Returning to my cubicle was as miserable as you’d expect. I sat down, surrounded by this world’s Arnold Bakers, all assigned to patrol the guilds of Haverbark, eager to catch someone for forgetting to dot their I’s and cross their T’s.
Adam had taken the liberty of dumping the Ripping Warrior files on my desk with a sticky note reading, ‘It’s all here! Records of documentation, methodology, timestamps, interactions. Have fun!’.
The one thing I appreciated about Adam’s managerial style was that he wasn’t a pretender. It was absolutely clear that he was going to lump all the shit-work onto me — no pretense of ‘ask me for help at any time!’ like those corporate ‘people’ I’ve previously expressed disdain for. I was here until I got it done, whether that be midnight or morning or March.
To be honest, the work was basic. I started by documenting the bits and bobs we’d found — the Ripping Warriors were mislabeling the quality of their Combusto-Gunk, so I did some projections of my own and bumped up their tax by about 30%.
Next, I looked at their employee records. I’d briefly seen them earlier when I was sorting through the documents, but now something caught my eye.
Their employee listing had eighty-two people on their payroll. There were maybe twelve people at the dinner table when Adam and I went in, and maybe four or five out guarding the processing station or cleaning the headquarters. They might’ve had a team or two out at dungeons, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t be thirty-man teams — the headquarters was tiny even for the sixteen that were there.
All the ‘employees’ were getting paid — some extremely well. I scanned the names, not expecting to recognize any, but more to see if there was anything ridiculous. I had been known to do something similar in Ralph Palagroo’s tax return workpapers — every now and then I’d chuck in a joke name for the fellas at the IRS. Being that tax fraud was the least of our issues, Ralph didn’t mind.
Only a third of the way down the page, in the ‘G’ section, there was a name I knew.
Granton Roolever.
I didn’t have an exact reference for whether the amount he was being paid was large or not, but it was more than most of the other names — 80,000 dura.
In the next row over, it had his role at the guild, which was ‘consultancy’. I’d seen this and done this before, but it hadn’t been my style for the last twenty years or so, as it was a dead giveaway to any keen-eyed auditor. Consultancy was such a broad term — anything from hitman services to bribery to sketchy legal shit could come under it —and it was essentially a ‘set your price’ kind of setup. If I was allowed, I’d have to investigate further.
Adam was a handy enough fighter, but he really hadn’t looked too hard at the fine print on this one.
I finished up the report not too long after my coworkers headed home. As far as I knew, no one gave me a nod goodbye or any notice at all, really, though I would’ve been too involved in my work to notice. I tacked the pages together and ventured round the cubicles and offices for any labelled under ‘Adam’. I couldn’t remember his last name, and I wasn’t sure how high up in the GTA he was.
Office or cubicle? The grand distinction of mankind.
Along my journey, I found some snacks. The staff kitchen wasn’t quite as generous as I’d hoped, but stale biscuits and a couple pieces of fruit resembling peaches was a decent enough haul for a man with no money to his name.
The splashback in the kitchen showed me something else I hadn’t fully discovered yet — man was a very generous term to describe me. I looked about seventeen at most, all gangly limbs and a head of dark hair. Given my rank of ‘graduate’, I knew I was young, but not this young.
The whole Granton thing still irked me. Church Man had subtly indicated that he wasn’t the most reputable of fellows, though he dressed like one. Sucking the prayers from a bunch of bums for a few coins was one of those things that wasn’t exactly wrong — they had agreed to it — but it didn’t really give off good vibes, especially in tandem with the strange payments he was receiving from the Ripping Warriors.
Ideally, I’d go out and question the guild leader, Veronica, but after the near-death experience I’d had the first time, I wasn’t too keen to visit the shack out in the dust.
For now, I retrieved the Ravenous Rendar book from my desk and started studying. The god was voracious — he liked virtually all foods, provided they didn’t contain any green or purple ingredients, but he was unbelievably particular about the time and conditions upon which he would consume them. For this reason, the book was more of a strict schedule for ‘How to Feed Your God’, rather than a Choose Your Own Adventure.
I grabbed some paper and tape and made a tree chart with a spiderweb of yes/no questions. At the top was ‘What time of day is it?’, and the tree branched out with question after question until the very bottom of the diagram where they were like so:
‘Did Rendar eat a boiled potato with starch content of less than 2% density less than five days ago?’
Or;
‘Did the last full moon fall on the eighteenth day of the month?’
I was starting to get peeved off with this world’s system for naming the days and months. It was just numbers. ‘Wednesday’ didn’t exist, nor ‘June’ or ‘July’.
With my tree chart completed, I was now in business. I used it to check some of the prescribed meals in the book and, after a lot of double-checking, decided that they’d made some errors. Feeding Rendar beef carpaccio on the fourth day of the week was a one-way ticket to Deity-Hell, and a pomegranate glaze on his lemon meringue at any time in the seventh month was pure lunacy.
If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Armed with my new knowledge, I studied until I could barely hold up the book. The sheer number of recipes and meals crossing my mind made my near-empty stomach growl and grumble, but if I were to feed it, I’d have to get a job, and getting a job meant studying food.
Right before I collapsed, I thought I’d give prayer a shot. I sat cross legged and clasped my hands in my lap, hoping I was doing it right. The calendar on the wall suggested we were in the second week of the eighth month — what would be about August 12 — and the crude barometer nailed next to the water bucket showed barometric pressure of 29.8 in Hg — a number that meant nothing to me four hours ago, but now was the key indicator between offering the God of Knowledge a lamb souvlaki or a spaghetti amatriciana.
There was a lot of other information I lacked, but this should’ve been a reasonable start. With any luck, Rendar would choke down the meal rather than turn my brain to mush.
