Suri recalled the day she responded to a job advertisement pasted on the adventurer guild. She had been looking for work for weeks, moving from place to place in the city spotting the job adverts pasted on the side walls near the entrances of prominent workplaces. She wasn’t alone. With disappointment and a sinking feeling in her stomach, she noticed the other hopefuls huddled around the same adverts that attracted her attention. Some people read the notice, shook their heads, and walked off to other places looking a little more despondent while others gave it a go and entered the premises to apply for the role.

One notice said ‘no chancers’ threatening bodily harm to those who ignored the warning. Suri wasn’t so sure if she wanted to work for people like that. Just living through an interview made her feel like diminutive beggar pleading for copper bits. But she arrested her negative thoughts and steeled her resolve, determined to visit every possible advert in the city, as far as her legs would take her. She owed that much to her dear mother, someone she cared deeply for. Suri felt that no amount of appreciation could ever repay the sacrifices her mother made to take care of her and get her educated.

Their trek to Hafeld proved to be a difficult one for Suri and her mom. Starting with their landing in Port New Hope where they only owned a few iron plates between the two of them, they soon realised that Port New Hope reserved none of its namesake for them. At that time, wagon trains advertised recruitment drives for places on their wagons for three-month escorted treks through to Hafeld. Although they called them places, it remained little more than a spot on a wagon to place a small amount of luggage. Most folks walked next to the wagon, only sitting on it if they couldn’t walk any further or when they rested for the night.

Like that, they pushed through the interior plains to Hafeld, each day rolling into the next only stopping briefly at small villages that lay interspersed along the way. Through driving wind and rain the surrounding environmental elements pushed man and animal to extremes. The hostility from the plain’s ever-present beasts added to that difficulty. Few dared leave the confines of the wagon train because most people carried the weapons or had the means to defend against beasts that easily overwhelmed individuals stupid enough to ignore that fact.

If that wasn’t enough, large bands of bandits operated with impunity, utilising the large, unprotected plains to their full advantage. When authorities did step in to try and quell the bandit problem, any well-armed armies or armoured escorts discovered the bandits’ superior manoeuvrability and knowledge of the terrain far outmatched their fighting power.

She considered it pure luck that their wagon train never encountered bandits, or if they did, they never found out about it. They didn’t gain much from the trek, but they at least made a few friends, probably more because of mutual suffering amongst people in similar circumstances.

After arriving in Hafeld, both found odd jobs here and there to keep their heads above water, but their funding threatened to run dry if one of them didn’t’ soon find permanent work. They decided that Suri held the best option to find work, her being younger, fitter and generally more employable.

Yet after months of trying and despite her best efforts, no employer gave her much more than a few cursory questions before saying they couldn’t help her, or that the job was already filled. She felt the latter excuse was nothing but their way of saying they weren’t interested in her. She quickly discovered that because some of the same adverts would still be posted the following day and she knew better than to ask again, not that she didn’t try that more than a few times with the expected rejection.

One irate owner of a laundry businesses became openly aggressive towards her as soon as she noticed her catkin ears. She didn’t know why she deserved such a hostile response other than to attribute it some dislike of catkin. On that occasion she politely excused herself from the premises as quickly as she could all the while apologising for causing any distress.

At the first toll of the watch tower’s morning bell, Suri got out of bed and dutifully washed herself. Paying particular attention to her face and ears, she made sure nothing stood out of place that could detract a potential employer’s attention. She didn’t want a misleading tuft of ear hair standing out at an odd angle pointing out her tardiness, something she knew prospective employers looked out for in their first interviews with prospective workers.

Convinced that she presented only the best image she could, she dressed and headed out her room. Perhaps due to all the previous days’ disappointments, she felt a little apprehensive about engaging any prospective employer. Her mother always encouraged her to leave home feeling positive about life, because any employer worth their salt would pick up on negative emotions.

“Suri, wait.”

Her mum stopped her before she exited the door and hurriedly handed her a small parcel wrapped in beeswax infused cloth secured with twine.

“You haven’t had breakfast this morning, take this with, you are going to need it. This is also a little something in there for you to buy some lunch from the food stalls when you get hungry later.”

Suri realised her mum must have prepared the food for her the night before while she slept. She fought the tears back the threatened to erupt in her eyes.

