Employment Opportunities!

[Quincunx]

Tzimfemme strode into the Conservatory carrying a large sheet of corkboard on her head with a small pile of other supplies helping to keep its balance. She unloaded the lot in a well-trafficed location: corkboard, kneadable tacky gunk, box of pushpins, sheets of parchment, and a once-fluffy quill which had been braided into a quill-point with a string attached. Tacky gunk soaked into the corners of the corkboard before Tzimfemme pressed it against the wall, then she pinned the quill to the board, along with several notices pre-written in tiny, even block lettering:

 

Wanting to buy extraplanar wards for the pantry in my room. Chocolate warded against all possible forms of disappearance I can manage and yet it keeps disappearing. Leave a notice below.

 

For Sale: Deep Freeze Unit. Room for six cadavers or hibernating human-size creatures. Remember--very few universes have laws against freezing your enemies! Contact Tzimfemme in the laboratory.

 

Work Exchange! I need to buy the services of a traveler of time and/or parallel existences and/or accomplished naming mage. Inquire for details. Serious offers only, please. Offering in return the services of a middling-quality naming mage, non-cyberpunk technomancer, cult-maker, and chocolatier. Your method of contact will be taken as a show of suitability for the job.

[Zadown]

Air rippled in front of the corkboard soon after Tzimfemme had left. Reality bent and grudgingly made way to the Dreamer, who appeared exactly in front of the written notices. His eyes were shining yellow as he looked around, a confused expression on his hideously scarred face. Finally the notes attracted his searching gaze and he read them from last to first, face impassive. After reading the last one, he read it again, smiling. Then again, grinning widely, eyes the golden-white of unmitigated joy and finally he started laughing - a roaring, deep and loud laugh, far too happy sound from such a being of death and destruction.

 

Still chuckling under his breath, the planewalker snatched a Chárôt card out of thin air and nailed it on the board next to the first written notice with a simple, crude sealing rune. The card showed a picture of little Valdar in a fool's cap, stepping out of a house completely in flames and marching forward with a wooden sword on his belt and a magic wand in his hand. It was titled "0 - The Jester" in an archaic, hard to read font. He then stepped back to admire his handiwork.

[Xaious, Master of Time]

He had been walking around, some bit woozy from the party he was just leaving from, when he tripped on nothing and fell face first on the ground, passing out, and then--eventually--waking, with an advertisement stuck to his forehead. An advertisement that appeared quite old.

 

"Work Exchange! I need to buy the services of a traveler of time and/or parallel existences and/or accomplished naming mage. Inquire for details. Serious offers only, please. Offering in return the services of a middling-quality naming mage, non-cyberpunk technomancer, cult-maker, and chocolatier. Your method of contact will be taken as a show of suitability for the job."

 

"A traveler of time, eh?" Xaious chuckled, then grabbed his horribly aching head. "It's a good thing that's me, otherwise..." Another painful chuckle.

He took his time getting to actually applying, but this was Ok: He was the first to apply. And undoubtably, his would be the first that could be noticed.

 

------------------------------

 

As Tzimfemme set up the notice, she felt an odd poke to her back.

 

The master of Time had applied, leaving a sticky note on her back.

Edited September 15, 2004 by Xaious, Master of Time

[Wyvern]

A shady figure dressed in a dark cloak that fails to disguise his not-so-shady tail, claws, teeth, horns, scales, and lack of manners slowly edges his way around the corner of the corkboard, nervously turning his eyes upwards towards the word "Employment" and noticing its position next to "Opportunities" on the sign that rests above the board. The meaning of the phrase is completely lost to the lizard as his greedy reptilian brain desperatly attempts to associate honest work to opportunity, and curiousity consumes him in the form of a headache as he turns the corner to examine the corkboard more thoroughly. The reptilian Elder raises a claw to his scaly chin as he reads over Tzimfemmes messages, and a sinister grin spreads over his face as he quietly hisses to himself:

 

"Hmmm... maybe if I marketed them right, I could pass those Almost Dragonic Brand Extra Plain Wards™ for extraplanar wards. Those defective vampire garlic bread wards really need to go, after all... they're beginning to stink up the Pen basement, and Tamaranis and Vlad both seem to be having more allergies lately."

