Following her day with Lark, her personal angel of death, she chose to spend her day in the HR Department, or what counted as one. The so-called HR department was nothing more than a small office filled with dust and boxes of files. If there was someone who worked here, they have been absent for quite some time. If there was a filing system other than dropping paperwork wherever it was, it remained elusive to her.

  She called upon a small gust of air to clear away the dust, blowing it all into a pile of dirt to feed her fungi. There is one that she still has been unable to grow and blossom. She thinks it's carnivorous, and she has yet to find its preferred prey. Today is the perfect time to try dust mites, little insects that live and feed off of dust.

  After giving the collection of spores a trickle of her magic, she got to work tackling the paperwork on the desk first. It was a vibrant paperwork forest of complaints, procedural updates, PTO requests, medical leave requests, training records, and assessment requests. They weren’t even dropped in chronological order. She has a collection of PTO requests that were easily a couple of years old, a partial training record that was a decade old, and a medical request that was filed three days ago.

  She started to form piles based on personnel files, as is the typical HR filing system. Starting with the alphabetical order of personnel names, then organized by the type of form, and lastly in chronological order. It was just easier to flip through all of someone’s training in chronological order or all of their PTO requests.

  Behind the stacks of boxes were filing cabinets whose drawers were so stuffed they hung open like a lazy, hungry tree just waiting for someone to fall into its open maw.

  She let out an exhausted sigh. This will take her days to sort through. The amount of paperwork makes sense given that Vlahd himself can easily fill a filing cabinet. For every single person who works on this quest, from those who live in the town to the goblins, there is a file that dates back to the beginning of their career with RADAWC. The absence of an HR representative is another strike against this quest and Vlahd, wherever he may be.

  What she needs is that file-sorting spell Dauven has. He can organize an office with a simple collection of arcane words and a motion of his hands, and all paperwork springs to life and sorts itself out and puts itself away in alphabetical order as per the operational standards.

  If she had her comms device, she could message him for help. But she forgot it in her desk back at the office. At least she knows where it is, unlike her matrix tablet. Her matrix tablet is lost either in her cottage or in the office.

  She reached out with her magic, hoping the paper remembers its life as a tree. She can work with a tree, as trees are alive. The paper was as dead as the dust in the room and refused her magic. Next, she asked if her fungi and the wind would work together to help her sort out the papers, but no matter how much she tried or they tried, the wind and her fungi simply could not communicate with one another. She pulled her long black hair into a bun. This will be a very long day.

  She lifted several of the boxes out of her way and started sorting through the nearest filing cabinet. Hopefully these have been here the longest and will be the most organized.

  Dauven walked in right when she started on the second filing cabinet. “I thought you might be hungry…” He trailed off, seeing her piles all over the floor. Next to each one was a different clod of dirt with happily blooming mushrooms to help her differentiate who each pile was for. She was wrong. The filing cabinets were just as cacophonous as the desk, if not more so.

  Dauven stepped over her piles and set a paper bag and coffee mug on the desk. “Where is the HR rep?”

  “That is an excellent question that I am lacking the answer to,” she said, flicking through a collection of forms in her hand. They were all requests similar in that they were PTO requests that were denied, all filed a month ago. “It’s odd, don’t you think?” She mused out loud, walking them to the desk.

  “The absence of the rep—what do you have there?” He asked, glancing over.

  “PTO requests, all made last month, all denied.” She explained reading through them slowly.

  “It’s not that strange, PTO gets requested all the time.”

  “That is true, but this many all at once?” She paused, flipping through them. Each and every one of them lacked a reason for the denial. Every denied PTO request needs a justification to be denied more often than not by the active HR representative. These simply had the denied box checked and the date they were denied. No signature for who accepted the request or who denied it.

  Dauven leaned over and gently took the forms from her and reviewed them himself. “That is yet another nail in this quest’s coffin. If I were anyone else, I’d have us pack up and return to the office. We have all we need for our assessment.”

  “But you are not,” she said before having a sip of coffee. She has Dauven to thank for her love of this delightful hot bean tea. She doesn't know who it was who first thought to roast, grind, and soak specific beans in hot water. But whoever they were, they have her thanks.

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  “That I am,” he said, having his hand in the air, a purely arcane gesture before he sat down in a now present chair. “I have far too many questions about what’s going on here. It’s easy to simply say the quest is at fault, but it’s another to find out how it happened.”

  She opened the bag to discover he brought her a delightful salad complete with roasted chicken, fresh slices of apple, and various seasonal vegetables. “My thanks for lunch.” She smiled, pulling the large wax-lined paper bowl out of the bag. “Shank, the senior goblin, hinted at the possibility that the quest was rushed. I think that is an answer to some of our questions.”

