Rimelion: The Exploiter

I walked into City Hall as if I belonged there.

This was technically true. I owned the building. But Parlie didn’t know that, and Parlie walked with the slightly uncertain posture of someone starting a new job and trying very hard not to look lost.

Inside, the clerks were moving in every direction, papers flying, stamps thudding, someone yelling about grain allocations, always grain allocations; this city ran on grain and slaves, and the low, constant hum of bureaucracy.

I picked a table.

The clerk behind it was a young elven man with ink on three of his fingers. He didn’t look up when I approached.

I placed the document on the table.

He glanced at it. Read it. Didn’t react.

Then he pointed, without lifting his head, to a table across the hall. “That one.”

“Which—”

“That one.” The finger didn’t waver. His quill resumed scratching.

I went to that one.

There was a line. One person ahead of me, a nervous-looking human woman clutching her own papers to her chest, shifting her weight from foot to foot. The clerk at this table was older, sharp-eyed, with the energy of someone who had seen every trick, every shortcut, every forged document that had ever passed through these doors.

The nervous woman was called forward. The clerk examined her papers, asked two questions, stamped something, and directed her to the first floor, room two. “Staffmaster,” she said crisply. “Next.”

I stepped up and placed my document on the table. The clerk picked it up. Read it. Her eyes moved across the text and let out a sigh.

“Not Queen again,” she muttered.

I kept my face neutral. Parlie’s face. Innocent, slightly confused. “I’m sorry?”

The clerk looked up at me. Her gaze moved across my face, my blazer, my pointed ears, my complete absence of a tiara. Whatever she saw, it didn’t register as royalty.

It registered as another body to process. “Parlie,” she said, reading the name off the document. “You want to work for the head administrator?”

Lola had gotten another title here. She’d probably reorganized enough of this city’s infrastructure to qualify for three title upgrades and a pension.

I was so proud of her I almost broke character.

“Yes,” I said. “The Queen said it was—”

“Everyone needs to pass a test,” the clerk interrupted. “You are not an exception.” She was already writing something on a secondary form, hand moving with mechanical efficiency. “First floor, room two. Staffmaster.”

She stamped the form, slid it across the table, and looked past me.

“Next.”

I took the form and left.

The stairs to the first floor were around the far side of the hall, stone steps worn smooth in the center from years of feet. The noise from the ground floor faded as I climbed, replaced by the quieter, denser hum of the upper levels, muffled voices through doors, the occasional scrape of a chair, the rustle of paper.

Room two was near the stairwell. The door was open.

Inside, the room was small. A single desk dominated the center, piled with neat stacks of folders. Five chairs were arranged along the wall, and three were occupied.

Two women and one man. The women sat with their hands in their laps, backs straight, the identical postures. The man sat at the end, arms crossed, staring at the opposite wall.

Behind the desk sat the staffmaster.

She was broad-shouldered, who looked like she’d been carved from the same stone as City Hall and had approximately the same tolerance for nonsense. Her hair was cropped short, her jaw was set, and she wore a uniform.

She looked up as I entered. “Paper.”

I handed it over.

She read it in three seconds, opened a thick ledger on her desk, wrote something, and closed it. Then she reached under the desk and produced a cloth band, white with pale blue stripes, and held it out.

“Wear this at all times,” she said. “It identifies you as an assistant in training. Remove it and you will be escorted out of restricted sections for the public. Lose it and you will be billed for a replacement.”

I took the band and tied it around my upper arm. The fabric was stiff and slightly scratchy. “Sit,” the staffmaster said, already looking back at her ledger. “Wait.”

I sat, and the chair was hard. I smiled at the woman next to me; she was a young one with punishing hair.

She glanced at me, then looked away. No smile returned, just the flat, forward stare of someone who was here to get a job, not make friends.

I tried the second, older woman. Same result. A brief flicker of eye contact, then nothing.

The man didn’t even bother with eye contact. His arms remained crossed. His stare remained fixed on the wall.

The staffmaster surveyed us like a general assessing troops she expected to disappoint her.

“The position of assistant to the Head Administrator,” she said, “is the most responsible position in this building. Possibly in this kingdom.”

She paused for effect.

“Only the best of the best are even considered.” Her gaze moved across us, one by one. I kept my face attentive. Parlie was a good listener. Parlie cared about this opportunity. “You sitting here are the best Alta—” She caught herself. “—Rimebreak Kingdom has to offer.”

This city had been Altandai for a long time, and new banners didn’t erase old habits overnight. “But that isn’t enough,” she continued. “In order to serve the Grand—” Another catch. Another shift. “—the Kingdom, you need to pass one last test.”

She stood and began placing documents in front of each of us, each one stamped with a number.

“Each of you will have one hour to produce a report based on the materials you’ll receive. Normally—” her tone suggested that normally was her favorite word, “—you would be expected to hunt the relevant documents yourself. Navigate the archive system. Demonstrate resourcefulness.”

