GOAL COMPLETE: Find out what Von Patrick knew about the Printer of Never Jamming.
+1 Level
+2 Emotional Intelligence
+2 Skill
+3 SP
Awards: 500 Credits
New New Added to Printer of Never Jamming V: Locate the paper trail.
Maxi looked at the rewards on her monitor. The emotional intelligence boost was probably from dealing with Patricia Von Patrick if she hazarded a guess. Truth be told, she hadn’t invested too much into her EI stat. She felt it was like Charisma from DnD, useless until the makers of the game went, “Whoops, better make some classes that use that stat.”
For Maxi, most social situations in gaming she’d handle with a sword. Now that gaming and the real world were blended together, she could see more reasons why social skills were a valuable tool in the kit. She’d have to invest more into the stat. As a Generalist, she was seeing the value of being good at just a little of everything, not just psychic powers and a blade.
She closed the quest reward window, leveled her character, bought Accelerated Healing that decreased her time spent in the chair per her dedication stat, and looked over her character sheet:
Name: Office Maxi Gender: Female Ethnicity: Other
Office Pool: Lus3rs (Cumulative Tier: 9.1)
Tier: 7.12
Class: Generalist
Level: 75
Stats:
Ambition: 80
Adaptability: 28
Dedication: 35
Speed: 48
Creativity: 101
Emotional Intelligence: 36
Luck: 140
Life: 535/535
Psy: 1510/1510
AR: 35
Att: +46 Longsword (47-49 damage)
Att: +45 Mind Shard (10pp, 46-55 damage)
Att: +45 Psychic Darts (50 pp, 46-55 damage, 100’ range, 30’ circle)
Skills:
Accelerated Healing +12
All Skills +28
Climbing (basic) +21
Customer Service +11
Dodge +15
Investigate +35
Leap of Faith +30
Listen +36
MacGyver +32
Melee Weapons +26
Intermediate Boosts:
-Swords: +10
Psychic Tsunami +30
Rally the Troops +7
Sneak +39
What is Lost is Now Found +68
Psychic Abilities:
Mind Shard +45 (10pp, 46-55 damage), a psychic attack against anything that can be reached by a melee chargei maneuver, modified by creativity
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Psychic Darts +45 (50 pp, 46-55 damage, 100’ range, 30’ diameter)i, AoEi psychic attack that creates needles of psychic energy pelting any opponent in a 30’ diameter, Friendly Fire: No, modified by creativity
Psychic Tsunami +30 (100 PP upcharge), a 10 foot by 10 foot wave of psychic energy dispels all psychic attacks, and knocks everything not bolted to the floor 10 feet back and dazed status condition. Obstructions to knock back case fall damage. Modified by creativity Upcharge: Add 10 x 10 and another 10 feet knock back.
Leap of Faith +30 (250 pp), grants user ability to teleport 30’ anywhere in line of sight, modified by creativity
Credits: 4059
Items: +11 Bluetooth Headphones. Fork. +23 HR Glasses. Infinity Backpack. +3 Khakis of Mending. +10 Long Sword of Grutomation Slaying. +3 Muddy Buddies of Grutomaton Deterrence (1). +23 Shirt of Growth (Legendary): Defenses: +6 Grutomaton/+2 Mechanoid, Mending, Mythical Beast Taming, Speed Boost II, Stat Boost I. +1 Stapler of Binding (uncommon). Utility Belt of Many Slots.
Storage: (Cubicle)
Pets: Irritable Inkjet of Nipping (Deceased), Dalek, Grutomaton Drone, Life: 200/200, AR: 15, Att. +12 Pincher (13-24 Dmg.), Att. +30 Blast Beam, (31-50 damage, 500’ range, 30 second cooldowni).
She closed the window, and swirled around in her chair. The others were buried in their work or off on a minor quest. Viewing Von Patrick’s files had answered a couple of mysteries. The first was that the Printer of Never Jamming was first discovered by Cassidy West on an authorized trip to their home dimension.
Cassidy had almost died and Maxi’s mom had saved her. It was back when her mom was Tier 1 and in charge of the PI branch. Cassidy was barely out of training then. When Maxi confronted her mom about why she failed to tell her about the incident, Tara said she found that it was unimportant.
“I heard the sounds of printing in another room,” Tara had said. “It could have been nothing, a portable printer brought by an employee who didn’t want the company snooping about what’s coming from their print queue.”
