Waverly had to sit on her tail to stop it from wagging as she boarded the hellevator. Her hands were steady as she pulled down the security bars over her shoulders, but her mind was racing, even more so than usual. The entire last week had been a blur of her caring for the brats, trying to keep up with her college work, doing household chores, and then finally, at the end of the week, Fight Night. Victor had been there, which had been super great, but she’d also needed to let off some steam, very much. In some ways, she loved her siblings as much as she loved life itself, but they were totally like puppies still, especially the younger ones, and they could really get on her nerves especially when they wouldn’t stop trying to play with her when she was actually trying to study, or get work done, or anything of the sort. So it had taken a fight or two or three or four before she had calmed her nerves enough to sit down and talk with Victor.
As always, the catboy didn’t mind her having to vent her excess energy, which was one of the things that she totally liked about him, because he was so very patient with her (more than herself, sometimes), which was super sweet. He also asked her how everything was going, but she hadn’t really wanted to talk about it, and instead asked him about his life up in Elysium.
With the adrenaline of the fight leaving her body and washing all the tension and worries out with it, she’d fallen into that lovely state where everything was calm and quiet and she just felt warm, and cozy, but in her mind, which was one of her most favorite feelings in the entire world. And so, calmly, she’d listened and the words that usually wanted to escape her so badly, stayed inside, snuggling up to each other like cozy puppies that you could pet if she wanted to, instead of worrying that they might bite whoever came close.
She’d actually been a bit worried about her bestie, because he said that nothing really happened up there, and perhaps he was maybe a little bit lonely? But he'd also said that he had started raiding his mom’s library for management books, which was completely unusual for him, but also kind of cool, because he had read stuff that she had never even considered. Instead of numbers and data and tables and columns, his stuff mostly concerned itself with how to actually lead people, which was completely useful and something she really needed to learn herself, so she asked him a lot of questions, which she knew he loved, which was even better, because this way she could make him happy and learn something at the same time.
By the time the Crow had brought out the old Stereo and the unofficial metal part of Fight Night had started, Waverly was already quite pumped again, so despite her earlier reservations she’d told him all about her life at home, and how his message had changed everything. She’d told her Mom and Dad immediately, of course, but they hadn’t even believed her it was real and told her it was probably some sort of scam, or worse, an unpaid internship, and that she shouldn’t ever be working for free, which was fair enough, but also it made her so angry how they thought about Victor being some sort of con artist trying to take advantage of her.
Just thinking about it had made ears flatten and her voice turn into that low, dangerous rumble, but just at that moment Ssseth had come up and told her that she should try to dance it off with him, and Victor had given her the annoying eyebrow wiggle and so she had playfully shoved him off his chair, and let Ssseth drag her to the dancefloor.
It had worked so damn well, it made her smile just to think about it. The beat of the drums, the insistent thrum of the base, the elated riffs above it all, they’d all spun her into a cocoon that hugged her until she felt like things would be alright.
Then, at the end, when they went out back to buy as many albums as they could carry without becoming conspicuous, Victor told her he’d mail her a contract as soon as he got home.
When she’d shown that to her parents, they hadn’t even talked about the fact that she’d snuck out again. Her dad had even said that she should do it, and hope it would work out for her, and her mom had only warned her once about not fucking up this opportunity, so they were both super impressed and happy for her!
The hellevator rumbled as the eruption of magma that was going to propel them upward started to roil underneath their feet. She was happy that she was wearing her thick-soled boots because sometimes the floor got a little bit hot and burned the feet of the races that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wear shoes, which she heard was always a bit of a nuisance. As the steel cage shot upwards and she was pressed deep into her seat, her mind wandered as usual, and this time it snagged on the cute date she’d had with Ssseth on Saturday.
It had been way cool! The guy was so sweet, it was almost unbelievable. Her parents had allowed her to go out if the other kids took over her chores, so Ssseth picked her up and they went down to Helheim to go ice skating. That was a super unusual hobby for a cold-blooded creature like a Lizardkin, but Ssseth had packed himself really tight and put a lot of those weird heating pads that got really hot once you flipped a little metal thing inside of them inside of his clothes. She’d never been ice skating before, and had to learn a lot, but by the end she could actually do an entire round without his help. To celebrate they’d gone for milkshakes, and Ssseth had told her all about his plans of eventually becoming a dragon, which was a totally amazing dream to have, and she wanted for him to succeed, because he totally deserved it, even though it was super hard to actually get that. Not only would he have to level up a lot, there would also be a lot of luck involved, but he thought that he could get the system to do what he wanted by trying to brave the cold a lot, and getting himself heated up, which completely makes sense, and explained why he liked ice skating so much. Though he had kind of explained that by now he just did it because it was fun. He was really good at it too. And kissing.