She looked at us.

“To save time, go to the archive in the basement and present your assignment paper. The archivists will provide your source materials.”

Her smile changed. It was not a nice smile. It was the smile of a woman who had watched many candidates walk into this test confident and walk out broken, and who found the pattern consistently entertaining.

“Go.”

Four chairs scraped back simultaneously.

I was closest to the door, which was an advantage. I was on my feet and moving in the same breath, three steps ahead, hand already reaching for the doorframe—

An elbow hit me between the ribs.

A deliberate, sharp, competitive elbow from the young woman with the punishing hair, who had apparently decided that politeness was for people who didn’t want the job badly enough. The impact caught me mid-stride, and I stumbled sideways, shoulder hitting the doorframe, momentum gone.

She shot past me into the corridor.

For approximately half a second, I entertained the queenly response. The dignified one. The I am above this response.

Then a thin line of frost, barely visible, slicked across the stone floor about two meters ahead of her.

Her front foot hit it perfectly.

She went down with a yelp and a spectacular full-body faceplant that would have earned high marks in competitive falling. Papers scattered, her punishing hair came slightly undone.

I stepped over her with Parlie’s most apologetic expression.

“Oh no,” I said very sincerely. “The floors here are so slippery.”

She glared up at me from the ground, but I was already past her, and the man had gotten ahead of both of us during the chaos, his long legs carrying him down the corridor.

That was actually perfect. I had absolutely no idea where the archive was.

I followed him.

Down the main stairs, past the ground floor chaos, and then further down, a secondary staircase I hadn’t noticed before, narrow and steep, the air cooling as we descended. The stone walls were older here, rougher, and the light came from crystal fixtures that hummed faintly with mana.

The basement opened up.

I stopped.

The archive was enormous. The ceiling vanished upward into shadow, and the space stretched in every direction, filled with shelves, towering wooden structures packed so densely with paper, scrolls, ledgers, and bound volumes that they seemed to lean inward, creating narrow corridors that branched and turned and disappeared into the dark like a library designed by someone who hated visitors.

Paper was everywhere. On the floor. Between shelves. Wedged into corners. One scroll had unrolled itself across a walkway, and nobody had bothered to move it.

At the center of the chaos, like a calm eye, sat a large desk. Two archivists waited behind it, a man and a woman, both wearing serene expressions. The man and I reached the desk at the same time.

We both shoved our assignment papers forward.

The archivists didn’t rush. They glanced at the papers, nodded, and reached down. There was a crate at their feet, prepared, pre-sorted, clearly assembled in advance for exactly this moment. The man archivist selected a bundle, handed it to the angry man. The woman archivist selected another and held it out to me.

“Good luck,” the man archivist said, and he actually smiled. Warmly, even. As if he were rooting for us, personally, even while handing us the instruments of our potential failure.

I took the bundle with a large grin. “Thank you!” He seemed slightly surprised by the enthusiasm. Most candidates probably looked nauseous at this point.

I turned and rushed back toward the stairs, already glancing down at the materials in my hands.

I almost tripped.

Ledgers.

Dense reports.

Tables of numbers.

Pages and pages of text, tightly written, in common script, not elven, thank every god in this system, which meant Cloudy’s translation kicked in automatically.

If it had been elven, I could technically read it, but it would have taken me until next season to parse a single page of stupidly dense text.

Even with translation, though.

I flipped through the pages as I climbed the stairs. Reports on trade volumes. Tax ledger summaries. Something about import ratios and seasonal yield variance. A three-page document that appeared to be nothing but numbers arranged in columns with headers I didn’t fully understand.

Charlie would be hopeless.

Charlie, the Queen of Frost, conqueror of Altandai, wielder of Strife’s Versatility, would sit down with these papers and produce something that made Vessith wince and Lola reach for a drink.

But Parlie.

Parlie had an ace up her sleeve.

I followed the man into an empty room, and he sat behind a desk and started going through the papers. I grabbed quill and ink, along with empty papers, and grinned at him.

He ignored me.

I ducked into the toilet on the ground floor, a small, blessedly empty room with a stone basin and a door that locked. I leaned against the wall, closed my eyes, and hoped Cloudy was in a cooperative mood.

The shift came. The familiar lurch, the brief darkness, the—

Ceiling. Earth ceiling.

I didn’t stop to appreciate it.

I was off the bed and moving, papers still clutched in my hand, bless Cloudy not fussing about smuggling reports between words, and I took the stairs two at a time, bare feet slapping on the floor, up to the small desk where my computer sat in its permanent state of being used as a backdrop.

I dropped into the chair, slapped the papers down next to the keyboard, and opened the browser.

