Welp, omake bug bit me, so here goes:
Hiromi sighed, her teachers had been going on about how important brand recognition was, the importance of maintaining the integrity of Arasaka's name, and all the various ways to protect ones' own while damaging their competitors. This had led to an assignment having them go out and find a dupe of one of Arasaka's products and write a report on how they are infringing and what effects it might have on Arasaka's name. By itself this was a pretty easy assignment, for every product Arasaka or one of its subsidiary's had there was at least one dupe on the streets, more the less important the product was.
The problem with that was having so many choices means that the teachers were expecting much better quality. She turned to look at the wrapper next to her desk, a colorful package showing off a Japanese pastry and the only thing marking it as a dupe was a tiny n in the middle of the name 'Arasnaka'. It wasn't her first choice of dupe but she wasn't high enough among her classmates to throw her weight around to call dibs on an easier choice so she needed to make sure her report was that much better.
*Found the servers, going to take a look around see what I can grab.*
Which ended up with her enlisting help from Motoko, which of course meant she was going overboard because in her words, "Grades are important Hiromi!"
*Huh, that's… odd, quite the security for a knockoff operation.*
All this ended up with Motoko and her tracking down the factory that was making these pastries and Motoko taking a stroll through the net to grab as much information as she could to help Hiromi for her stupid report.
*Oh, I wasn't expecting that but it sure explains all the security.*
Hiromi arched an eyebrow at the message.
*what did you find?*
*Something slightly bigger than some gonks repackaging food. On the upside you're definitely going to get good marks for your assignment.* She scowled, damn gonk-brained friend teasing her.
*spit it out Motoko*
*well… looks like someone grabbed an actual recipe from Arasaka, and decided to produce their own and pass them off as knockoffs of the original. Sending the data now.*
Hiromi blanched. Stealing a recipe was a hell of a lot bigger than counterfeiting some pastries. Checking the data revealed that yes, this was an Arasaka recipe some absolute Gonk managed to steal and further browsing came up with the reasoning. Selling the recipe or producing it and packaging it as an actual Arasaka product would get cyberninja kill squads on their ass, but passing it off as a knockoff would only get regular kill squads at the worst as long as they didn't look too deep.
*Shit Motoko, this is way too big for my assignment, this is shit that Counter-Intel deals with!*
*Counter-Intel huh? Well how 'bout this, write up the report all fancy like and I'll send a copy with the recipe to my choom there and get them to lean on your teachers for a good grade, all right?*
Hiromi relaxed a bit, at least Motoko had a plan… wait, when did she get a choom in Counter-Intel?
V
"Fucking chaos goblin!"