Chapter 21: Book 2 Chapter 1 – The Simple Life (Part 3)

The nightlife had slowed down dramatically since Esther and I had taken our jobs at the Café Served. All of the freshmen, eager to celebrate their new position in life, had learned that money was something they needed to conserve if they wanted to make it through the month with three good meals a day. Some had gotten jobs to supplement the university-provided income, others had simply gotten good at saving, a concerning number had chosen beer over food, and a select few had managed to become friends with upperclassmen of the upper two ranks, Golden Eagles and Silver Knights, who were decisively more flush with cash than them.

Whatever the means of maintaining some funds to go drinking were, the people who could afford to drink were spread out throughout the month and less prone to getting absolutely wasted. The weekends, particularly Saturday, were still the most crowded time, but it couldn’t be compared to the concentration of ill behaviour and foolishness that had been the second weekend. I didn’t want to imagine what the one prior to us taking the job had been like.

Whatever horror we had missed there, nowadays the majority of our shifts consisted of serving regulars. A few locals were regulars of the Café Served’s bar. Its quiet atmosphere, and its relative remoteness made it attractive to a certain clientele. Plus, Hannibal, the regular barkeeper, was a person of moderate renown. I wasn’t aware of this initially, but apparently barkeepers had several bars they worked at on different days of the week. Hannibal was a hired hand only for the weekends in the Café Served, Monday to Thursday he worked in a bar closer to the city centre. We regularly had friends and customers who followed him here, because they appreciated his service. They also got to make fun of him having to wear a butler’s suit.

Long before any of them arrived, Esther and I got to work. The bar opened at 17:00, our shifts started at 16:00. Due to the intricacies of the uniform, getting changed took around ten minutes. Getting undressed was easy enough. On a good day, the clothes that I had hung in ‘my corner’ of the changing room were still there. On most days, the actions of a colleague had either displaced them or ruffled the perfectly ironed shirt in such a way that I was better advised to search for a replacement at its size.

Once assembled, I stepped out of the changing room as the image of a barista. A sleeveless vest covered my white shirt, and a black tie was orderly tucked between both. Shining shoes and fine, well-sitting pants covered my lower half. Accenting the entire look was a pair of white gloves and a felted wool hat. Both were articles the shop provided, yet weren’t regularly worn by the employees. I had picked them up just because I wanted to.

When I stepped out, Esther was still waiting for the changing room to be vacated. Although they didn’t know why, our fellow employees had taken note that my raven-haired lady never changed while others were in the dressing room. Esther always made up for the lost time, adding it to the end of her shift, so there were no complaints.

Out of the changing room came Mathilda. The pink-haired maid was another regular for the Saturday shift. In all due likelihood, she was the connecting link between the shark-man and Allister, the owner of the café. Unlike the barkeeper, she was a regular employee, working on the weekdays. She was also part of Hannibal’s Anomalia – his Jack, to be exact.

“Waddup?” she greeted the two of us in her casual tone, high-fiving Esther in parting. “One day you’ll learn not to answer that like a robot,” the cool-headed woman remarked, just as Esther put her hand back down in a mechanical motion.

“I only respond due to your insistence,” Esther returned and marched straight into the changing room.

“You two sure are weird…,” Mathilda said to me, just as the sound of the door lock put a barrier between us and Esther, “...but useful. Sort of like magnets. Weird, but useful.”

“My dear senior servant, I must leverage, formally, a complaint. Could continuously cantankerous characters, such as you, truly call collaborating colleagues, such as us, out as curiously kooky?” At the end of this question, Mathilda just looked at me for several seconds. The empty look in her eyes reflected deep thought about something definitely unrelated to me.

“Let’s not keep the big guy waiting,” Mathilda decided and walked out of the door of the café’s pause room. Waiting for Esther would have been a waste of time, so I followed after my senior servant.

“No acknowledgement whatsoever of my brilliant wordsmithing?” I asked, unable to hide my disappointment. For having been woven together at the spot, I reckoned I could be proud of that string of alliterations.

“No,” she answered plainly.

I pouted the rest of the way down. Interactions between me and Mathilda usually went like that. She was the calm, teasing character. For my part, I felt like I got along with her splendidly, given the limited interactions we had whenever our work schedules overlapped. Much like Arlethia and I kept getting into verbal altercations that I typically ‘won’, Mathilda handled me by depriving me of the one thing I often craved more than I should: attention.

The result didn’t hurt me, not getting attention wasn’t a big deal. Just because I liked it didn’t mean I was offended if someone denied me their time. Rather, when it came to getting ignored in a friendly fashion, I took it as a different flavour of banter. Until she clarified, Mathilda and I had that sort of relationship where I said something interesting, far-fetched, or plain stupid, and she shook her head in dramatised exasperation.

“Congratulations honey, you’re the second most annoying guy in the room,” Mathilda announced, when we emerged from the storage room behind the bar.

“There’s only two men here, you dumb broad,” Hannibal growled back. The two metre tall man was a mountain of muscles. His smooth skin had a blue hue to it and was completely hairless, excluding his head. While he could have grown out his hair, he preferred to keep it shaved, making his eyebrows the only notable presence of hair anywhere. Due to the two rows of pointy teeth in the shark-man’s mouth, his voice always had a sharp undertone. “Can you do me a solid, Mathilda?”

