Up and Coming 4 – Making a Name

“I hate you. You are the worst.” Avari cleaned the last tears from the corners of her eyes, then wiggled her way out of the hug. “All of you. Just THE worst!”

“Yeah, yeah.” Eldred managed to get one more head pat in before the gremlin jumped into an adjacent chair. “Can I ask you a difficult question?”

“Is that… are you trying to be tactful?” Tilting her head, she glared at him as if he had just thrown the most confusing yet poignant insult imaginable at her. “Don’t start treating me like a sensitive little wallflower, dickhead!”

With permission given to be his usual self, Eldred just came straight out with it. “Alright – if you are this determined not to let your father dictate what you do, why the birth control?”

Arms crossed over her chest, Avari kept staring at him. The edge softened somewhat, but the underlying emotion remained hard. “You seem to be in a bit of a rush,” she responded accusingly.

“Not going to lie, I am riding that ‘fatherhood’ high, yeah.”

“I don’t want kids yet,” Avari answered. “I especially don’t want kids while this much is in the air. I’ll keep an eye on what kind of father you’ll be before I decide on anything more.”

“Fair enough,” Eldred relented, his curiosity satisfied. Arms squeezed the goblin still in his lap. “I hope you are comfortable with it all?” he asked, trying to be a bit more considerate. He had been so swept up in his own delight, soothing her nervousness with kisses, that he had skipped over talking to her. ‘I’ll have to work on that,’ he chided himself.

“Y-yeah, it’s… it’s good…” Ellie suddenly gulped. “Just hope that the baby isn’t… too big.”

“Haven’t read up on how magical genes work yet?” Avari asked. “Vast majority of the cases, baby takes the mother’s species. Sure, there’s some halfbreeds running around, but even if you got knocked up by an ogre, you’d be fine. The gods that created us shortstacks clearly wanted us to be able to be everyone’s cocksleeves.”

“A derisive way to consider oneself,” Nyx remarked.

“Nah, see, shortstacks control societies by being the sexiest things around. The men can have all the power; they’ll do what we want with it anyway.” Avari grinned broadly, unfurling her arms. “Probably sucks to be a male of our species though.”

Eldred was somewhat forced to consider that. It could very well turn out that his first child was a vertically challenged man. In which case… nothing really changed in his mind. Civilised goblins were successful all over the entirety of the universe. There was no reason to worry about his potential son just because he was short.

“Alright, back to business talk,” Avari declared. “We need a name, Sir.”

“I know,” Eldred sighed. He had been dragging his feet on the corporation getting a proper designation. Since they weren’t using the OmiRe anymore, they hadn’t needed to change names so far. “Any particular reason why there’s urgency?”

“Besides me wanting to fill that empty spot above the entrance?”

“Yes, I would like a good reason.”

“I just told you the good reason. There’s also this though.” Avari hopped out of her chair and went back to the controlling computer. She logged into her private email, serving as their business address for now, and did not lose a wink of nervousness over the multitude of emails currently in her inbox. They revealed that Avari was both a gamer and a sex enthusiast, two facts Eldred was already familiar with.

After switching to her saved emails, she immediately clicked on the uppermost one. Eldred’s eyes drifted over the contents with growing interest.

‘To Eldred and his supporters,

We are happy to invite you to this year’s Up and Coming Conference! For over 350 years, we have been hosting this event in our proud mansion in the Green-Grass district. We offer this chance for all those newcomers in the area to connect and to find their place in the network of corporations that make our lives run.

The event runs from the 1st to the 7th of Herald. During your attendance, food and shelter will be provided. The service, stemming from our proud Rags to Riches program, will be happy to help you with whatever you need – perhaps even to join you! Find out more about that program here.

If you are interested in attending, please make sure you meet the following requirements:

- Respond to this email with your list of attendees and what company you are from.

- Each attendee must have at least 1 Core.

- Wear your best!

- During your stay, you may not engage in unsanctioned violence or we will remember.

If you can meet these simple requirements, we encourage you to come and network!

The warmest regards,

Oriana Orelion Orpheus’

“Oriana Orelion Orpheus…” Eldred repeated the name to himself. “Sounds familiar… aren’t they a fashion brand?”

“Your ignorance truly continues to astound,” Avari drawled. “Triple-O, as they are more commonly called, are a megacorp. They’re an interesting one. At the top, it’s a cooperative of, well, Oriana, Orelion and Orpheus who started out as a designer company. They conglomerated more and more corporations under them until they got majority control over the entire fashion industry in a sprawling number of districts.”

“And they stopped there?” Eldred asked, with a raised eyebrow.

“You’re still sitting there, all bright-eyed, thinking that reality will just let you keep climbing forever,” Avari mocked him. “You already had someone try to kill you and if Otto hadn’t been so much of a coward, he might have succeeded. More importantly, it’s pretty likely Triple-O originally was controlled by a Great One. They shot up from nowhere, then started hosting social events, all of that just 3 years after Ever-Rain opened up.”

“Ah… well, reaching megacorp level probably means they got out from under that thumb?”

“Either they’re very content with being puppets, out, or have enough sway with their overlords to make them quasi-independent.” Avari shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. I met them once when I went to a fancy dinner with some of my siblings. They struck me as decent people.”

Nyx laughed quietly, “High praise.”

