GXP Novel 18 releasing 6/20

[Eff Efferson]

Chapter 1: The mood of people on the racepshi is in the dumps because of the big mech fight. To combat this the performers are performing the same old same old while developing a huge new act and every performer is practicing their new acts. Maya goes to see Maisan (Probably misreading her name but she is the 3rd  of makihi's children) She specializes in seducing information out of Renzan intelligence operatives and Pirates, who we are informed ate now calling themselves the freedom alliance. She assures Maya that since she has heard nothing Seina is safe, but his whereabouts are still unknown. In exchange for monitoring the situation Maya agrees to introduce her to Kiriko, who she wants to work with, but is told not to recommend her to Kiriko, which implies Maisan receiving a lesser payout in that she stills has to prove herself to Kiriko and thus is owed another favor from Maya in the future. Maya rushes off to go practice her new act.

Chapter 2: Quiz Panta sneaks off to a private surveillance space in Recepshi where she meets "the Queen" of Renza, who is the wife of the head of the five families, her attendents are also there. It's revealed that Seto had orchestrated her rise to power and that it wasn't expected they'd meet up for another 3 hundred years. "I can't believe such a think happened over there." She says about seina's exploits in jurai, "neither could I" says Riberta (Liverta?) Clay revealing herself to quiz by turning around in the operators chair. Dr clays mom is then given her due exposition: She is over 20,000 years old just like clay and washu and she may be the oldest woman in the galactic federation thanks to clay.
she is a genious at talent scouting, she can is able to simply point people in the direction they need to go and stay hands off and has success and she had recently helped quiz develop one of their border planets. Clays father was a local lord of a planet his family had lost its prestige and the territory was in decline Riberta was a merchants daughter married off the clay's father as a concubine to pay off their financial debts, but his status territory soon grew thanks to Riberta, but she has a bad habit, she loses interest always right before the pay off of her actions, so as her husbands estate entered its peak she asked to be set free and divorced taking a large portion of assets and then ran off to visit clay at the academy and dragged him around the place to meet all his associates including  washu and naja.

a person made the mistake of teasing him over this and so he started the first great war of embarrassing information exposure  clay went into hiding and it got really bad eventually his mom had to use her special ability to locate him anywhere to find him and dragged him on an apology tour.

 this lead to more humiliation but to prevent a second war mentioning clays mother became taboo. The person who started the fight with clay was fully doxed to an extreme level and booted back home.

Since then she left clay alone and took up her personal hobby of collecting art originally, she funded this herself, then when she went broke clay started donating over half his earnings to her to fund her hobby. The establishment of the MMD (whos name secretly means:  Remember Everyone, don't waste money)
 was also partially to curve her spending.
 she bought many historical art fakes but due to her reputation and collection they became just as valuable as real historical items. Because of her age her collection is one of the oldest historical collections there is. so, her taste in art influenced future art and her talent scouting abilities nurtured many artists. She has a ship clay made for her on par with jurais ships and ryo ohki but its designed for self-defense rather than offense and is used as a museum and it's accessible even from remotely. Because of this the ship is simply known as the museum. This made it a huge target for pirates and thus she was the largest capturer of them before seina came around thanks to clays security systems (which we've already seen he licenses out like in gxp 2) in that regard she was a major contributor in galactic safety because of this the misdeeds of dr clay

once quiz had her team look into what would happen if riberta had stayed as owner on one of the companies she was developing at the time and found that it would have become a company larger then jurai with assets enough to support Jurai's entire military budget.

Kuisu tells her that clay is onboard and she confirms she already knows, but feels they are too old for the role of mother and child anymore, and she notes that because clay keeps his natural face and doenst get plastic surgery he looks like his father and she thinks he does that just to spite her because it shows he loved his father.

Riberta changes the survailance monitor over to one following clay and his companion. "don't you think it's time he settled down?"  she then excuses her self away leaving only the queen with quiz who thanks her because without seto her husbands wouldn't have been able to become kings but she is worried that jurai will become dictatorial over them due to having higher ranking trees, quiz talks her through her worries.

[Eff Efferson]

13: later that night, elene  seina's waitress from before  talks to Jovia and tells her about her latest rejection, jovia tells her about seina and elene wonders if they can recruit him for their own purposes.
she analyses the hallway where seina came in and brings up the rumor that he is beloved by Mabia, a renzan goddess of bad luck
later after getting drunk jovia gets a video call from airen they update on life and jovia tells her she thinks she found a man to take care of her daughter
 airen updates her telling her the pirate who came in earlier that day seemed to be doing reconnaissance as if they were planning to attack upcoming the harvest festival.
they finish talking
later on she wonders if that whole ordeal is caused by seinas luck
seina  is greeted when he gets back home by nana. He goes and checks the souvenier he got theyre nearly authenticly recreated Japanese sweets seina realizes that she probably used the demon tree forest to harvest the ingredients so he decides to scans them to find later which allows him to find them in the forest. He then contacts zinv by teleporting outside the town barrier.
seina asks zinv if its alright and it responds, yes I have friends here. It has made friends with the dryads of the forest, seina promises to keep zinv updated and goes to bed.


14
seina wakes up and checks his status, as he sleeps nayuta uses his powers to gather the items he wanted by teleporting them into spirit thread storage. Seina gets up and begins his work day which he cheats at by using magic to deliver pit meat and find illegal traps.  Later he goes to the hunter adventurers guild where a bunch of new child recruits are because the pit fields had expanded. Raska comes to greet him she appoligizes for her mother and assures seina she will help him if jovia gets out of hand seina assures her  he has plenty of experience dealing with women like her. Seina is told that if jovia ever gets out of hand there are some magic words that work on jovia that make her calm down. Seian heads off to a conference hall a kid named hado tries to sucker punch seina but his punch is caught he is let go but tries to elbow seina in the side as he passes him to go back to his seat he is again blocked hado is pushed out of the way and stumbles and falls down a stairway he comes back up and stares seina down seina offers to fight him after training is over had says if you want to be an adventurer don't run away! And "jovia sneakily appears behind him and goes yeah that's right!  Scaring everyone"  she is the instructor that day. the situation evolves into a battle at the terrace arena . seina considers how to best kick hados ass and thinks about how kiriko lately imitates seto and simply puts out a warning shot so strong it scares others into submission. Seina wonders how he'd do such a thing before he comes to a conclusion and prepares for battle by "getting in the zone" and mentally aiming all the bad luck he subconsciously doges at hado. but he is stopped by a hug  from behind. Theres a perspective change and were shown that when he did that everyone could feel the armosphere shift and something off emminating from seina and it was clear something horrible was being aimed at hado  it feels to jovia like a high ranking beasts miasma so she teleported next to seina to stop him since everyone else was paralyzed by the feeling. Seina snaps out of it. "But jovia... the match is still on. " just look over at hado!"  hado had fallen to his knees and pissed himself in fear. Hado is hauled off to get a medical exam.  Jovia lightly flirts with seina as she hold him.

[BobSchlotkin]

Just finished the first draft of GXP 18 and sent it off to EFF.
It needs some work, especially the cover and the pinups. I suck at graphics!

BoB