By the time Ketis left so that she could formally file the paperwork for her new Storm Sword Project, Ves leaned back on his chair and settled into his thoughts. Thankfully, none of the other Journeymen requested his time so that they could fill his thoughts with even more unusual mech concepts. The Woodpecker Project and the Storm Sword Project already occupied his imagination. That was on top of the plundering spree that Ketis had suggested as a possible means to acquire new first-class materials! Ves didn't know whether it was safe and viable enough to go on a continuous alien warship hunt in the following years. Before his talk with Ketis, he had already set his mind on keeping his expeditionary fleet outside of hotspots like the border region between Krakatoa and Zelmar. The Larkinson Clan and its allies needed a lot of time to digest all of their recent gains and break in a lot of powerful net combat assets. Therefore, it was not suitable for the expeditionary fleet to dive right back into trouble again. "Maybe I can find a middle ground." He murmured. "We don't have to hunt down and ambush an alien warfleet every month. Once a year or twice a year is enough in my book." This was especially the case if the Golden Skull Alliance finally expanded from three to five members! The Adelaide Mercenary Company's Third Fleet and the Boojay Family did not go out of their way to join the party because they looked forward to mining asteroids in an out-of-the-way star system for months on end. They expressed their intention to join because they wanted to take part in massive operations and earn a lot of loot and MTA merits on a regular basis! "I need to talk to a lot of people." Ves concluded. As the expeditionary fleet calmly made its way out of the border region and made its way back to the Davute System, a lot of talks indeed took place. Ves sometimes took part in them, but he wanted to devote more time on his various design and research projects. He devoted a considerable amount of effort on progressing all of his ongoing mech design projects. The Dullahan Project, the Ghost Project and the Eye Project all received the bulk of his attention. While he was also involved in other mech design projects, they could either wait or were already being worked on by other colleagues. He regularly met and worked together with people such as Gloriana, Juliet Stameros, Miles Tovar and Cormaunt Hempkamp. Ves especially made sure to be extra attentive when working together with the latter two mech designers. Miles, Cormaunt and Merrill had either become Journeymen somewhat recently or had only joined the clan recently. They did not have a lot of experience with leading design projects in the Design Department. Fortunately, all three of them were coping well so far. Miles and Merrill had been with the Larkinsons for a long time while Cormaunt was a talented and clever Journeyman in his own right. Though Cormaunt Hempkamp was clearly the least 'Larkinson' out of all of the lead designers in the Design Department, that also allowed him to look at the clan from an outsider's perspective. The older hires such as the Voiken siblings and the Power Pair spent enough years in the clan to lose that quality. They identified themselves as Larkinsons first, which meant that they had fully accepted their separation from their old lives. In any case, Ves always enjoyed talking with Cormaunt about what life was like outside of the clan. "You know." Cormaunt said as he worked on designing the technical interfaces of the Geist System. "If I tried to pull any of this off at my old school and employers, the people around me would call me a degenerate war criminal before calling in the authorities to put me in chains. What we are trying to do with the Ghost Project is absolutely crazy if you think about it. I don't know what possessed you to not only come up with the idea of exploiting the decapitated head of an expert pilot to generate metaphysical covert attack spurs. Even I have to stop and try to wrap my mind around what exactly we are trying to make." Ves glanced at his current collaboration partner. "Are you having second thoughts about the Ghost Project? I admit that it can be a little spooky, and I can't promise you that I have everything under control. All I can say for now is that our upcoming work will either become the most effective and innovative expert stealth mech of this mech generation, or it will turn into such a catastrophic failure that we cannot even guarantee Venerable Zimro Belson will be able to come out with his life intact." The more the pair worked on the Ghost Project, the more they became cognizant of all of the ways it could go wrong. They were very much working on unfamiliar territory here. Though their respective specialties gave them a solid direction on how to go forward, whether they would be able to realize their promising ideas was another matter altogether. "Any talk about risking the life of an expert pilot can already land you in jail in most jurisdictions. People do not take kindly to mech designers who are willing to play fast and loose with mech pilots, especially the heroes among them. Neural interface specialists such as myself must constantly check our own work in order to avoid the hint of excessive damage." Cormaunt spoke in a strained tone. Ves chuckled in response. "It's a good thing that I am the one who is setting the rules in our clan. That said, I am not inclined to tolerate that kind of stuff either, but I am more open to well-intentioned ideas that have the support of the mech pilots in question. The Geist System we are working on may produce untold damage if it runs out of control, but as long as we remain careful and implement as many