You’re Fired - Chapter 3
**Jay**
I woke up with a panic, pushing my arms to my sides, propelling myself upright.
‘Why is there no peace in my life anymore, have the heavens disowned me for my sins?…’
The first thing I noticed was the smell, it was a pungent nasty cow dung-ish smell too foul for me to accurately describe; then as my eyes adapted to the darkness, I saw how I was closed in a dumpster, my head sticking out of a black jumbo sized plastic bag, my legs tied around by some rusty wash cloth, and my sanity one step away from being completely gone.
‘You freaking bitch janitor what the hell did you do to me? What the hell is going on? When I find you, you better give me a good reason not to send you straight to the devil's lap!’
Words cannot explain how infuriated I was, ready to punch the first person I saw, until I noticed a small sign and calmed down a little, it read:
{Hello; Message sent from you, to you}
{Come to the apartment (number: F2R80) after 12PM midnight, when ready}
{Code: Lava Cake}
I would have put this whole message thing off as a prank if not for the code at the bottom, the only person who knows about my particular love for chocolate lava cake is me.
So I pushed out of my makeshift “sleeping bag” and walked over to the apartment complex behind me, limping to the elevator and slowly clicking the button.
When I reached the door, I check under the doormat like any other sane home intruder, and instead of finding a key I see another message:
{Key in left plant, come to bedroom *quietly*}
I enter the dark bedroom with my masterful door opening skills avoiding any and all squeaks, I see my subordinate snoozing peacefully on the bed.
‘Why was I brought here anyway, and was it really me who guided me?.’
As I was thinking that I felt a connection on the consciousness level, and felt a wave of tiredness attacked me
‘Yes dumbass I guided you here, who else could’
I felt my own mind think, a very weird feeling, like I was the one who thought that, but also it wasn’t me.
‘Ehh are you the shard of consciousness I split off from before?’
‘Yes… also don’t address me as ‘you’ because I am you, and you are me; we are the same consciousness, but because you slept and missed out on the rest of yesterday, a lag created in memories and I can be considered a version of your consciousness that contains different/advanced memories.’
‘Ehh wtf’
‘So how do I fix it?’
‘Let me just give you the memories I gained so “we” can catch up and become a whole consciousness again.’
‘Also we’ve read about dissociative identity shit before right? When we’re all caught up I'm going to have to think about ways to fix this whole situation.’
‘Ok memories coming in 3-2-1–.’
Memories came flooding in, as I was transported into the perspective of the System where I left off, just after I had passed out in the closet.
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**Jay’s consciousness shard that was left behind acting like the system**
‘Well, shit.. It looks like my body is out cold in the back, it seems I'm going to have to make sure the janitor moves my body away from danger.’
‘Well how's the quest going so far? Let me lock into his senses.’ Through the janitor's eyes I saw him tending to the ashes of the fire, scooping them up with a brush and holder and dumping them into a large trash bag.
‘I guess I should issue some kind of side-quest in order to give priority to securing my body.’
[Side Quest: Clean Up the Trash]
Difficulty: FF
Contents: In order to guarantee that guards are not alerted, clean up all the mess in the closet and pack up the trash, including the body in the back of the room.
Reward: Cleaning Skill +1
‘I'll prepare the info-packet for the quest now and send it when he's all done with the other cleaning. ’
Although I had little self love, a sharp pain formed in my side as I referred to my precious body as ‘trash’, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Also I gave a cleaning stat as reward, but how do you do the stats/level up stuff? In the book when someone gained a stat point they got a discrete increase in their ability - but thats completely stupid - no one progresses in big steps like that, you have to go slow and steady gaining continuous power over time.
‘Ehh I can make it work for now, my time spent as an outer disciple cleaning the streets is not for waste, when he levels up cleaning I will just send him some experience I gained from that time to make sweeping more efficient.’
Well now was as good a time as any to consciousness swap into full immersion of the janitors thoughts, I need to make sure this guy doesn’t do/think about doing anything stupid.
Commencing swap to janitors conscious..
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
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**Mario (The Janitor)**
|Well, the fire is easy enough to clean.| I have a decent amount of experience cleaning fires from all the stupid stuff my brother does, so this quest seems like free money to me.
|Well the reward isn’t money, based on the response it talks about a ‘lesser focus improvement pill’.| I have no clue what that's about, but if it's from a cultivator it must be good. I would be totally shaking in my boots right now, since this pill could help me tremendously with getting a scholarship into school, but I'm going to stay calm until I actually see the results - Ma always told me not to raise my expectations.
But at the same time, I should have known a quest from the same ‘God System’ that tried to cook me alive wouldn’t be simple, it seems that I have to do what I hate the most, talk with the pretentious hospital board to remove suspicion on the fire and clear up the situation.
I was thinking through what the conversation would be like, when I felt a “side-quest” transmitting into my brain.
|What. The.. F*(#!...’ ‘Holy shiz what is it wanting me to do?? Clean up a body, where?? Is this system a vampiric murder who feasts on the souls of annasuming mortals?? Damn Ma I should have listened when you told me about stranger danger. Shit– shit- shit.|
|I mean I know I'm a janitor but I am not prepared for this type of mess.|
I slowly force myself to walk to the back crevices of the closet as I spot a sneaker popping out from the side.
|Don’t think about it Mario, you got this, just don’t think and do it, you're good at cleaning right? It's the same as a big lamp or something.|
No matter how much you tell yourself you can do something, it barely helps when you actually have to do it. I touched the cold body on the ground.
|HURLLL… EUK..| I threw up into the can on the side, feeling my fingers shake as I dragged the body to a place with more light.
