12 A Little Night Music

"So… you're naked because a slime ate your suit?" The Bureau agent I was handing in my written report to asks incredulously after reading through the brief paragraphs.

"I have spare suits," I reply calmly, leaving everything up to my paperwork before abruptly turning and walking back to where the others were preparing the truck. Even though I could wear my weapon belts and the inner strapping of my coat about my lower body for coverage, I was apparently not allowed to ride in the back of the truck. Because of this, I had the back seat all to myself while Leo and Ms. Gwyn sat up front.

Nobody really said anything during the ride that was much less awkward for me lounging in the back seat that it was for everybody else. However, it was still pretty much a quiet and smooth trip that ended with the same question my guardian eventually asked me. Lucinda had made a 'family recipe' lasagna with smoothies for dessert and half of dinner was spent discussing my assignment.

One thing I honestly appreciated about this lady was that she did not even bat an eyelash at my appearance and had clothes ready from my calling ahead.

Halfway through the dinner when I was making a joke about being the only one naked in the back seat of another couple's vehicle, Lucinda started to laugh but immediately scolded me on my personality then asked, "What if you ever worked with them again? Now, you're the nude dude from the back seat."

Nodding my head slowly as if I had just stumbled upon an epiphany, I say, "Ms. Gwyn actually asked me about that before I got out of the truck. She asked if I would ever consider working with her again. Her personal party is her husband and the two tankers, they're very level-headed, smart, and know their job. Plus, despite their low rankings they can still accomplish some heroics."

"Like when they pressurized and depressurized a natural gas explosion?" Lucinda asks with a thin-lipped smile. "Which is completely illegal, I might add. However, since they pulled it off THIS TIME I won't say anything THIS TIME. So… what did you say?"

"That I wanted to avoid slime dungeons and start focusing on subhuman dungeons for a while," I reply with the same expressionless face and voice I used to answer them. Then, relaxing once again after taking a bite of lasagna, I say, "Ms. Gwyn said she felt the same way, so we would probably be seeing each other soon."

"How are you feeling after having your face melted more than a hard rock festival?" She asks suddenly, bringing up concepts I only vaguely got the references to.

"Not bad… but I want to avoid dungeons with slimes for a little while," I answer honestly. "The slime was a high enough grade that swallowing some of it would have eaten out my chest and stomach. I probably did not have to be in so much of it for so long, but I needed to get some contribution in."

"There was another lady there, someone closer to your age…?" Lucinda asks, changing tracks as quickly and suddenly as usual. I simply stared at her in bland confusion. "Don't give me that look, I'm your guardian and Bureau agent because you dont have any parents or family that can take care of you. If you have questions… or interests… I'm the only one you can talk to them about. So, talk to me about it. Did you like her?"

"She's six years older than me, very attractive, and Hispanic," I inform her with the same bland expression on my face. "There's no way I'm going to shit the bed in a potential full-time team. They're honestly one more ranged and one more magic user away from an upscaling portal team."

"Nope, you're already in the next rank over your head," Lucinda rejects instantly, raising her glass with a satisfied smile as if she had heard the words she was waiting for. "They're two members short of a proper party but you're already and overachieving heavy hitter and they probably want to upscale early. They want to do subhuman dungeons, now? what's your number one rule for subhuman dungeons in E?"

"No more than five hobgoblin sized signatures and one troll- or ogre-kin boss," I reply in a mechanical droning voice. "-Even with more than five other people on the team." I rush to add, cutting off her reminder of the same words.

"They plus me equals five and they bringing in another third-party like Emilia's group would make around eight people," I continue in the following silence in which neither of us eat anything. "They had two sturdy tanks with mana projecting shields that could generate sustainable wall wards, two healing capable magic users with one main healer sub-fire and a main fire sub-healer.

"Emilia is a high-speed ranged heavy hitter with better heavy weapons marksmanship than me and a pair of speed-based swordsmen. I'm a heavy swordsman sub-gunner who is going to have a second saber and revolver as well as the combination rifle once my contribution points hit. The next thing I save up for, in cash, is body armor."

Silence reigned over the dinner table once again, but this time I did not let it come between me and good food.

After a few moments, Lucinda finally says, "The Bureau's sweepers who checked the dungeon before the porters got the work carting and mining report that the slime boss' core was big enough to belly crawl your future boss' truck and had a reading of just under three hundred. Your wages already came in and they're double what the contract offered for an F in an E dungeon. Your contribution points probably went up as well."

"I had my face melted for almost half a minute, they better have upped my pay," I grumble irritably, shivering as I think back to the experience of only little more than an hour ago. I was probably going to have nightmares about acid baths because of this.