“Thanks mum. I love you lots. See you later.”

Suri couldn’t help but smile at the small expression of love her mum showed her and gave her a big warm hug before walking out the cottage door.

Usually, Suri awoke early to be first in the row when employers placed work notices outside their prospective shops.

“Early bird catches the worm.”

She said softly, trying to motivate herself. It was hard to stay positive when places like the labour guild or the merchant guild often advertised for labourers but being a petite female catkin meant Suri couldn’t even cast a shadow on larger males when it came to pure physical strength.

Other jobs more related to her skill set were rare finds. She excelled in two languages, catkin, and common tongue with a smidgin of beastkin, something she learned from her home continent. Those could help her work in places where different people interacted, which is why Suri found herself first reading the merchant guild’s job notices. She had a penchant for organising messy situations and memorising things. She hoped to find a clerk job advertised but once again found nothing, not that she had ever seen one and didn’t let it get to her.

“Hey Suri!”

Called a young man from across the street. She recognised Carl, a human boy about the same age as her and like her, still relatively fresh in the job market. She could remember how or when, but they somehow came to know each other through their constant jobhunting sessions.

“Hi Karl, looking for a job again, I see. Weren’t you recently employed?”

“Yes, I was, but only on a short-term labour contract. Moved a few goods for the merchant guild now I’m looking for work again. Those jobs are pretty common, but they don’t pay much, so I’m looking for something a bit more permanent.”

Suri couldn’t help feeling jealous. Even having a semi-permanent labourer job would suffice for her, and yet Carl treated the work as if he had a world of choices.

“I can’t believe you treat it so flippantly. I’m even willing to do labourer work if anyone would take me.”

“No, you don’t. Even if you could, which you can’t, I’d say you more suited for something administrative.”

“Trust you to state the obvious. Where do I find something like that? It’s not as if administrator jobs are just lying around waiting for me.”

“I dunno. But I heard someone is leaving the adventurer guild.”

“When did you hear that?”

“This morning when I queued in front of the merchant guild. They didn’t have any work today, but my friend Bob mentioned that his ex-girlfriend has a cousin who worked for the adventurer guild but decided to move to Northport. Something to do with some opportunities opening up down there. I’m thinking of going there too if nothing works out here in the next week.”

“Really? You’ll go all the way east?”

“What have I got to lose. There’s nothing for me here, no more family, well a few friends but I can always make new ones.”

Suri felt a sudden touch of sadness at Carl’s words, but she couldn’t tell why. Perhaps, the brief time she stayed in Hafeld, she came to appreciate the few people she regularly encountered. Even though she never called them friends, she nonetheless considered them close enough to be that.

“You’re an idiot, you know that?”

Carl paused to think for a moment. He faced the same dilemma many a man faced in past history. His mind told him everything he said was logical, but his heart said he just made a serious miscalculation. He then amplified the problem by making the next typical male mistake.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Did I say something wrong?”

Suri didn’t want to highlight the fact that she liked Carl, it would mean exposing her emotions to him, and she wasn’t ready to do that yet. So she did what any woman would do in that situation. She artfully changed the subject.

“Do you think the adventurer guild posted a notice yet?”

“Ah, what? No, I don’t know.”

As badly as she wanted to kick Carl’s shins, experience taught her to grab an opportunity she might miss if she tarried there. Being networked had its advantages, and one of them was staying one step ahead of the competition because somebody had information nobody else had. How one used that information, made the difference between having a job and having nothing.

“Carl, I think I need to go. If there is a chance that the adventurer guild looking for somebody, they might still post this morning.”

“Don’t hang around here, go for it and good luck. I’ll speak to you later.”

“Thanks Carl, if you’re bit of news works out I’ll stick you for lunch sometime.”

She took off at a pace her mother would admonish her as being unseemly for a lady, especially one hoping for an interview. What if your employer saw you running? Her exasperated mother would probably say to her. Suri only caught the edge of Carl’s faint words as he shouted after her.

“I’ll hold you to that.”

Many lungs full of air later, Suri found herself hands and knees and panting in front of the adventurer guild hall. Why she decided to run she never knew but something in her heart told her not to miss an opportunity. To her disappointment there wasn’t a work notice posted outside the door but for some reason she thought there might be a posting inside. From what she could see from her standing position there seemed to be a noticeboard with some notices inside the hall.

