Page 68 of Derivation

Sarai got an idea and said, “And what if there’s a merch store?”

“I’m sorry; a what?” Violet asked.

“For prizes?” Stella asked.

“Yes, but only – or, at least, primarily – marketed to the schools. There could be prizes that the schools or students could earn. We could have stuff drop-shipped for us so that we don’t have to do it ourselves, and we can make it something that really gets the kids to learn.”

“So, not stuff with the company logo on it all over the place? We could have that, too, but other stuff mainly,” Stella said. “I can look into how that would work.”

“Babe, I love you, but we’re years away from that.”

“Not if you launch it with a partnership,” Sarai argued.

“You mean as part of a partnership with someone else’s glasses?” Gabi asked.

Sarai turned and replied, “Potentially, yeah. They’d buy our software with the gamification working on their glasses, which–”

“Gives us testing and proving ground for the concept,” Arlowe interrupted.

“Yes. Then, we launch a merch store that’s small but respectable and obviously work out the costs so that we don’t lose money, but we’re probably not going to make much on it, if any at all.”

“I like this. We can have a school store where students can get things they’d need for school,” Stella said. “Supplies, fun things, and maybe something worth a ton of points that they’d have to save up for.”

“Yeah. And if we need to change pricing to accommodate all of this, now is the time to do that before we sign any partnership agreements anyway. We might even be able to convince them to carry some of the costs. I don’t know. That’s more Violet’s area than mine,” Sarai said.

“And this is why we all have meetings together,” Violet added. “Because we’re better when we bounce ideas off each other.”

“Gabi, how hard is it to add the gamification piece into the hardware instead of just the real-time translation?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to examine Arlowe’s code some more, but from what I’ve seen so far, it shouldn’t take much. Her code is great.”

“Tell that to the bugs she has to wake up to fight,” Sarai said, and it only took her a moment before she realized that she’d said it out loud.

“Hey! I was a one-person team before we hired other people, doing this alone with no support, and we hardly had any downtime. Do you know what a miracle that is?”

“No, I obviously don’t, because I don’t speak binary.”

“Me neither,” Enya added.

“The one language you don’t know,” Violet joked with a little laugh.

“I bet I could learn to code using similar techniques to how I learn other languages.”

“She has idea face,” Arlowe noted, pointing at Enya.

“We could add a computer language component.”

“I thought you were going to work on ASL next,” Sarai said.

“I am. I’ve got the plan down already. It’s on Arlowe’s backlog.”

“I think that one comes first,” Violet said.

“Me too, for what it’s worth,” Stella added.

“So, do you all want me to go all-in on glasses and add in the game and prize feature?” Gabi asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Violet replied.