I don't really enjoy finance and accounting.~Head of the Agency of Responsible Spending and Experimentation

Bernin sat at her desk. Calling it her desk might be a bit of stretch. It was technically that of the innkeeper. She had tried to do her work on the original smaller desk that was provided in her room, but quickly found space running out. 5 years of materials took up quite the space. Strangely, it was Haspal who spoke to the innkeeper and helped her convince the innkeeper to part with their own desk for a time. He had apparently cured them not long ago. What off, they had not said. Bernin assumed it was embarrassing, but she didn’t really care. She finally had something to do.

The first week passed in a flash. She had worked through the first few years and found some irregularities. Nothing major though. The budget for bribery had been rather large the first year, but that was to be expected. The irregularity was the second year. Instead of a decrease, there was a rather substantial increase. Only for a complete fall the third. She had noted it down for further study and questioning. There might have been a reason after all, it generally behoved her to ask questions first.

She also had to grab several books on ecology and druidism. The materials for experimentation had taken a turn in the third year. They had changed into materials she didn’t recognise out of hand and would need to reference them to make sure they were actually legal and not code for something else. That took her to the second part of the inspection, inventory. After all, he could write whatever he wanted, one could only truly find out the truth by checking the inventory against the supposed inventory and she had to do it carefully. She was already not looking forward to it, numbers didn’t lie but comparing a blessed trihorn against a sanctified trihorn wasn’t easy and based on the materials he had in stock, she would require multiple weeks to even identify some of the stuff.

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It was time for a talk. Bernin had stayed here for 2 weeks by now. She had finished her accounting a while ago. The last two years weren’t anything special, Haspal had stayed consistent after the third year. Something about that nagged at her though and she decided to stop procrastinating and get to inventorying. Haspal had agreed and brought her to the storeroom underground. It was dry and cold, which was great for long term storage, but Bernin likely would not enjoy the next few weeks. She channelled some more power into her clothing, they had a temperature ward worked into them, but she couldn’t isolate it, instead having to channel into the whole piece to fight the cold.

The boxes were labelled. Thank mana. She still had to check off course, but it implied a level of organisation not often seen in wizards and hopefully, it also implied consistency. Again, something to check, but still. Haspal had won more points in her book. He was actually good at organisation. Most wizards were ‘good’ when they started of course. But generally things got annoying to keep track of. Especially when you could just be doing research. That path generally led to unlabelled vials and weird smells. What people failed to realise is that a lab full of coloured vials was not actually the sign of a good alchemist. Instead it was the sign of a messy one. After a long sign, she moved onto the second box. This would take a while.