Chapter Twenty-One - Work Day

I woke up bleary and early the next day, did a quick check of my surroundings, then suffered through my new morning routine of squats and pushups and stretches before I stumbled to the shower, got dressed, and set a new Save point.

This was it, second first day at my new job.

I hadn't been given a new Luna Corp uniform yet, and I'd worn my nice 'interview' clothes yesterday for the casino. There was no time for clothes shopping.

Damn, I should have poked Jane into helping me find new clothes.

Jane...

I shook my head and refocused. I wore a nice, if plain blouse and some clean jeans. It was very casual, but it was either that, or show up in gym clothes or looking rather grungy and punked out, which wasn't an option.

Corporations didn't like it when you showed up wearing a hoodie that said 'Burn Down the Corps' on the back.

It was good enough. Casual, but clean. I grabbed a nice bomber jacket, cut high at the waist like a bolero and made of some puffy faux-leather. It was a bit less casual, but it showed off my waist and stomach a little. Apparently those were good features.

Packing up a small purse with some essentials, I headed out the door after making sure Mister Couchtop's auto-feeder was full to the brim and his water bowl was topped up.

"See you later," I muttered.

He "Nyouw'd" in response.

Taking the bus to the Inner Circle was very familiar. It was the same almost-an-hour long route I'd taken so many times to get to work. I... really had to look into buying a car.

And learning how to drive.

That part would suck, but if I wanted some level of independence, then I couldn't afford to rely on Fortress ENE's spotty public transportation network. Besides, I was a D-ranker. Could I hit up the casino again? Or a different one?

Two big payouts in a row would be very suspicious. Lottery winnings wouldn't work. That was tracked too closely. I needed easy, quick money that I could get by leveraging my power and without putting myself at risk.

Playing the stock market was out as well. That was tracked.

Whatever, I had a while to figure it out, and I wasn't going to buy a car tomorrow morning. I just sat back and enjoyed the ride as best I could in the stinking rear of a F-ENE bus.

Eventually I made it to the Inner Circle, hopped off, then headed over to the Luna Corp building. I was greeted by the same borg'd up receptionist, who took my ID and welcomed me to the Luna Corp family. I smiled, played nice, and then followed her directions to the back. She also subtly reminded me that once I was a full-on employee I wouldn't need to come in by the front.

The rear entrance wasn't nearly as pretty, but it was a whole lot faster.

I found my way to the back, where I was guided into a small conference room where some six others were sitting, all E-rankers. Some guy from HR came up and gave a short presentation on what our duties would be, with lots of legal disclaimers and a few short videos.

I remembered most of this... vaguely. It was a lead-in to a couple of weeks of training. All in all, it... wasn't that good, but it covered the basics. How not to shoot yourself in the foot, how to use the comms, how to call in an alert, and so on.

I found myself a little bored with it all, but I kept focused.

Eventually, noon rolled around, and I was starving, but on my way out of the room I was accosted by a familiar face. Damien, the D-ranker who'd been there when I joined up. "Ah, Miss... hmm, can't quite recall your family name."

"Yeah, that happens," I said. "It's European."

"Ah, yes, I remember. Italian?"

"Moldovian. Not that I have much family there now," I said with a shrug.

"You're taking the E-ranker training courses at the moment, correct?" he asked and when I nodded, he hummed. "Follow me. I had Serene keep the magic testing device out, just in case. Not that the E-rank course would be a loss. Goodness knows some of our D-rankers could use some reminders."

"Ah, but it's different, right?" I asked.

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He nodded along. "Oh, very much so. Honestly, I didn't ask, but are your goals... ambitious?"

"What do you mean?"

"Do you intend to just find a nice, quiet, relatively low-risk job? If so, remaining as a guard will do that for you. D-rankers have the unique privilege of being allowed into portals without too much hassle or extraneous equipment, but the risk that comes with the work is much higher, as is the responsibility."

I kind of got that. The jobs weren't the same. E-ranker could clear out portals. E and D rank portals, maybe a C if push came to shove. Hell, normal people could do it too. It had happened before. Squads of soldiers diving in with top-level military gear.

Those kobolds I fought wouldn't last ten seconds against a full squad of marines.

E-rank meant being able to hit the top of human potential with a little less effort and keep at that level for longer. D-rank was the same, only with greater ease, and some magic on top.

Luna Corp, and some others, just preferred to put their investment in people that had more 'potential' as measured by magical capabilities. So that meant full D-ranker portal clear teams.

A few corps still mixed in normal folk with their portal clear teams. Though... enough time in a portal almost guaranteed at least an uprank to E. I'd heard somewhere that in a hundred years, there would be as many 'normals' as a percentage of the population as there were 'magicals' now.

Damien led me to an elevator, then up two floors to HR. It was... a normal office. I'd only had reason to come here a couple of times before. Luna Corp's employee pool was mostly normal office workers, slaving away in cubicles doing normal office stuff. I was on the more 'action' side of things.

"So, you never told me what you expect out of being a D-ranker," Damien said.

"Ah, sorry. I guess I haven't come to terms with it. But... yeah, I'm ambitious, I think. I'd like to be a C-ranker one day."

He nodded along. "It's possible. From D to C requires, on average, two hundred completed portal runs. More or less. That's the commonly repeated statistic, but the quality of a run can vary a lot, and most of the factors are outside of our control."

"I see," I said. Made sense. Two hundred E-rank portals like the one I'd cleared wasn't the same as two hundred D-ranks or a hundred C-ranks. And he was talking about portals cleared as a group, with the magic shared between several individuals.

Damien invited me into a small space at the back of a large room where the machine I'd interacted with last time was set up. He checked it over, tested it on himself, then nodded and gestured for me to place my hand into it.

I did just that, then looked up to see the results.

155 - E-99

"Wow," Damien said, though he didn't sound that impressed. "I've never seen an E-99."

"That's bad?"

"That's so close to D-rank you're tickling it," he replied. "Your potential went up as well. From... lemme see... 151 to 155. That's fantastic."

"Thank you," I said. "I've been trying to understand my magic a little more, and I've been eating more magical foods." Well, one meal at the casino counted, right?

Damien nodded. "Close enough. If your results hold steady, one minor trip through even a weak portal will have you solidly in D-rank territory. I'll mark you down as one. This might take an hour or so."

He lied. It took three hours, and by the end of it I was famished. But I couldn't argue with the results, because after signing a few papers I was given a new card with an image of my face on it and a pretty little D in the corner.

I think Damien had fudged the numbers to get a bonus of some sort, and I really didn't care. The rank-up came with a fresh bonus. Fifteen thousand dollars just popped into my account, and that was after taxes.

Better yet, Damian invited me to the upper floors, where the other D-rankers waited around between jobs, and where I'd have--limited--access to an honest-to-god D-ranked database of spells and information.

Worth the hunger indeed.

***