Fleer took a deep breath. It was his least favorite time of the month. But this was the last thing he had to wrap up before the conference.
He stood before a drab building with a concrete exterior, working himself up to go inside. A weathered sign overhead proclaimed that this was "Mercenary's Guild Branch Office #72".
The ancient glass door squealed in protest as he pushed through. He pasted a false smile on his face. Maybe she wouldn't be here today. Maybe she was sick. Maybe she had finally died of pure nastiness and been decently interred, probably in a piano box. Maybe she--
"Please take a number."
Nope. There she was. The Trog.
She squatted behind the chest-high desk that spanned the narrow width of the office. The Trog was a heavyset woman, with synthetic curls piled unnaturally high and dead, pallid skin. It looked as though her face had been pushed back into a layer of fat. And then that had been pushed into another layer, and so on about four times, making her head unsettlingly square and broad. She wore a thick, rude slash of lipstick, false eyelashes, and a permanent, hateful sneer.
Some people make up for an unfortunate appearance by having a pleasant demeanor. The Trog was one of the other kind.
In a fit of pique, Fleer had once referred to her as a "troglodyte." Since then, she had taught him the kind of ceaseless, needling torment a career bureaucrat could inflict. Fleer had been thinking of her as The Trog for so long that he didn't even know her name. Perhaps she didn't have a name. Perhaps she was just assigned a number, like the office.
"Please take a number," she repeated.
Fleer kept the grin affixed through sheer force of will. He looked around the dingy, sun-bleached office. Nobody else was there.
"Hi there! Do I really need to grab a number? Only nobody's--"
"Please take a number," she repeated again, a measured edge of satisfied sarcasm creeping into her voice.
Twelve seconds in, and already he could feel his false grin slipping. With a mighty effort, he walked over to the number dispenser, and pulled a ticket. Number 13.
The Trog turned her attention back to her computer. Grinning madly, Fleer took a seat in the empty office and stared straight ahead.
A clock that had probably been built shortly after time itself had been invented clicked over another minute.
The Trog continued tapping away at her computer.
Another minute ticked by.
Another.
Three minutes.
Each minute pulled into eternity by the office and the annoyance.
The Trog finally spoke.
"Number eleven," she bellowed, her voice filling the office. "Number eleven," she repeated.
Fleer looked down at his slip as though it would suddenly read "11".
It did not.
More minutes ticked by, hourglass sands pinging down on Fleer's frayed nerves. Three more minutes again, then another minute. Four more minutes, stretched like taffy over the frame of his impatience.
"Number twelve," she called. "Number twelve."
No number twelve answered. And so the waiting began again.
The silence squeezed in on Fleer, pressing into his psyche, making his ears buzz. He watched dust motes float around in the sunlight. He watched the clock tick over. He watched the carpet. He dared not appear bored or upset. He would not. His grin stayed stapled on.
"Number thirteen," she called, and almost before she was done speaking Fleer stood upright before her.
"Number thirteen," he verified, showing his slip. "I've come to re-up my submission for entry into the Mercenary's Guild, please."
Her eyes shifted up to him with measured slowness, and one engineered eyebrow rose.
"Name?"
"David Fleer."
Her eyes rolled.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
"Your business name, Mr. Fleer."
"Oh, uh, Riotfish, Inc."
She spent long minutes tapping in this data.
"What is the state of your business?"
"Oh, we're still going strong," he said, clinging to his grin. "Still a going concern, you know."
"Do you have corporate sponsorship?"
"Not yet, not as such, although we've got some very exciting prospects. Here soon."
Her mouth shadowed, as though she had quirked just the tiniest smile, nothing he could reasonably get offended about, but which was mortally offensive nonetheless.
"Do you have any declarations, awards, outstanding achievements, or other accolades to add to your company's records?"
"Not at the moment."
She made an arch little "mm-hm" and tapped in more data. She waited for the computer as it ground through some interminable process.
"Say, have they made any progress on getting this process automated? So I could do this without having to come in and bother you all the time? Ha ha!" The grin was haggard, haunted, and barely there.
She gave him a level stare. "Let me check that for you." Without once breaking eye contact, she said, "No, not yet. But they're adding new features all the time, so do check back."
"I certainly will, thank you."
The computer finished whatever process it was churning through, and The Trog finally turned her attention to it.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Fleer," she said in a voice microscopically close to sarcasm, "there are no open Guild membership slots for a firm with your record at this time. Also, your membership application expires in two months. If you haven't qualified for membership by that time, your submission will expire and you'll have to re-apply." She gave another tiny, satisfied, almost-but-not-quite smile as she looked down at the screen. "With your record, you shouldn't get your hopes up about an extension."