  "You're welcome." He gave her a quick nod. "If the quest was rushed, that could explain the state of the abandoned keep. Barnibus and BEEG found nearly fifty safety violations, and Gwen discovered they are severely understaffed when it comes to backup staff as well as with healers," Dauven explained, massaging his temples. “Lark is with Riv currently, going through payroll and budgets. Other than the underpaying of goblins, there is nothing else of note.”

  Keylynn scoffed. Of course the goblins are underpaid. “What I don’t know is why the quest line was rushed.” She chewed on a bite of her salad. What could have caused Vlahd to make such a grievous mistake?

  “It is a good theory, if it weren’t for Vlahd’s renowned reputation. Didn’t he run his entire demiplane quest line such that upon success, adventurers become verified heroes?” Dauven asked, sifting through a filing cabinet.

  “That is correct. The reasons behind the termination of his quest were citations of high difficulty from what I found,” she explained. “Perhaps these old dusty files hold the secrets the digital ones lack.”

  Dauven looked over her shoulder and rolled his eyes at her. “As if you checked the digital files, do you even have your matrix here?”

  “Why would I have it when we both know physical copies are harder to manipulate without a trial hinting at the deceit?” she asked in response. He, like her, prefers to see the physical copies of files. There have been too many instances of people trying to hide things in their paperwork purely due to missing pages in those files. Digital copies make it easier for forging paperwork. They need a whole new wizard to help them decipher the digital changes, and those wizards have long waiting lists.

  “I’m aware, but it’s protocol these days, not that I think this quest is following that,” he let out a defeated sigh. There wasn’t even a computer in the office. “Your missing matrix has been noted.”

  Keylynn cringed. Dauven does know. “I did explain my reasons aren’t because I refuse to accept new technology. It’s purely due to it not working for me. How long did it take for the comms?” She reminded him as she took another bite of her salad.

  “I was authorized to have a matrix for you by whatever means necessary. Barnibus will be working on it upon our return to the office,” Dauven explained, setting his on the desk. “For now we will use mine. But the office is a mess, and we don’t have the time to waste on filing.” He said, looking around the office.

  “I did try to copy your spell, but the wind and fungi cannot talk to each other. Maybe one day they will,” she explained sorrowfully. She had seen his spell a hundred times by now, and still it was a mystery.

  “May I?” He gestured at the desk and the chair she is currently sitting in.

  She nodded and stood up and gestured for him to take a seat. He nodded and sat. She sipped her coffee while he poked the screen of his matrix.

  “I don’t see anything developing in your spells. Your decomposition manifestations have grown stronger, and so have your swarm summons. You also have one called "Mycelium Connection" brewing that sounds promising. Elemental magic, however, has no change in elemental manipulations. Your fungi cultivation has grown leaps and bounds since the last time I checked,” he summarized from her matrix. As team lead, he has access to all of his team’s individual class designations and matrices.

  Dauven’s spellbook rose to hover open at his eyeline. It is open to his collection of corporate spells, most of which he designed himself, while others he gained access to due to his role as a team lead. Should she have the same corporate title, she will not have the same spell access. Arcane magic and natural-based magic, which may result in similar outcomes, are as different as a bumblebee and a wasp.

  As if thousands of small invisible brownies manifested, papers flew through the air, organizing themselves and finding their rightful home filed away. What would have taken hours was completed in under a minute.

  Dauven tackled the digital versions of the files, while she tackled the physical versions. They found several discrepancies between the two; there were missing files, incorrect versions, omitted sections, and so on. Some of the differences between the two versions of the file could be attributed to the previous filing system, but not all of them.

  In Keylynn’s hand she had the full explanation behind the termination of Vlahd’s infamous quest. It ‘disagreed with the core values of COMPANY in reduced heroic successes,’ which, as far as official reasons go, is dog excrement. She read the entire assessment and audit of the quest line and saw a collection of corporate jibber-jabber ranging from too costly of a budget to not enough monster deaths. It all added up to a corporate cover-up under the guise of following protocol.

  This is so much bigger than the untimely demise of the Day eyes or Vlahd.

  She stared into Dauven’s eyes as he stared at hers. She was surrounded by a cloud of puff shroom spores and her hands shook. All the corporate changes to procedures were a cover-up.

  Vlahd kept meticulous notes on everything, including his Cursed Vhampyre quest. He noted that the quality of adventurers has declined. They weren’t interested in being heroes. All they cared about was the fame and glory that comes with the title. He surmised they didn’t want the hardships, only the fun. This was the reason for the decline in success rates, not the quest itself, as he was doing nothing different. The response from corporate he got was to change the quest to match the adventurers' ability. Vlahd refused, so they terminated his legendary quest and reopened it under a different name under the leadership of a different storymancer.

  This is a cacophony of intercourse,” Keylynn stated, adding even more to the pile she wanted Dauven to replicate. His paperwork duplication spell was much more efficient than her fungal replication one.

  “A clusterfuck, yes,” he agreed. “We still have to finish this assessment. I’ll get us dinner, and we can start digging into Lunyxia.”