As he saw it, it came down to three viable routes. He needed to move forward, to find home- at least get off this planet.
He’d been exploring for…weeks now, was it months? It wasn’t years though. Right?
Watching the intergalactic freighters come in, dock, people and goods come and go, but not him. The cost of a ticket was beyond thinking about being out of reach. Who were these incredibly wealthy aliens he’d never heard of existing? It was unfathomable.
Slowly a new thought began to sink in to Lalslan’s mind. His own world, his own sense of space…was just a backwater in the greater cosmos. He was just an intergalactic hick lost in the big city universe.
It was a jolt. He’d always considered there couldn’t be much beyond what he knew; he’d been to so many planets. He’d owned seven…was it ten?- starships, real intergalactic travel starships. But all that he knew was nothing, he now realized, against the scope of the much greater universe beyond.
Practical matters brought his thoughts closer to home. For now, he’d narrowed the possibilities to three viable options.
His first thought was to pick up a job as a dock worker. Work his way up to getting a job on a passing freighter in need of a hand. This seemed a reliable way to get off this planet, though he couldn’t control his destination.
The second thought that occurred to him was to move in on the local economies and find ways to capitalize on what was already in progress. He’d already realized that the entire real local economy was based on energy drawn directly from enormous herd animals. This process was slightly dangerous, and lone collectors went out into the field, hazarding the local wildlife, to collect a substance that ended up being worth so little that collectors had to work nearly every hour of the day just to survive. The total amount of value harvested in this way braced every transaction upwards, however. Lalslan figured if he could convince enough collectors to band together, and form an alliance to control their prices…he could profit in the exchange.
His third option was really just always his last option in any situation…find a place in the local underworld (he’d already met several contacts) and work his way up, taking whatever odd jobs his talents lent themselves to, from burglary to neutralizations.
