For Sale: S-Grade Superhumans, Never Used (3)

On top of that, I stripped out all the pointless fluff I'd tacked on yesterday. I posted a thoroughly cleaned-up auction listing and decided to just let whoever bite, bite.

Of course, if it still failed to get any visibility and nobody even looked at it, there wasn't much I could do about that…

But I wasn't an idiot. Posting something and then sitting on my hands had been enough of a lesson the first time around.

Once again, I opened the global chat window — that fully anonymous free-for-all overflowing with every kind of nonsense imaginable.

And right then, I spotted someone else promoting their own auction listing. That was all the reassurance I needed. I decided ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to drop a short chat of my own to advertise the listing I'd just put up.

Of course, just writing that didn't mean much…

Factoring in the number of users who either didn't use the gallery at all, or who only talked to other players through their own in-game community settings or actual comms channels — people who used nothing but the chat window — the floating population of global chat was estimated at a minimum of 110,000, spiking as high as nearly 500,000. How many of those people were actually going to read a short little message like that?

So until tomorrow, when the listing would auto-delete if nobody bid, the right move was to drop a line in chat whenever I had a free moment and do a little non-promotion promotion.

With that in mind, I resolved to spam the global chat at least once every thirty minutes or so, like I was running a macro, and push the cheap sale hard.

But then, remarkably, exactly twenty-nine minutes and thirty-three seconds after I'd started deleting garbage posts in the gallery with that plan in my head—

The hell?

An anonymous chat request out of nowhere. For a second I figured it was some guy looking to vent about me deleting his trash memes.

So of course I went to hit decline, but—

Whoops, slippery fingers.

I accidentally pressed the Y right next to it and opened the chat window cold.

Fortunately, the anonymous chat request turned out not to be some desperate flailing from the shitpost brigade.

Oh.

Not those trash people at all — this was a message from the auction participant I'd been waiting for this whole time.

At the long-awaited arrival of this mysterious benefactor (?), I immediately started responding.

For sale: S-grade Superhumans, never used. (3)

Since they'd opened with polite language, I decided to match them and keep things reasonably courteous myself.

Of course, that courtesy came with a caveat. If they came at me with something like "hey can you knock a little off the price"…

Even if I wasn't particularly hung up on the price of dumping those two, that would still be a hit to my pride. So I kept my finger ready to hit leave and block user at any moment.

But contrary to all my thorough preparations, the other party came back with an answer firmer than anything I'd expected.

Something I hadn't anticipated at all — forget ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the auction, shut up and do a cool trade, right here, right now.

But just accepting that on the spot was the kind of thing amateur traders did.

Up until yesterday I'd been thrown off because this damn garbage game's auction system worked differently from what I remembered, and on top of that it had been four years since I'd last used it. But it wasn't like I'd never done secondhand deals in real life. Faced with the other party's clearly eager chat, I decided to lay out the negotiation table first.

Ah. So they want to avoid a situation where other people pile in and they can't snag them cheap?

Watching them bite immediately on the line I'd casually tossed out, I took a moment to consider how best to play this — but only for a moment.

I almost let the merchant in me take over there.

At the end of the day, the whole point of this was to offload prisoners who were locking down our own Superhumans and squeeze a little profit out of it. So I nodded at their attitude, and following the golden rule of the negotiation table, opened with double what I actually wanted.

Well — a little more than double, to be precise.

Now, I'd only floated that price as a negotiation opener. In reality, even if I rounded the combined auction listing price of 888 Gold down to a flat 1,000 Gold…

Okay, 1,000 Gold, thank you very much!

…I was more than ready to slam the cool trade button right there.

But maybe this complete stranger was even more desperate for Superhuman firepower than I'd thought. Or maybe they were a Gold-rich whale on a level I couldn't even touch.

Oh damn.

Even after I'd asked for fully twice what I actually wanted, they fired off a trade request without a second of hesitation.