Chapter Twenty-Two - Squad B

"Ah, everyone, this is... well, you can present yourself," Damien said.

"Hello, everyone," I said before bowing slightly. It felt like the right thing to do. In many ways this group was made up entirely of my superiors.

Damien had guided me to a room on what was almost the top floor. There were wide windows overlooking a really nice view of the Outer Circle, past the walls. The room itself was wide, with several modern (read: uncomfortable) couches, a small kitchen and a pair of vending machines. It was a break room, but a really luxurious one, and one that was lived in. There were lockers--massive ones--filled with coats and folded clothes and personal belongings.

There were five people in the room, other than myself and Damien, which I instantly knew I wouldn't be able to keep track of. I could barely remember the names of my co-workers at the best of times, and some I'd been working next to for months.

This bunch had a bit more personality, though. Sure, they all wore some Luna Corp merch, but as D-rankers they weren't stuck in same-y jumpsuits and plate carriers as I had been as an E-ranker.

"Hey!" one of them said. This big guy, whiter than white, with messy blonde hair and a bit of a beard. "I'm Eldur. Current team lead for squad B. If you'll be joining us as our twenty-first D-ranker, then you'll probably be on my squad."

"Oh, pleased to meet you," I said. I reached out and shook, then regretted it. Eldur didn't look like he was being mean on purpose, but he had a grip on those mitts of his.

"Let me show you around," he said. "This fella here is our other E. I call him Little-E but he really hates it."

Eldur gestured to a rather normal looking guy. Brown hair, greenish eyes, clean shaven. I supposed he was handsome but not in a way that stood out much. "Hello," he said. "I'm Erde. Don't call me Little-E, please."

"I won't," I said with a smile.

"Ah, and this is our studious ice mage, Sol," Eldur said.

Sol was a man out of season, wearing a thick sweater and a Luna Corp branded scarf of all things. As eldur pulled me close, I could feel a chill creep up my back, but it soon faded and the warmth of the room rushed in.

"Sorry about that," Sol said. He reached over to shake, and his hand was frozen. "Practicing a new spell."

"He's our mobile AC in the summer," Eldur said.

Sol chuckled. "I'd like to think I'm a bit more than that, but sometimes... ah, that's how it is." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of antacids of all things and popped one into his mouth.

"Ah, and I should present you to the ladies," Eldur said.

"Hi!"

I jumped and spun around, only to come face-to-face with another blonde, only unlike Eldur, her hair was very clearly dyed.

"I'm Terry," the woman said. She gave me a megawatt smile, then shook my hand. I flinched as a static shock raced through me, but she didn't seem to notice. "Good to finally restore the gender balance on the team. With you here it's three and three!"

"Squad B is just six members?" I asked.

"We usually aim for between five and six members per squad," Damien said. "A is our primary, with all of our C-rankers in it. B is our squad for newer member and lower-threat level portals, and squad E1 is our rapid response team with an additional six members at the moment. E2 to E4 are the E-ranker squads for normal guard work and extractions."

"I keep telling them that we need to change the names," Terry said. "I get confused with all the As and Bs and Es all over. If there's a squad D one day, I'm quitting."

I chuckled along with her joke, though it wasn't the funniest thing I'd heard. Still, it was lightening the mood a bit.

"Ah, is this the newcomer you warned us of?" a new voice asked. A woman stepped in, and I had the immediate sense that she was a little stronger.

Not that the others felt

weak. Eldur had a presence to him, a sort of magnetism that I could feel. Terry was bright, somehow, and Sol was literally cooling the room with his presence. Erde, by contrast, was hard to notice. Actually, Damien lacked that feel as well.

This woman was the opposite. She walked over and I could feel an oppressive... feeling, wash over me. It was hard to describe, hard to pin down.

C-rankers had this kind of aura about them too. Lousie... her I could feel from across a room. Maybe this woman was closer to C than most, then?

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I'm Dharti," she said with a kindly smile. "Squad B's medic."

"Pleasure," I replied.

"Don't get hurt and the pleasure will all be mine," she said. Dharti was very obviously Indian, or had family from India. There was a nice lilt to her voice when she spoke, and her skin was a few shades darker than my own pasty white. She eyed me, and I noticed that her eyes were a very deep, almost purple blue.

"I'll leave you with the team," Damien said. "Keep in mind that you all have a portal clearing job on Friday. Ideally you can bring the newcomer along if she feels ready for it."

"It's that little E-rank by ninth ave?" Terry asked. "The stinkhole?"

"That's the one," Eldur said. "Good place as any for a newbie! Hah!"

Damien soon left, and I found myself entirely uncertain what to do. "Ah, so, I'd love to help with the portal. Two days isn't very long for outfitting, but I don't mind using E-ranker gear. I can handle myself relatively well."

Eldur nodded along. "We'll see about that! But tomorrow. We have a consultant that comes in for combat training, and as for gear, we'll figure something out."

"Regs call for a minimum that we definitely have to spare," Sol said. He spoke from across the room and... I could see why. The area around him was collecting little white tendrils of frost and his breath left fog in the air.

Terry clapped. "We'll keep you safe! Oh! What kind of mage are you?"

"Ah, I really don't know," I said. I was still piecing together what D-rankers took for granted. There was something about emotion, but that was all I'd gotten.

"No fireballs? Big sparks? Mud?" Terry asked.

"Mud? I mean, no, nothing like that."

"Ohhhh," she said, stretching the word out. "Outer elemental, then."

"Pardon?" I asked.

Eldur hummed. "Possible. Saw your transcript, I mean, what's there. Light pink-blue magic spectrometry. Plus the eyes. That's very much an outer elemental. Either Void or... Nature, I think it is?"

Terry gasped and bounced over. "Dharti can teach you! You can be a healer too!"

"Outer elementalists make for poor physical healers," Dharti said as she pulled up a seat. She'd gone over to the small kitchen area and returned with a warm kettle. "Tea?"

"No thanks," I replied. "Actually, I was curious... is there like, a database or something I can look into? I'm very new to the rank."

Eldur tugged on the end of his short beard. "There is. Let's see if HR plugged your credentials in yet. Luna Corp doesn't have the largest library of spells, but there ought to be a couple you can start studying now."

"It'll be months before she can use all of them, even those within her elemental band," Sol said. "But Eldur's idea isn't bad. The sooner you start carving the pathways, the faster you'll learn how to properly cast. I can show you some tricks, even if we're non-adjacent elementally."

I nodded along, because what else was I supposed to do? I knew about elemental stuff, of course. Who didn't? Fire mages did fire, water water, wind wind, and so on. Common knowledge placed fire and water and the most common elements.

I wasn't sure what outer elemental meant, but I had an inkling.

There were some magic types that were very obvious, and some less so, less physical and more metaphysical. My time stuff was definitely on the metaphysical side.

I thought giving Eldur that suggestion turned out to be a good idea. He felt like the kind of person that had to be doing something. Sol felt focused on his own thing. Dharti was enjoying her tea in peace, Erde was... watching something on a tablet, and Terry flitted about the room, picking up one thing and then doing another. She did the dishes, then moved around and swept up, then came to talk to Sol for a while, then wandered away, all in the space of the thirty minutes it took Eldur to help me get a tablet with the Luna Corp D-ranker database.

"Here you go," Eldur said. "The magic wheel's got all the standard D-ranker spells that aren't classified or the like on it."

Magic wheel? I discovered what he meant a moment later.

The tablet had a sort of star design on it, each prong a different colour, and each one was labelled with a different type of magic.

There were also, next to those, a bunch of small, labelled emotions, each one linked to an element.

Well, that was new.

***