Chapter Seventy-One - Mondays

Chapter Seventy-One - Mondays I arrived in the motel where my shit was and then just... slumped into the room. That had been a lot. I was fifteen loops in by the time I decided that enough was enough. Learning to cut off my losses was an important lesson, I figured. There was such a thing as a sunk-cost fallacy, and when one had the ability to repeat the same thing over and over and over again, then that fallacy could be what made me spiral into insanity. Was I a perfect swordswoman? No. Was I way, way better than I had been 'this morning?' Yeah. I had something like ten hours of practical experience now, plus a couple more of watching videos and practicing some moves. I considered taking a nap. I had work in... about seven hours, and I was far from home, and physically, a bit tired. The real-time day had been long, and the last few hours in the portal had involved a lot of swinging my arms around and dodging goblin attacks. I had come out entirely unharmed, but not without being a little tired. Actually, I had come out to find... Nobody. Becky and I stepped out of the exit portal to an empty room. I told Becky that I'd send her the payment, as promised, then darted out of there and out the back. Weird, but no one had followed me. Something was up with that, so I couldn't just reset my Save. Which meant that taking a nap would be hard. So, I rolled over and looked something up, then gasped at what I was seeing on my phone. One hundred pulls on the Super Starlight Mega Standard Banner was eight hundred dollars?! What kind of braindead idiot played a game with ten-dollar pulls? Even discounted by buying a full one hundred, that was still nuts. And I'd shaken her hand and everything. Fuuuck. She'd even gotten me to agree in other loops. Sure, I'd be the only one to know that I cheated her, but... urgh. I pulled out a pre-paid credit card from my wallet, went online, and purchased a digital gift card. I had Becky's Email address. The stupid... wait, was she stupid if she managed to get paid? Urgh. I'd just cleared a portal, a D-ranker at that. My core was still buzzing, more so than when I'd cleared that portal with Fran. This was a stronger one, overall, and we'd mowed through even more monsters. I'd probably gotten more advancement in my magic tonight than most D-rankers received in a week, and it was only Monday. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't go back home, so I paced the room, then eventually sat down and did some research instead. Three events were coming up soon that I'd have to plan for. The shitty motel wi-fi wasn't great for plotting anything, but I had a pre-paid burner phone with a browser on it. First, I checked on Fortress Marketplace for that bike I wanted to buy. The listing wasn't up yet, which... yeah, that tracked. It was supposed to go up sometime today, but closer to the evening. Nothing I did should have changed the timeline to the degree where the seller would list their bike half a day early. Still, worth checking. I really wanted that bike, and now I had a heap of cash to buy it with. Second, the prisoners. I confirmed that Timothy was carted off to jail, as I'd told Fran that he would be. He was probably chumming it up with his kidnapper pals behind bars already. The breakout was on Thursday, sometime in the night. I planned on being there and burning a few timelines tracking them down. That felt like a relatively easy task, honestly. Well... no, but to me, with disposable timelines, it should be. I'd get there earlier, see where they broke out from, go back, then see where they went, then go back again and be there when they left. Do that a few dozen times and I ought to be able to figure out where they were going. Third was something a little closer to the present. There was a crack-down on a black-market chrome clinic on Wednesday. I had to check the place out. Probably tomorrow. If the owners seemed like reasonable, non-assholish people, then maybe I could cut a deal with them. Warn them of the crackdown before it happened for access to a good back-alley surgeon and some decent cyberware. Or... maybe just the cyberware. I wasn't sure I'd trust my life in the hands of any old surgeon. I was nearing six in the morning and I hadn't slept a wink. I decided that that was enough for the night, and headed out, changed into my normal clothes, eyes scanning for trouble. Support the creativity of authors by visiting novelhall for this novel and more. No one came around or caused any trouble though. I ditched my burner phone in a trash can along the way, took a taxi out of the area, then stopped at an early-to-open cafe for a hefty dose of caffeine. Being a D-ranker meant having a body that slowly rose to peak physicality. That meant metabolism and energy and strength. It didn't mean not having to sleep at all, and I hadn't been a D-ranker for long enough to get all the benefits. After a large dose of caffeine and sugar, and some pastries I... was really ready for bed. Sure, the magical surge helped. I was still feeling warm tinglies all over, like all of my limbs had gone asleep and awakened, but in a good way, but that didn't mean that I wasn't tired. Still, it was approaching seven-ish in the morning. So I got on one of the inner-city buses and rode out towards work. I had my bag with my Deadline gear, but no one checked things at work, so it would be fine. I arrived to find the doors still locked, which shouldn't have surprised me. Fortunately, I only had to wait twenty minutes for someone to come over and unlock them, then I got to experience that weird feeling of being entirely alone at work where there were usually plenty of people around. I found the lockers, stuffed my crap away, then picked out a spare uniform. It wasn't anything pretty, just a Luna Corp jumpsuit, the kind of thing that most non-ranked and E-rankers wore. D-rankers... kind of got away with wearing whatever as long as it wasn't offensive. That actually made it a bit more expensive for me, since the jumpsuits (which were a little scratchy) were at least 'free' as part of the corp uniform and there was even a laundry service for them. Whatever. I went down to the gym, took a long, long shower to wash off the grime and try to wake up, then I got dressed in the jumpsuit and headed up. I found Eldur in the lounge, already looking at a tablet with a coffee in his free hand. "Can our hearts stop from too much coffee as a D-ranker?" I asked. He looked up and scanned me with his eyes. "Long night?" "Didn't sleep a wink," I said. "Ah, to be twenty again," he said wistfully. Well, at least my age would let me play some things off as youthful indiscretion. Wasn't I... well, at least a few weeks older mentally than I looked physically. "By the way, you've got a psych-eval this morning." "A what?" I asked. "Yeah. One of the company therapists. HR's orders. Well... practically Dharti's orders. Unless you've got your own?" "Ah, I don't," I said. "Should I?" "No, the company one's fine. Everything you say is strikingly confidential, of course," he said. Yeah, so that was bullshit. I vaguely recalled something about a leak in the company about two months before the Breach. It had pissed off a bunch of people, and there had been some private info in that. The leak was targeted, some other corp sticking their fingers in Luna Corp's pie. Hmm... now that I thought about it, could it be linked to the Breach? Luna Corp was the only company I could say with certainty wasn't. I might only have been an E-ranker, but when shit hit the fan, I was at the front, and the corp really did try to help. It had a vested interest to, both because ninety-nine percent of its employees lived in the afflicted city, and because if the Breach was sealed, Luna Corp could take some of the credit for it. Or something. "Hey, is Terry in today?" I asked Eldur. "She's usually late," he grumbled. "Cool. Had some questions for her. Guess it can wait until after the eval. Uh, what's on the docket for the week?" "Tomorrow we're doing guard duty for a small event, the rest of the week is training until Friday. We have a minor repeat portal that might pop up then that we'll be in charge of. It might be an overtime situation, depending on when it chooses to appear. We can narrow it down, but it has a twelve hour variance." "Alright," I said. Nothing better to do, then. I checked my schedule for that appointment--that I planned on wasting--then went off to practice my spellwork. Restore Stamina wasn't going to master itself. I really wanted to nail down at least one first-level spell by the week's end. That portal with Beky proved how strong even a D-ranker with a few good spells could be. Might as well see if that boost from the portal completion helped with my magic as well. ***