Nine-to-Five 027 (Patreon)

Workforce Development II

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Having decided they had been sufficiently mortified, Gerald let them go early that day. But not before telling them what their new schedule would be. Tuesdays and Thursdays, they would report to Human Resources and go about their duties as usual. Once enough time had passed, they might be transferred to other departments, so they could familiarize themselves with other aspects of Regum.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, they were to go underground for check-ups and training.

Amanda had many feelings about that. None of them were good.

Gerald might have said it was to get them used to their powers, and Mr. Cadogan might have spoken about saving the world, but Amanda wasn’t buying it. How exactly did creating people with powers like theirs save the world? From what little she’d understood, powers were the entire problem!

No. If Regum was training them, it was because they were eventually going to ask them to use those powers. Amanda hadn’t figured out for what and on who just yet, but after what happened on the train, she wasn’t blind to the possibilities her powers offered her. Regum had made her and Tim dangerous, and they were just the first people to undergo the so-called SP Treatment.

What would happen when Regum started giving other people the treatment? What would they make them do?

And what would happen to her and Tim once they were no longer unique?

Amanda really didn’t want to think about all those things.

“Hey, I need healing here!”

So she wasn’t.

“Wait a tic,” came her reply as her fingers mashed the buttons on her controller. She was leaning forward, lightly biting her lower lip. Her eyes shone with quiet intensity as she went through her combo. “I just need to finish this and…”

Her character shattered into pixels as her HP went to zero. With no one around to heal him, Tim’s character suffered the same fate only a few seconds later. ‘Game Over’ flashed on the screen with big red letters.

“Argh!” The controller fell from Amanda’s hands into her lap as she covered her face. “So close!”

It was still early compared to the time she usually went home, so Tim had invited her to hang out in his apartment. It was exactly the kind of dumb distraction Amanda needed. They still had a lot of floors to clear in the game they had been playing the other day.

“I told you I needed healing,” Tim said. He was pouting at the screen and had his controller held by the cord. It swung back and forth like a pendulum.

“Well, I couldn’t very well enter the skill menu while fighting, could I? It’d have left me wide open,” Amanda grumbled. She gestured at the screen. “I was so sure I had that one. Why did the game get so much harder all of a sudden?”

Last time, she and Tim had been making good progress. It had taken Amanda some time to get the hang of the game, but once she did, they had breezed through the first couple of floors. By the time she had to go home, they had made it all the way to the thirty-second floor.

Now, clearing each floor felt like they were pulling teeth out.

“It does that,” Tim said. “I read online that the difficulty spikes up hard every ten floors. It’s famously super hard to clear.”

“It gets worse?! What sort of cruel person designed this?” Amanda glared at her controller. “Also, I swear this thing is broken.”

“Oh, it probably is.”

Amanda’s eyes snapped back to Tim. “What?”

“Well, I only had one controller because the other one was all busted, so I bought that one a couple of days ago at a used good store. It was super cheap, so I knew there had to be something wrong with it. But I really wanted to have two.” Tim shrugged. “Eh, you get what you pay for, I guess.”

Amanda’s face went flat. “So you just gave me the bad controller?”

“Well, I wasn’t to use it myself,” Tim replied as though it should be obvious.

Amanda pinched the bridge of her nose and counted to ten. “Next time, I’m bringing my own controller.”

“Do you have one?”

“I’ll buy one.”

“Aren’t your parents going to ask why you want to buy a controller despite not having a console?”

Amanda made a puzzled face. “What do my parents have to do with it? I said I was buying it.”

Controllers weren’t costly. At least, she didn’t think so. Amanda had enough cash on hand, and if not, there was always her credit card. Her father had gotten her one about a year ago to use in case of emergencies. He had also told her it was fine if she wanted to treat herself with it as long as it was done in moderation.

Amanda had rarely used the card at first, feeling uncomfortable with buying things with it without first asking for permission. However, her dad had encouraged her to use the card at least a couple of times a year. A controller was probably not what he had in mind, but she doubted he actually checked each individual purchase when he paid her balance.

“You’re buying me a controller?”

“I am buying myself a controller,” Amanda corrected him, “which I’ll only use when I’m here, but still! You don’t get to touch it.”

Tim raised his hands. “Hey, if we can clear the game faster, I’m all for it. I’m generally in favor of everything that makes things easier for me. Speaking of, do you think we should get paid?”

“What?” Amanda blinked, then did it three more times when Tim's words finally sunk in. “What?! Where did that come from?”

“Well,” Tim dragged out the word, “we were talking about buying things, and that made me think I could really use some money. I mean, sure, I don’t have to pay for food and shelter right now. Especially not for food. You really should have tried the solyanka, by the way. It was a little sour, but it was pretty good. Very filling. Probably not summer food, but you barely notice it with all the AC in the building. Could stand to be a little less cold. Have you noticed all the people that don’t take off their jackets?”

“Tim!” She cut in. “The point?”

