What a grand start to my day.

An extremely powerful guild, one whose weakest member is undoubtedly far stronger than I, wants me wiped out.

“Now, you don’t need to get your knickers in a knot just yet. We might’ve been collateral damage, or we might be wrong, and the tip-off could be a fake. We’re not going to know until we do some proper investigation. How’s your day looking, capacity-wise? Nevermind, if you’ve got anything, sideline it for this.”

I swept my metaphorical nothingness off my metaphorical desk.

“Done. When are we starting?”

“Right now. Today’s job is deciding what we want to know. I need you to draft up an information request so I can send it off to the GTA office in Anpar. With any luck, they’ll send a courier out our way with a stack of documents for you — sorry, us — to trawl through.”

“Okay. Easy. What kind of things will go on the request?”

“You just put down anything you think makes sense, then I’ll review and add in any leftovers. Cool?”

“Cool.”

Pen clapped twice and stood.

“Great! Now get out of here, some of us have important work to do.”

We shuffled out. Adam greeted some people on the way, but I made straight for my desk.

Information request. Hmm.

I tried to work it backwards. If we were to find some damning evidence, what would it be? What would it tell us? How would it be presented?

I started with the classics. A listing of all the people present on the day, their rank within Cavern, and their employment history. The last one was a long shot, but it was worth trying. I wanted to check off any ex-GTA employees, just in case there was someone with some long-burning resentment. Possibly someone who was fired? Unjustly?

Next, I requested a complete manifest of the loot acquired on the day, as well as copies of the notes any other GTA employees took. With any luck, I could tie these back to each other and catch any huge discrepancies.

Finally, I wanted a chart of all the Cavern employees from all teams. This was for completeness more than anything else and was also a sneaky way for the GTA to update their registers under the pretense of the investigation.

Doesn’t hurt to be vigilant.

I put some other nitty-gritty things on there, too. Criminal records, previous bankruptcies, addicts, all the usual items that might point to someone taking a desperate payout for a hit-job. The raid team all seemed well put together, but a lot of things don’t show on the outside.

Adam had a quick look, added some more miscellaneous items, then rolled up the paper and stuffed it in a tube. He handed it back to me.

“Down to the aviary, please.”

The aviary? We use birds still?

“Umm, I have no idea where the aviary is. I thought there’d be some function in the Navigator to send messages.”

“Ha! Yeah, there is. We just haven’t got the levels for it or the budget to use it. So, pigeons it is.”

“Wild. Sooo, the aviary?”

“Oh yeah! Sorry. Couple streets south, lady there named Celeste. Ask for the GTA pigeon, and when she says, ‘He’s a feisty little fellow!’, reply, ‘Always eats his greens’.”

“Cheers.”

Secret codes. Hell yeah.

It was nice to be out in the sun. Recently, most of my time outside the office was spent commuting to the cathedral, or in dungeons. The trip to Anpar was the exception, but the scenery was bland for the most part so it doesn’t count.

That’s not to say that Haverbark was some architectural supermodel, but any town looks a lot nicer when you’re getting paid to walk through it.

South of the GTA office lay a district of other office buildings, interspersed with industrial places and service businesses like carriage repairs and maintenance or larger construction firms. Two carpenters stood outside one of these firms, trying their best to balance a frame of some kind over the top of a cart. It was far too large, and it sagged on the sides where the weight was. I considered giving them a hand, but I decided there would be too many cooks in the kitchen.

The aviary came into view across a freshly rolled road. The dirt here was darker than the rest of Haverbark, made of a packed red sand rather than the usual pale-yellow dirt. It still felt the same, but I had to wait for a line of carriages to pass before I could cross, as though the drivers all wanted to try out the newfangled track.

Yeeepp, still dirt!

That’s enough cynicism. For now.

If I were a bird, I would be very happy to live in one of the cages before me. Each was huge — almost putting my bedroom to shame — and housed only two or three birds. I imagined it would be hell trying to catch one of the pigeons to attach a message, but I’d reserve judgement until I watched the pro do it.

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Out the front of the store was an orange-haired young lady who I assumed was Celeste. She wore a blue jumper despite the sunny day and was sitting on the grass. She stared through me as I approached, like she was brooding over something.

“Hello?”

She snapped out of the trance.

“Oh! Hi! Sorry, just thinking a bit too deep. Got kind of lost, you know?”

“Yeah, I getcha. I’m from the GTA, Adam Warstock would like a message sent to the Anpar office. Can you help with that?”

“Absolutely I can. We’ve got a pigeon reserved just for you guys. He’s a feisty little fellow,” she queried.

“Always eats his greens,” I replied.

Satisfied, she winked at me and opened a green bin, pulling a generous handful of pellets from inside. They looked like compressed oatmeal, something that the ‘hotel’ in Anpar would’ve been proud to offer up at breakfast. Or lunch and dinner for that matter.

She spread the pellets along a flat sheet of iron just outside the cage, and all three pigeons fluttered over and pecked madly at the grainy meal. Celeste stood in wait, then at the precise moment that the closest bird poked its head through to peck at a pellet, she grabbed it by the neck.

It fluttered and beat its wings against the cage, scrambling to pull its head away.

