Okay, I figured out a title I like, so now it's "Akari's Glorious Grimdark Cheatathon".
...That's all, go read now =D
Chapter 3
Looking at the pile of stuff that was haphazardly stuffed into a hall, Akari was torn between amusement and annoyance.
It was supposed to be the yearly 'tax' from the villages, but honestly, she would have preferred just not having it. There was food, metals, fabrics, fine clothing and other assorted crap she had zero interest in. More reason to set up a currency system and tax collection, since that way, they'd just have to give her money that she would then have to cycle back into the economy again...maybe tax wasn't worth bothering with...not until she actually had a government system set up so she could delegate shit to other people.
Maybe that'd actually be the next best task, finding people to assign to handling stuff. Well, no, currency first, then she could pay them, and thus they'd handle buying material and working on the economy. But she'd have to teach them to do it...nah, she didn't have to do that actually, she would most definitely cheat in that regard, because she had literally zero idea on how to teach someone to manage an economy.
With a wave of her hand, Akari dumped the pile of shit into a storage pocket, then began debating where to build her mint. Probably somewhere in the palace would be best, nobody would try anything stupid when it was literally right under her nose. Perhaps it could simply be placed underground...or she could just build a new building somewhere for it, that would probably be best.
Akari departed the palace, lazily floating upwards as she tried to decide where the royal mint was going to be placed. Eventually, she deleted a few empty buildings and began constructing the building, which vaguely resembled the building she had built when she met the various region leaders. It was made of marble and other pretty materials, with pillars and ornamentation added haphazardly just so it felt more like a royal building.
When that was done, she then started fiddling around with coin press designs. 2cm diameter coins that were 2mm thick was the size she settled on, it wasn't too large nor too small. As for their content...well, pure gold would be a stupid idea of course, so maybe bronze coins would be a good idea. They would be durable, light, and so long as she backed the coins, she could set their value to whatever the hell she wanted. If she said that a bronze coin with a 10 on it was worth 10 ounces of gold, then that coin was worth the same as 10 ounces of gold. Of course, that was definitely too high a value for such a low denomination of coin, but that was the basic gist of it.
The coins themselves would be made in a press that would add some very intricate detailing, such that counterfeits would be nigh-impossible for at least a while, long enough for alternative counterfeit-prevention methods to be made. The fact was that after some time, people would figure out a way to copy the coins, whether by use of a clay mould or more advanced techniques, so complete prevention would be pretty impossible. There was the option of making laminated notes instead, something that absolutely nobody would be able to copy for thousands of years...maybe that was the best option. It would mean cheating again, but in return for making a currency that couldn't be counterfeited and would also be durable, that sounded like a fair trade-off.
Akari scrapped her coin press designs, then palmed her chin as she realised that making a lamination machine was useless without a machine that could turn wood into paper, as well as the plastic to go onto said paper. So instead, she re-instated the coin presses, as they would just become low-denomination coins, then made a 'machine' that was really just a facadé. Inside there was just a seal array that spawned laminated notes on-demand when activated in a specific denomination and ejected them in large quantities. Right beside that machine, she placed 4 other machines, such that there was one for 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 unit notes.
After some deliberation on what to call them, she settled for pounds, simply because it was easy, and formed their appearances casually, each one bearing her appearance and being designed with some rather intricate calligraphic detailing even if it was all just there to make it even harder to fake. Each note was laminated on both sides and on the edges, sealing the paper within in a layer of plastic and thus turning each note waterproof. The plastic was a layer of extra-flexible and durable polycarbonate, durable enough to avoid being scratched easily, whilst still being flexible enough to fold perfectly in half.
As for the paper, Akari cheated a little more, making the bonds holding the paper together several orders of magnitude stronger, then making those same bonds flexible without sacrificing integrity, so that the notes weren't just utterly inflexible. This meant that she could bend and fold the note as much as she wanted, and the paper inside wouldn't get frayed or worn out and begin fading. With these two factors together, she had a note that would probably last longer than the people using them, and that would be hilariously unreproducible.