She clattered at the keyboard for a moment.
"Your submission will remain open for another month. That will be thirty-five credits, please."
With as much good grace as he could muster, he handed her a credit chit. His face was numb, unfeeling. He only kept the smile on by remembering which muscles to stretch. The Trog slotted the chit, scanned it, pulled it and handed it back.
"Have a nice day," she sneered.
"Thank you," he replied, hanging on to his temper with both hands.
He escaped, and gasped for air the moment the door squealed shut behind him,
Done, for another month.
Maybe next month would be the last time.
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As part of his mission prep, Little Timmy poked his head into one of the rooms at the back of the Riotfish HQ. It had piles of old boxes full of paper, dusty and collapsing under the weight of years. He shrugged and checked another room. This one was empty except for a single candle lying in the middle of the floor. Another room had a cobwebbed machine, tall and ominous, with scrolled flywheels, exposed gearing, and an inscrutable system of levers and knobs. D'khara liked that kind of stuff, and Little Timmy made a mental note to tell him about it, which fell out of his head as soon as he closed the door.
The back of the HQ was a maze of old forgotten rooms filled with the most amazing old junk. The HQ itself dated from before the first corporate war and had passed through any number of hands before ending up as the Riotfish's home. Each subsequent owner had simply shoveled the previous owner's stuff into the back when setting up shop. There were no defined hallways or structure, just a jumble of half-walls, dividers, and rooms leading to rooms leading to dead-ends. There was probably enough history back there to make the careers of a whole team of archaeologists. Not that Little Timmy cared.
"Roger? You back here?"
Roger liked to vanish back here for long hours, and Little Timmy couldn't find him up front or in the living areas. Little Timmy was trying to find Dr. Navarre's medkit, and Roger might have seen it. He'd already tried asking Oliver, but this close to mission time, Oliver was fretting far too much to be useful for anything. Oliver was a world-class fretter.
He didn't get an answer, but he heard a high-pitched humming coming from his left. He followed the sound through two more rooms to a bright red door. Incautiously, he threw it open and strode in.
"Roger, are you b-- OH hey, agh, uh, sorry. Ugh." Little Timmy slammed his hands over his eyes.
"I! Has a naked!"
"Oh yeah, no kidding. Didn't need to see that. I didn't mean to interrupt your whatever."
"I'm making, a sweater!"
"Sure. Whatever you say. Look, have you seen Dr. Navarre's med bag? I'm kitting up for the op and I can't find it."
"No kabooms in the pantry! It's full of cheese!"
"Yeah, no I just... oh wait, that's right. I left it in the kitchen. Thanks, Roger! Uh, feel free to keep doing... whatever."
Roger, balancing on one foot and holding a vest with bands of straps running across it, blew a raspberry at Little Timmy, who felt his way out of the room with his eyes shut.
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D'khara's mind buzzed with the upcoming mission. A heist for his first mission! Of all the things to start with! Coordination, planning, strategy, flexibility-- all things he'd never had to know, wrapped up in a single mission. He absently took his new uniform down from its hanger on the door.
He considered the outfit, coveralls with an ugly, jagged brown-and-gray camo pattern. Mrs. Meade had been kind enough to press it for him in the midst of her other preparations. The uniform had blocky red letters reading "RIOTFISH INC" over the left breast, and his last name "ARILBURR" over the right.
He shucked off his jeans and t-shirt, shook the uniform off its hangers, and got into it. The fit was tight in the chest and loose everywhere else, strange and stiff.
He stomped his feet down into his thick-soled hobnail boots, adding at least three inches to his height. Over his chest he strapped on a thick pauldron, covering his left shoulder, running the strap across his body and underneath his right arm. The pauldron had spikes. Not big ones, but that's How It Was Done.
He strapped a leather sheath to his left leg, sliding in a thick-bladed Bowie knife. He put on a black steel helmet and slid on his fingerless chainmail gauntlets to complete the outfit.
He hung two extra drum mags from his waist at 4- and 8-o'clock. To complete the ensemble, he clipped two frag grenades to his belt, which sagged alarmingly despite its thickness.
He picked up his Polozola automatic shotgun. His thumb brushed across a dwarvish rune he'd engraved on the receiver: due to an accident during the engraving, it read "Goodlove" (more or less). He winced in embarrassment.
He was now fully kitted, more heavily armed and prepared than he had ever been in the mines.
"Bad luck, don't screw me up this time," he said.
He took a deep breath, and walked out the door.