The Mech Touch

"Here."

"Pardon?" Gloriana looked up from her design terminal.

"You wanted to incorporate TESMAS into the C-Man, right?" Ves spoke and tapped the data pad that he had placed onto her desk. "Here you go. Our clan has just concluded a new partnership and business deal with Melmen Advanced Systems. It took a few days to hash out our differences, but there are enough reasons for Professor Neihy Almar to concede to some of our demands and sign a mutually-beneficial agreement."

His wife grew puzzled. She picked up the secure data pad and skimmed through the lengthy contract.

She quickly read through the most important terms and became increasingly more impressed and astounded by the extent of the new agreement!

Gloriana never expected Ves to cooperate so deeply and extensively with Professor Almar and her development company!

A few minutes passed by as she took in as much as she could from the contract. She eventually placed it on her desk and directed a questioning look at her husband.

"Explain."

"What do I need to explain? I think it is quite clear what has happened if you think about what we have put into the contract."

"I'm not that stupid, Ves. I just want to hear the full story."

He shrugged and sat down next to his wife. "It's quite simple. When you initially made contact with Professor Almar, the relationship between the two of you was quite shallow. The developer treated you like a client while you treated Almar as a vendor."

"That's true." Gloriana said. "I see nothing wrong with this approach."

"Something went wrong from the moment Professor Almar demanded 5 kilograms of phasewater as payment for her services! You can outfit an entire fleet with superdrives with this amount! The value of 5 kilograms of phasewater absolutely exceeds the value of getting a single development company to provide a first-generation smart armor system that requires us sacrifice another 5 kilograms of phasewater!"

"So you decided to act like a cheapskate and tried to bargain down this service fee?"

Ves slapped his palm against the desk. "I tried to get my money's worth, that is what I have done! I took a more sensible course of action and brought up this matter to Minister Shederin Purnesse. Together, we analyzed the situation and researched the provider. We came up with several new ideas that we thought were worth pursuing. Once we came up with a negotiating strategy, we opened up a dialogue with Melmen Advanced Systems."

"What did you try to achieve through this dialogue?"

"We tried to come up with a more reasonable bargain." Ves told her. "The negotiations that Minister Shederin and I conducted with Professor Almar and her R&D company enabled us to find out what we wanted and what we had to offer to each other. Our goal throughout these talks was to seek out ways to lower our concessions and obtain more value out of a potential deal. Did you know what we found out during our mutual exploration sessions?"

Gloriana looked curious.

He grinned. "We found out that our clan can offer more than phasewater to Melmen Advanced Systems. Do you remember the Phase King? I retrieved his damaged spirituality a while ago and only recently turned him into a design spirit. While I am not completely sure what he can do in this new form, let me say that he has an insane affinity with phasewater. He is over a million years old and he has spent much of that time learning how to make better use of this substance. The insights he possesses along with the techniques he has developed may be of great value even if much of his applications require access to fish-whale organs."

"Is that why this contract contains terms related to conducting shared research on phasewater and its applications?"

"Yes. Did you think it was a joke? It's not. Alongside the Phase King, our clan managed to plunder a lot of phasewater and fish-whale organs from Purgatory. These are extremely valuable alien assets but the problem is that we don't know what to do with them. Our exobiologists are completely stumped because none of our researchers possess a deep understanding of phasewater."

"Don't you have the Phase King for that?"

"The Phase King isn't a human researcher." Ves replied. "We can ask him to explain how phasewater works and how to make use of the valuable exotic, but that doesn't help us develop any solid and reliable applications that we can use alongside other human tech. For better or worse, we need the services of highly knowledgeable and competent researchers and developers who systematically understand phasewater. Professor Almar and her R&D teams are exactly who need to convert our spoils from the Purgatory Campaign into powerful and useful applications for the Larkinson Army."

"So by using the Phase King and the fish-whale organs as bargaining chips, you managed to convince Professor Almar to get the Larkinson Clan involved in her high-level research projects?"

"Yup."

His wife fell speechless for a moment.

This was a brilliant arrangement! Both sides got what they needed from each other. The Larkinsons not only became involved in advanced research related to phasewater, but also gained priority access to any of the products that Melmen Advanced Systems managed to develop.

On the other hand, Professor Almar obtained access to a lot of unique and interesting phasewater-related assets. Whether it was the Phase King, the fish-whale organs or the data that the Larkinson Clan managed to retrieve from the ancient phase whale pocket space, all of this provided the senior professor with a competitive advantage over her rivals that was hard to beat!

"If you think about the value of what we can offer to Professor Almar, we should gain far more than what I've already mentioned." Ves stated. "This is why we demanded equity from her. If she wants access to our unique fish-whale loot, then she needs to give us a share of the profits that she can generate with our assistance. After all, our clan can easily offer a similar deal to another R&D company that is working with phasewater."

