The panic caused by the Controllers' invasion had mostly subsided, and business at the Tower of the Chosen was running smoothly once again. Miss Planner started her day off in the research division to see all the new ideas her staff came up with while she was busy with interviews.
"Good morning, everyone!" said Miss Planner cheerfully as she entered the office. Her smile was genuine and bright.
She sat down in a chair next to one of her analysts and looked around at her employees. They were all sitting at their desks working diligently. Some of them even took a moment to look up from their screens long enough to give the boss a friendly wave or nod of the head.
"We're having a meeting in an hour, so all of you should be getting ready to present your ideas. I want to see your best work!"
Miss Planner's hapless batch of analysts worked hard and received little positive feedback. Their job was to come up with ways of making the Chosen Ones more powerful and efficient, but Miss Planner rejected almost every idea they came up with.
"Too risky," "too expensive," "too impractical," or "we don't need it."
Her analysts were usually left with nothing to show for their efforts, but they still tried. The worst part was that Miss Planner came up with plenty of incredible ideas on her own that were all safe, cost-effective, and easy to implement, so they had no excuse not to do the same.
Miss Planner would always tell her analysts that they needed to think outside the box if they wanted to make real progress. That might be why they spent all of their time coming up with crazy schemes that were guaranteed to fail. They never seemed to find the right balance between being creative and realistic, which frustrated Miss Planner immensely. If it wasn't for the fact that the analysts occasionally came up with something smart, she'd probably have them all fired and start over with a team of fresh recruits.
"Okay, everyone, let's get started," said Miss Planner in a cheerful voice. "Alex, you can go first today."
The first analyst, a man in a suit with short black hair named Alex, took the podium stand and cleared his throat nervously.
"Uh... yeah. Okay, well, uh..."
The analyst was sweating profusely and couldn't think straight. He didn't have a good grasp on how to begin this presentation.
"Um, I'm sorry, I don't know where to start."
"You can just get to the point."
"Well, I've been thinking about this, and, uh, it seems to me that if we're hiring new people, we're gonna have to pay them, obviously. And that means we either need to raise prices or raise sales. But raising the price of Nuke will lower the demand for it. That's bad. So what we should be doing is, uh, lowering the price of Nuke to keep demand high."
"I see. Yes, that makes sense."
"So, like, I thought maybe we could use a strategy called 'market segmentation,' and, you know, divide the market into smaller groups and sell to each group separately."
"I'm afraid I don't understand. Can you explain?"
"Yeah. You see, we can do that because there are so many people in the Pit who are poor and desperate. If we target them specifically, then we'll be able to dilute the quality of our product and cut our costs way down. I did a cost-benefit analysis and it looks really promising."
It was the type of idea a child would come up with. The analyst was completely ignoring the fact that the Chosen Ones marketed their product as the best in the Pit. The only reason they were so successful at selling Nuke was because of the reputation they built up over years and decades, and they couldn't afford to lose their edge. They had no choice but to stick to the original formula and maintain their standards of excellence, or risk alienating the customer base and losing everything. The idea wasn't completely worthless, but it had a long way to go before it was ready for prime time.
"That's enough. We can discuss the finer points of your proposal later. Thank you, Alex. Next is Tracy. Please, go ahead and take center stage."
Alex scrambled off the podium, and Tracy took his place. She had a bright smile and was eager to impress her boss with a great plan, but her idea was so horrible it almost made Miss Planner cry.
"We're getting ready to start production on our first official batch of refined Nuke product, called Rampage. Only for Chosen use, of course. I was looking at the formula. Why is it stronger than normal Nuke? We concentrate the active ingredients to make them stronger through a process called resin adsorption. But we can actually go a step further with a chemical process called crystallization. I had the chemists test it out, and it actually works! This will be the most powerful, potent drug ever made! A super-powerful form of Nuke. Rampage Ultimate!"
"Oh, my. I see. Well, that's quite an interesting idea. What kind of side effects might we expect from such a concentrated form of Nuke?"
"At maximum, it should be about a thousand times more powerful than regular Nuke. Only very, very powerful psychics with a strong tolerance for Nuke would be able to handle this stuff without going crazy, transforming into a monster, or dropping dead. Only the ultimate psychics can use it, so, Rampage Ultimate! The main issues would be safety, of course, as well as the enormous cost and difficulty of producing it. The crystals are so strong that just touching them with your bare skin would be enough to give you a seizure."
Miss Planner was speechless. She had never heard anything so ridiculous. Who would be stupid enough to smoke something that could instantly kill them or turn them into a monster? If the public ever found about this, they might stop smoking Nuke entirely!
"Too risky," "too expensive," "too impractical," and "they didn't need it!" A perfect zero! How did these morons come up with this nonsense in the first place?!
"Very interesting, Tracy. Rampage Ultimate? The name is quite catchy! I want you to come right to my office when we're finished with everyone's presentations. Next up is Gordon. You can go on."
Tracy took a bow and left the podium. The newest analyst on the team, Gordon, stepped forward next. He was a tall man who wore his hair long and had a scraggly beard. His face looked like he'd been punched repeatedly, but his eyes were sharp and intelligent.
"I've got a great idea for you, boss. I was thinking about tools we could use to fight the Controllers and protect ourselves from their mind control powers. I asked some of our Chosen warriors to help me brainstorm, and one of them gave me this!"
He pulled a small plastic box out of a pocket in his pants and opened it up to show the boss. Inside was a shiny black piece of metal that resembled a tiny beehive.
"What is it?"
"It's a special material that absorbs psychic energy. It's very expensive to make, but the Chosen Ones have used it before to keep people with dangerous powers from destroying themselves. My first idea was that we could use it to make a full-body suit of armor to prevent the enemy from controlling us. The issue with that idea is that the material drains so much psychic power that it would probably leave the user's body in tatters after a few hours of combat."
"Hm. That's a shame."
"Yeah, but it's not the end of the world. I thought of a different way to use this stuff. If we grind this material up into dust and spray it into the streets when the Controllers attack, it might weaken their abilities enough to give us an edge! I call it 'Psychic Fog.' What do you think?"
Gordon's proposal had several things going for it. The Chosen Ones were desperate for any advantage they could get over the Controllers, and although there was no telling how effective Psychic Fog would be against the enemy, it was still worth trying out. Psychic Fog would be fairly easy to create and use, too, which was a big plus.
"Well done, Gordon! This is your second proposal ever, isn't it? I'm very impressed! I'll put it on the agenda for our meeting tomorrow. Keep up the good work! Erica, you're next."
Miss Planner was happy that the meeting wasn't a complete failure. She always gave her research team the benefit of the doubt, even if their ideas were usually garbage. She believed good ideas could come from anywhere as long as you had the patience to wait until they came.
