Chapter 10: Ch. 9

“Probie, transcribe these quest completions by lunch.”

“Right.”

“Probie, file these request forms before next shift.”

“Sure.”

“Probie, sort these logistics documents by end of day.”

“Okay.”

“Probie, redo the numbers on these contracts within the hour!”

“…You’re enjoying this, aren’t you.”

Sago stared gloomily over the pile of papers in his arms at the two snickering teens, fighting down the urge to incinerate the paperwork along with the whole building. It would be so easy. The whole thing was made from timber frames.

“It’s tradition!” Chay insisted, grinning as she rested her chin in her cupped palm. “Probie.”

“Probationary Union Apprentice Sago.” The decidedly undignified former Demon King corrected with a tiny bit of stress in his voice. He didn’t know if it was her tone of voice or simply the innate nature of the thing, but the word “probie” made him taste a lingering bitterness on his tongue that he didn’t want to acknowledge.

After a pause, he added with some emphasis, “I’m even wearing the uniform.”

If he had a free arm, he would gesture helplessly at the ostentatious white uniform with dark blue and gold trim. As it was he could only perform a little spin, unaware of the slight hook of pride in his upturned chin. It was a fine cut: a three piece styled suit with a caped jacket. Far too much tailoring for a desk clerk, but it had something to do with the fact that they were at the head branch. There were a lot more high-end clients or something.

At least, that’s what they kept telling him. Sago had yet to be allowed to meet any of these high-end clients. He couldn’t fathom why.

Chay clapped, then dug her elbow into Doug’s side until he looked up from his work and gave a dry clap in unison. After his expected participation had passed, he immediately ignored the two of them and returned to work.

“Looks good! You’re still a probie. Don’t feel bad; Doug was a probie. I was a probie. Even Vera was a probie, allegedly.” Chay continued, slouching back in her chair. “And part of being a probie is being the office whipping horse. It’s a rite of passage. Teaches you discipline, humility—”

“Is a stress reliever for your senior apprentices.” Douglas snickered, earning a kick under the desk and causing him to release a small, resentful, “ow!”

“I’m not naïve.” Sago stated flatly. Demons had their own hazing culture. It was just simpler, more straightforward, easier to deal with. This form of hazing was so, so… so reasonable. It was just telling him to do the work he was already doing, but making the process slightly more annoying just to mess with him.

“No, you’re arrogant.” Chay hooked her arm over the back of her chair, pointing at him imposingly with her pen. “Listen up, probie, ‘cus I’m saying this for your own good. Every society is built on layered structure: you have someone at the top and you have the plebs down the bottom. Moreso for adventurers! Everyone gets ranks, right? No matter how strong or capable you are, you get slapped with a D-rank and you’re nothing.

“Same goes for this side of the counter. In the Union, the person at the top is Old Goldy—the Hallmaster, got it? And as for you, you’re down the bottom. You’re the brick aaaaall the way down here holding up the whole pyramid.

“I’m treating you like this to make you learn to put up with it. Because, probie? You’re gonna be putting up with a lot worse. Adventurers disrespecting you because you’re a penpusher, seniors fobbing work off on you because you’re a junior, clients completely walking over you because you’re poor, because you’re weak, because you’re just the middleman to the person they really wanna be talking to. And you’re gonna wanna punch ‘em all in the face.”

She pounded her fist down on the table for emphasis, causing the towers of papers around her to shake.

“But you can’t. That’s the damn rub of being a working class stiff. You have to put up with it, usually with a smile.” She rolled her eyes. “Just be lucky you’re not a woman either, because then you have to deal with sleazebags too. There’s a reason they put Orion on the front desk during rush hour.”

Douglas quietly stacked another form onto the pile, steadily making faster progress than his chatty colleague. His only offering of advice was a simple:

“Ignore her.”

“Am I wrong?!”

He sighed, looking up from his work with a resigned expression of someone who was having the same conversation for the umpteenth time and already knew all the answers. “No, everything you said is true. But that’s not the reason you’re hazing him: you’re just being annoying for the sake of being annoying. Please get back to work.”