"Is this why Melmen Advanced Systems has obtained exclusive access to our fish-whale assets?"

Ves nodded. "Yes. Considering what we get out of it, I think it is worthwhile to give Professor Almar assurances that we won't offer the same benefits to any of her competitors. However, she needs to provide enough research results to keep us happy. If she and her research teams start to slack off, then we might need to reconsider this relationship."

Through these negotiations, Ves and his fellow Larkinsons had turned a simple one-off transaction into an extensive research and development-oriented partnership!

The biggest implications of this new business deal was that the Larkinson Clan would continually gain access to some of the most advanced and powerful phasewater applications that Melmen Advanced Systems intended to develop in the coming decades!

Ves had high hopes for Melmen. Led by a senior professor who not only made a lot of research accomplishments in the old galaxy but also invested a lot of time and effort into understanding the properties of phasewater, she was well on her way of becoming one of the most notable authorities of phasewater in Davute!

While there were many scientists who possessed an even greater mastery phasewater, they weren't as accessible and open to cooperation as Professor Almar.

Ves was more than happy to work with someone who was competent and reasonable enough to cooperate with. Anyone with better qualifications would either look down on the Larkinsons or demand way too much to make a partnership worthwhile.

Meanwhile, his wife still found it difficult to wrap her mind around the magnitude of this beneficial arrangement!

This was like obtaining insider access to top secret research projects!

Gloriana resumed reading through the contract and noted a few more important clauses.

"You still agreed to hand over 3.5 kilograms of phasewater to Melmen anyway." She remarked.

"That is true. Professor Almar truly needs more phasewater. I agreed to give her at least this much because she can speed up the completion of her Appelar Project and start a bunch of new research projects related to our fish-whale assets with the help of our phasewater. However, I am not giving all of this for free. The phasewater along with the other research assistance that we are ready to provide to her is enough to allow our clan to receive a 7.75 percent stake in Melmen Advanced Systems."

In other words, as soon as this contract went into effect, the Larkinson Clan would become a minority shareholder of Professor Almar's company!

This was the biggest concession that the Larkinsons obtained out of the negotiations! It was a prize that Gloriana would have never thought about if she was in charge of the negotiations!

This was because Gloriana had remained stuck on conducting a transaction while Ves and the other Larkinsons saw an opportunity to exchange many more benefits with the other party.

In the end, she had nothing else to say to her husband. His results completely exceeded her expectations, and that was not a bad development.

Gloriana got what she wanted and more. Not only would she be able to proceed with her original plan and turn TESMAS into a key component of her ambitious C-Man Project, she could also increase the scope of her future mech designs!

This was because the Larkinson Clan's new and ongoing partnership with Melmen Advanced Systems granted her the possibility to make use of other advanced phasewater products in other design projects.

She could even approach Professor Almar and request that they develop a specific phasewater component that might add powerful new functionality to certain mech designs!

After the couple finally went to sleep, they woke up the next morning and met with Professor Neihy Almar once again.

This time, Ves had invited the senior professor to the Cat Nest in order to complete a few bureaucratic procedures and discuss the start of their cooperation.

"What do you think, professor?" Ves asked.

He, his wife and Professor Almar stood in front of a display window that separated them from a frozen chamber that held one of the many fish-whale organs that the Larkinson Clan had plundered from a battlefield during the Purgatory Campaign.

The older woman looked fascinated. "It is incredible. While it is a pity that you have not managed to obtain a genuine phase whale organ, this is not necessarily any worse. A true phase whale organ is too advanced for second-raters. From what little I have learned so far, these fish-whales which are derived from phase whale DNA are much simpler."

"Will you be able to study these organs and understand how they work?"

"Not alone." Professor Almar shook her head. "I do not have any biotech specialists in my research teams. I will either need to hire them or work together with another biotech company in order to decipher the principles and mechanisms of these alien organs."

"You can cooperate with Larkinson Biotech Institute. While it is relatively new and doesn't have a lot of scientific accumulation, we employ plenty of talented and knowledgeable exobiologists and so on. They have already spent months studying fish-whales and their organs so they can give you a head-start on this research direction."

While the professor did not have much confidence in the Larkinson Biotech Institute, she was willing to give it a chance.

"I shall try and see if we have a basis for cooperation."

"Good. Please bear with my researchers. They might not be as brilliant as you, but they have their strong points."

"We shall see."

With Professor Almar's active cooperation, Gloriana had much higher hopes that she would be able to turn the C-Man into a fantastic expert mech.

With the new level of cooperation between the Larkinson Clan and Melmen Advanced Systems, she could actively work together with Professor Almar to develop a more specialized and customed version of TESMAS for the C-Man Project!