Copyright © 2024 Levi Singer.
All rights reserved. No part of this book (including serialized chapters) may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from Levi Singer, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Ownership Validation Hash: ae9d5b8c9d6534a7f155e61d163e2b7d96d6f71a9097ff8c2bd886d99b971473
----------------------------------------
Luzzi
Recruitment Square, Farcem City, Motrendi
The scent of blooming flowers, fresh baked bread, and marshland slowly began to fade. Luzzi flicked her tongue out to enjoy the sensation of the diminishing scents even as the new ones gained strength and smothered them out.
The fragrance of nature was too-quickly replaced with the smell of hot sun-baked asphalt, open sewage, and millions of unwashed bodies. So today’s collection must be earth. The only other tutorial world which smelled as bad was Briddock, with its brimstone, sulfur, ash, and salt.
As sightless as Luzzi was, she had no problem navigating through the area as simple huts and hovels dissolved, only for buildings of concrete and metal to take their place. She wove through the bustling streets, dodged around other recruiters and setup staff going about their own preparations. This was her five thousandth recruitment day, which meant it was her last recruitment day - assuming she could convince some naive arrival into taking her place. She was confident she could.
“Luzzi. Come here.”, a deep bass tone rang out behind her. Spittle flicked from her long tongue in annoyance, she spun around to face the huge bear-like beast kin.
“Baav. What do you want?” Luzzi’s speech was accented ever so slightly as her long tongue had trouble with the dialect chosen for today’s recruitment. It seemed to be some Latin variant. They were some of the worst for her kind.
Baav raised his top set of arms, paws closed in a show of non-violent intention. “Calm yourself, Luzzi. Peace upon your pack.”
Luzzi’s long prehensile tail flicked in irritation, the ends splitting wide in a clear sign of annoyance. “I am busy, Baav. Today is my last.”
Baav nodded, his muzzle splitting ever so slightly to indicate a smile - though no teeth could be seen. Why Baav and other beast kin decided to mimic human mannerisms outside of recruitment, she’d never understand. “Madrick will be watching today.”
Luzzi froze. Her mana circulated unconsciously, activating her most powerful defenses and stealth. Baav’s large eyes blinked slowly in her direction, dropping his top pair of arms and crossing all four of them as he deliberately drew his brows down into a frown and flicked his eyes about, “Now that is rude, Luzzi.”
She hardly heard his words, survival instinct demanding she run. Hide. Her sixth rank stone-skin spell would protect her from a point-blank explosion, would turn any enchanted blade up to rank seven, and would shrug off being crushed by any of the skyscrapers which were rapidly fading into existence all around. It would do nothing against Madrick. Nor would her plethora of stealth skills and equipment. She forced her mana to calm and shook herself to throw off the lingering effects of her stealth.
As she faded back into view, Baav’s eyes snapped back to Luzzi’s face - Examining her pale fur gone green around her puffy cheeks. “Peace, Luzzi. Madrick has no reason to notice either of us. I warn you only so you would not react so… Powerfully if you sense him while working.”
“Yes…” Luzzi’s tongue flicked out again to taste the air nervously, as her tail swished, her legs crouched slightly as if to leap. “Yes, that would not be ideal. Gratitude.”
The big bear face lit up in his attempted human smile, “Good. Good. We want to avoid having to wipe any of them.”
Luzzi’s tail fell to the ground, wilting at the reminder. It was nearly seven hundred years ago, but her first day as a recruiter still haunted her. She had been scared to death of the orcs who began appearing around her, having never met any of the war hungry creatures before. She had used her natural stealth to vanish from the terrifying warrior’s sight. No orc straight out of the tutorial had the ability to disappear to so completely.
That was all that had been needed to start a chain reaction. One orc had screamed about being, “In a shaman dream trap,” and all of the orcs within earshot had become immediately belligerent and uncooperative. The attitude had rapidly spread as the orcs spread the theory loudly until every single one of them was ready to fight. The recruitment administrators had to intervene that day. One of them had cast a spell of mass-sleep and they’d all been taken to a secondary “emergency recruitment” facility where mid rank mind weavers used them as practice. They wiped their minds of the event, then several days later when all of them had been “reset” they sent them to the recruitment training platform for soon-to-be recruiters to practice with them. Every orc in that batch had been crippled by the event, their potential limited drastically. Not one of them had ever risen above a rank one as far as Luzzi was aware.
Mistakes like that happened, though rarely at such a large scale. Orcs and other war-like races tended to be the easiest to mess up. One slip could ruin the entire batch, as their training and instinct would be to inform the rest of the “hoard”. Luzzi just had the misfortune of her first recruitment being an orc world. She hadn’t even been scolded for it. Her trainer had simply said, “Don’t do that again.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Humans aren’t like that anyway”, Luzzi muttered. “I could probably just ‘reappear’ and tell them I’m a magician. Actually, today is an Earth day. I could just say I’m a wizard. Only those nearby would be effected, and it’d probably just help me get more tier ten recruits.” Luzzi’s tail raised and she ran both her paws down her face in an expression of glee.
Baav laughed, a booming sound exploding from him which quite literally forced Luzzi to step backward to avoid losing her balance. “You’re more likely to cause problems with that gale-force of a laugh than I am.” She admonished while running her hands down her face twice in returned laughter.
The huge bear beast kin waved her off, “You are warned. Proceed with your day.”
She took the dismissal gracefully, Baav had never learned manners or subtlety. He would do poorly today, as he always did on human recruitment days. He only excelled with recruitment when the target race was one of the “brute races”. Luzzi rubbed her paws together as her tail rose and swished in happy anticipation; she, on the other hand, did well with humans. Her race’s deliberate way of showing emotion lent itself well to properly mimicking their expressions with her illusory selves.
