Clearly that was not good enough. 12-001 got bored of hanging around us and left. "So, what's your plan then?" Brett asked. "We're older than all the major clans. That's a good thing. Because it was before the Next Stage everyone did their own thing. Now that the main clans are here, they all swore fealty to whoever was in charge. That was what they were supposed to do. Except us and our vassal. We can't get any unaligned PEP units here because this hub hates us. But, we could go anywhere else and make more vassal clans." Paul nodded his head. "Makes sense. Where are we going to go to recruit?" he asked. I said "I'll go to Water Clan territory with Hunter and some of our AEP units. Brett can go to another one of the Advocates. You can go with some clan members somewhere too." That was what we decided. Paul would go to Radiation Clan. I had to pick my party. Aside from taking Hunter, I chose Caroline, Chase, Kyan and Bryar. We were ready to go right away. Hunter had a van and was driving the AEP units. I was right behind them. It was actually a very long journey on foot.
Making it there was a testament to my will and determination. However, we did get there in one piece. Once we got there, it was easy enough. We just went around their area looking at PEP units. Once we found 9, we learned a couple of things. There were quite a bit of PEP units that were not in any clans. I offered them to be a vassal clan for us. 4 of them turned us down right away. They were actually decently put together models. All of the elitism came into play here. None of them wanted to be the subordinate to PEPs that were objectively worse them. The 5 that agreed were a group of prostitutes that were in the 7000s. They were not as concerned about status when the only way they had to get by was to walk the streets looking for humans to have sex with. I told them to follow us for a bit. It was time to go to Water Clan. We knew from our correspondence that they had their base on the beach. Because the Advocates were all for human flourishing, they cleaned the beach. There were no big cybernetic monsters to be found on the limits of the beach. It was also a big nudist beach.
After looking around for a bit, we found an AEP unit. He was peacefully relaxing under an umbrella. Of course, he was naked. I approached him gently and said "Hello. I am Brianne, clan engineer of Sixteenth Notes Clan." He looked at us all and smiled really wide. "Amazing! I am 05-001. I've heard so much about you. I think it's really good to see humans and PEP units being friends!" he said. The 5 prostitutes were star struck. They probably would have never gotten close to the clan on their own. We spent the day with him people watching and soaking in the atmosphere of the beach. It was pleasant. 05-001 invited us over to his clan building. We accepted the offer. I was not going to turn them down. They were generous and showed us a lot of the things they used the money we gave them on. I was pleased that they were able to build their clan building under an aquarium. It was fully open to the public. They had all the labs up and ready and the members were stockpiling many weapons. That is a good thing to see from our allies. I hoped our other allied clans were all the same thing.
