Patty finally reached the Counselor’s office. He knocked on the door, but no one answered the door. Damn, the thought. He knocked because he wanted someone to open the door for him, but it seemed like he had to be the one to do it.
When he opened the door, he saw that the Counselor's Office was emptier than he thought it was. This was usually the hub of delinquents and lazy people like Patty. One would get summoned to this office if they noticed that a student’s grades were dropping. Of course, Patty also got summoned a few times back then, but they all learned that Patty wouldn’t learn his lesson, so they stopped asking him to come here.
The only person he saw was another student in the front desk. As usual, he didn’t recognize this new student. Was he new? In all of his visits in the Counselor’s office, there had never been just a student in the front desk. Usually, it would be the Counselor herself or her secretary.
“Where’s the Counselor?”
“You’re Patrick Patterson, right?”
He answered Patty’s question with another question, which was rude. But, Patty didn’t want to waste any energy arguing. He just wanted to know where the rest of the staff was.
“Yeah. Where’s the Counselor? Is she going to come back?” Patty asked again.
But instead of answering his question, the student simply got out of his seat at the front desk and opened the door next to the Counselor’s main office. This was unusual because usually, he would just head on to the main office to talk to the Counselor herself, who wanted to talk with her students face to face, no matter how small the problem was.
Since Patty was about to reject a big company, he would have thought that the Counselor would talk to him about his decision. With the way he knew her, she would usually ask him the reason why he was doing things that actively hurt his future;
‘Why are you not going to school early and preparing?’
‘Why are your scores so low? Why don’t you study more?’
‘Why are you always absent whenever you don’t feel like attending the school?’
He would have expected her to say to him, ‘Why are you rejecting an offer from this amazing company? Don’t you know how big of an opportunity this is for you?’
Then, she would probably go into a spiel about preparing for the future and whatnot. Patty actually kind of liked talking to her because unlike Professor Ortez, she wasn't angry at him and always just gave him a concerned look followed by an understanding nod. She knew that she couldn’t change people just by talking to them, but she made sure that students always thought about why they were doing what they were doing. She was always there for support; she made sure that she was there for students to talk to if they needed to talk.
It was weird that she didn’t reschedule the appointment if she wasn’t present.
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“Just go in and answer all the paperwork regarding your internship. There’s extra paperwork on there if you want to reject the offer from the company.”
The student led Patty into the room where stacks upon stacks of paper were on the desk. He had never stepped foot in this room before, and after seeing it, he understood why. Instead of furniture decorating the room, it was instead boxes and files that were stacked upright. There were so many boxes that Patty couldn’t even see the wall behind it. No wonder the Counselor didn't let anyone into this room; it was just used for storage.
“I have to go in here?” Patty asked the student.
“Yes. You have to. You have to read all the paperwork and sign your name in each and every one of them to understand what the application was about.”
Patty looked at the stacks of paper that was halfway up the ceiling and already decided not to do it. There was no way he would be reading all that. There were about thousands of pages there with just one stack, and the whole desk as wide as an arm span was filled with all of the papers. It would take him hours if not days to just read through what the documents said. And if he just skipped reading them, then just signing his name on the bottom of each and every page would take hours upon hours of tedious work that would make his arm hurt like hell.
The student could see Patty’s disgusted face at how much paperwork he has to do. “I don’t think I have to remind you, but this is a matter of utmost importance. This is a major company that even the Principal respects. She will not allow you to disrespect them by ignoring them and leaving them with no dignity.”
[Double Mission]
[Requirement]
* Go to the Counselor's office
* Write a rejection letter to the company
[Reward]
* 500 Credits
The system repeated the mission again to make sure Patty wouldn’t renege on their deal. No matter what, he had to go through thousands of pages just to write a letter of rejection to the company.
“Ugh. Fine, fine.”
If he didn’t need that 500 Credits, he would never do this. But knowing that he would have enough money to buy the Voice Box Teqx, it made Patty steel his resolve. He didn’t know when the system would get generous again and give him this much Credits. Heck, he didn’t even know when the system would give him another mission with Credits as his reward. If he didn’t do this, maybe the system would get angry and refuse to give him Credits as a reward.
As he entered the room, the student closed the door behind him. Quite aggressively, too. With Patty all alone in the room, he walked over the desk and faced the mountain of papers. He felt like he was in a paper world, and he was facing the mightiest mountain he had ever seen.
He took out one piece of paper from one of the stacks and read through it.
BLAH
BLAH
BLAH
He couldn’t even force himself to read the first line because he was too lazy to do it. His lazy brain immediately shut down and prevented his body from doing anything because it knew how daunting this task was. He decided he wasn’t even going to read through it and just sign his name on every page.
Usually, no student would ever do this because it was too much of a legal risk. Signing your name on a paper you didn’t read would leave you liable to everything. But of course, Patty didn’t care about anything like that. He didn’t even think about that. All he knew was that he didn’t want to spend days in this room just reading a boring legal paper.
As for the risk, well, he just believed that the Muscava minion would warn him if he was about to sign something that would ‘hurt’ him. He didn’t really know if the minion worked like that, but he just used it as an excuse for himself.
Patty picked up the pen and was just about to sign it when his body shut down yet again. He didn’t want to do anything! He was too lazy to even sign his name on every piece of paper like a madman. Why wasn’t everything just automatic? The world was already past the electronic age, so why weren’t people using electronic signatures anymore?!
GRAAAGHH
In his frustration, Patty slammed his fist on the table. He didn’t seem to remember the fact that he was now 40 times stronger than that of a normal human. Slamming his fist on a wooden desk was akin to punching through a very fragile styrofoam.
BRKKKKK
The desk broke into two and left thousands upon thousands of paper flying all over the room. All Patty could see was white. The paper slowly descended from the ceiling and covered Patty through his entire body like he was buried from an avalanche. Frustrated, he popped his head out of the pile of paper and took a deep breath.
With the paper disorganized like this, his workload tripled. Not only did he have to sign every piece of paper, he also had to make sure that they were all in the right order.
“Nope.” Patty said nonchalantly. He truly gave up this time. There was no way he was going to do all this tedious work. He would rather die.
He was just about to get up from his seat and leave the room when all of a sudden, one of the paper fell right to his face. Annoyed, he quickly took the paper and was about to crumple it into a ball when all of a sudden, he saw a word that bothered him to no end.
He uncrumpled the paper and straightened it to read through what the text said.
‘All rights reserved for the Sunverk Corporation.’
Sunverk? As in the company of Sonny Sunverk? As in Griff Sunverk?
A chill went through Patty’s body when this realization hit him.