Apocalypse: Fairy System by Macronomicon (fox in socks read aloud txt) 📕

2. Pick people they were familiar with and could work well with.

People the teachers would be familiar with were school lunch ladies, school janitors, etc. They existed in the same realm as the teachers themselves, and therefore knew how to deal with children, even if it was in passing.

Allowing a certain level of favoritism was good for an organization, and bringing their whole family together would keep them tight-knit.

For this con, Jeb needed them to be tight-knit.

Oddly enough, the handyman that Mrs. Lang picked out was mid-fifties and had Lang for a last name. Weird.

One of the cooks was a white-haired woman with an amiable grin. Last name Everett.

Jeb overlooked it.

They filled in the remaining positions with people from their old schools, which was exactly what Jeb wanted.

Each of the positions technically counted as unskilled labor, so all-told they ran him another fifty cool, leaving Jeb with just fifty left.

That’s the skeleton crew I’ll need to take care of the kids I’mma kidnap. Honestly cost a whole lot less than I thought it would.

He glanced at the last five tubes of gold, when he felt a spark touch his mind, reminding him of the jet fuel lens resting back in his newly-purchased mansion.

“Quick question before I go. Are there any astrophysicists, roboticists, rocket scientists, or NASA people in here?”

One hand went up near the back.

“Come on to the front.”

It was a skinny old man with a shock of unkempt white hair, his gaze somewhat manic, unlike Mr. Everett’s.

“What’s your name?”

“Eddie Davis.”

“And what do you do?”

“A little bit of everything, but robotics and AI are my speciality. I was in the middle of working on walking rover designs and programming its AI to deal with unexpected situations more efficiently when the Tutorial happened.” At the mention of the Tutorial, the old man’s face contracted into an impressive scowl.

“You think you could fix a Roomba?” Jeb asked to lighten the mood.

The older man stared at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

Colus leaned in. “Excuse me, Mr. Trapper. I do not know what a roboticist, astrophysicist, rocket scientist, or NASA is. There hasn’t been a specific request for any of those things in the entire time we’ve been selling humans, and I noticed only one man raised his hand. Would it be correct to assume they are high experts?”

“Yeah, they’re high experts,” Jeb said with a sigh, pulling out four tubes of gold.

“To hell with that, son. You want me to play housekeeper for some schoolteachers while an entirely new set of physics just got dropped in our laps? I gotta science, man. If you try to make me tuck sheets, I’ll kill myself. Do you have any idea the kinds of things that are possible now?”

Jeb leaned in and whispered in the old man’s ear. “Magical energy sources that weigh half a pound and could take a ship to mars.”

Eddie jerked away, his eyes wide. He searched Jeb’s gaze for a moment.

“Fucking buy me. Fucking buy me right the fuck now,” Eddie said, holding his shackles out and wiggling his fingers.

“What did you tell him?”

“I made him an implicit offer of something his nerdy kind has been seeking for a thousand years,” Jeb said, handing over the money.

Jeb took his eight new staffers to the paperwork room, signed a bunch of papers and made his ownership official, then paused when he noticed something odd.

“Where are the slave collars? The Myst ones that control their behavior?” Jeb asked, pointing at the simple leather collars on the middle-aged slaves.

Colus chuckled. “If you like, we can lease one of them to you for a bulb a month, but most of these slaves aren’t worth that level of insurance.”

His gaze flickered to Eddie.

“How much is a Myst slave collar?” Jeb asked.

“I told you, a bulb a month.”

“How much to buy one?” Jeb clarified.

“Oh. Two hundred and fifty bulbs is the typical amount we add if a client intends to buy the collar outright with a particularly expensive and valuable slave.”

“What if I just wanted the collar?”

“We do need them to keep control over the most unruly, powerful individuals, but we could spare one or two for say…three hundred apiece.”

Jeb sucked in a breath through his teeth. Almost twenty pounds of gold each. He currently did not have that much, but he would.

“I’ll revisit that subject soon,” Jeb muttered, finishing his signature. He didn’t want the slave collar so much for the slave collar aspect of it. He wanted the big Control lens for his own creations along with the other Myst-based guts to hand over to Eddie, his R&D department.

“Of course.”

“If any more NASA folks, astrophysicists, roboticists, or rocket scientists come into your possession, I’d be happy to buy them,” Jeb said.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Colus said. “If we find such a person, we will contact your staff at the manor.”

Colus laced his fingers together. “You know, most human men who come by are far more interested in purchasing attractive young females. You are a welcome outlier, in that you seem to be purely motivated by practicality and profit. I think you’ll make quite a splash in Solmnath.”

“You better believe it,” Jeb said, standing and leaving without another word. It was probably a bit rude, but Jeb didn’t want to be buddies with a slave trader.

He led his group of eight back to the mansion. A few of them flinched at the rough state of the exterior, but most seemed to be happy simply to have a place to sleep.

“Yeah, it’s a fixer-upper. That’s what you guys are for.” Luckily, there was a lot of overlap between a janitor and a handyman. Mrs. Lang had basically gotten him four people good with their hands by ensuring cook number two