Any counterfeit would stick out like a sore thumb, and she also intended to make very clear that any counterfeit found would be traced back, and the counterfeiter in question would have exceptionally harsh punishments levied against them. Some would likely still try to make some fake money, but so long as she kept on top of it and had the Praetorians bend a few legs the wrong way, they should stay in the vast minority.
After all, nothing stopped people from doing things more than the fear of getting their legs snapped.
It was while she was enjoying a relaxing soak that an idea came to Akari.
What if she made a system? Not one exactly like her own of course, that was far too powerful, but more of a guide, assistant and general enhancer. It would have an inventory, stats, ways to improve those stats, quests that were generated based on the desires and goals of the user, item drops and various other random features. It could also work to encourage using currency if she set up a marketplace which bought and sold the dropped items.
Perhaps she could even start to work some mysticism into things through having odd items like teleportation circles, magic spells and things utterly unlinked to the Warp. That way, her populace would grow powerful without relying upon the Warp to do so, instead relying on her, even if they wouldn't know she was the one to make the system. Having a government-backed marketplace would mean a gathering place for these new system-users, and maybe she could even create a portal to a dungeon where they could gain combat experience.
Said portal would completely rip off World of Warcraft's Dark Portal in architecture if not in scale, simply because she thought it looked impressive. Inside would be a typical dungeon with levels that increased in difficulty and value, filled with various respawning monsters of various levels and appearances. One thing she had to decide upon though was...how safe should the dungeon be?
She could make it so that each entrant received an item in their inventory that would let them instantly recall back to safety but would block entrance to the dungeon for seven days, that sounded like a decent way to avoid people constantly dying due to overconfidence, especially if the item could read their situation and decide for itself whether they needed to escape or not. Though, she would also allow people to switch that off if they so chose, putting their life entirely in their own hands, and thus washing her hands of all responsibility, not adding any more to her already-considerable indirect kill count. She would give them the option to not be saved if they were at risk of dying, and if they chose to not accept it, that would be on their own head.
So, using the system that had given her the tools to grow to what she was, Akari started to design her own. Strength, Intelligence, Vitality, Charisma, Agility, Luck and Wisdom were the order she went in, utterly ripping off the NoxCorp system, simply because it was applicable. The basic 5, Str, Int, Vit, Agi and Luck were all essentials, even if they got renamed. Charisma was also perfectly suitable, it would help those who wanted to trade improve their skills in an appreciable way. Wisdom was going to be used for her magic system, once she got around to designing that.
And then, she promptly scrapped it all...then recovered it again. Indecision just kept on calling at her, because she honestly couldn't decide on what was actually needed, what she shouldn't add, stuff like that. Should the inventory be limited or infinite? Should money take up an inventory slot or have its own counter? If so, how was it meant to be extracted if it wasn't an item? What about inventory-to-inventory trading menus? What about abilities? Or skills? Should they be given through books and items, or acquired from killing enemies? And how would they be used, through actions, mental commands, verbal, or some other trigger maybe?
There was so much that went into making even a basic interface, because every time she thought 'this is it' there was something else she thought about and realised she needed to cover for. The worst decisions to make were the numerical ones, deciding how much experience was to be needed to level. Fortunately she could delegate how much experience was gained by simply having clones handle the creation of the different monsters in the dungeon, and thus they would also handle item drops and experience amounts from other things, because there was no way in hell she was going to try and figure all that kind of stuff out.
She was already going to have to make some clones for creating the myriad of items that were going to be required, so it wasn't like it was a big deal. They'd also need to set all the pre-existing items in the world to be applicable inventory items, so things like fabric, food and other things could be placed in the inventory. That would definitely give trade a bit of a kick in the ass, since transporting goods would become a piece of cake. It also meant robbery would be...potentially worse actually because instead of killing, the robbers would outright be forced to torture whoever they were robbing into dropping their inventory. It also meant they couldn't tell who had an inventory full of amazing items and who had diddly-squat, so someone who already dropped all their possessions might be assumed to be holding stuff back.