Perhaps they posted the notices there, she thought to herself.

Suri never paid much attention to adventurers, but a three-month trek across the plains brought into contact with the wagons’ adventurer escorts so she immediately recognised the typical adventurer types crowding into the guild hall.

Emboldened, she stepped into the guild and found herself suddenly engulfed within the crowd of armoured adventurers that towered over her small frame. Feeling out of place and not wanting to attract attention to herself she allowed herself to follow the flow lest she get trampled on in everyone’s enthusiasm to go wherever they seemed to be going, totally oblivious to her existence.

By some miracle of luck, someone bumped her out of the way, and she found herself standing clear and in front of the very notice board she originally spied from outside the hall. She never hesitated and started reading the notices one by one totally oblivious to the amphitheatre of adventurers standing behind her also reading the notices. Nobody paid attention to her. Everyone looked over her head, focused on the noticeboard above her, looking for the quests they intended taking for the day.

To her frustration, none of the notices seemed to indicate job positions at the guild, instead they went on about specific jobs like herb gathering, mineral collecting, dungeon delving, escort requests and beast subjugations.

All notices indicated monetary values that varied from a few copper bits per item, like the herbs where it indicated a couple of copper bits per weight price, or a gold bar for a dungeon delve. That one nearly made Suri’s eyes pop out. There was just money to be made everywhere. She wondered how she could join that guild. She stopped her pipe dream and focused on why she entered there in the first place. In the end there were a lot of notices about a lot of things but none of them seemed to help her in the slightest. She quickly ran out of notices to read and with a sinking feeling realised there were no notices about job postings.

As she stood there mulling over what to do next, she became situationally aware and suddenly realised how trapped she was between the noticeboard and the throng of adventurers behind her.

“I know I saw the calacite quest here somewhere.”

Said the frustrated voice of a man that reminded her of her father. The man’s calloused hands told of many years of holding a heavy tool in his hand, perhaps the very handle of that heavy axe he carried on his back. He seemed lost in the sea of notices on the board, something she sympathised with, given the vast terrain the board covered.

She recalled a notice about a mineral called calcite that a particular alchemist needed as a specific rare ingredient in a special tonic. Without a word she pointed out the notice by placing her finger on it. He noticed her hand and smiled a big, toothy smile.

“Ah, thank you missy. You saved me a bunch of time there.”

He thanked her as he indicated for her to pass the notice to him, which she promptly did. It seemed someone else battelled with similar issues when a woman asked her,

“You wouldn’t perhaps know where the Allandale support quest is?”

That one Suri recalled being on the top right-hand side of the board closest the door. That notice mentioned an escort for the Allandale merchants headed for Northport. It was one of those quests that offered a few metal plates short of a gold bar. It must be an important and dangerous job to offer that much money, she noted.

She only pointed out the notice because she couldn’t reach it, but the female adventurer simply leaned over and pulled it off the board.

“Thank you.”

And just like the previous man, the woman pushed back through the crowd with her notice in hand. And that released the floodgates of requests for her to help others find notices. Not wanting to impose she kindly fielded each person’s question in that crowd, each person thanking her in turn and calling her miss or missy. Frustratingly, some folks just didn’t know what notice were looking for, only giving her vague hints of what they thought they wanted, but she mostly figured out what they needed and pointed them to it.

She felt exhausted. She wondered just how the heck she got into that situation but felt glad at seeing so many people happy with her helping them. But even she had a limit and it finally got to the point where the crowd around her thinned to where she finally noticed a gap she could push through and was about to do exactly that when a man’s loud voice suddenly called out.

“Hey you.”

Everyone in the guild hall stopped what they were doing and looked upwards. Now that everyone suddenly stopped talking, Suri realised how noisy the place had been. On top of that, she had been so busy she never realised there was a mezzanine floor in the hall. A staircase near the door led to a wooden balustrade on the upper floor that ran the entire length of the hall. A rugged man leaned on the handrail, looking down at them.

“Yes you. The short lady at the noticeboard.”

Then everyone in the guild suddenly turned to look at Suri. A feeling of dread fell over her as a cold feeling washed from her head down to her toes as she realised the man called to her. What trouble had she gotten herself into, she wondered. She only hoped she didn’t embarrass her mom or cause her any grief if she landed up in trouble with the authorities. She vaguely pointed to herself if questioning the obvious.

