn’t bribe him with it. “I filed the patent with the Master of Paris weeks ago, and finalized my partnership with Paris’ pet stores this morning. I predict there’ll be one in half the homes in the city within the year.” One of the things she loved about Paris is how honest the businesses all were. The Master’s rulership was strict on crime, but simple self-interest ensured that the pet shop owners kept firm control over the mitosis hormone, and with the Master’s law enforcement and the tax bureaucracy the way they are, she doubted there would be material losses from unreported sales, so she’ll get her cut from each and every purchase. 

Finally, freedom from the limited stipend the Baron allocated for her expenses while she attended the university. She could get quality components for her miniature clank army!