Chapter 16: Taxi! Part 2

Any enlisted service member can tell you that hurrying up and waiting is one of the most frustratingly repeatable lessons prevalent in any military. It is often caused by someone higher up the food chain deciding that something must happen by a specified time.

The mid-range powerhouses of the command structure, being the loyal and professional minions they are, cut fifteen minutes off of the desired time and tell their subordinates to be there at that time. The grizzled veterans that are highly regarded as the ones that get shit done and will murder any that say otherwise because they don’t have time to deal with fuck-fuck games take these instructions and pad the time by another fifteen minutes to an hour. Just to be sure everyone will arrive on time.

The lower enlisted mafia then gets handed a time to be where they are supposed to be, which is now anywhere from two to three hours ahead of the time everyone needs to be ready to do anything significant.

Who in this exalted organization hides details from the upper ranks so things can get done varies in actual rank by the time of day and what work details need to be slogged through by the mafia's least-liked members. They, too, add another chunk of time to be cut off for the lowest of the low, the bottom of the wrung, the fucking new guys, or FNGs.

This complex arithma-fuck-you gets even more tinkered with when other detachments or command structures feel their agendas should be prioritized when doling out resources to get everyone where they need to be on time. The administration wing of any military has a reputation for being the most notorious for screwing up step-off times, or at least they get blamed more often because that jackass newbie in admin is the one that rejects a leave request. After all, the applicant hasn’t updated who their next of kin is in six months.

Jenkins knew none of this and still found ample reason to come up with ideas on why anyone who insisted on proper paperwork about things that could be solved without it should be burned at the stake. He even had reached into foggy memories of his grandmother teaching him a delicious way to season a chicken before baking. He soothed himself with thoughts of seasoning and roasting the man alive before him as he handed over another stack of papers.

Jenkins would give almost anything just to be done with the endless stacks of paper he kept pulling out from some god’s forsaken endless hole of hate and regret the man kept under his desk. It had seemed endless. The yelling from the Corporals at the arrival to the military district had proven to be an omen of more complications.

The attack on Red Adder had not been an isolated incident, and the entire party had to report to the administration district for debriefing before Jenkins and Robby could be turned over to the guild to start their accelerated training regime. News that other Counties had suffered an attack was met with doubting dismay.

Cries from various party members that they had attended a debriefing at the gate fell on deaf ears as the man asked for a confirmation letter stating such. Nobody had been given such a letter, and no one admitted that they had known to ask for one. Johansen unobtrusively sidled to the back of the crowd of yelling soldiers.

Jenkins couldn’t get a solid number of other towns attacked as Corporal Smythe, who had been informed of this pristine example of military logic, had been too busy yelling to ask the soldier who turned them away from their destination.

Another two hours of travel had brought them back through some of the other districts they had already been through, the soldiers grumbling loudly about the unnecessary task eating into their liberty time. Smythe had quieted them with the ageless empty promise that most NCOs use of it being over faster if they quit bitching.

Along the road to Purpolis, he had confided to Jenkins one night that it wasn’t when the troops were grumbling that you had to worry. It was when they stopped complaining significant acts of mutinous stupidity occurred. When Jenkins asked if all mutinous acts could be considered stupid, Smythe looked at him with distaste.

“Jenkins, you can’t ask when a good time to mutiny is to someone who isn’t in the rank and file, not where those inexperienced idiots can hear anyway. And you should never ask the rank and file either, especially not around any of their superiors.”

“Why not?”

“If I give you any answer in front of the troops that isn’t to their liking, I’ll have to deal with the fallout. If any of the troops give an answer that isn’t to the liking of any leader worth their salt that overhears, that soldier is going to the brig. You don’t talk about it. It’s a touchy subject.”

Jenkins had let it go. In his simple civilian view, a leader should be removed if they were causing problems and you could do something about it. Politics be consigned to the fiery pits of the void.

Struggling back through the masses clogging up the city had only taken them a couple more hours after the ten minutes Corporal Smythe had argued with their taxi service to escort them to a new destination. Finally giving up and digging a few more coins, he shoved them angrily into the most prominent taxi man’s hand. They had departed for the administration district as directed by the gate guard.

Jenkins marveled at the stupidity of having an entire district of Joclyn’s. The place was just as pompous as the man Jenkins had consigned into a corner of his mind relegated to people who had little use in this world other than making others miserable with their abuse of the soul-sucking power of idiotic bureaucracy.

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The taximen had escorted the party with the enthusiasm of hard laborers that enjoyed using the tools of their trade, big sticks in this case, to a towering monstrosity of a building covered with overlarge windows and gilded statues, all holding those runed staves. Jenkins wondered again how such buildings stood so high under what must be an immense weight of materials used to construct them. This wasn’t the first time he remembered that Purpolis housed the only mage guild in the country and had a district all to themselves.