 

The overgrown lizard frowns upon saying this, not content with the thought of creating bad blood between himself and the resident Pen vampires over a few stolen loafs of stale bread. Turning to Tzimfemmes second message and deciding that Deep Freeze Units are too water-oriented for his tastes, the lizard skips over it and rereads the third part of her message before hissing:

 

"I dunno about traveling through time and seperate multiverses, but naming mages I can do. Just have to remember what those different styles were... I know Asininity was one, Vacancy was another. There was one that began with an N... Neurasthenia? Yeesh, this'll never do. I'm going to have to revise my naming strategies if I want to make a good impression with a method of contact. She only wants serious names, after all."

 

Having said this, Wyvern shrugs and begins to turn away from the corkboard when he suddenly notices a card that's been tacked below the final message. Examining the card curiously and noticing the phrase "0 - The Jester" along with the intricate rune that has been etched onto it, Wyvern immediatly translates the cards symbols by means of his universal method of Almost Dragonic translation, in which any rare rune is translated to "big money."

 

"Ooooo, thissss looks rare!" hisses the lizard sinisterly as he snatches the card from its position on the board and promptly slips it into a pocket of his coat. "I wonder how many gamblers would be willing to pay for an ancient trump card."

 

With that, the overgrown lizard quickly glances in both directions before dashing off towards the Cabaret Room, practicing his pronounciation of complicated names as he dissapears down a hallway.

 

;-)

[Quincunx]

Tzimfemme walked away from the notice board, shrugging one shoulder to shake off an odd feeling in the muscles. She passed one of the large Pen wards set into the wall for protection and heating, backtracked, and leaned against the warm wall. Her back covered the ward and relaxed in the heat, but the odd feeling persisted. Suddenly she realized, jumped away from the wall, and opened a suction portal immediately behind her back to take an air and mystic elements sample. Once the portal pinched itself off, she tested the region with her own skills: no perceivable mana flow, no fingerprints, no spoken command, no phantasm spells, no sentinel spell, nothing but a tiny trace of post-party alcohol and sweat. "Well, I'm sure that eliminates. . .someone from consideration. . .I hope," she thought, and hastened upstairs to the laboratory for more extensive testing of the sample.

 

*****

 

A few days later, she returned to the notice board toting a small bucket full of quivering, half-congealed mana. She set the bucket down and looked at the little rune, still clinging to the cork, and tried to pry it off with her fingers. No luck. She took a wood popsicle stick from a convenient mini-portal, scooped up a gob of mana, and applied it to the rune and surrounding area. The cork got wet. The rune remained. She tossed the stick negligently over her shoulder (the portal reopened, taking it to the trashcan in the lab) and cast her own spell of protection on the rune, then stripped it off violently, hoping to destroy both enchantments. Still the rune was stuck. Tzimfemme grumbled and fished out her flail from the portal, then used the dagger-head's edge to cut a circle of cork around the rune. Cork, rune, and corner of card all came loose from the wall.

 

With the rune sent back to the laboratory (to be glued to the handle of the pantry), Tzimfemme took another popsicle stick and dabbed mana onto the third notice. With each dab, she recited another possible name, Pen people of power. . .and phenomenal alcohol tolerance. The sample had held both the final metabolized traces of pure alcohol and fresh untainted cocktail mixes, with plenty of other varieties of alcohol to explain the intervening hours. She was a little leery of broadcasting an invitation to six or seven people, but hadn't been able to get a more precise identification of the poking feeling.

[Xaious, Master of Time]

It had been quite some time, and there had been no announcement of who had been chosen for employment. Wondering if something was truly amiss, the Master of Time decided to make an inquiry.

 

 

*a few time manips later*

 

 

Plopping himself onto his bed--in some hidden closet at the Pen--Xaious sleepily wondered aloud. *yawns* "Maybe...sticky..note on forehead....will...seeen... *yawns*now...sleeep....".

A note, with clear directions to him who left it.

Edited October 12, 2004 by Xaious, Master of Time