I pulled a rag from around my belt and wrapped up the body so it was easier to deal with. I emptied my mind and dumped the body into the last bag I had, and moved it to the cart.
As I was walking down the hallway with the body weighing down my cart and most importantly weighing down my sense of morality, I encountered one of the board members directing the firefighters to where the fire started. I saw him glance towards me with a disappointed look.
I looked back, only slightly confused, because it was oh so common to get shitty looks when you are the janitor - I continued on my path expecting to be ignored.
“Hey janitor, do you know how this fire started?”
“Um boss, it was an accident in the closet.”
“It was drugs wasn’t it? I know you have gotten in trouble for smoking that shit. You probably got high and threw the bud on the floor, you're a damn bastard you know; us doctors try our damn hardest to help patients, but when you're killing yourself with god knows what compounds, our efforts are in vain. Why this is the straw that breaks the camel's back, we have many people who are ready to become janitors for this hospital, knowing they clean the floors that save the lives of their friends and family. You should be more respectful of the environment you work in and not do all this crap all the time, why don’t you just go ahead and talk about all the wrong doings you committed and then maybe we'll consider giving a second chance. Actually we have already been given a second chance, and there are no third chances in life. Why don’t you go ahead and take off that uniform and leave it here; actually you can keep that filthy thing… I don’t want to see you here ever again. Bye.”
‘Blah- blah– blah blah blah… What the hell is this guy going on and on about, so basically I'm fired, is that what you're trying to say? Well whatever, I was going to leave this hell hole anyway.’
“Noted.”
I just kept walking, nothing this man could have said to me would affect me more then the body I was pushing off.
[System Notification: janitor career path ended]
Please choose another career:
* Engineer
* Blank Option (prerequisite not met)
* Blank Option (prerequisite not met)
|Oh what's this? It seems the system is letting me switch career paths, I mean why the hell is it giving three options when two are blank?? Whatever, I wanted to be an engineer anyways.|
I selected the option and kept walking.
I walked fast, speeding to my apartment that I rented just around the corner - cart in hand. When I got there I dumped off all the bags of ‘trash’ in the back dumpster, but before I could run up the stairs and drop straight to bed I got a notification.
[Put out fire, Part 2 ✓, completed]...
[Put out fire - Reward will be presented at 5:30AM GCT]
[Put out fire, Side Quest ✓, completed]...
[System Notification: Cleaning Stat + 1]
[Cleaning Pathway: Sweep Skill Unlocked]
{System entering light sleep mode…}
*Boop*
Ahh the sweet sound of hard work, although after that trauma I don't know if any reward can be worth it. I sweeped my shirt clean of all the dust, my hand moved in autopilot as it gently swayed across my shirt like a piano, cleaning off even the smallest speaks of dirt.
|Oh wow, I was not expecting this, is this what a skill does? It seems like I have cleaning experts muscle memory in my body.|
My eyes scanned back to the bin.
|Hmm I’m starting to have serious doubts whether or not the body is even dead, although it felt cold at first, it seemed to me pretty lively with a heart beat and everything as I dumped it out… -well whatever it's not my problem to deal with.|
I sprint-walked over to my room and collapsed on the bed, ruminating on the intense events of the day until my body finally gave out - not before hearing a couple very quiet steps near my door.
Commencing swap back to main conscious..
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**Jay - current timeline**
‘Ok so that’s what happened, goo me for not messing up badly! Well I'm going to have to prepare the reward for him.’
A small pill from the Adderall bottle gets placed on his nightstand as I slowly back out of the room and close the door.
‘Also the career switch thing is a pretty good development, I need a good engineer to compete with this “Subaru” sect. I should also be able to teach him some Qi-engineering methods as he evolves down his path, actually there are quite a lot of skills I can feed over time (so I guess I can sleep better not worrying too much about rewards), overall quite a useful subordinate to have in the long run.’
‘Ahh I'm feeling refreshed, the 7+ hr beauty nap seems to have done wonders to my complexion. But now that he has got familiar with the System and all, I think it's time to prepare a cheat; based on the “System Bible'' it's a necessity to prepare a cheat for the host, and it seems like its all but accepted that every system has an appraisal feature, but whyyy, although appraisal is useful it's going to be a huge pain in the ass to be knowledgeable about every goddamn thing in this universe.’
‘The most valuable resource for me is time, so I got find some way to BS around this stupid feature.’
‘Well I got this night, he's probably going to sleep for at least a couple hours, I'm just gonna cross my fingers and search around the apartment.’
I take out my trusty notepad again and scribbled down the date: 12/12/13
[Quest: Bring Body To Safety ✓, complete]
Quest Takeaways:
* Subordinates are useful for masking your problems
* Always make sure to be knowledge about things so you can use that as rewards
* Be friking careful about this consciousness stuff, otherwise you gonna die
* Other stuff I’m too lazy to write down
The frogs start croaking in the dark night as I set out to look for a way to recreate the godly appraisal skill.