“Oh. Right.” Tim made a nervous smile. “Anyway, I don’t need to buy food or pay for a place to stay right now, but I’ll still need to pay when I want to buy new clothes or when the electric bill for my house, the real one, comes, you know? I’m pretty sure mom has money on her account, but I don’t want her to wake up and find it all dried out while she was in a coma, you know?”

No. Amanda didn’t know. It hadn’t even occurred to her that this was something Tim was dealing with. In her defense, she had only just found out about his mother being in a coma.

It still made her feel guilty.

“So yeah, I figured we should be getting paid. Think they’ll say yes if we ask?”

“Actually… they probably will.”

Tim blinked. “Wait. Really?”

“Why not?” she asked, straightening her posture. “Think about it, we might need Regum, but they need us too. You heard Gerald and that scientist today. They put a lot of effort into giving us these powers. If what they did to us was so easy to replicate, there’d be other people like us running around instead of just the two of us.”

The more she spoke, the more convinced Amanda became of what she was saying. Why else would they give two random kids superpowers instead of people who were already loyal to them? There had to be restrictions on who could and couldn’t receive the SP Treatment.

“They need us,” Amanda repeated. A smile tugged at her lips as she felt the power in those words. “That gives us leverage. If we went up to them and asked for a salary, they’d probably say yes just to humor us. It’s not like it’d cost them much.”

“Ah, because they’re rich already.”

Amanda nodded. “That’s part of it, yes. Regum is already paying the salaries of thousands of employees, several of them in the six figures. As long as we don’t ask for something completely outrageous, they’ll have no problem granting it.”

It was basic appeasement. Employees who knew their value could get away with a lot more during contract negotiations. Her parents had mentioned that to her on several occasions.

“So, we’re getting paid?” Tim asked, eyes wide with excitement.

“Almost definitely!” Amanda said, now getting really into it. “We just need to go there tomorrow and…” Her face fell abruptly. “...Ugh.”

“What? What happened?”

“I just remembered who we would have to talk to for this.”

“Who? … Oh!”

Matilda Martel.

Head of Human Resources.

“It’s fine! It’s fine!” Amanda held out her hand before Tim could say anything. “The idea is good if only so we learn how much we can get away with.” It was best to start testing their boundaries with relatively harmless stuff. “We were always going to need to learn how to talk to these people anyway.”

And by we, Amanda meant that she needed to learn how to face Ms. Martel without feeling unreasonably intimidated. She had fought a literal supervillain. She could stare down a… come to think of it, Ms. Martel was technically also a supervillain.

Huh.

“Nice! Also, we should probably go beat up the guy threatening your parents.”

“What?”

“What?”

Amanda blinked. Hard. “Did you just say what I think you just said?”

“What? Beating up the Exceed threatening your parents? Yeah. Definitely. We should go to his place and be like, POW!” Tim not only sounded the onomatopoeia. He slammed his fist against his palm to demonstrate.

“You cannot be serious.”

“Why not?” Tim shrugged and leaned back against the couch. “We just beat up an actual supervillain the other day. Sure, maybe it wasn’t some well-known supervillain, but it still counts. We’ve got superpowers, and we’re being trained to use them. There’s an Exceed making trouble out there. What stops us from going there and beating him up.”

“That it’s dangerous?” Amanda asked with far less confidence than she felt. “We don’t even know where he lives!”

“He’s your mother’s client, isn’t he? So your mom probably has his address on her computer or something. That’s how it works, right?”

It was, but she didn’t want to admit it.

“We also don’t know who else he’s working with,” Amanda said, scrambling for another excuse. “That’s the entire point of me asking Regum for help. If it was as easy as pointing the authorities his way, my parents would have gone to the police already!.”

“Your parents didn’t have Regum working with them. That’s sort of your entire deal with them, right? They find out what there is to know about this guy and deal with it while keeping your family safe. There’s no way they haven’t found out about this guy, so yeah, like, in theory, we could find out what there’s to know, go there, and beat him up.”

“I am starting to get worried you keep ending with ‘go there and beat him up.’”

“If it works, it works, and if Regum doesn’t give us anything, then that says enough, doesn’t it?”

It did, and she didn’t want to admit it. It was too strong a move. Too much, too quickly.

“When I said I wanted to test our boundaries, I meant to do it with small things. A salary is one thing. This…” Amanda sighed. “It’s too much.”

And yet, now that Tim had said it, she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. Robards’ existence had hung over her like the sword of Damocles. Tim’s idea… It was tempting. Extremely tempting.

Worse still, it felt feasible.

Amanda fought multiple armed men and found it easy. She also fought an Exceed with Tim, and they had been about to win. Mr. Robards had been a mysterious, powerful Exceed to her before, but now…

Why couldn’t she and Tim just deal with him?

Even if they couldn’t take him to the police without evidence, Amanda was willing to bet Regum had some sort of jail in the building. Why wouldn’t they? They had everything else already.

“Tomorrow,” she said at least. “We’ll bring it up tomorrow.”

“And if they say no?”

“Oh, they’re going to say no. The issue is how they say no, and what we’ll find out through asking.”

And if she didn’t like how the conversation went, well, like Tim had said, that would be its own type of answer.

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