Another point in favour of the teleportation circles idea.
At least a dozen iterations later, Akari was finally satisfied with the system she had created.
Well, satisfied wasn't the right word, it still felt lacking, but she'd learned already that if she kept chasing 'perfection' she would add so many stupid features that the system would just be a bloated mess that nobody would ever properly use in its entirety. The basics were still there, everyone had stats assigned based on their abilities, and they could improve by levelling up. Experience was given for practically any focused action, so just walking wouldn't do it, but snapping a branch off a tree would give a tiny amount of experience, the same as picking up a rock.
More experience was given for rarer or more difficult actions, like killing an animal, creating a weapon, smelting ore, weaving a blanket, those sorts of higher-order actions would grant more experience, and in turn they were harder and longer to achieve. Then there was monster-hunting, the most lucrative way to gain experience, but also the most dangerous. Kobolds and slimes were the weakest, but the Kobolds possessed the intelligence of primates, and as such were able to use weapons and make crude traps. Slimes meanwhile were slow, cumbersome and not very bright, but their threat was in their numbers, they spawned in groups no smaller than 10, and would slowly glide towards anything they considered a threat, engulfing their prey and suffocating them.
To compensate, killing a single Kobold was worth the same as breaking more than a thousand branches, and killing a slime was half that due to their high numbers. The Kobolds, by default, had lower stats than a human, and the slimes were the same aside from their Vitality, which was higher than the average person. It was all balancing and shenanigans to decide, which was why she left that frustrating task to her clones.
Several of them had taken the opportunity to test out the dungeon, going from the top floor right down to the depths below, and the memories she got really impressed her. There were trap floors, puzzles, ambushes, illusions, foliage, onslaughts, and even a rest station or ten that had one-way connections back up to the surface. The dungeon had a hundred floors, then on floor 101, it was the final boss, something the clones had decided on naming a Terrorsaurus Rex.
Of course, they went stupidly over the top as they kept on working away at it, giving it laser cannons, heavy metal armour and intelligence higher than a standard human, which didn't even start with the stats. With its stats, if the Terrorsaurus Rex was to be released, it would wipe out life on Earth, because it had an insane movement speed, obscenely powerful attacks, and made the original T-rex look like a ready-to-roast turkey by comparison, for obvious reasons.
What was important about it though was that the drop-table for the final boss contained a copper key. That key was going to be used in future to open an even higher-level dungeon for the adventurers to face, which Akari had to fix because she didn't actually want them to go higher than the Terrorsaurus Rex in personal power. When they were able to fight toe-to-toe with it, they would be so hilariously beyond even the Eldar, Necrons and anything else in 40K, so giving them more power would just be overkill.
So of course she then decided that maybe it didn't need a 'fix' after all. She wasn't allowed to use her powers off-world, but that didn't mean she couldn't create things that would empower others to do her dirty work. She would need to keep an eye out in case some uppity adventurer decided he or she was powerful enough to overthrow her, that could get annoying if they started damaging her palace or killing people. However, one thing that she was fixated on from the start was that the system in no way, shape or form extended lifespans. That would ensure that people continued to live and die, and wouldn't grow old and arrogant whilst staying youthful in body.
It did however mean that all her effort put in to figure out good water systems was utterly useless, because not only were there spells for creating clean water, there were also items that purified water, and a higher-level item that gave an endless supply of pure water without needing to be refilled in any way, but that didn't matter. It was still fun to do, so it was worth the effort she had put into doing it, and it helped teach the people that she wasn't going to be their answer to every problem, they had to solve things for themselves and find their own solutions.
Plus, it introduced the basics of plumbing, and as such, they would be able to use what they had learned from what had been built to then construct more advanced things. Not immediately, of course, development took time when she wasn't forcing it along, but she had literally nothing but thousands of years to kill before anything interesting happened, so she had to make her own entertainment, and what was more entertaining than watching people fuck things up a hundred times over?
