Countless Joyful Dawns - Chapter ?? - 15: Hiring Fair I (Patreon)

I looked at the panting, wheezing girl in front of me. Where had I… ah! Right! Tattletale of the Undersiders. Who’d gone straight from ‘yes, I’ll be paid fantastic amounts of money’ straight to ‘please hire me’ so fast something was up. 

Still, I wasn’t one to miss a moment messing with kids. I had to find my own little entertainment in life. Like intentionally misusing whatever the new slang of the day was. The trick was to figure out what it meant first, then use it wrong. Constantly. This wasn’t the same thing, but hey!

“One moment please! Our representatives will be with you shortly.” I said before vanishing into my [Manor]. The way her eye twitched… delightful. 

I did have something to do. I summoned a nice parchment, an old job application from the last time we’d done this, and quickly wrote a new one, translated into English and adjusted for the current world I found myself in. 

I never thought I’d make a job application with a ‘phone number’ and ‘email address’ line, but here I was!

A quick [Teleportation] brought me to The Holy Printer. I ignored the dozen little dodads and thingamabobs that Colin had attached to it - Tinker stuff - and started to scan a thousand copies. The man in question worked feverishly at his workbench, entirely ignoring me. I let three copies print out, checked that they looked good, then teleported back to my hiring booth.

“Fill this out please!” I cheerfully handed the paperwork to Tattletale. 

More twitching. Glorious.

However, she dutifully filled it out, while my stand started to attract some attention. Nothing more than shoppers along the boardwalk pausing and taking a look, but it was something.

I wasn’t surprised at Tattletale’s age - 16 - and I had a name, Lisa. The work experience was light and incredibly vague, and I frowned over the entire thing.

“Look, Lisa, hiring you means running right into the local child labor laws. And bluntly, you just don’t have a lot of experience. Why you?” I asked.

She gaped at me in disbelief, and looked around. She leaned a bit closer to me.

“Don’t you recognize me? I’m Tattletale!” She whispered.

“Yes?” I said. “Why does that change anything?”

“You know.” She whispered. “Thinker 8? Can figure out anything? Most people would be dying to get me on their team!”

I raised an unimpressed eyebrow.

“Yes, but I’m starting a factory here. Business. Industry. What skills and experience do you bring to the table?”

“I’m really, really good at figuring things out.” She said. 

I sighed. I possibly hadn’t explained it well. I scanned through my archives, which took a full, awkward minute of silence. I made it a hair less awkward by holding up a finger.

I finally found two financial statements that worked for my purposes. I grabbed both of them and teleported them out in front of Lisa.

“Which one has a problem, and why?” I asked her. “Hang on, translating.”

Paper, ink, and a quick scribble later, and it was English-legible.

She wrinkled her freckled nose at the papers - one was hundreds of years old, the other thousands, yay preservation magic - and quickly scanned them.

“The inventory’s off in this one.” She said smugly, pointing to the number in question. “It’s inflating the profit. See, that’s the kind of thing I can do! Give me something harder.”

I mean, this particular example had been simple enough that a 10 year old could figure it out, which was the point. I didn’t want it missed.

I shook my head.

“Both statements are perfectly fine.” I said.

“What!” She protested. “But there’s clearly a huge difference! Something’s being covered up.”

“Yes… the fact that they’re from two different legal frameworks.” I said.

“That’s completely unfair.” She protested. “How am I supposed to know that? It’s a rigged problem.”

“It is rigged, but the point I’m trying to make is, you don’t know there’s a problem until you’ve got the correct educational background. You’re getting a lot right now. Imagine how much more you’d get with a proper education? If you were in school, not working your current job. It’s not about the brains, it’s about the knowledge and thinking patterns. Yes, you’re immensely talented, and that’s why I think you should try to make more of yourself. Go to school. Go to college. Get an advanced degree. Become the best Lisa you can possibly become.”

Plus, you know. Child labor laws. I was playing a delicate game. On one hand, I couldn’t acknowledge the sovereignty of the US government until they recognized Exterreri in return. On the other, I wasn’t going to piss them off to the point where they… okay, fine, I had already pissed them off an ungodly amount. I wasn’t going to piss off the actual local citizens, instead of throwing eggs at the government’s face.

Printing money was a great example of that. It annoyed the hell out of the government, while people generally cheered as money rained on them. There were excellent reasons not to print money, and usually I was the government cracking down on counterfeiters, but the average man and woman on the street was pro-money raining from the skies.

On the other hand, the culture here was extremely protective about children, and ‘child labor’ was basically ignored by the government while reviled by the average person.

A pair of boardwalk enforcers walked over. They weren’t like mall cops at all, more ‘gym rat stuffed into a suit’. Lisa briefly looked terrified by them, then smirked. 

“Watch how useful I can be!” She said, turning to them with a vulpine grin. I stood up, reached over, and tapped her on the shoulder.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Excuse me. You’re not allowed to be here. Move.” One of the enforcers said.

“Spill their every secret and get them to go away. For example, did you know-”

Whatever was going on - I had a pretty good idea, my sense of smell was great - this was a terrible way of going about it. I clamped my hand over Lisa’s mouth, muffling whatever secret she was about to tattle.

“So sorry! Excuse her, she doesn’t know how the working world works yet. Trying to find her first job and all.”I ignored the indignant, muffled protests and flailing. It was difficult for me to tell if she was genuinely flailing, or just faking it. Spindly teenage girl with zero stats, my baseline was already off. 

