We left Republic City's harbor heading to the South Water Tribe, Korra's home. It was a nice day, the sun was up high and its gentle light was hitting my face with love, the wind was caressing my face, it was the perfect day, the only problem I had was that the boat we were on was rocking too hard for my taste and made my stomach do backflips each time a wave hit the boat. The only silver lining I had was that once I entered 'limbo state' I could use my internal energy to calm my seasickness.
"Are you ok Ethan?"
"Sure! I'm quite enjoying the view. What about you, Nya?"
The trip with Nya was great, we enjoyed our time in the Fire Nation a lot. We meet with Zane and Kai and they took us around the nation to the more interesting landmarks. After all the months of hard work, it was a nice change of pace to sit back and relax. In the end, we extended our trip by two weeks to enjoy the peace and quiet that the city was sorely lacking.
It's been a few months since the Equalists were taken down and Heaven's Gate was established and things were progressing nicely. Even though I wasn't present in the early stages of the forming of the organization things progressed smoothly, with the plan I gave the archangels they managed to put things in order faster than I anticipated and organized a good hierarchy without any problems.
The change in the way the organization was run left a lot of the people upset at first since we wouldn't be so active and our enemy was now a more abstract thing. It's easy to make people direct their anger at a group of people that they can easily distinguish but in our case, we didn't have those kinds of enemies so it was hard to keep the people in the organization motivated and the fact that most of them were now unemployed didn't help. Luckily with me joining Future Industries came new opportunities.
Let's talk about how Asami's firm was doing. Since people found out that the last owner, Hiroshi, was part of the Equalists and even provided them the gear, cause a lot of the providers for the raw materials to cancel their contracts with the firm since most of them were benders and didn't take to kindly to the movement. This bad trend started to move to the masses, making fewer and fewer people buy our products. Asami couldn't do anything about it alone but with me, things took a turn for the better.
Ever since I started to post papers in the science magazine multiple people in diverse industries have started to send me letters to help them maximize their efficiency or ask for permission to use my designs. I replied to most of their letter positively and received quite a lot of promises in exchange along with quite a bit of money. I contacted them and set meetings. When I showed them the new things that were going to hit the market they were more than happy to become our new suppliers and business partners. With this done I've started to change public opinion with an aggressive advertisement campaign, the modern world taught me plenty of things and this was one of the more useful ones.
With me as the face of the company, Future Industries experienced massive growth. From only being in the car industry we started to open departments in multiple other fields. In the short few months that I started to change the business strategy of the company, its size quadrupled and this trend didn't seem to come to a stop anytime soon. It frightened me quite a bit to see the rise of our capital, it was too sudden and it wasn't good for the company in the long term so I even though the demand for our products was big I started to divert most of our resources to consolidate rather than expand so aggressively. With Asami's help, we devised a new business strategy, it was quite complicated and there were a bunch of steps and variables in the plan but the short of it was that we would consolidate and the moment knock-offs started to flood the market we would launch another new product. I knew Asami was a great engineer but what I didn't know was that she was a very shrewd businesswoman.
With so much money and demand we started to hire a lot of people, since we needed people we trust, of course, we started to employ people from the organization and managed to find jobs for almost all of them in a field or another. Now the people of the organization had stable jobs. With this out of the way we made them train after hours as a mandatory service part of the job. They weren't bothered by this since the pay was good, they were even excited since we bought old buildings and made them into brand new training centers. This was the first time they had new equipment and nice conditions. No more training in abandoned warehouses, no more bad equipment.
The skill gap varied from person to person, most people weren't that good since they didn't have muscles built for fighting. With legitimate centers for training being made I started a training regime to raise the overall skill level and find talented individuals to train more intensively. We made a ranking system like the one in LOL ( League of Legends) and told the members that if they got high enough they would get additional money. This made them train harder. We also added a lot more knowledge for them to learn, making them more efficient in battle.
We even started to think about expanding out of the city to other places, but we needed to establish more connections, and Varrick was the best person for the job, unfortunately.
Back on the boat, I exited 'limbo state' thinking that I finally solved my problem, this was one of my biggest mistakes yet, since the moment another wave hit I throw up.
"How the mighty have fallen. From the feared Undying Mechanical Terror to this."
"Ha, ha, very funny, Korra, blargh, I swear the moment we get back I'm going to make us an airplane, no more boats!"
They all laughed at my expense while one of the sailors gave me some sort of medicine for this kind of thing.
It was going to be a long way to the Spirit Festival.