“Who says Parlie can’t cheat?” I muttered, already typing. Jerry was in Rimelion, doing whatever Jerry did when he had a new body. Which meant the personal AI assistant who usually handled my incompetence was unavailable.

But Rimebreak had its own AI now.

The corporate one. The one Dmitry had insisted on developing because “every competitive organization requires proprietary analytical infrastructure, and no, Charlie, we cannot just ask Jerry every time.” I’d nodded through that presentation, too, but for once the nodding was paying off.

I pulled up the interface, fed it every page, the ledgers, the trade reports, the columns of numbers that might as well have been ancient runes for all I understood them, and waited.

It thought for about twelve seconds.

Then it produced a report.

Twenty pages. Structured. Sectioned with headers. Analysis of trade flow disruption in the southern agricultural corridor, projected yield variance under current policy, three recommended interventions with cost-benefit breakdowns, and a conclusion that tied it all back to the Kingdom’s long-term food security strategy.

I understood maybe a tenth of it.

It didn’t matter.

I grabbed the quill and ink and started copying. Word for word. Every sentence, every number, every painfully specific phrase the AI had generated.

The charts were harder.

The AI had produced clean, geometric visualizations; bar charts, trend lines, a comparison matrix. My copies were... not clean.

The lines wobbled.

The bars were uneven.

One axis was slightly diagonal.

But they were there. They existed. They had labels and numbers and the general shape of competence, and that was what mattered. I didn’t need perfection. I needed to look like someone who knew what she was doing and had worked very hard, which was technically true if you defined work as frantically copying an AI’s homework in another dimension.

Twenty pages in forty minutes.

My hand was cramping. There was ink on my cheek, and I didn’t remember how it got there. The last chart, a projected resource allocation timeline, looked like it had been drawn during an earthquake, but it had all the right numbers in approximately the right places.

Good enough.

I closed my eyes and went back.

The toilet. City Hall. Stone walls, mana-crystal light, the muffled chaos of the ground floor bleeding through the door.

I straightened my blazer, checked that the blue-striped band was still on my arm, and ran.

The staffmaster’s office. I rounded the corner, slightly out of breath, papers clutched to my chest, and pushed through the door.

The other three were already there, sitting in their chairs, hands folded.

The young woman with the formerly-punishing hair, now slightly disheveled from her encounter with the floor, had her arms crossed and a small, satisfied smile.

The older woman sat with quiet composure.

The angry man looked marginally less angry, which for him probably meant triumph.

The staffmaster looked up from behind her desk. “Cutting it close,” she said.

“Thorough research,” I said, which was technically not a lie.

The other three glanced at my stack of papers, and their smug expressions wavered. Twenty pages were, apparently, more than any of them had produced.

I placed the papers on the desk.

The staffmaster picked them up. She flipped through the pages, eyes moving quickly, pausing on a chart, moving on, pausing again on the cost-benefit breakdown.

“Hm,” she said.

She went back to the beginning. Read more slowly this time. Turned a page. “Actually, good work,” she said. She looked up at me, and there was something in her expression that was almost impressed. “I see why you needed nearly the entire hour.”

The young woman’s satisfied smile had curdled into something sour.

The staffmaster gathered all four sets of papers, labeled each with a name and number, and tied them into individual bundles with string.

“Follow me.”

We followed her down the corridor, up a staircase, before she stopped at a door.

Room 14.

My heart did something entirely unprofessional.

The staffmaster knocked once, opened the door without waiting for a response, and stepped inside.

The room was tables pushed together, maps and scrolls and ledgers covering every surface, the conspiracy-theory corkboard with its web of strings and notes. Boxes stacked against the walls.

And Lola.

She was sitting at the center of it all, exactly where she belonged.

Hair pulled back, dark circles under her eyes, sleeves rolled up, ink on her wrist. A clipboard balanced on her knee. A quill in her hand. She was writing something while reading something else, while apparently also thinking about a third thing, because her lips were moving in silent calculation.

She was beautiful.

She was so beautiful it was actually offensive, and I had to physically stop myself from grinning, because Parlie didn’t know this woman. Parlie was a stranger. Parlie’s heart was not currently attempting to exit through her ribcage.

The staffmaster stepped forward. “Head Administrator. The new assistant candidates are here to present their work.”

Lola didn’t look up; she finished writing whatever she was writing, set the quill down, and raised her head.

“Fine,” she said and motioned vaguely. “Go ahead.”

The staffmaster placed the bundles on the one clear corner of Lola’s desk. “Four candidates. Standard evaluation.” She untied the first bundle. “First is a very thorough report, by Parlie.”

“Parlie?” Lola’s eyes lifted.

They moved across the room, past the staffmaster, past the other candidates, and found me.

I stood there in my blazer and my blue-striped training band, ink on my cheek, quill-cramped hand at my side, wearing the most innocent expression I had ever produced in either of my lives.

Lola stared at me.

“Huh?” she said.