Watching it happen many times more.
When she first implemented the system, she did it carefully.
A smaller, out of the way village a ways away to the southwest was her first testing spot. She gave them all the same system and included a tutorial that would walk them through every facet of the system, then she simply kicked back and watched to see what they'd do. For the first few days, not much really as they were freaked out a bit by the sudden appearance of floating text boxes that they could understand.
After a week though, they began to explore what the system could do. Some of the more adventurous villagers who had already followed the tutorial to completion and then poked around a bit guided the others in finding useful features and understanding what the system was actually doing for them. Having numbered ability counters was good for deciding who would be good at certain tasks, so those with high strength got certain jobs, agility got others, so on and so forth. The inventory was also incredibly useful for moving things around, since weight became a non-issue. The inventory system was limited in slots, but could be upgraded either through items or by levelling strength up.
After a month, they had begun to lean on the system as a crutch, using it regularly in various facets. She had added a crafting system that was managed by Intelligence, Agility and Strength, dictating what could and could not be crafted, alongside rarer crafting recipes that could only be found from the dungeon, and which had many useful recipes that allowed the villagers to do things like turning excess crops into seeds to replant for an even larger yield next time, or turning assorted pieces of wood into more usable forms, even exchanging it straight into furniture if they so chose.
The voices of those who doubted the system began to fall silent amidst the crowd of people who now used the system frequently and had developed a reliance upon it. Plus, the system hadn't done anything bad. It hadn't stolen anything, it was useful in most facets or at least tried to be in those it kinda failed at, like the map. The issue was that literally nobody had any idea how to use a map, because of course they didn't, there was no cartography yet, it was all just verbal knowledge since if she recalled correctly, runestones only began to be used in like 300AD.
Of course, she had skipped that, but she hadn't also given them cartography knowledge, so the map wasn't currently useful. She had no doubt that soon people would learn how to use it and it would then become another essential feature of the system that people relied upon for their day-to-day lives to function, but for right now, it was just another odd function that they couldn't understand, and thus it was ignored in favour of the inventory.
By watching what they did, Akari was able to make adjustments for things that were hilarious but unbalanced. For one, stats had to be reworked a bit because she had placed too little value on each point, but made gaining more points too difficult. A level-up only gave 5 points, but an average man had 100 strength, so levelling up strength by 5 points would only increase strength by 5%, and there would be diminishing returns. She still kept that sort-of rarity, because she wanted people to level slowly across their entire lives, but she still wanted them to have some serious potential for growth.
To that effect, she added some random perks. When a system was activated, either from the mass distribution she was planning, or when a child was born, they would receive between 1 and 5 random perks. Some would thus be able to get 5 amazing perks, and others would get a single rather weak perk. However, this didn't mean that those with only one perk couldn't achieve anything, because if they levelled up and explored the dungeon, they had a higher chance of finding untradeable perk scrolls compared to those who had more perks.
She immediately knew some would gather up perk scrolls with a single perk, then use them to get many perks, but that honestly just sounded amusing to her, so she didn't even bother adding negative perks or anything that would screw that up. She wanted to see how someone with twenty or more perks would act. There was also the opportunity for her to give certain entertaining people a 'gold-finger' so to speak, giving them a random opportunity that, if they succeeded, would give them something rare and powerful.
Between watching the villagers to see how they did with their new system and handling any issues that cropped up in the Capital, another year quickly slipped past.
Okay, so, I reread my pilot chapter for Akari going to Mass Effect, and I kinda want to use it now.
So, my intention is to make a spin-off, unrelated to this story, where Akari just decides she wants to visit a different universe and so creates a random portal to a world that was once fictional in our reality, and that portal takes her to Mass Effect. I won't specify where, just that she gets dropped straight into a rather major event. Would people like that? I've made a poll for it, it's at the top of my profile, mobile users I don't think can actually see it though, sorry!
Also, I have a pat reon, so if you want early access to chapters, you can head over there and throw some cash my way, link is on my profile as well =D