“I’m helping you too.” Chay insisted, though begrudgingly returned to scratching at forms with a chicken handed font. “Remember the last noble that thought she’d make a career for herself here and just ended up putting more work on our plates? They got all that education in all the wrong places.”

Sago wasn’t sure if he ought to argue that he wasn’t a noble but realised it made no sense: his background was he was an itinerant from the harbour district, yet he had a recommendation from one of the highest offices in the kingdom. It certainly screamed “some highborn noble's bastard embarrassment being shuffled off to be someone else’s problem with the help of a large donation to the church”. It also tied up loose ends about his identity that stopped people looking further into it, so perhaps it was better to just go with their assumption.

So instead he settled on: “I had no formal education.”

“Oh, that’s even better. You’re stupid and arrogant instead of just arrogant.” Chay rolled up a scroll of paper, bopping him on the head. “Redo the numbers, probie. Or else if an adventurer gets shorted on a reward, you can deal with it.”

Sago was out of witty ripostes, so he was forced to just nod and turn around without another say in defence of himself. The office was bustling as compared to the first day he was here, with countless clerks dutifully ignoring him in order to focus on their own work. Chatter flew literally and metaphorically over his head on the subject of membership tax, resource distribution and sales, chop shops, monster population surges, collection site protection, ranking reviews, dungeon grading investigations…

The front of house was in full swing too. It was too early for drinking, but the Union Hall offered the kind of breakfast that catered specifically to adventurers—sausages with little chewy bits that you hoped were gristle and hash browns that were more oil than they were potato and steak cuts off the chewiest bits of the carcass and eggs that still jiggled and a dearth of anything coloured green—and everyone was eating. The whole Union Hall smelt like heartburn.

“Sago?” Orion paused in the middle of processing a backlog of quest forms, swivelling in his chair to peer at him. “What are you doing here?”

“I—” He paused, wondering how to approach the complex dance of nuanced dialogue that made up human vocal interaction. Start with a pithy pleasantry? “I think your glasses are very reflective.”

Beat. Pause. Wait. Process. Orion gradually nodded in solemn acceptance, letting out a soft, “Oh.” His sea green eyes swept over the cudgel of bureaucracy Sago had been burdened with, picking up the top sheaf of paper the stack. “Quest accounts? Junior apprentices shouldn’t be filing these.”

“I was told to double check the numbers.” Sago explained flatly, nodding to the quest board.

Orion leaned back into his chair and crossed his arms. His head tilted slightly in understanding. “The ‘welcome work’. When I was an apprentice, my seniors gave me the backlog of paperwork to do.” He nodded to the pile in front of him. “I’d end up staying up until past midnight and fall asleep at my desk, and still not finish it all. Then the next day, they’d give me more to do.”

“What’s changed?” Sago asked with a frown, looking at the untouched work in front of Orion. Quest forms in triplicate, acceptance and completion, quality assurance applications for turned in materials, proposition forms for on-site reviews of monster infestation clearances, and who knew what else.

“Nothing. That was the point.”

The diminutive demon king couldn’t help but sigh as another life lesson was dropped on his shoulders. Was this what nurturing was meant to be? He really couldn’t say, since he was short of anything to compare it to. He was alone from the moment he was formed into the world.

“Leave those here, I’ll do them after lunch.” Orion stared at Sago thoughtfully, his gaze inscrutable behind his spectacles. “Come with me in the meantime; I think I have a lesson you might find more interesting.” He moved a placard declaring his station was now closed on the grainy countertop then stood, pulling out a small silver disc attached by a chain to the pocket of his uniform jacket and flipping open. Small needles clicked around the face of the disc, gliding over numbers marked on the outer rim. “It ought to still be open.”

Sago stood on tiptoe, intrigued.

Orion was about to put the disc away, but paused when he noticed Sago’s interest. Lowering it down to his eye level, he explained, “It’s a kind of watch. It measures the passage of time.”

