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Only after settling the brain-controlled exoskeleton business with Mason did Ryan go strolling out of the prosthetics center.
Although it was called a brain-controlled exoskeleton, calling it brain-controlled limbs would actually be a touch more fitting. After all, what Aaron Holt needed was only a machine framework that could let him walk again.
So assigning this task to Mason and his team didn't count as beyond their scope. Besides, Ryan would help out when he had time, so there was no need to worry at all.
The tower still held a brain-machine research center. Several of its projects, developed in cooperation with outside parties, had secured funding from the partners, and the only one requiring Prism to put up all the money itself was Triton-2's brain-control device, making it the department under the lightest financial pressure.
There weren't many familiar faces in the brain-machine center now. They were all researchers recruited from outside, conducting research across the various sub-projects.
As for Kyle and the others, although they'd joined the research center, they still had to stay at the base ordinarily, and their experimental research would be carried out at the base too.
So Ryan had no desire to go in.
Ryan headed off toward the AI center instead. Along the way he walked past a window and happened to see, down on the front-gate plaza of the tower below, workers braving the blazing sun to assemble an enormous model.
And by its shape, it was unmistakably the Scrapper he knew best.
This immediately reminded him of something.
After he'd asked Patricia earlier to crack down on pirated mech models, the bootleg models of the two mechs, Scrapper and Crimson Typhoon, had quickly been swept clean from the country.
So much so that a vacuum appeared in the market.
If this gap wasn't filled, piracy would soon reappear on the market.
So his father had immediately secured the image operating rights for Crimson Typhoon at the time, and simultaneously contacted the country's various figure codemaker factories, hoping to launch a cooperation.
And those parties were more than happy about this cooperation.
After all, the ones coming to their door requesting models be made were Scrapper and Crimson Typhoon.
Look across the whole globe, was there any mech hotter than these two?
Other mechs could only be seen on paper or on television. These two genuinely existed in reality.
That Crimson Typhoon was, even now, still maintaining high-intensity testing once a week.
To date, the number of foreign tourists pouring into the Redcliff Islands had probably already broken five million visits, to say nothing of the figure once domestic tourists were counted in.
In just this short span of two months, it had exceeded the whole of the previous half year and then some.
Even thinking with their backsides, they knew a deal like this was guaranteed to make money the moment it was struck. It was only a question of making more or less.
The two sides hit it off at once.
And Prism seized every bit of the initiative in the negotiations that followed.
There was no helping it. The manufacturing factory was merely a tool. Swap in whichever one and it was all the same, so naturally they had no confidence to bargain.
In the end, Prism settled on a codemaker factory that gave up the most profit and whose product quality was also good enough, by the name of Vastar.
The two sides agreed to release four mech models on a trial basis.
They were the 16 cm and 36 cm styles of Scrapper, and the 56 cm and 76 cm styles of Crimson Typhoon.
Between these two models, Crimson Typhoon was aimed mainly at the large-model market, while Scrapper was aimed mainly at the small-model market, the two forming a nicely complementary posture.
And of the profits these models earned, seventy-five percent belonged to Prism, with the remaining twenty-five percent being the manufacturer's profit, while Prism didn't need to pay the other party any manufacturing fees or bear any production costs either.
Prism's maneuvering here could be said to have relied on the two mechs to mooch a whole codemaker factory for free, needing only to lie back and collect money.
This was the benefit of a monopoly.
Even Ryan had to sigh in admiration.
Counting the days, today was already the day the first batch of models hit the market.
Ryan logged onto Twitter, and sure enough, saw many people bringing up related information in his posts.
"May The Mech Expert bless me, let the official lottery tomorrow draw my name and let me mooch a 76-centimeter Crimson Typhoon for free!"
"Mech Expert, bless me. An honest man doesn't speak in riddles. I want the biggest Crimson Typhoon, I just want to mooch it, I'm just shameless, I just crave its body!"
"May The Mech Expert bless me, my exam tomorrow will surely pass. As long as it passes, I'll definitely come back tomorrow to fulfill my vow."
Ryan read it all with a face full of question marks.
What in the world?
Why had they come here to make wishes?
He wasn't some lucky koi.
Shaking his head and skipping past this information, he kept scrolling down, and finally learned the mech models' release date from the other information.
The first batch of models numbered a hundred thousand pieces in total, and would be sold online and offline together.
The online flash-sale time was midnight tomorrow, while the offline flash-sale time was noon tomorrow.
Among the offline flash-sale storefronts across the country, the ones on the Redcliff Islands were especially numerous.
"Isn't this openly getting foreigners to pay up more?"
Ryan could see through his father's scheme in an instant.
Those foreigners had come to Redcliff specifically to see the mechs. After seeing them, how could they not carry off a lifelike mech model as a souvenir?
Though this scheme was simple, it was very direct and effective. Ryan could already picture the way those foreigners would open their wallets tomorrow.
Ryan took a look at the models' selling prices.
Dividing them from largest to smallest, the prices of these four mech models ran from the smallest 16 cm Scrapper at eighty, all the way to the largest 76 cm Crimson Typhoon at three hundred eighty.
Each rise of one size tier added a hundred.
This price was fairly reasonable, all things considered.
The reason was that the first batch of models had been rushed, so their quality was comparatively ordinary.
---
Evening.
The dorm.
Danny Price lay sprawled on his bed, watching the mech model flash-sale countdown on his phone. He'd already prepared his money.
Time slipped by second by second, and he suddenly grew very worried in his heart about whether he had the luck and the hand speed to snag one.
"The first batch is only a hundred thousand units. What on earth is Prism playing at?" his roommate and son Trey complained.
Ever since going to watch the live test last time, the whole lot of them in this dorm had converted into Crimson Typhoon's most devoted die-hard fans.
Every piece of information about Crimson Typhoon, they'd go collect. If there was a livestream, they'd record the footage too, and then open it up when the dorm was deep in the quiet of night, everyone sitting together to watch.
The thing they were proudest of now was having gone to see Crimson Typhoon's first test.
"Right, that piddly little quantity. Who are they looking down on?" the other two roommates in the dorm chimed in.
A hundred thousand units sounded like a lot at first, but compared with the countless fans from all over the country and indeed all over the world, that hundred-thousand-unit stock, even multiplied a hundredfold, wouldn't be enough for one per person.
"Shh."
"Everybody stop squabbling. It's almost midnight. Everyone focus your energy."
Hearing him say this, the three roommate-sons who'd been chatting idly on the floor instantly went whoosh, flying back to their own territories.
Under everyone's watchful eyes.
Midnight crept closer bit by bit.
---