“It’s enormous praise from me!” Avari declared. “Most people reach a level of power and influence and then stop there. Sure, if you make it to megacorp, you like going further than almost everyone else, but even then you have a limit. Triple-O could have moved to monopolise the fashion in the area and expand further, but once they started meeting resistance from other megacorps, they just stopped. They aren’t keeping upstarts down either. They just exist, do their thing, and are genuinely good people.”

“Isn’t that… common?” Ellie asked.

“It actually is fairly common,” Avari explained. “There’s a lot of violent corpos around, but most are just doing their thing. You’ll never really think about them because they just sell you things without you thinking about it. Corporations that do turf wars usually get squashed by others around them fairly quick. No one likes a troublemaker. Chaos is bad for business.”

Eldred hummed to that. He had lost his mother to one such turf war. The small messenger ring she was a part of eventually told him who and why, but only after that corporation had been killed to the last by the Cultivators of other corporations. This was simply how Iridescia maintained its stability.

“You recommend we attend this event?” Nyx wondered.

“I’d like us not to be upstarts forever and that requires us networking.” Avari sat down on the edge of her pedestal. “Best to go to an event like this.”

“Personally, I am more interested in that Rags to Riches program,” Eldred opined. “Did you click that link?”

“It’s just one of those charity things where they take orphans and then give them training in some useful field so they have a future,” Avari explained. “In this case they trained them to be butlers and maids.”

“Unorthodox,” Eldred remarked.

“Servants are always in demand. If you want to set someone with no familial connections up, give them the tools to endear themselves to people in power.” Avari shrugged. “Smart decision by my standards. ANYHOW!” The gremlin suddenly hurled her training pebble Eldred’s way. The project stopped just short of his forehead. “Stop distracting from your job, boss! The company needs a name.”

Groaning, Eldred reclined. Regardless of whether or not they went to this event, he had to get this sorted. “How about… Dominion?” he suggested.

“…D-did you... choose that because you’re a dom…?” Ellie asked with quiet disapproval.

“Yes… not good?”

“No, no!” Ellie backpedalled immediately, only for him to give her a reassuring smile.

“You’re my woman, give me your honest opinion.”

“It’s…. uh… it’s pretty uninspired…”

“No one will know what corporation is being talked about if you just called it ‘Dominion’,” Avari joined in. “That’s an addition to a name to indicate what kind of corporation it is, not a name itself.”

“Then… how about…” Eldred drew out the words as he tried to get his brain to come up with something. The night in the rain came back to him. The resignation to dying alone and unimportant, followed by the invigoration of truly living. “Never Rain.”

“Never Rain?” Avari asked.

Nyx scratched Eldred’s scalp. “Never Rain Dominion. It rings well.”

“I-I like that!”

“Sure, we can work with that.” Avari walked on over to the computer and pulled up one of the manifold programs in the Netsphere that turned prompts into images. “We’ll get something proper commissioned in due time, but let’s just generate a placeholder until then. Do you want to do Never Rain as two words, one word, hyphen…?”

“Let’s do one word,” Eldred decided on a whim.

“Alright, endless chain of customers mispronouncing it coming up…” Avari added some details to the prompt, then pressed the button. The first result was an utterly overdesigned thing that looked more like it belonged on the ceiling of a temple than a company website. Under a glorious golden sun, parting the clouds, sat a beige, gold-roofed temple in the style of the Garden Realms, a harem of non-descript people sitting around a king in front of it. “Just going to tell it to be less detailed…”

The second press of the button could at least be put on a website. Simple forms combined into expected elements. The sun still parted the clouds and one king was now flanked by two women on each side, below them a flower-like shape. “Take out the harem part of the prompt,” Eldred decided. “I like the idea, but it doesn’t make for good images.”

“Why the fuck does it only put human women around you anyway?” Avari complained. “Racist piece of junk!”

With the additions to the prompt made, the third generation was a lot better. A golden sun parting black clouds, a golden flower beneath, and then the name of the company beneath that: Neverrain Dominion.

[Neverrain Dominion AI Logo: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/fbc21519ae02.png ]

“How is that?” Avari asked.

“Perfect.” Eldred looked at the logo with a light bit of trepidation. “You think we should get it replaced eventually?”

“Using AI generated logos is forgivable for an upstart. We’d be the laughing stock of the corporate world if we didn’t get someone to draw a distinct logo eventually though.” Avari shrugged. “Future concerns. Neverrain Dominion… works well. Now, are you going?”

“You? Aren’t you coming along?”

“Would love to, but that implies we are leaving Ellie alone in here for a week.”

“Right…” Eldred agreed slowly. Between Ellie being too shy to go grocery shopping and the local hoodlum population, he didn’t want to leave her unprotected for that duration. “Maybe you should go and we stay?”

“They specifically invited you. You’re the boss, Master.”

“Right… on that front, I think we’ll be sticking with Sir.”

“Are we? Alright.” Avari grabbed her clipboard and made a checkmark on a box on a prepared document. “I heavily recommend you go, Sir.”

Eldred sucked on his gums. Networking would not be his strong suit, he was certain of that. Without Avari there to give him advice, he only had Nyx to lean on. His banshee was well-spoken, but he would not exactly call her diplomatically gifted either. Avari had her own problems, feisty as she was, but she was capable enough.

An unfamiliar sound echoed from a different part of the renovated building. It was like a golden gong being hit, though the clearly artificial sound faded much quicker than its natural counterpart would. “That’s the doorbell,” Avari explained.

‘Who wants something right now?’ Eldred wondered.