Sago was somewhat familiar with the construct. He’d found them occasionally on the corpses of adventurers, though they were defunct by then. This one, however, was built differently. It gave off a rhythmic clicking sound with each push of the thinnest needle, and there were no visible magic circuits engraved into the silver metal of the casing. There was another thing: it was too thin.

“Where’s the crystal core?”

It was like something had been activated inside the bespectacled man, triggering a waterfall of words: “Ah, that’s what makes this so interesting. It’s something called a mechanical watch. It means it doesn’t use magic to power it. Strange, isn’t it?” Orion handed it over to Sago as they walked to the back of the Union Hall, explaining in a rhythm that wasn’t rushed, but had a kind of plodding, painful importance of someone whose special interest had been unleashed.

It was strange. It also reminded him of that bizarre metal world devoid of magic yet full of functioning machines. As he turned it over, he felt nothing but smooth silver and felt not a shred of magic emanating from within the casing.

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“Is it new?”

“No.” Orion took the watch back, tucking it away. “The first design was… a hundred years ago? They just didn’t really catch on. They’re more expensive, for one thing, and need to be constantly wound—powered up—by hand. Basically they’re a specialty item for a fairly niche market to serve a specific purpose—can you guess what?”

“Is this a test?”

Orion simply answered, “No. But also, yes.”

How massively unhelpful.

“Dungeons. To measure the passage of time in dungeons.”

“Pass. Since magic tools are unreliable in dungeons, a toolmaster came up with the idea of trying to find a way to power tools through non-magical—”

Orion pushed open a door, revealing endless floor-to-ceiling rows of shelves stuffed with books and binders. His voice should have echoed, in such a large and directed space, yet instead it seemed to disappear into paper and leather, becoming soft and muffled white noise that blended in with the sound of whispered rustles as pages were turned by unseen hands. He seemed momentarily taken aback, and then sheepish.

He placed a finger to his lips, then raised it to a plaque hung over the door. 

SILENCE IN THE ARCHIVES

It wasn’t a request, nor even an order: it was a command spell. The spell mark was formed from a sheet of silver and had a fine circuitry network of mwyn embedded in it, combining sigils for muffling spells and boundary spells. Sago’s eyes flashed, intrigued by the workmanship. It wasn’t pure silver really, but instead a sterling alloy, and the sheet of metal was incredibly thin. There were probably five other marks at least to create the completed barrier spell, but probably more given the limited range achieved with such a deliberately muted medium. What was interesting was there was a third spell effect woven into the sigils of the first two, borrowing rune shapes and syllables to obfuscate itself.

A hand rested on top of his head, distracting him from his thoughts before he could truly study it. Sago looked up at Orion. The man tilted his head, gesturing for him to follow.

There was no logical rhyme or reason dictating the layout of the shelves that he could make out. They were labyrinthine corridors of crowded books, of binders with dates burnt into the leather of the spines plotting out chunks of time spanning months to years. These were not Union reports—those were stored away in the back offices in tightly guarded lockers. But they were records of something.

Orion stopped in a circular clearing that had been formed from curved shelves, with three exits including their own. In the centre were a cluster of study desks with hooded oil burner lamps. Orion walked the entire proximity of the clearing, pausing at occasion to pull books from shelves and add them to a pile that Sago had been involuntarily volunteered to carry.

The books swayed, and Sago eventually followed Orion based on the sound of his footsteps.

After being instructed through hand gestures to set the book mountain down on one of the study desks, Orion gave Sago the tiniest flash of a smile from someone who read for fun and clearly mimed his intentions for the new recruit.

Read.

Yeah. He’d gathered that.

Sago’s days became split between work and reading. At first his pride prompted him to put his best effort into the work in order to prove his superiority over the trivial formalities of bureaucratic pomp, but gradually realised there was no way to really finish it all. To paraphrase as Orion had said: the work would always be there, lurking like a bad dream in the dark recesses, and the point was to realise there would be no end to it.

The reading was interesting, at least. The regiment Orion had chosen for him to start with were arithmetic, logic, law, and history books, which neatly filled in the gaps of his common sense. It was fascinating to learn of history as remembered through the words of humans, though he couldn’t avoid scribbling pertinent corrections in the margins of the books.

