Grumpy had to spend a whole night wrestling with his factory. The tells begging for deeds priced below bazaar-resource cost were getting annoying and Grumpy figured he better throw a few more deeds on the vendors to get, what seemed like, the entire server off his back.

Grumpy was in a foul mood too, having just dealt with a bunch of price-checkers looking to get a dozen factories at 2 cpu. Grumpy told them that when Grumpy got that stupid, Grumpy would get back to them. Then, the gd factory kept tripping on pebbles and shutting down FOR NO APPARENT REASON, and would only produce one subcomponent at a time, AND while idle, would spit pebbles at the passersby, endangering the vast architectural empire with an expensive lawsuit.

Grumpy realized, the only way to solve this factory issue was to actually sit next to the factory and read it a story or ask it to share its feelings or some similar BS. While on his third run-through of Goodnight, Moon, a lair of red and angry mobs spawned next to the factory. Of course. But wait! These were only blue-con red and angry mobs that dropped hides! O happy day. Grumpy could clear these out himself without having to beg a Master Creature Handler with 25 pets to do it for him.

In theory.

Grumpy has some combat skills, Novice Pistoleer, and naturally has a WEAPON WORTHY OF THE GODS, thanks to the gf/business partner/Master Weaponsmith, so the vrelts were about to get their butts handed to them. As luck would have it, one of them was particularly stubborn and would not die before he infected Grumpy with A DISEASE. Grumpy didn’t even notice it until his monitor kept glowing red and his health dropped steadily. This was his first SWG disease and it was somewhat exciting. For the first 38 minutes, that is. Then it was just annoying as hell.

Some of his customers pointed out to him that he was diseased; ya, as if he hadn’t noticed that a half hour ago. He hid in his workshop, like a SWG leper, so that the entire vendor neighborhood wouldn’t be embarassed by his red glow. After an hour of this nonsense, Grumpy became alarmed that this disease could be terminal. He wasn’t sure how diseases worked around here, couldn’t find any info on how much longer it would last, and the long-dead vrelt could end up having the last laugh by incapp’ing Grumpy (or worse!).

Grumpy whistled for his trusty steed and raced to the nearby Cantina, hoping to find a infectious disease professor, or whatever they would be called, for assistance with his SWG leprosy. The 38000 dancers (and 2 musicians) were very excited to see him. Too excited, in fact. It seems the dancers would get better experience if he got mind diseased, and just lay oozing and gasping for breath at their feet. And they wanted him to do it quietly too because he was being disruptive with his disease questions while they were image designing each other.

The one dancer was having a mind-diseaser dispatched from the starport and wanted Grumpy to just hang out for a few until they could fix him up. Grumpy thought this sytem seemed vaguely like medieval medicine. How in the h*ll was making him sicker going to make him healthy?? But as they explained, he was diseased anyhow, why not make it worth THEIR while?

While Grumpy was fighting for his life in the Cantina, his factory decided it had waited long enough for some attention and came to an abrupt halt. Grumpy didn’t have time to run back out there, he might die en route, so he swapped over to his stealth alt to shove more steel into the factory. He logged back in as the near-dead Master Architect to discover….his disease was gone. He had been cured!!! This seemed too coincidental. And it seemed he had outworn his welcome in the Cantina as well — healthy people need not seek sanctuary there.

Grumpy got a stern lecture from the medieval dancer about logging off when she had an assassin en route to “help” Grumpy. Grumpy made a few mumbled apologies, then threw a handful of credits into the cantina and escaped in the other direction. He arrived back at his factory, kicked it back into submission and kept a sharp eye out for any more killer vrelts.

Grumpy got a great new idea out of all of this tho. Grumpy added all the variable overhead from that night’s “vrelt incident” to the price on the resultant sofa chair…for a grand total of 20000 credits.

D*mn chair still hasn’t sold.

The Grumpy Master Architect ©