“Depends.” his Jack responded.

“Can you hurry home and bring the Rewelterb gin here? Allister forgot to restock and if Jenma shows up, which she will, I guarantee she’ll want some.”

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“Sure,” Mathilda affirmed and went back up the stairs, leaving me and Hannibal alone in the room.

I was already past the actual wooden construction that shared its name with the type of establishment it was inside. The bar underneath the Café Served was pretty light on the servant theme, all things considered. The tables, benches and chairs were made from the same dark wood as the bar. The seats were covered in dark grey cushions, their colour similar to that of the simple carpet. The round tables were meticulously polished, the rims of their surface decorated by white lines that had the same style as the embroidery on the skirts of the maids. That and the pictures of famous servants was as far as the theme went.

The bar was only open on the weekends. For the people who worked on Friday, that meant that they had five days to clean up after what had happened the previous Sunday. For us, the Saturday shift, it was only a single day. Typically, this meant that there were some small inadequacies that had been overlooked, so the first hour of the shift was making sure everything appeared proper.

“Where did you leave your girl?” Hannibal asked.

“She’s still changing. Evening, by the way,” I greeted and waved, before bowing sideways to check under a table. All chairs were upside down on top, to make vacuuming easier. A fact that I decided I should take advantage of.

“Evening,” Hannibal responded to the delayed greeting. “Here I thought she’d leave me dry on her first shift.”

“You should know my beloved lady well enough by now, honoured Hannibal. She is physically incapable of going back on an agreement once struck or once she has decided on its validity, ignoring the other party’s thoughts,” I responded, while fetching the vacuum cleaner. “Also, whoever had cleaning duty left a literal cigarette under the table.”

“What?!” the barkeeper circled out from behind his domain and into the room. I could hear the very unservantly curses from the other room. “Who smoked in my bar?!”

“Probably got stuck on someone’s shoe,” I just guessed at the simplest explanation, carrying the object with me. Hannibal picked up the cigarette butt and inspected it. Appeased, he nodded and carried it to the trashcan behind the counter. That did not remove the reason for me getting the vacuum cleaner in the first place. The presence of a large piece of trash indicated a general lack of attention. Best to give all the corners a bit of attention, before the guests arrived.

“I think some fresh meat was on cleaning duty yesterday. I’ll tell the chief about this,” Hannibal said, before the roaring of the vacuum cleaner made polite conversation impossible.

It did not please me that I was the source of trouble for someone. Doubly so because, statistically speaking, that someone was probably a woman. The male to female ratio when it came to people who knew the Dimensional Truth was 1 to 10. Welldark, as a Cosmic University, was almost entirely populated by students of the Dimensional Truth. Therefore, the gender ratio was skewed immensely. 

Much as I loved flirting with the fairer sex, a bad job was a bad job, however.

Halfway through vacuuming, Esther joined us. I was temporarily distracted by the glorious sight of the curvy, raven-haired woman in a maid outfit. A warning glance got me back to work. While Hannibal continued preparations behind the bar, making sure all the glasses and bottles were in order, my Queen lifted the chairs off the tables I had double-checked and inspected the surfaces. It was unusual for the carpet to require additional cleaning. Stains on the tabletops were even rarer. Esther found nothing to do, beyond setting the chairs in correct positions.

Ten minutes before opening, we had everything sorted out. The vacuum was back in the staff area, Hannibal poured himself the first beer of the evening, and Mathilda returned with the bottle her King had asked for. “Might as well open a bit early,” Hannibal said and threw the key to me.

It turned smoothly in the well-maintained door, which swung open inwards. A broad staircase led down to the door, atop of which three people stood. Arlethia, Willt, and Aclysia were all waiting for the establishment to open. The former two looked just like I had last seen them when they had left the house, with the addition of two stuffed backpacks. Aclysia was every bit as gorgeous as I remembered.

She was about Esther’s height, just a tad smaller, and remarkably bottom-heavy. Her chest was on the petite side of things, present enough to be seen under her white blouse. Stretching out her pencil skirt, the backside of the half-elf could best be described as prime real estate. The swing of her wide hips fit wonderfully with her long legs. The thickness of her thighs contrasted mildly with her overall slender figure. Pear-shaped as she was, nothing was out of proportion.

In the sun of the late summer’s day, her snow-white skin was almost reflective. She looked better once she was under the soft, artificial light of the lamps, allowing the silvery-white of her hair to properly rise from her skin. She wore it strictly combed back, the straight strands aligning orderly and falling all the way down to her fantastic ass. Green eyes and light pink lips were all that gave her face colour. As a fellow white-haired person, I shared much of the struggle - albeit my skin did have enough colour to draw an easy contrast.

“Greetings, Karitas,” Aclysia said in her soft, diligent tone. Competing with Esther in matters of a sexy accent was a battle no one could win. That being said, if the voice of the lady of my love, with all its velvety sensuousness, was a 10, then Aclysia’s maidly softness was a solid 7. As an all around woman, she was a definitive 10. Greater than the sum of her parts, as they said.

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