-

The special alarm for the government contribution payment app finally went off while I was in the middle of working out two days after the slime spider portal. I was a little preoccupied standing against the side of a three-sided workout machine that dominated the middle of Lucinda's basement. The entire thing stood seven feet tall and I was currently using high-tension cables and weight to perform 'wall squats' while standing parallel to the ground.

With three hundred and fifty pounds resisting my two-hundred-pound, it was not hard at all to perform squats like this. What WAS hard was what I was trying to do, now. Which was switching from the two-legged warm-up to the one-legged squatting three hundred pounds.

If I alternated legs at fifty squats, I could get one hundred one-legged squats. Even though I was currently used to this workout, it was still the morning of 'leg day after work'. Later in the afternoon I would be doing fifty warm-ups and then forcing one hundred one-legged squats directly from either leg. In the evening before my shower, I would do the fifty-fifty one-legged routine before bed.

Tomorrow I would just heal 'in bed' with light core training and then hard upper body training the next day. Two days of rest later, I would start the cycle again. Even though I healed twice as fast as the average person, I still took care of my body despite all of the pressure I put it under.

Now, though, I was forced to take a brief break after the warm-up and somewhat excitedly check my phone to see how much contribution I had received. I anticipated around five hundred before I ever even entered the dungeon. When I looked at my phone, I quickly saw that I had received a point payment of over a thousand.

On top of my previous points, I now had just over twenty-one hundred points. I was already paid more than fifty grand for the dungeon, so the increased contribution points were a pleasant surprise. However, I really did deserve them.

I kept Emilia from blasting apart an upper D grade giant slime core that was being fed by a C grade mana crystal cavern, the government really liked having things like that to play with.

After acknowledging my payment and signing in to the contribution marketplace through the app, I soon when through a brief but generic list of basic and common goods. Things like a second revolver and saber combo cost around a hundred points with a few varying styles and mods with similarly varying prices. A basic vest of carbon and Kevlar synthesized from portal resources with MP ratings of around one hundred cost five hundred points.

Supplies and upkeep, though, we sold separately. I learned early on it was better to pay cash for those sorts of things. Especially since I had somebody I could freeload off of.

Currently, I was looking at a set of different combination rifles while weighing my options. Emilia used the highest caliber model of this semi-auto rifle and pump shotgun combination rifle which also came with the lowest ammo capacities. Per standard issue, of course.

The next lower model went from 7.5mm to 5.5mm with a twenty-gauge double-barrel under the rifle. This gun had a standard issue of twenty and twenty whereas the 7.5mm and twelve-gauge double had a standard issue of twenty and ten sized magazines. The clip size Emilia was using, though, was paid for out of pocket to match her rifle magazine.

Under both of these was a .300 caliber rifle with a clip size of twenty-five and a four-ten double-barrel with twenty-round clips.

While all of the rifles could only accommodate that size of magazine because of the way it fits into the gun, there were drums in these calibers all over the market that could fit the loading of a single barrel. The magazines for the shotguns, though, could be any two magnetic-acceptable magazines taped together.

My dilemma lie in whether I should go for lower caliber cost and capacity or manage higher powered low capacity with costs. If I did not increase my shotgun capacity on the 5.5mm, I could easily afford a set of small fifty-round drums for the rifle and load it with cheap standard issue contribution ammunition. However, the lower caliber model was more popular and thus its aftermarket mods were more plentiful and cheap.

They were so cheap that I could go down to broke levels of only a could grand to get through to my next job and buy a drum for either shotgun barrel on top of two fifty-round drums for the .300 rifle. The decision was ultimate made by contribution point. In rifle caliber, fifty contribution bought one hundred high-charge-low-MP rounds. That was one full load in the drums.

One hundred points could fill the drums twice or fill the drums and two standards twice. One-fifty points would give me the minimum to reload my drums once and two magazines twice for going on a mission. I would have to spend three hundred points to comfortably load the guns for enough missions- expecting full expenditure- to make at least twice my money or points back.

I would probably only use a single full load of either the rifle or the shotguns in any one dungeon because of my newly ordered second revolver and current munitions connection. With the second mission supply to continually draw ammo from, I can make the worst-case projection of two missions into more like four or as many as six missions. My money recovery from two missions would cover switching from contribution bullets overall.

The two-mission minimum is as little as one month and as much as two. Lucinda was always offering to buy me things because she had a lot of income from her old job in the original government bureau, so I knew I always had that to fall back on when going broke just for food and bills. However, I have never asked her to give this baby any sugar. I never will.

Like most men of integrity and culture, I will simply let myself go broke and let her feed me.

After finally spending my points on ordering weapons and supplies, I simply put my phone down while playing some celebratory Mozart and went back to finishing my workout.

*