Speaking of which, she fell into stealth and cast her illusory puppet. Unlike Baav and many others, she didn’t use self-cloaking illusions or gear to make her own visage appear to be the target race for recruitment. Instead, she summoned puppet illusions and had them say and do what she wished. She had begun with a self-cloak like the others, before she had the spells and power to make the puppet illusions, but now she had a superior option.
----------------------------------------
The illusions had all been reset to create an environment extremely reminiscent, but not a mimicry of, Earth. The administrators had figured out long ago that reproducing a person’s homeland too closely would cause a mental dissonance which was anything but ideal for recruitment. “Uncanny valley,” the humans of Earth would call it.
Luzzi had been waiting patiently for the last hour, her puppets all setup and ready to intercept likely candidates for her faction. Her patience was rewarded moments later when the humans began to materialize. She quickly found three which which looked promising. Each of them was small, scrawny even. The body one incarnated into after the tutorial was the same body a being had in the tutorial; but at the absolute height of their ability. They were given the body from their “golden years.” The awe and excitement seen on many faces was proof enough of that.
The one exception were people who had been born into the tutorial with disabilities . No one started with disabilities in the real world. One had to “earn” their disabilities. Within her stealth field, invisible to the humans, Luzzi ran her hands down her face repeatedly in laughter at the thought.
It was this group of people Luzzi always targeted. They were just as good as anyone else for the tasks her faction needed done, after all. It didn’t matter if a body started at peak physical condition when it would just be running errands, pushing papers, and making coffees. Besides their eligibility, another reason Luzzi liked to target this demographic was due to their relative willingness to do menial work with little to no questions asked. Deciding it was time to get down to her own menial tasks, she directed her puppets to begin their work.
With her ability to multi-task, Luzzi could pass control of two of the three puppets into the “background” and they would go through the motions well enough without her direct control. She did just that, choosing the one that looked the most skeptical and unsure about the situation and approached with her main attention.
“Hello, you look a bit uncertain ma’am.” Her puppet said, her voice a soft and sweet tone that most humans responded well to. Each puppet was as nondescript as possible. This one had brown hair and dark eyes which could have been any color, and skin that was a lightly reddened peach color, with her face in particular being a little too red. The illusion had lips which were just a bit too small, cheeks a little too sallow. Nothing about her was ugly, nothing about her was beautiful.
The human in front of her turned her eyes toward the illusion and nodded, “What’s going on?” She spoke in the same language that all of the humans spoke for this recruitment.
Luzzi wasn’t too concerned about the specifics, as the mass universal translation spell that was maintained over the recruitment area ensured they could understand each other. Even if this language wasn’t the woman’s native tongue, which was likely, she probably hadn’t noticed that she was speaking a foreign language.
She had the illusion reply, “You’ve started life! I and my colleagues,” she had the illusion wave in a vague manner, “are here to help you acclimatize and get you to someone who can answer all of your questions. May I ask your name?”
After a moment’s hesitation the human nodded, “I’m Naomi.”
“Perfect! It’s a pleasure to meet you Naomi. I’m Sherry. I was in your position once too, don’t worry, we’ll get you sorted out in no time! First things first, let’s figure out who I should send you to talk to. What skills do you have, and what would you like to do with your life? The tutorial should have given you some idea of all that, as that’s the point of it.” The pitch was calculated, curated through hundreds of Earth recruitment days and polished up just right. The last part about the tutorial made most Earth humans feel pressured to agree. After all, they didn’t like revealing they had done anything wrong or failed to learn a lesson they were meant to. An easy weakness to exploit.
Naomi stared for a few seconds before answering, eye twitching slightly in what Luzzi could only assume was nerves, “I’m good with money and math… I was an accountant before… Before I died…” her eyes began to glaze over.
Luzzi’s illusion pushed forward quickly, before Naomi could begin to panic or think too hard, “Perfect!” She pushed the illusion’s smile to be as dazzling as the puppet was capable of, her tone filled with energy and cheer. Just enough to pull the stressed human back into the conversation.
“Then I’ll go ahead and assign you to our economics department for on-boarding. You can go through all of the details with them, how’s that sound?” Seeing Naomi begin to nod, her mouth starting to open to answer, she quickly continued, “Excellent! You’ll see the agreement pop up in front of you, just think, ‘Accept’ and I’ll lead you over there!”
Seeing the woman’s eyes unfocused, she waited for three seconds, enough to make it clear she wasn’t trying to keep her from reading the agreement, before mentioning, “It’s just a standard user’s agreement for all of the amenities, our privacy policies, employment opportunity disclosures, and so on. If you’d like to read it all I can lead you over to a quiet booth so you’re undisturbed. I think it only takes about four hours to go through it all if I remember correctly.”
The statement worked like magic, as Luzzi glanced at her own contracts interface and rubbed her face in glee, she had accepted. The woman was now under contract for the next seven thousand years - the longest possible term under the universal law of debt release. Luzzi moved her attention from that puppet to another, which seemed to be struggling to make a similar deal with a scrawny dark skinned man, or maybe kid. Her Sherry puppet would lead Naomi over to the correct department desk; then go into an office and dissipate. She’d create a new one to replace it once she felt her link to the puppet vanish.
Luzzi’s day was going fantastically well so far, if she managed to get twenty or more contracts today: she’d not only meet her ‘five thousand recruitment days’ requirement to be released from this role, but she’d also be eligible for a free delve as a reward. That would be nice; it’d been too long since she killed something.
As Luzzi directed her puppet and got the recruitment of this “Marcus” back on track, she rubbed her face with fierce laughter, over and over, as she caught the words of Baav’s chosen recruit next to her illusion, “I want to speak to a lawyer.”