Loosely Lawful | 19

Sera was about to pass out from butter-sugar-flour-chocolate overload when Kali slammed open the door to Kyle’s room. Sera flinched up off the floor. Kyle cringed. Benvolius froze like a kid caught with the cookie jar.

“Done talking nerdy?” Avon asked, still sprawled over the laundry Kyle had already managed to strew about.

“Your paying visit to La Drippe without retrieving a takeaway coffee for me is abhorrent, first of all.” Kali arched a brow, and the boys stiffened under her gaze. “Second, our spell preparations require another day, so I come bearing a suggestion for your afternoon.”

Not more shopping, hopefully. Sera was sick of wizard errands.

“Poliphenia–one of the PhD candidates–tells me there’s a career fair today for the sciences and engineering departments on campus, and that the North Wilds Company has a booth. Surely this is as good an opportunity as we may get to ask questions without breaking any rules?” Kali leveled Sera with a questioning glance, and Sera grimaced. Misrepresentation wasn’t exactly good, but maybe it would preclude any ideas Avon and Kali got about breaking and entering.

“I’m a horrible liar,” Sera said, before pointing at Benvolius. “And also what are we going to do with him?”

“Benvolius will stand for examination here. And I’m certain Kyle and Avon will pass for non-traditional students well enough.” Kali either did not see or ignored the wicked glint in Avon’s eyes. “You can tag along as… an advisor, I suppose. Keep them out of trouble.”

Which, of course, was an impossible ask. Sera had never regretted pastry as much as she did over their long walk back to campus, during which her stomach went from sinking to jittering to twisting itself in knots and then through the whole routine again a handful of times. She tried her best to make note of the stories Avon and Kyle had come up with for themselves; they were both non-trads, slowly paying through school by taking on adventuring work and coffee shop gigs and myriad other odd jobs, and only now had they finally earned enough credits to think about landing a real internship. Ideally paid. They were willing to travel, and particularly interested in the new frontiers opening up in the far north.

“What are you going to do if someone asks for your transcripts?” Sera hissed, as they passed by a gaggle of fine arts students painting in situ on the campus’s main lawn. “Or a resume? We are carrying none of those things!”

Kyle waved a hand. “Brah. Chill. It’ll be fine.”

“We’ll say we didn’t have money for a print shop,” Avon answered. They had grown several inches over the course of the walk, going from normal, lanky, birdish Avon to a brawnier, bro-ier, more filled out version. It was disconcerting. This was not a transformation Avon had ever wanted or needed to make when they worked together in the past. They looked vaguely like a red-headed copy of Kyle.

It took some wandering to find the career fair. The National University’s Jadeport branch sprawled like a lazy goddess, jewel-like in its lawns and gardens and sparkling, white structures. Finding the name of a building required walking all the way up to it, across entire city blocks’ worth of open space and through seas of stately, well-dressed students. It was nothing like the dense, dirty weave of the Gaville branch.

But eventually they stumbled across a towering, glass-clad building with a career fair banner hanging from the roof, and made their way inside. Sera’s skin crawled as she followed Avon and Kyle inside. It had been so long since she’d been a student that she felt uncomfortable being back in an academic setting. Everyone here looked young and fresh and innocent.

The front doors dumped them onto a wide, concrete balcony that ran the perimeter of the building, from which Sera had an expansive view of every classroom, every office, and every lounge space that opened into the atrium. Below them, the career fair ebbed and flowed, masses of students roaming the stalls like enormous slimes. Noise bubbled up from the basement floor in a deafening buzz.

Sera gulped. With the Kavarn scholarship, she’d never needed to attend a career fair. The law firm that the family kept on retainer had already been contracted to hire her.

“Any of you see the North Wilds Company?” Avon asked, leaning over the balcony wall.

A few companies had shelled out for massive banners, announcing themselves like knightly orders of old, and Sera peered at them, looking for the telltale tree in the North Wilds Company logo, only to come up empty. Kavarn Mining, though, had made their presence known. A trio of enormous signs flew high in the center of the atrium, eye-catching in their bold yellow and black.

“I don’t see them,” Sera said, and Kyle surveyed the hall for a few more seconds before agreeing.

“Then in we go.” Avon turned on their heel and headed straight for the nearest staircase, Sera and Kyle following behind.

