The next day.
‘Six days until the Century Festival! We’ve broken the one-week barrier!’ Alina exclaimed as she checked the calendar hanging on the office wall. Surrounded by piles upon piles of paperwork—something which had become a daily sight—she resumed her work at lightning speed. Regular working hours had passed, and the veil of night hung heavy over Ifühl. Hours had gone by since the start of her overtime shift, but seeing the devilish heights of the paperwork mountain, she hadn’t once considered taking a break.
‘Ugh… I’m about to call it a day,’ an exhausted Laila muttered with a deep, languid sigh, before collapsing over her desk. ‘I can’t believe a rumour was the cause of all this. And now, of all times. It’s too unfair.’
‘But there’s less work than yesterday. Maybe those shitbags calmed down a bit after the Guild’s warning.’
‘You’re too mean, Alina.’
Ignoring Laila’s complaints, Alina shifted her gaze to corner of her desk, where a small booklet was placed like a good-luck charm—her Century Festival guide, filled with the wealth of information regarding the celebration she had managed to gather over the past few months to make sure she could enjoy the festival to the fullest. That guide had become Alina’s sole source of strength.
‘Are you still going to continue?’ Laila asked. Alina replied without pause, ‘Of course. There’s still work to be done.’
Laila fell silent for a second or two, searching for the right words to say. ‘Hey, Alina. Don’t you think you’re taking on too much work?’
‘Eh?’ Surprised by her junior’s unexpected remark, Alina raised her head, where she met Laila’s slightly guilty-looking eyes.
‘Like, you’re twice as fast at dealing with the adventurers’ commissions than the others, so you end up with twice as much paperwork.’
‘Well, that may be so, but…’
When the reception gets busy, Alina cuts out any unnecessary procedures and processes the commissions as quickly as possible to keep the queue moving. Compare this to the other receptionists, who drag out the procedures to reduce the amount of commissions they take on. The adventurers in their queue either get get tired of waiting and come back another day, or go line up at another counter.
As for Laila, she’s just slow slow at her job because of her inexperience, but the result—less paperwork later—is the same. Still, the fact that she picked up on such a sophisticated technique as deliberately working slowly to reduce your workload in her first year of working here was a testament to her keen intuition.
‘Just by taking things slowly, just by listening to the adventurers’ boastful tales, you can reduce the amount of commissions by quite a lot, right? That’s what everybody else does. That’s why they don’t have as much overtime. It’s not fair that you should bear the brunt of the workload! Especially when you consider that you’re also responsible for doing the final tally at the end of the day. Can’t you slow down? At least until the Century Festival…’
‘Listen, even if all of us worked like that, it wouldn’t change the amount of adventurers we have to serve. At the end of the day, someone has to do the work.’
‘That may be true, but… it doesn’t have to be you, does it? Someone else will, surely!’
‘That’d be nice…’ Alina nodded wearily, before averting her eyes and adding in a whisper, ‘but I don’t like doing such underhanded things.’
‘Alina, it’s things like that that make you such a convenient pawn for the workplace!’