precautions as possible, we can limit the damage." The other Journeyman Mech Designer still found it astonishing that his own boss was willing to tolerate so much risk. The professionals he worked with and spent time with before all exhibited so much caution that they were rarely willing to step outside of proscribed areas even if their ideas held more promise! "Do you think you will maintain this outlook towards experimentation in the long run?" Cormaunt carefully asked. "I love what you are doing, but there are clear downsides to your approach. Will I be able to keep experimenting with neural interfaces and other related projects, or will you tighten the reins in the future?" "Hmm." Ves did not immediately respond. He spent a minute or so in thought before he answered the question. "The reason why most of your previous employers set firm rules is because their main mech designers are already accomplished enough. Masters and so on have moved past the stage where they need to engage in reckless and wild experimentation in order to produce strong results. They don't want their subordinates to pull off anything crazy either, hence why people such as yourself always get shackled. In our case, I cannot guarantee that I will remain as tolerant and free-spirited as now. I will be in the same position as your previous bosses, so I am obliged to make sure that no one engages in war crimes under my nose." It was a difficult position to be in. As an innovator himself, he hated being shackled or restricted, which was exactly why he insisted on becoming his own boss. While he may be able to play fast and loose with rules for now, once the Design Department expanded and professionalized even further, it was no longer possible for Ves to monitor everything that was going on anymore. That vastly increased the risk of accidents. In the end, Ves could not give a satisfactory answer to Cormaunt Hempkamp. Hopefully, the Design Department would no longer need to depend on too much radical innovation in order to produce satisfactory results in the future. The pair of Journeymen continued to work on the Ghost Project whenever they could. With Cormaunt Hempkamp busying himself with creating a stable interface between Object 335 and the rest of the Geist System, it was up to Ves to shape its more esoteric properties. This was quite difficult because Ves did not have an existing template to draw upon. He needed to invent everything from scratch, and that caused his progress to slow down more than he wished despite his massive increase in productivity. One of the areas that he remained stuck on was how he could obtain the specters that functioned as the spiritual semi-autonomous attack spurs of the Ghost Project. After a lot of theorizing and puzzling, he formulated two different plans on how he could proceed. "There are two possible ways I can solve this problem." Ves frowned in thought. "I can either make the ghosts myself or I can harvest them from other sources." The former amounted to creating spiritual products from whatever ingredients he had on hand. The latter amounted to killing other organisms, harvesting their spiritualities by force and stuffing whatever he obtained into the Geist System! Neither of these options sounded ideal to him. Manually creating the specters for the Ghost Project sounded like a tedious job, and Ves was not entirely confident that he could produce ones that functioned effectively enough in the field. Taking the spiritualities from existing individuals and integrating them into the Geist System sounded like a much more effective idea. The troublesome part was finding the raw materials. They needed to be high enough in strength and quality to be worth a damn in the field. As Ves continued to think about where he should get his ghosts, he suddenly remembered that Helena might know a thing or two about this subject. "Helena!" "Yes, little bro?" His sister's intangible body materialized next to Ves in the design lab. "I'd like to receive your input on a matter that I am working on. I think it will interest you a lot." He was not wrong. Helena looked increasingly more intrigued as Ves outlined the Ghost Project and its signature Geist System. "Ves! How come you were working on something so good without involving me from the start?!" His sister flew over and whacked his head with her hand to express her dissatisfaction. "I happen to know a thing or two about ghosts. While I am not an expert in them, I at least know more about them than you, I bet." "Maybe you're right." Ves reluctantly said. "Anyway, can you help me out here? Can you supply me with a batch of nasty ghosts? They need to be vicious enough to pose a threat to other life, but they also have to be pliable enough for the Geist System to direct their actions." "You're asking a lot from me here, brother. In the first place, I don't even know whether this 'Geist System' of yours will work out the way you think. It sounds a bit dubious if you think about it. How can you possibly come up with the idea of using the willpower of a captive expert pilot as a way to give ghosts the strength and ability to interfere in the material realm? Even I cannot say whether it can be done!" "That is part of the reason why I called you here." Ves patiently replied to his sister. "The best way to find out whether a new innovation is viable or not is to conduct experiments. I am thinking about trying out several different possibilities and see what happens. It would be nice if I have an expert on death on hand such as yourself." Helena hesitated for a few seconds. "Fine. I will help you out, but you should build a more comfortable form for me first. It is exhausting for me to show up like this all of the time."