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The warmth Waverly felt on her cheek as she undid the metal bars and exited the hellevator at Elysium station had nothing to do with the magma underneath her feet.
“Yo!” said Victor with one of his shit-eating grins when he saw her. “Assuming the date went well?”
“Can you, like, shut the fuck up, please?” Waverly asked while her cheeks felt like they were about to melt off her face. She did laugh though because she was quite sure that she must look kinda cute, and that was cool.
“Come on, the rail to the portal room is over there!” she said, not-so-sneakily changing the topic.
Victor said nothing, but his quiet smile said more than anything else, as usual. How the hell did he do that? It was so unfair.
They settled into the mag rail car that was, like everything up here in Elysium, quite meticulously kept and absolutely spotless. It was actually so spotless, that Waverly doubted she could ever get her house as clean as this railway car, even if she gang-pressed all of her siblings into cleaning duty. Then again, it might be better to actually not involve them at all, and just dump them somewhere outside so the house would actually stay clean for longer than like 15 seconds.
“Are you, like, excited?” Waverly asked as the mag rail was picking up speed with a quiet hum.
“Not as excited as you,” Victor said with a raised eyebrow and a pointed look at her twitching tail. If that fucking thing kept betraying her, at some point she would think about tail reduction surgery, for real.
But she knew Victor by now, and so it was with her own smirk that she countered: “So did you get through this management book that you told me about last night?”
“Oh yeah, it was only 350 pages,” Victor said, his eyes suddenly lighting up. Like birds taking flight, his hands began to wave animatedly as he began talking more than he ever had until two weeks ago. “Did you know, for example, that after some point, paying people more actually makes them less productive? I know, it sounds bad. I do not mean it in the way where you steal from your workers, though. If they have everything they need, truly need, not what management thinks they should need, and they are satisfied with how much money they are getting, then paying them more makes them feel like a fraud. At least that’s the working theory. Instead, what people are really looking for at that point is purpose, autonomy, and mastery. They want their work to matter. They want to be able to do what they think is right to reach that purpose. And lastly, they want to be good at what they do. That’s what really motivates them in the end.”
Waverly was skeptical, because she couldn’t even think about having enough money to buy everything she needed, much less what she wanted and she couldn't keep that from her face, so she said as much.
“Well, maybe you won’t have to imagine for much longer, eh?” Victor said with a quiet smirk.
Waverly smiled back, but she thought about all the other people in the dregs, who weren’t as lucky as she was and who also totally deserved the chance. But this was really not the time to talk about stuff like that.
A minute later they arrived at the portal station.
“Oh!” Waverly said, feeling her eyes go wide at the sight of the portal chamber. When people call it a chamber, that really was super misleading because it made her think of a small cupboard or something, like a storage box. Instead, she was looking at a skyscraper with more stories than she could count in a few seconds, and she was really good at counting quickly. She was actually pretty sure that the Spire on top of the building scraped against the ceiling of Elysium, but she couldn’t be sure, because of the clouds that swallowed the upper floors.
It had been built in that style that used a lot of brass and arches and glass, with statues that reminded her of gargoyles and those really vigilant ominous guardian figures, but in a very stylized way, all featureless, which made them somehow even more imposing, all sleek like. What did they call that style again? Art depot? Hard décor? Something like that. Point was it was huge and was clearly meant to remind people of a time when everything was possible and limits had been abolished for a while.
The gates, all orange gems and gold, were wide open and she was pretty sure that if two cyclopes stood on top of each other, they could still walk through there, no problem. Probably built so that Dragons and Giants didn’t have to squeeze through just to go to work. Super smart, but also probably really friggin expensive.
Next to her, Victor was looking at it with the same admiration, but unlike her, he had managed to keep his mouth shut.
“Have you never been here? I, like, thought you must have been here a lot of times before? Because like, of school stuff?” Waverly asked.
"Oh no, I was homeschooled, remember? And Mom was always too busy to take me to work with her." A shadow hushed over his features. Waverley wrapped an arm around his shoulder and nodded toward the entrance, where hundreds of monsters were streaming in and out constantly.
"That’s super cool, though, because now we can explore it together. Portal chamber exploration twinsies!"