It had been an uneventful week from there on out. There was some more ruckus on the Elemental Islands on some occasions. Newcomers, unfamiliar with the only just forming rules, stirred up a fuzz, but the incidents were kept so small that John only heard about them after the fact. Otherwise, there had only been one notable thing per day, which was slow and pleasant business as far as John was concerned.

Tuesday had been focused largely on the resettling of local commerce. Since the entire district had been restructured, there were some people that were unhappy with where they had ended up. A swimwear business, for example, had ended up further inland and they wanted to be pushed further towards the northern beach. A shop that specialized in children’s toys was right across the Garden of Sinners. Tall wall or not, it was understandable that they didn’t want to be selling things to children next door to the local sex convention. Another problem case was a smith who wanted to be closer to the south of the district so he wasn’t too far away from the Foundry.

John spent the entire day listening, judging and resolving issues like this. The aforementioned cases were pretty reasonable, but as soon as he granted them, others had some more selfish requests. Expansion of their shop borders or relocating to a scenery that simply looked nicer were among the most usual. The work was long-winded, courtesy of the amount of conversations he needed to have, but he made steady progress and had arrived at a nice new configuration at the end of the day.

Wednesday, in turn, was then mostly spent on putting supply lines in place. He had to hire transporters that moved raw goods from the Mine, Farm, Fishery, Silicate Fields, and Logging to the appropriate refinement Buildings or to craftsmen on the island and the Hudson Barrier at large. This came along with a few other complications. First, he needed to expand the bureaucracy responsible for accessing how much material had yielded to shoulder the expanded production of all new and upgraded Buildings. Then he had to have several meetings with the expanded bureaucracy to discuss the needs of each individual Building. The need to put up a partying office for the Mine, for example, and designing a system for which trees or crystals should be left to grow.

Because spawn rates for rare raw materials were naturally lower, it was in the Gamer’s best interest to not harvest them immediately, but only touch them once they reached maximum conceivable size. This had to be drilled into people because the Guild Hall was rather unforgiving with trying to gimmick a system. If even a single branch was removed of a tree, it immediately stopped growing entirely, so there was no partial harvesting. The entire thing should be taken down at the point of maturity and not a day earlier.

Thankfully, like many videogame mechanics, once something harvestable reached maximum size, it just magically stayed there. Hasty action would reduce profits immensely, but slow action would only lead to small inefficiencies caused by taking up the spawn point a few extra days. Given time and work experience, these inefficiencies would be lessened. Senior workers would be able to recognize what tree was fully grown and the experts John paid to keep tabs on all of the kinds of trees the Logging grew would further help with this.

With offices expanded, John could at least delegate the responsibility of hiring new people to someone else. What he could not delegate was the actually lengthiest part of this process.

Negotiating economics, a process that took the rest of that Wednesday and stretched well into Friday morning.

By this point, the quality of Guild Hall goods had become famous in the parts of the Abyss that were dedicated to crafting. Fusion, Collide and John Newman were brands known for reliable, regular and high-quality shipments. Abyssal metals, woods and foodstuffs were all highly sought after and usually difficult to get. The Natural Barriers these things were usually harvested from had a semi-predictable spawning pattern. Everyone knew where Natural Barriers were most likely to appear, but sometimes they just stayed away for a while or what was within wasn’t the material currently demanded. Successes in deliberate cultivation were a slow story. Abyssal plants were even more complicated in what they needed to maintain health than roses were, wilting or losing their magical properties if things weren’t exactly right.

As much as the Guild Hall produced within Fusion, its share vanished in the vastness of the global market. It was the reliability he could lord over everyone else, not the quantity. Once all the yields were divided between interested groups, there was very little left to give to any single one of them. Equal division was a non-starter. Bureaucratically managed division was an absolute administrative nightmare, had to be updated every single time they sold stuff and could easily lead to corruption or other inefficiencies. A true free market solution would have been nice, but it had a fundamental issue: shipping was cheap.

Before the advent of ludicrously large ships, shipping containers and proper engines, shipping had increased the cost of goods by such a margin that local businesses didn’t have to greatly fear foreign influence. In the modern age, that was a tad different and the Abyss wasn’t exempt from this. On the contrary, this issue could be greatly exasperated in the Abyss. Mobile Barriers were more easily maintained on the sea, where there were few others that could be run into and several Fateweavers were easier kept in a naval vessel than a car. Ships could be made much larger with magic and supernatural alloys. Currently such ships were only used in warfare, but it was a possibility in civilian usage.

With shipping being so cheap that the costliest part of transportation was hiring a number of Fateweavers to maintain the barrier, foreign corporations could just buy up all of the goods. Fusion would get rich and could probably develop the infrastructure for a large service industry, but the Federation would be unpleasantly dependent on foreign money and manufacturing. This was a situation no nation should find itself in.

There were large swathes of Fusion that didn’t have the same issue. The further inland business was, the less applicable the shipping problem was. This was true for both to and from, however, which was why inland economies, albeit more self-reliant, were also rather small in the big scheme of things.

Fusion had five big economic centres: 1. The Guild Hall, with its magical resources. 2. The Hudson Barrier with its naval industry, the continuously multiplying small businesses and, yes, a noticeable share of prostitution and other sexual services. 3. Boston, funnelling the resources from Natural Barrier hunts into the open market. 4. Washington D.C., where the Maryland economy was focused, producing an even spread of services and refined goods. 5. Miami, which had a large tourism industry, even among Abyssals, and apparently a very large industry for alcohols, oils and other ‘fun’ luxury goods.

