Sworded Affair

Chapter 112: The Office

"Something wrong?" Elizabeth asked, turning from her own unpacking at the dining table to see Emma frozen in place.

"No, no. The opposite actually, I just levelled up."

[Trait - Rorschach's Blot selected!]

Having thought it over, Emma locked in one of her choices, seeing a clear upside in frustrating any surveillance aimed at her. The second choice, she left for later; as none provided any immediate relevance.

As the final notification faded from view, Emma dug a finger into the plain brown package in her hands, and activated Wolf, Ram and Heart. Strictly speaking, she'd already possessed a degree of control over the ability in its prior iteration, being able to decide by her intent what counted as an attack; but now with a built-in toggle, she had enough fine control to dig through wrapping paper with the confidence that it wouldn't cut straight through her new clothes. It was still slow, delicate work though, peeling one layer of wrapping at a time, the kind that couldn't really be rushed without tearing something unfortunate. Three layers in, Emma paused and facepalmed.

"I'm an idiot."

Raising her hand, Emma pointed her ring at the package and ordered it to store the clothes; only the clothes.

[Victorian Gown (3-piece) stored!]

An underarm throw sent the now empty packaging into the blue Fire Slime sleeping in the corner of the room; Emma watching with some satisfaction as more than ten layers of wrapping burned away to nothing. The slime gurgled contentedly, the orange glimmers that made up its face rearranging into a smile that wouldn't look out of place in a game of Pac-man.

[Taylor's always overdo it with the packaging. So much waste; it's almost as bad as Amazon.]

Shaking her head, Emma looked to her Mom again, finding the latter still busy with her own unpacking. Admittedly, she had a lot more to go through; including several boxes that came with cipher locks. Elizabeth was working at the largest of them, one hand glowing with white light, while the other held a piece of paper featuring equations Emma couldn't make heads of tails of.

"This might take a while," Elizabeth admitted, feeling Emma's eyes on her back. "Can you get dinner started? Ingredients are already laid out for you."

"Sure thing," Emma agreed easily, already heading to the kitchen as she spoke.

It was a far cry from the old days, when she only ever did her chores with the begrudging attitude common to teenagers worldwide; but after going for quite some time confined to a liquid diet, Emma had a newfound appreciation for the art of cookery. Her enthusiasm waned somewhat when she found the cutlery; as it turned out, kitchen knives for civilian use weren't easy to hold in a gauntlet sized for a great-sword. Nor did Epitaph fit the dimensions of a kitchen counter, as it turned out.

Reluctantly, Emma had to bring out her homunculus in the end; getting started on peeling the potatoes, onions and carrots the old fashioned way. Looking at the spread of chicken breasts, rashers of bacon and beans, alongside the aforementioned vegetables and carbs? Emma was looking forward to dinner; she hadn't had Hunter's chicken in a long while.

---

People left their desks and stood to greet Noah as he entered the newly christened Oxford administrative building.

"How bad is it?"

Those were Noah's first words, because nobody stood up to mob him the moment he arrived at work, unless things had already gone pear-shaped and he was desperately needed.

"Not an emergency, for once," Ryan replied; the first to speak as always where Noah was concerned. "We're being proactive for once, words of the eggheads."

There were higher ranked people in the room, even in what remained of the old military hierarchy, to say nothing of the newcomers that had arrived to act as liaisons with the Eternal Britannian Empire. The latter had remained oddly deferential to him though, which the former took as a sign to do likewise; as a result, Noah had been elected leader and was now regularly giving orders to men two decades his senior. Sometimes, he wondered if this was how newly commissioned officers felt, being deployed for the first time.

"Our sentries have done a good job at keeping our immediate surroundings clear," A willowy, bespectacled man of indeterminate age spoke up next; one of the Empire's analysts, judging by the badge on his chest. "A bit too good, actually, because it's forcing demons to spawn further afield, beyond the firing range of most of our weapons. Thus far, they've kept to themselves, but that's unlikely to hold forever. We're in need of some heavy support to thin the herd, before they become a problem."

"Nothing from the tower, I take it?" Noah asked.

"Scholomance is continuing adjustments to siphon away the ambient mana in Oxfordshire. Progress is slow, because it has to happen simultaneously across the region; otherwise you just force all the mana into a few dead zones, and end up with massively powerful demons. We're unlikely to get any support from there for the next month at least."

"Fine," Noah grunted, having expected that answer, given it hadn't changed for weeks now. "I'll talk to my family over dinner, about them joining us for a raid or two. That's in just under two hours, by the way; so give me the short version on anything that can't wait."

Not bothering to head to his office, Noah pulled an armchair out of his bum bag, sinking down into it and blocking the front door obnoxiously.

[Good, you're starting to internalise Empire management principles. Flaunt your power regularly, it keeps those who fear it in line, and encourages those who covet it to work hard.]

Is it weird how little difference there is between the the power plays in a globe-spanning magocracy, and those found in a corporate middle office?

[Eh. Magic is great and all, but people will be people.]