For example, here, the date of this battle was entirely off by two years and the so-called general heading it had already been dead six months. Or here, it said that So-And-So III inherited the crown after the death of So-And-So II, but Sago knew for a fact that there had been an interim king for a span of three months between the death of the last and the coronation of the next. He hadn’t gotten his name before he’d killed him, sadly.

Their understanding of demons was even worse, and almost all the history in regards to Daimonos and surrounding regions were, to his knowledge, fabricated. This book seemed to suggest that the demon kingdom had always been terrorising the continent, locked in conflict with neighbouring lands, which was wholly impossible considering that all human and demi races preceded the existence of the demon race by thousands of years, and Daimonos itself was at most eight thousand years old, while the human kingdom he was currently in was over twenty-thousand years old according to his knowledge—though the foundations were even older than that.

So he annotated a small correction unhappily, and flipped the page.

There was a stifled laugh, causing him to look up.

A dark-skinned girl with fluffy chestnut hair stared at him, steel grey eyes veiled behind small half-rim spectacles. Her features were odd, a little too mature for her apparent age, but there was also a playful spark in her eyes. When she realised Sago was looking at her, she immediately dropped her face, her expression becoming apparently cold and stony. Lifting her chin, she wandered over with her hands behind her back, carrying herself with a deep sense of gravitas and dignity. She spoke to Sago in a muted whisper:

“Graffiti is strictly prohibited.”

Grabbing the page, she turned it back over, raising her eyebrows at the flourished “IDIOT” underscored three times at the end of Sago’s painstaking corrections.

“⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ” Sago replied coldly.

“Wages will be garnished for every infraction.”

“⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ” He insisted.

“I don’t make the rules.” She tapped the emblem on her chest, signifying she was part of the archival staff. “I’m merely here to strictly enforce them.”

“⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ !” He despaired.

“…Pfft. It’s the muffling spell.” She finally relented, breaking into a grin. “Whispering is fine, but it’ll automatically silence you if you—” As she raised her voice, her mouth continued to move yet the sound was abruptly cut off, her expression calm with experience as she finished explaining, “—so this is about the loudest you can speak.”

“⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ” He whispered.

“…Well, practice makes perfect.”

“⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ” He gestured to the book, not really worried about the garnished wages as he’d yet to even receive any and had no real purpose for them at the moment anyway, but more worried about possible reprimands.

“Nah, I don’t care.” The girl shrugged, pulling over a chair that let out a small groan of wood rubbing on wood before it was abruptly silenced in an eerie fashion. She sat down on it lazily, half-slouched on Sago’s desk, all veneer of authority cleanly wiped away. “I’m no snitch. Moreover, I’m ways more curious ‘bout how come you’re so sure of yourself.”

“⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ” He explained the truth of his identity cleanly.

She responded with an expression caught between a scowl and a laugh.

“Cheeky.”

Her hand ruffled his hair lightly. What was it with people and doing that?

“Okay, I’ll tell you a secret instead, then. Truthfully, it’s pretty much tradition for adventurers to add their own notes and observations to the records. Why do you think we provide pens?” She laughed silently, the sound disappearing into webs of invisible magic capturing each wave and carrying them off into the ether. She flipped the book to the back, showing where extra papers, many as yellowed and brittle as the original book, filled with a variety of handwriting had been crammed. Some were barely legible with age, others unreadable due to the immaturity of the author’s writing, but most speculated on the information contained within the main volume. Only a few were petty signatures denoting who sucked and who ruled, or exclaiming the eternal love of two pairs of initials.

“This is the stuff you really wanna study.” She assured him.

“⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ ?”

“Okay, please learn to mime or something.”

There was a chime through the archives. The only sound louder than rustling paper and indistinct whispers, chiming four times a day through the room. The girl looked up, her eyes immediately brightening. In a complete turn of face, she hurriedly excused herself with the exclamation of her shift ending, and waved him good-bye before disappearing with a flash of speed.

Sago was starting to feel the way human beings formed connections was too random and abrupt for him to ever keep up with.

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