After dropping off the party at the entrance of the building, the taximen had skedaddled out of there before Smythe could insist they wait around to escort them back to the military district.

There was a line of people stretching out the door whose dress made Jenkins think more of country folk like himself than the flashy colors and materials all of the city folk he had been forced to observe all day. A few minutes of conversation with some of them, as the party waited in the line, revealed they all hailed from various counties throughout Keltaire. The repeated and now confirmed news that Red Adder wasn’t the only one that had suffered an attack spread through the party again quickly, and much conjecture about what this might mean for the kingdom at large was discussed by the soldiers.

Jenkins thought it was a telling sign that the nobles and king weren’t doing their job. Robby, who looked more troubled than Jenkins thought a boy would be, shrugged off the comforting hand he tried to place on the boy’s shoulder.

A receptionist at the front of the line took the name of the county the party represented and handed a sheaf of papers to be filled out by Corporal Smythe. The man looked more disgruntled by the paperwork than anything that had happened throughout the day.

One overbearing hoity-toity prick was enough for our entire county. May the gods save us from the paperwork. Does it ever end?

The gods had turned a deaf ear to Jenkins’s plea for clemency from all things inky and boring. After Smythe had turned the paperwork back in with the receptionist, the party had been escorted out of the lobby and up several flights of stairs to a floor with long, narrow corridors leading to individual rooms. They had been separated into pairs and informed that a debriefing interview for each of them needed to be held. The cries of protest that this had already been done were ignored as none had the demanded confirmation order from the gatehouse they were supposed to have received. Smythe looked to have a moment of clarity and turned to glare at Johansen.

The private smiled sheepishly until Smythe grabbed him by the ear and dragged him back to the stairwell to ream him out privately about overlooking that detail instead of letting the party string him up for overlooking such a crucial piece of stationery.

Jenkins had been saddled with Robby. The Millers had neglected to teach the boy his letters, or so he said. Jenkins was reasonably confident the boy was smart enough to play dumb about being able to fill out all these gods damned forms.

Good for him. Still gonna get him back somehow. Gods, this is awful.

So, Jenkins sat in front of a man who calmly withdrew any form Jenkins even slightly mussed up with his farmer’s handwriting and replaced it with a fresh copy of the aggressively offensive tedium.

Why is the date of birth and name needed on every page? And who cares what Ma’s maiden name was?

The third time Jenkins asked the man what the point of having the header information on every page was, the man had drawn back the form and replaced it with another. Jenkins read it aloud to be sure what had just happened wasn’t a fever dream,

“Form ten-thirty-eight-zero-two-bravo, A formal request for the files to be submitted in consideration of an issuance for the paperwork to be filed as a registered complaint against the efficiency of data collection.”

The man looked embarrassed,

“Apologies, I missed the expression of hatred you showed on the third question of the necessity. I meant to give you the Charlie form, you know, for the expedited version.”

The clerk, or minion of Dennis as Jenkins was starting to think of him, took away the form in front of Jenkins and slid a new one into place. Sure enough, the same form was marked with a bold red expedited request under the title whose ending had been changed to Charlie.

“Look, I didn’t want to file a complaint. I wanted to know why I needed to fill out this much paperwork on an attack that can be summed up with bad shit happened. Our county handled it.”

“Oh. Well, then, please fill out the header and check the box near the bottom that says complaint request withdrawn. Sorry about the mix-up. Let me see if I can find the forms for a request to substitute summary information. Do you have your guild seal to corroborate that…version…of the event that took place in Crimson Viper County?”

Jenkins carefully did not jab the quill he had tightly gripped in his fist into the eye of the man sitting across from him. He took three deep breathes and stated calmly and not with any heat,

“It’s Red Adder County, and no, I haven’t been given any guild seal yet. We have to get through all of this bullshit first. We were told this had to happen before I and that boy laughing at both of us in the corner, who is about to be kicked all the way back to the military district we just came from, could be indoctored.”

“Inducted.”

“Sure.”

The clerk stared at Jenkins with the vacuous smile of the bureaucrat who knows he is infuriating as the novice farmer stared back, waiting.

Why is he just staring like a jackass? If Robby doesn’t stop that sniggering, he will get a tanning when this is over.

The clerk spoke again,

“Well, that’s going to slow us down. These were all forms for Crimson Viper County.”

Jenkins took another deep breath to calm himself, stood from his chair, grabbed the back of the wooden piece of furniture in both hands, and started smashing it against the wall to the left of the clerk’s head. He didn’t know when he started screaming, but it blended with a little boy’s surprisingly vicious laughter coming from the direction in which Robby had been seated on a stool in one corner.

The clerk flinched back from the violence, tumbling out of his seat to land on the floor behind the desk. The man scrambled away from the flailing Jenkins and into a corner of the room, smashing a red button set into the wall nearby on his way.

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