They meandered slowly through the milieu. Sera found, to her surprise, that she recognized a fair number of the companies represented here. Each of the founding families had one or two of their subsidiary corporations here. In addition to Kavarn Mining, she spotted booths for Ozen Canning and Moore Industries–the two families known for settling much of the lower Jade Coast. They were really old money, with claims on the Consumed Continent that stretched more than a hundred years earlier than those made by the Wildes, Kavarns, or the upstart Huo family currently building their train empire across the eastern plains.

Frowning, she tugged on the spirit of Librata in her chest. She had beef with the Kavarns and the Wildes already. Was the goddess going to have her fight every rich asshole in the country?

Power roused inside of her, but didn’t swell, or answer, or really indicate anything other than a broad ‘maybe,’ which was definitely helpful. So instead of thinking further on what ‘maybe’ might mean, Sera just looked up to make sure she could still see Avon and Kyle’s distinctive heads of red and white hair above the crowd.

They’d gotten a bit ahead of her, of course. Stupid tall people with their stupid long legs. After a bit of dodging and shoving, she elbowed her way to the booth Avon and Kyle had stopped at, freezing when she noticed the telltale tree logo on the tablecloth. It was go time. That was definitely the North Wilds Company. Sera glanced at the faces of the two young men manning the booth, as if she could determine if either of them had been one of the masked attackers from Azuria’s Amazing arcanery, but there was no way for her to know.

Great, now she’d be thinking about it all through Kyle and Avon’s interactions with them. Before the two could approach directly, she nabbed them by the backs of their shirts and hauled them down to her level.

“Alright, do either of you have a plan?” She slid her gaze back to the men at the booth. “Also, is there any way for us to know if those two are also super secret Wilde family assassins?”

Avon looked over, considering. “If I go first, I might get a good scent off them. Then I’ll pull Kyle in?”

“Solid, bro.”

“And then what?” Sera asked.

Kyle clapped a jaunty hand on Sera’s shoulder. “Brah, chill. How many fellow bros have I charmed for you?”

Sera wrinkled her nose and ignored Avon’s amused look. “I know, I know. I just. Usually I’m your backup for that.”

“I promise I’ll take good care of him,” Avon said, and then before she could stop them, they turned lazily on a heel and strolled towards the booth.

The two young men looked up, and Sera saw on their faces the immediate interest. They probably didn’t get a ton of strapping, muscular folk on this campus. Avon offered them a nervous smile and made a show of glancing around at the pamphlets and booth decor. Their shoulders rose on a long inhale, and then they snaked hand behind their back and signaled for Kyle to join them.

“So uhh. North Wilds Company?” Avon started, pitching their voice into a deeper, more masculine timbre. “That’s crazy. I didn’t know you guys did anything down here.”

Sera took a step back and let the rivers of students come between herself and the booth, obscuring her from view. It was hard to hear the conversation, but like Kyle said, it was probably best to leave this to him.

One of the men at the booth answered in a loud, booming tenor. “Haha! It’s true. Most of our operations are up north, but we do a lot of sales down here. And some R&D.”

“Oh, so no environmental research work for folks out of Jadeport?” Avon asked.

“Not unless you’re willing to relocate for a season.” The man paused as Avon and Kyle looked at eachother with matching, agreeable shrugs. “But if relocation is an option, then we have a lot of open positions.” He winked, and Sera perked up from her hiding place in the crowd. “Let me just dig around in our box of extra materials…”

“We can totes relocate,” Kyle said, beaming. He reached up to scratch absently at his neck, and even looking at his back, Sera could imagine the charming, boyish face he employed as he explained their backstory. It was the same face he’d used to somehow charm Kali the first time they’d run into each other. “I’ve actually been up there, you know? The trees are legit so huge.”

The second man’s eyebrows shot up. “You made it pretty far north, then.”

Kyle chuckled. “Adventuring gigs, man. You go crazy places! But I bet you guys have made it even further. How far does the lumber tract actually go? Like, I swear I could have kept walking forever, and there’d still be NWC camps around.”

“NWC?” repeated booth man number two, just as his partner came back with the promised extra materials.

“Oh, shoot, you guys don’t call it that? My bad!” Kyle reached for the papers, his hand dwarfing the booth man’s, and he snapped up the extra pamphlets before any attempt could be made to sort them for him. “North Wilds Company? NWC? Just an acronym, dudes.”