I closed my eyes and mumbled a prayer that felt reasonable.
“Oh Rendar, God of Knowledge, I offer you a sacrifice of spaghetti amatriciana, served with a sprinkle of lightly dried basil and a teaspoon of strong parmesan. Please accept my offer and grant me experience points in whatever way you see fit. I assure you there is extra parmesan if that is to your liking.”
I opened my eyes, sheepishly checking around the room to see if Rendar had come down to congratulate me on preparing his favorite meal. The old woman said I had an affinity for everything, but apparently I wasn’t attuned enough to deserve a meeting with the Deity.
I didn’t feel any stupider, so with the start of my academic life ticked off, I dragged two chairs into a dark corner of the office and promptly fell asleep.
###
“Marcus, what the hell are you doing?”
My eyelids flung open so fast my eyeballs almost jumped out, and I wiped my cheek through a puddle of drool as I fumbled out of my chair-bed, standing to attention.
“Morning, morning, err, let me put these back — was just a quick nap, I got in rather early this morn.”
“Did you sleep here all night? And why my office? It smells like sweat and stale bread, man!”
Adam pulled the chairs from my grasp and pushed the drooled-on one out the door, then tucked the second half of my bed under his desk. I was impressed with myself for finding his office, and impressed with him for having an office.
Not as much of a chump as I thought.
“I swear to Talthen, if you don’t have a good reason for this, I’m gunna put you on the janitorial team — they get a graduate once every thirty years, and the work they do makes our job look like daisy-picking. Explain!”
I cleared my eyes and tried to gather some saliva in my mouth so I could relieve my throat from the scratchy, claggy feeling of sleep.
“I...uh...I finished the report on the Ripping Warriors, then it was already late, so I did some study here, but I fell asleep. I’m sorry, Adam, I didn’t know this was your office.”
He fished around his desk for a moment, raising my copy of Ravenous Rendar.
“You’re studying prayer? I swear, you newbies get so keen on your Navigators that you’d kill yourselves trying to level up. Did you make an offering to any Rendar? You don’t seem much stupider, though the bar was low.”
I chuckled at his lazy joke. It was relieving to see Adam show some real emotion — the ‘corporate-voice’ and the managerial mannerisms he’d had yesterday — or was it two days ago? — were going to be the death of me if he kept it up. Better to rip off the Band-Aid now.
“I made an offering to Rendar, yeah. You took all my money, so I gotta earn some somehow! I’m going to work for Granton Roolever for a bit, just between work here.”
“Pff, Granton Roolever. As if he is gunna help you out — he hasn’t become one of the richest people in Haverbark by paying his employees well. He’ll scalp you for sure. And besides that though, did the prayer work?”
I checked my Navigator. I hadn’t felt any vibration while I’d prayed, and nothing had woken me up, but the green bar under ‘Domain Thinking’ in the Knowledge category was about half-full. A quick read suggested that levelling up the tree would give me a better understanding of battlefield tactics, troop movements, pretty much anything involving the indirect management of objects over a large area.
More knowledge to file away.
“It worked, yeah. And while we’re vaguely on the topic, I’d like to ask— sorry, I noticed something in the Ripping Warriors file. They have about eighty employees listed, and one of them is Granton Roolever. They’re paying him about 80,000 dura?”
Adam frowned, then spun round with his hands up.
“Okay, where’s the bluddy report then?”
“Ah shit, sorry. Let me grab it. I didn’t know where your office was.”
I scurried off to the sound of Adam scolding me under his breath. He was really laying into it now — I was starting to wonder if it was a sign of familiarity of disdain.
When I returned, he snatched it from me and flicked through to where I’d circled Granton’s name in the employee register. Continuing, he checked a disclosure in the Ripping Warriors tax return. His eyebrows slowly knitted together, and he chewed his bottom lip like a chattering Eskimo.
“Interesting. This is some surprisingly good work, well done. I’ll read the full thing this morn and then we might get out on the road. This time, don’t blow up the carriage.”
I smiled and held up my hands in mock horror, then walked back to my desk. I’d forgotten what it was like to have coworkers, and in my good mood, the tug of saying ‘Good morning!’ or ‘What’s on for today?’ to my cubicle neighbor almost captured me. I took a few deep breaths to relinquish myself from such a poisonous activity, and soon I was able to return to my menu preparation for Rendar.
I didn’t make any offerings this morning — breakfast was a touchy subject with the big man, and largely dependent on last week’s weather, which I was not game to guess. A stray apple pie could spell my demise.
Like many graduates, I was struggling to find work. Most people were caught up with their own stuff and couldn’t afford the time it would take to teach me anything or pull me onto an investigation, so my efforts were mostly in vain.
The best I got was a brief trip to the post office to drop off a bunch of letters. Most of them were demands for guilds to pay their tax — the GTA started off with a kindly worded letter, but it would very quickly turn into a powerful Combat-based employee armed with a club arriving on your doorstep, if need be.
If only it was that easy on Earth.
When I got back to the GTA, Adam was waiting for me. In each hand, he held a set of reins, tethered to a horse. The horse on his right was a giant — a grey monolith of muscle — and on his right was a brown and white spotted thing with a milky left eye and knobbly knees. It was barely half the size of the other, but it seemed well-tempered — it stood as still as a rock the whole time.
“Ready to go, Marcus? I bet you can tell which of these is for you. We weren’t granted the budget for a carriage this time. Again, you can guess why.”
I sighed and took the reins for the half-horse. If we had to run from anything, I didn’t think this one could carry me much faster than my own running pace.
“Do you think we can get any more of that Combusto-Gunk? I skipped breakfast.”
Adam laughed and swung up onto his ride.
“I’ll make sure to ask. Let’s get going.”