“Seems like a dangerous place to do it,” Maxi had retorted, still a little worked up from the argument they had moments earlier.
“When some players reach a certain level, they think they're invincible and take stupid risks all the time. Either way, we went back, searched the place, and no printer. Still, it was the very idea that an object like that could exist that got us looking for the damn thing to begin with. We still don’t know if it’s real or a fantasy from wishful thinking.”
“Dad found it, ma!”
“We don’t know what dad found. He could have found a portable printer left behind in a Grutomaton infested hellhole like our homeworld, that was just a time bomb waiting to go off and killing him before he had the chance to come back on grid!” Tara yelled
Maxi saw that she had upset her mother, and decided to stop pushing. After their conversation returned to tones that weren’t as blood boiling. Maxi learned that Tara had ordered Cassidy to forget about looking for the printer to prevent the young PI at the time from getting killed. Whether Cassidy had indeed dropped it or was on the exact same quest Maxi was on, Maxi didn’t know.
While Maxi and the head of the PI Branch pooled their knowledge about Von Patrick’s quest, she wasn’t ready to let Cassidy into the trust circle in regards to the Printer. For all Maxi knew, the woman had killed her father and stolen the Printer. There wasn’t enough information yet to do anything but conjecture.
Either way, a trip to her home dimension was looking more and more likely, now. Between the fact that both Cassidy and her father went looking for something over there, there had to be something. Something her mom and her team missed, something the extraction team for her father missed.
But she wasn’t going to go unprepared. When she had received the new goal of following the paper trail. The Ally Limit on the quest screen changed from 0 to Office Pool. The ally limit on the quests screens were based on an algorithm from the AI that managed the quests.
Each quest had a difficulty rating that was only known to the mysterious machine that managed the system. If the quest was deemed too difficult for an individual, that limit would increase, too easy, it would decrease. All it was a number to encourage people from going solo, and incentivize others to go on the quest, by splitting quest rewards.
She could bring more people on a quest if she wanted, but if her Ally Limit was zero, they wouldn’t get rewards for helping her. Not that she’d need rewards to convince her Office Pool, but it was nice to have that option. As for the AI that figured the numbers out, it wasn’t Terry.
He was an HR Assistant and a glorified search engine. There were other AIs living in the IT server room, the one that managed the quest system was one of them, and this one had deemed that she needed help with the new goal, and Office Pool was that help.
The only problem now was if Daisuke could be trusted, and to follow the paper trail. The other mystery answered from his files was the mysterious flier with the broken link and the tophat figure. That flier had been created in a different dimension.
Part of Von Patrick’s endless dissection job was figuring out where the monsters came from. The elevator network was vast. There were also other ways monsters could pass through the space between dimensions that didn’t require an elevator shaft, but it was far less common. Monsters getting into new worlds sometimes yielded new creatures from unknown dimensions. Perhaps Theseus and the Minotaur was just the story of a poor sap who found themselves in the IT basement of another company only to come out rambling of mazes and horned creatures.
Regardless of how a creature got to Earth, Von Patrick could figure out where it came from carving out and grinding up the cells that didn’t divide and create new very often ones like brain cells or oocytes. Each dimension had a signature in molecules that made up the cells. However that signature would go away for something like skins cells that divide quickly.
Since organs and creatures all seemed to have different internal makeups, with cells that divided on their own times, he also learned from dissecting, categorizing, and labeling. The tree that was cut down to make the paper of the tophat guy fliers was from her home dimension. Which meant that either a robust printer paper had sprung up post apocalypse, or Printer that Never Jams was in the place when someone printed the flier.
The paper trail was leading her home, though she wasn’t even sure she called it that. Earth felt more like home. Either way it was something she’d need her whole Office Pool, and she wasn’t going to exaggerate the dangers. However, before they went questing to a far off dimension that would kill them all. She had a couple of items to knock out of her todo list.
One was a meeting with Ted, the leader of Generalist Branch, technically her mentor, but she never confided in the guy, nor much talk to the guy, if it wasn’t for the fact that it was mandatory for her to check in once a month so he could “see how she was doing.” It was one of those, the “company really cares policies” that was more a chore than an employment benefit.
The time ticked down. One more minute till her meeting with Ted. With a groan, she stood, and trundled over to the elevator.