Avon peered over Kyle’s shoulder, and their face lit up at some job title. “Surveying track? What’s that? It sounds like something an ex-adventurer would be good at.”+

The booth men made identical faces of snide disbelief. “There’s a lot of math in surveying,” said one of them.

“So?” said Kyle.

In the awkward pause that followed, Sera adjusted her position in the crowd to get a better view of all the boxes in the back of the booth. Maybe one of them was full enough that she could get a glimpse of what was inside. She stood on tiptoe and tracked behind a pair of students comparing resumes, but still wasn’t tall enough to catch a good look.

Maybe Librata would allow a clairvoyance spell in this one instance? Since she was in public, and her targets were in public, and she could maybe bend the privacy laws to– nope. Her chest tightened, Librata’s holy energy warning her against it.

Eventually, one of the booth men gave in. “I don’t know that a pair of ex-adventurers can handle all the math that goes with”-

“I’m in environmental sciences,” Avon broke in. “Of course I can handle maths.”

Kyle elbowed them, wide grin still plastered across his face. “And we’re already great at logistics! What areas are you trying to survey? Is the North Wilds Company going all the way up to the White Ocean?”

A bit put out by Kyle’s superior deftness with conversation, Avon snatched up the brochures and flipped further through the stack. Booth man number one fiddled with his tie as he considered how to answer Kyle’s question.

“Er, yes. But there’s a lot of land between our current operations and the shore of the White Ocean. I don’t think we’ll get there any time soon.”

Avon unfolded one of the pamphlets, considered it, and then held it up. “That’s a bit odd. The North Wilds Company made it from Gaville to here”- they poked a spot on the page, probably a map that Avon had facing the booth men -”in less than a decade. Does the climate north of that change so drastically that you couldn’t”-

Kyle reached one meaty hand up around Avon’s shoulders and dragged them in close, somehow still beaming. “What my buddy means to say is that we’re worried about job security! You guys move so fast, what if there’s nothing left to survey once we’ve finished our degrees!”

Booth man number two made a constipated face. “I’m sure there will still be plenty of new regions. Listen, the Wilde family themselves are the ones managing choices about when and where we send survey teams. We really can’t tell you any more.”

Damn. They really kept that information under lock and key. Sera hadn’t expected a pair of recruiters to know everything, but if they’d indicated they knew something about the company forecasting and were merely doing their due diligence to not share beyond their fellow employees, then Sera might have been able to find verbiage in the company business plan that they could use for their lawsuit. If it was truly only the Wildes that knew anything, this would be much more difficult.

“That’s alright!” Kyle said, reaching across the table to shake the men’s hands. “Thanks for chatting with us anyway. You got any kind of separate recruiting office we can go to if we want to apply later?”

The booth men handed over business cards. Kyle wrapped up the interaction so smoothly that Sera almost missed it when he tugged Avon away from the booth and back into the crowd. Grumbling to herself about the pitfalls of short legs, she scrambled to catch up with them.

“Well,” she said, as they paused by a Moore Industries booth covered in bright blue banners, “that was a bust.”

Avon smirked. “Not entirely. I saw you trying to snoop, thought I might have better eyesight and a better vantage point. They had the company business plan open in one of the boxes. I managed to catch a few lines about a ‘protected zone’ in the northwest quadrant of the Wilde Family territory.”

“I guess that’s not nothing.”

After snagging a few cubes of brightly-colored lokum off the nearby Moore Industries booth, Kyle chewed thoughtfully. “And we know the rank and file bros are just bros. Which is good and bad.”

Good, because it meant that only the Wildes themselves would face punishment. Bad, because it would make information harder to get, and because these regular employees might not have anywhere to go when the Wilde family’s secrets blew up. This sucked.

“I could turn into a spider and try to dig around in their boxes,” Avon suggested.

If Sera couldn’t use clairvoyance to get a better view of their boxes, then the goddess sure as hell wouldn’t approve of that. “Maybe once we translate the contracts, this will make more sense,” she said, turning them toward the stairwell. But her brain whirred as they exited the building, turning over the conversation and the wording Avon had mentioned from the open business plan.

A ‘protected zone.’ That was odd language for a region that, as far as Sera knew, had no publicly recognized status. How unusual that the Wildes would categorize some part of their own massive holdings that way.