“Come and see me in my office.”

He said, whereupon he promptly disappeared into the room somewhere behind the railing.

Suri wished a hole would open the floor and swallow her up. The adventurers opened up a pathway leading to the staircase and without a choice she followed the gauntlet of people and headed up the stairs. Two people sat in the office, the one person she immediately identified as the man that called her to his office, the other was a lady and obviously an elf judging by her ears. She was beautiful and lift up to what Suri heard about the elves.

Suri had never met an elf before. She heard stories about them, but no one knew if they were true or not. Suri introduced herself by politely knocking on the door despite both the man and the elf already looking at her. Her mom always said to introduce herself regardless of the situation and since no one spoke to her she decided to start the introductions.

“Hello. My name is Suri. Nice to meet you.”

She did a short bow as courtesy, commonly accepted as a greeting in those parts.

“Hi Suri, my name is Grud, and this is Melody. Thank you for coming here. I’m assuming you’re not an adventurer?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

Grud didn’t appear aggressive, she realised he was only asking for pure curiosity.

“I heard there was possibly a job in the adventurer guild, so I came to look. I didn’t see a posting outside so I thought that noticeboard might have one.”

“What made you think there was a job here?”

Asked the soft voice of Melody.

“I heard from a friend that someone might be leaving the guild and thought to come check if there was a job posting.”

Grud and Melody looked at each other for a brief moment before Grud asked another question.

“When did you hear that and who told you that?”

“I heard it this morning and I have a friend whose ex-girlfriend had a cousin that worked here and was planning to leave for Northport.”

“I told you that girl was a handful.”

Said Melody, and I seemed his statement formed part of a previous conversation with her.

“But even I didn’t think the news about Atricia would spread that quickly.”

He hmphed once but didn’t stop talking.

“So, Suri. Have you worked in a guild before?”

Suri didn’t know what role Grud held in the guild, but it obviously lay high up because Grud could make a loud noise capable of stopping everything in the guild and no one dared complain.

“No sir.”

“What is your previous work experience?”

“I’ve only done short cleaning jobs around town since my mother and I arrived in Hafeld.”

“I see. Well, we haven’t had the opportunity to post the new opening, but you have the job.”

“Huh, excuse me?”

“I said you have the job. You can begin this morning; Melody will start you on the reception desk.”

“Why would you hire me? Aren’t you worried about whether I can do the job?”

Grud sighed in resignation, he didn’t seem the type who enjoyed long conversations, but he realised Suri couldn’t mind read his logic.

“Look, firstly you arrived first thing in the morning to enquire about a job you only heard about less than an hour ago, which means you are driven and can wake up early.

Then I watched you from the moment you first walked in where you fielded a morning crowd of burly adventurers like a professional. Which means you retain people skills while under pressure.

Without any prior exposure to our systems, you quickly answered everyone’s questions and pointed out the correct quests. That showed me that you can read, and by fair deduction, write.

No one ever explained the details behind the quests on the noticeboard, and yet within moments you logically deduced which quests suited which adventurers. That tells me your perception of your surroundings are well above average.

I doubt you had time to scan that noticeboard more than once, but you effortlessly recalled where each quest on the board. Wielding a memory recall like that, no average adventurer can intimidate you.

So overall I think you are well suited for the administration role. Should I give the job to someone else?”

Suri felt stunned at the sudden overload of information. Grud seemed to misjudge the situation.

“Okay I see. Then I’ll give the job to the next person that responds to the notice.”

“Wha…, no don’t do that!”

Suri woke up out of her daze, calling out in dismay.

“Relax. He’s pulling your leg.”

Prompted Melody dryly. Suri pouted when she spied Grud’s smiling face and realised she fell for that hook line and sinker. She thought of what a wonderful present she would bring back to mom.

“Come with me and I’ll get you started.”

Suri followed Melody stuck in the thought about how she needed to pay for Carl’s meal.

“Oh bugger!”

Cried Suri as she remembered something really important. How would she tell her mom?

“What?”

Asked Melody just as surprised.

“I don’t even know how much I’m earning.”

“You’re earning something?”

“Please don’t even joke about that.”

“Ignore her, she’s pulling your leg.”

Came a voice from the top office.