Ninjaburger

Ninjaburger is the second-most profitable venture of the Village Hidden in Asteroids, and one of the few subculture references physically implemented in Fenspace that is properly licensed with its owners in the ’Danelaw.

Exactly where the idea of taking Ninjaburger from RPG to an actual business came from is open to some debate. Most people blame the Karasukage, but while Ninjaburger is certainly affiliated with the Village Hidden in the Asteroids, they are not one and the same. The most common story is that during one of the long, tedious asteroid-mining jobs in the first year or so after Handwavium turned up, one of the miners ran a Ninjaburger campaign for his or her co-workers that had their characters ranging around a drastically implausible solar system delivering fast food to an even more ridiculous assortment of customers (probably not as zany as the reality of Fenspace).

(A deeper analysis of this story shows it to be quite plausible. Given the character and scope provided by the early pioneers of Fenspace, the apocryphal “run a business case analysis for Ninjaburger in space,” which was caused by the legendary abandonment of the game “due to fact being sufficiently weirder than fiction,” all holds true, or at least possible. The early members of Fenspace were the type of people that could and would run an accurate business analysis out of boredom or for fun - and it’s certainly possible to create a Ninjaburger In Space campaign that is less interesting than what was actually in existance at the time.)

Ninjaburger existed in some form or another for several months before it went “public,” supplying glorified cup ramen and cheeseburgers to the workers building what would later become the Village Hidden in the Asteroids. In 2009 the first really large shipment of meat patties was delivered to orbit and the Ninjaburger franchise took on the mammoth job of catering to Worldcon Floating Island using three converted double-decker buses as kitchens/dining areas and a cadre of Hidden Asteroid's still small corps of genin to deliver.

It wasn’t until Kandor-Con the next year that Ninjaburger reconciled with the trademark owners back in the ’Danelaw, but once the legal status of Fenspace was adjudicated, the Ninjaburger Corporation licensed the rights to use the name indefinitely for a hefty cash sum. These days, Ninjaburger is a fixture - operating from “secret bases” (sometimes literally; the administration of at least one station doesn’t like Ninjas) and mobile shop-fronts (the infamous bright yellow buses) that move around under what is presumed to be high-level stealth handwavium tech to deliver Ninja Burgers, Samurai Chicken Sandwiches and three different flavors of Ramen to any fixed location in the Solar System except Earth (but including Danelaw spacestations) and to most mobile locations, although the latter do take a bit longer. How they can track their targ- er, customers has not been explained - or rather, it has been but only as “Ninja Magic, honorable customer.”

The upper management of Ninjaburger are naturally shrouded in mystery but are believed to be headquartered on the Hidden Asteroid and to rent out franchises to interested parties who can either pass their arcane tests or have graduated from the Ninja Academy. It’s estimated that about a hundred genin are working for Ninjaburger at any one time, so even if your delivery-ninja isn’t officially working for the Karasukage's intelligence office, word of anything they find will probably get back to him. (Killing the delivery-ninja to ensure their silence is very firmly discouraged).