I felt awful for the poor bird. The process was so much more violent than it needed to be.

“Now go in the cage there and grab ahold of it, alright? Quick sticks now, he’s slippin’ a little.”

Hell of a first impression. Two minutes ago, she’d been sitting in the flowers daydreaming, now she was wrangling a mad pigeon. Or she was the mad one.

I unsnibbed the gate and ran in, jostling through the branches and decorations placed inside. I grabbed the pigeon in both hands right as it came free from Celeste, but with both wings firmly clasped in my hands, the little fella was happy to sit still and look around at me.

Sorry, bud. At least you’ll get a day or two of respite.

He didn’t complain, so I took him outside to Celeste where she slid a contraption onto the bird’s ankle. She took the letter I carried out of its large GTA tube, folded it twice, then rolled it up until it fit in the capsule she’d attached. A round cap went on with a dab of glue, then we were ready to roll.

Sending a letter had never been so strenuous.

Celeste whispered something to the bird — surely not an order? — then threw it into the air. It went east for a couple hundred meters — the complete opposite direction of Anpar — then righted its course and flew back above us, as though playing a joke.

“Success! That’ll be one thousand dura, please.”

My face fell. For one, I had no money on me, but even if I had all my money on me, I wouldn’t be able to pay that much.

“I’m sorry, I...I thought it was free.”

“Free?! Free doesn’t put food on the table, does it? You can’t eat ‘free’.”

She was huffy now, understandably. The only thing I had worth one thousand dura was my dagger and, well, that’s it.

“I could pay in prayer? I’m really good with Rendar, or even Talthen if you’d like. Any Deity is fine, I’m really sorry.”

She scrunched her face as though considering her price, then her frown unraveled, and she burst out laughing. She held onto the side of the cage like she was at risk of chortling herself into next week.

“Hahaha, I’m just playin’ with ya! Ooo you should’ve seen your face. That was hilarious! The GTA has a tab with me, silly, it’s all free for you!”

I shook my head and grinned. Color flushed to my cheeks and once again, I felt the fool.

“Okay, yep, I’ll take that. You really committed to the act though, you know? And a thousand dura is cruel, that’s like my whole savings.”

“Doof, you gotta look after your money a bit better then. ‘Specially since you work at the GTA and all, y’all supposed to be financial whizzes,” she replied.

“One day. Thanks for that, Celeste. Not for the heart attack though.”

“My pleasure. For both things.”

I left the poultry torturer to her own devices and returned to the GTA. Adam waited at my desk, leafing through a sheath of papers.

“Did she get you with the five hundred dura fee?”

“She told me a thousand, and I nearly had a breakdown. Thanks.”

Adam got as much of a kick out of it as Celeste had, so much so that he had to put down his documents.

“Bluddy beautiful. She got me good when I started, too. I had the five hundred in my pocket, so she took it and then let me come all the way back to the office before she came along and returned it. If you ask Pen, she’ll say that she’s never seen me so despondent.”

“Oh wow, so you had it worse than me then!”

“Aye, these days, y’all get it so easy. I almost died twice in my first week.”

“I think I’ve matched that fairly easily.”

He thought for a moment, then agreed.

“That’s fair. Well, I’ve got a new way to kill you — drowning in paperwork?”

“Hand it over.”

He dumped the current sheath on my desk and rubbed his hands.

“This isn’t much at all,” I began. “I was expecting—”

“NELSON! Bring it in!”

In walked Nelson, and with him came my doom.

He led a trolley stacked with boxes from here to kingdom come. Nelson was a big man, brawny and built like a brick shithouse, but he was struggling. Each time he stopped to let an employee pass, he’d strain and grunt to get the trolley moving again.

He brought the trolley of terror to a stop next to my desk and I shuffled away, worried the floor might collapse and I’d go with it. He lifted each box off one at a time and plonked them in a semi-circle around my chair, boxing me in. My cubicle neighbors nosed over the top of the partition to see what misery I’d been chained with this time.

Once they saw my task, they hustled away in case the work was infectious.

“Quick one for you, I’m sure,” said Adam. “This is for one of Pen’s engagements. One of the larger guilds, as you would imagine.”

That much was clear.

“These are all invoices. We’d like you to catalogue them in alphabetical order, if that wouldn’t be too much trouble. Maybe staple each stack of fifty? Yeah?”

“Gladly. And when should this be done?”

“To be honest, mate, if you don’t explode of boredom first, I’d be surprised. Just chip away at it when you can and do some other things in between. Who knows, maybe we’ll get another graduate soon for you to pawn it off onto. Don’t rely on that though.”

“Fantastic, I’ll get cracking right now then.”

“Good luck!”

Adam left me with my Box-Friends and fled to his office.

I greeted my new companions with disdain, then lifted the top off the first box.

Oh, the joys.

I will admit, it felt like life was being a bit too exciting recently. Battles, investigations, strange acquaintances, wild bird-ladies and more.

This must’ve just been life’s way of tipping the scales back the other way, balancing me out with a cold hard slog of paperwork.

First invoice.

Where’s my ‘A’ pile going to be?

What should I have for dinner tonight?

Why am I so tired?

*Thump*