Of those five, the Hudson Barrier and DC relied on the Guild Hall to continue their own prosperity. The Hudson Barrier more so than DC, predictably, but since John had taken the shackles of over-legislation off the local businesses, they were expanding rapidly and the local economy had an appetite for more investments and materials.

Boston was running the completely free market system whose problem John was currently contemplating, but a lot of it stayed in internal circulation thanks to nepotism. Corruption was, oddly enough, not always a terrible thing for local wealth. Miami and Florida as a whole were pretty self-reliant and whatever John decided here wouldn’t threaten tourism.

John had only actual authority to change policy for the Guild Hall and the Hudson Barrier. Both of those were Collide territory, where he governed as a de-facto dictator. There were a lot of positions that were democratically decided, but he could overrule anyone within these borders by law and sheer influence.

Whatever his decision was wouldn’t immediately doom all of Fusion, that was the beauty of a decentralized model, but it could ripple outwards and hamper growth in areas directly affiliated. Politically, it would have earned him a lot of ire with other leaders if he sold too many resources abroad. Economically, he would make himself dependent on foreign people.

Therefore, it was best to NOT adopt a completely free market system. Having ruled both it and the complete administrative oversight of distribution out, the viable model had to be something in between. He needed to carefully engineer a system by which local businesses had an easier time to get his goods than foreign ones, while still allowing foreign ones to buy up whatever excesses he had to keep money flowing.

It also was a fact that there were foreign powers he wanted to sell things to in order to strengthen relationships. A number of lengthy calls, group and single, with representatives from Fusion’s economic centres, the NTC, the Abyss Auction as well as council by Scarlett and Lydia later, John had cobbled together a basic system. It was designed to be adjustable and expandable later on and would doubtlessly need both.

Fundamentally, it was just a layered tariff system. People that operated their business within Collide paid no tariffs at all. Within Fusion, people paid a low tariff. Those that Collide or Fusion had trade agreements with, such as Rex Germaniae at large and the NTC in particular, paid an average tariff. Lastly, those wares that ended up on the Abyss Auction had a high tariff. Access was also limited in that 50% of every yield was only accessible to members of Fusion and only what was left after the locals had a few days to buy what they needed entered the open market. Originally that percentage had been 80%, but John had put it deliberately high, so he could let himself get haggled down.

Very few people were fully happy with this system. Scarlett admitted that she liked that she would be guaranteed an easier time on the market, but principally disliked such a direct involvement of the state in market affairs. Even if the state was the one producing things. Lydia was the exact opposite, principally approving of a degree of protectionism when it came to growing an independent economy, but pragmatically disliking that it was her market that was shut out of goods that she could buy cheaper than the rest of the world because of this.

The Boston corporatists were pretty happy, but they would have preferred if they actually had first access to ALL of the wares. They wouldn’t buy them all, but they wanted to be protected to the highest degree possible. Unhappiest of all was, predictably, the Abyss Auction. They wouldn’t get a cut out of anything that wasn’t traded over their website, which was now the majority of transactions. Only getting the scraps was far from what the largest economic force on the globe found acceptable.

John would have loved to tell them to suck it up and live with it. That wasn’t a possibility, as sad as it was. The ‘scraps’ were, after all, still a massive amount of raw materials and he needed the Abyss Auction to get them sold to whoever wanted them. It was also far from wise to mess with a force that had more money than God. The Abyss Auction may have officially been a non-combat organization, but only an idiot would believe that they didn’t have ways to cause problems of the violent variety if they didn’t get what they wanted.

With that in mind, John instead diplomatically promised that he would be happy to enter negotiations about other aspects of the economy. Along his reconciliatory tone he dropped a few subtle and not-so-subtle reminders who Rave’s parents were. If he had to bow before the mega-corporation, he would at least do it in a way that potentially elevated people he knew within the power structure.

John himself was happy with the system. Not because he thought it was perfect or made him rich. If it had been about his personal benefit, the completely free market solution would have been the best one. No, he liked it the most because it would help the small and local businesses the most. Because large corporations had a tendency to haggle over prices or lose themselves in forms exchanged between departments, the small businesses would be able to reliably swoop in first and get the small cuts out of the large pie each of them needed. Orders of kilograms were quicker agreed on and delivered than orders of tons, to put it simply.

A satisfied small business owner was a happy person that sang John’s praise. The Gamer did all of this because he wanted to keep Fusion largely independent of foreign markets, but he also did it because he knew, without a doubt, that this would make him popular. The only thing that was more pleasing to his ego than positive entries in the history books were the whispered compliments of his harem.

As always, John Newman was motivated by selfish reasons as much as selfless ones.

After this affair was done with, around 10 o’clock on Friday, John got on a plane and flew over to Miami. He wasn’t there to meet anybody, he just wanted to put down a long-range teleporter. With that placed, he had 4 out of 5 of them and no idea what to do with the last one. Which was nice. Having some overhanging resources rather than having to chase after new ones as the need for them arose was a welcome change of pace.

He used the teleporter to get back home and spent the rest of Friday with regular paperwork. Thanks to Jack, even with all of these things going on, he hadn’t gotten behind on that front at all and had the regular and relatively relaxed ‘read, sign and get sucked off’-experience.