Mar 63 min read

The Turning Cogs of Invention

"You know Nexicorp gets pissy with us when we don’t hit our quotas, Joseph. You’re lucky I finished my weekly for component 356’s." "Honestly, anyone else might think you’re still brand new to this work, but you’ve been an engineer for six months. I’ve taught you how to make all of the stuff that you’re supposed to be able to make. Maybe if you spent less time in the Black Sheep contracting all manner of diseases, you’d be able to pay your debts and start being an actually respectable engineer. "

"Listen, I ain’t gonna be able to do this again. The amount of commissions for 1NDSTRL grade prosthetics I’m getting is skyrocketing. The amount of amputations that had to be done after that industrial accident in the slum means demand is sky high, so if you got in and actually made some, you might get Nexicorp off your back. It should be easy enough for you too, since 1NDSTRL is the easiest one to make. Hell, you could just make the components and I could put together the entire thing, and that would already be a massive improvement over your current situation. The bottle of whiskey you’ve left to fester on a shelf for a month isn’t the solution to your problems!" "If you’re so averse to hard work, you could do easy work, and someone could start filling the endless hole that is the demand for slinger bullets. It’s not exactly interesting, sure, but you’ll never run out of work. The peacekeepers are always gonna pay well for them, and you could even send some to the Outlook so maybe you could start to rebuild your workshop’s crumbling reputation. You could even make the hollow ones - it’s not like you’d need to be the one making the solutions to fill them up with, I’m sure you could work out some sort of trade with the alchemists around town."

"At your current rate of development, I won’t be able to assign you to the clockwork cannons project, and you definitely won’t be touching aerolyx reactors. You can’t be trusted to handle dangerous machinery like that, especially since we don’t want a repeat of the hullbeck pike incident. Plus, if you don’t improve your production quotas, you’ll never get the chance to work on M1L1T4R-E grade prosthetics, and I know that’s what you're really after. If you’re able to start pulling your workshop out of its very rapid decline, I’ll see if I can pull some strings and get you a trainer that would be willing to take you under his wing so that you can start getting the experience you need. You need to prove to Nexicorp that you are still competent after all." "At the very least, just make something before next month rolls around. If you have nothing to show the inspectors, they’ll sling you out into the street, and I’ll have to find another engineer to manage the god awful backlog you’ve created. Seriously, why the hell have you racked up orders for fucking baking ingredients and jewels? Are these things you’ve swiped so that you can make the money you need to buy more alcohol? It would explain why you somehow manage to keep finding what you need to buy the impressive collection of empty bottles you’ve made." "Seriously Joseph, just get your shit together."

(Transcripts of disciplinary action taken by Olivia Robinson towards Joseph Vex.) (Joseph was fired in the following month.)