“Hi! I’m Elaine! I’m currently hiring, including security! Would you like a new job? Nothing exclusive, so you can keep working here, and I’ll work your shift schedule around your existing job! The pay’s not amazing, sorry, only about $40k/year to start. Interested?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

The two guards - uh, enforcers, private security and all that - looked at each other.

“The baby’s due in four months, I need the extra cash.” One said to the other.

I let the two start to bicker, and slowly unhanded Lisa.

“See?” I said. “That’s how you do it.”

“Yeah, but it cost you a ton of money.” She said. “My way would’ve been more economical.”

I rolled my eyes and sat back down.

“That’s part of why I’m saying I don’t want to hire you.”

“Please?” Lisa begged.

“No.”

“Pretty please?”

“N-” I cut myself off as I had a sudden flashback. Me, at 14, terrified out of my mind, running away from home. So sure that Artemis would let me tag along, and then she said no. It almost ruined my life, and instead gave me everything.

And here I was, hundreds and hundreds of years later, telling a scared girl who’d ran to me for help, trying to be an adult, the same thing. What did I really know about her situation? Maybe there was a damn good reason she’d sprinted just to be the first person here. She didn’t exactly look like she enjoyed exercise.

“Yes.” I said.

“Pretty please with- wait, yes? YES!”

We stared at each other. The enforcer that wanted to stay asked for an application, and got it. The other one left, muttering unhappily.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked.

“Eerrr. What do you need me to do?” Lisa asked. “I want to help! Oh! I know! I can tell you if someone’s in one of the gangs and trying to infiltrate!”

“What gangs?” I asked.

Lisa paused, and the enforcer that stuck around grinned maliciously, and handed back his application.

“Former gang members?” She suggested. “We don’t want skinheads or nazis!”

I spent some time thinking about it, as interest in my stall increased. People were starting to congregate, but nobody was quite coming up to us yet.

“Everyone’s allowed a chance to turn over a new leaf.” I settled on. “If they cause a problem at work, we’ll handle it then. Making a dividing line is an excellent way to recreate an ‘us vs them’ mentality again, and we’ll be right back where we started. Plus, I exiled almost all of the E88. No, the whole point of this is to remove any economic incentive for uncivilized behavior. Make no mistake, I’m not going to ignore discrimination, simply draw a line in the sand and start from here.”

Unfucking fascism was a bitch, and one task I’d mostly been content to sit back from and let the people who enjoyed that sort of thing handle. Couldn’t just ‘forgive and forget’, letting them lie around and mutter darkly before trying again, but ‘purge them all’ was genocide with the thinnest veneer of civilization on it. Going off Earth history, it was a bit like the American Civil War or the French Revolution. No, I wanted to thread the needle like Germany had, but I wasn’t exactly able to implement my own set of educational reforms.

The best I could do at the moment was let them in, and attempt on the job educational reforms. When there were cases where it inevitably failed, I’d need to let people go and keep going. Hopefully, the obvious stick of ‘lose this nice job’ combined with close contact would help educate bigots.

Why was I signing myself up for so much work again?

Right. I had to live here for an unknown number of years, if not a century. Future-Elaine would thank me for all my hard work, just how I thanked Past-Elaine for all the work she had done to get me here.

“Thank you, you’re hired.” I told the enforcer. “You can start on Monday. I should be flush in cash by then.”

He snorted at me, and stood menacingly to the side of the stall.

“Or I can start today, save you a bunch of grief, and get paid twice, since this is also what I’m supposed to do on the Boardwalk.” He said.

Alright then! I wasn’t going to complain about that.

“Wait. How are you handling payments and bank accounts?” Lisa asked. “You don’t have an identity, no bank’s going to open an account for you.”

I shrugged.

“The same way I always handle it?” I said. “Coins - or in this case, cash, at the end of the week, and a very secure lockbox.”

It wasn’t that simple, but I didn’t need to go into all the logistics right this second. I’d pick out a few of the hires, and train them on that particular complex part. There might be superheroes here with esoteric abilities, but Pallos had thousands of years of people trying to rob payday, with a dizzying array of skills. We’d developed countermeasures over time.

Lisa groaned, then lit up.

“Wait! I know! The Numberman!” She said. “He handles parahuman banking, no matter the legalities.”

Wow. How convenient. There was exactly the perfect person for this need that suddenly came up, on a topic Lisa prompted, that Lisa knew? Please, three day old fish that had been out in the sun the entire time smelled better than the story Lisa was trying to spin. 

“Suuure.” I said.

“No, wait, listen!” She said, waving her arms around. “How are you going to get paid for your Immortality? People might get millions out, but billions? It’ll never happen! How unbelievable is it that someone triggered with a power for numbers, and made a bank?”

A flat look told Lisa exactly how likely I found it, and I was starting to suspect that maybe she wanted to be an employee just for the chance to stick her fingers into the pie. She was a professional thief, and this could just be another con of hers.

“Have you ever heard of this Numberman?” I asked the enforcer. Loyal minion #2. Or, quite possibly, loyal minion #1, given Lisa’s questionable loyalties.

… I’d just started, and I already had a treacherous lieutenant. Great.

He glanced towards Lisa.

“Never heard of him, sorry boss.” He said. 

She looked furious and stomped her foot. 

Which was when the first member of the crowd came over.