A Lot Of Money

Greave walked off on his own through the corridors and into one of the rooms, I could only assume that it was his bedroom and he was planning to chill on his own a bit.

Lauren took a seat on one of the sofas, avoiding Allen who had now taken up an entire sofa by lying down on his back. She gestured for me to take a seat myself, which was a good thing too considering I was just sort of standing there awkwardly at the moment.

"Right, lets go over the rooms," Lauren said. "Down at the end is the bathroom, then you've got mine and Allen's, I'm on the left and Allen's on the right."

Each of the rooms had a picture on the door, Lauren's was a winking face, while Allen's was a controller of some kind.

"After that we've got Becca and, of course, you saw Greave scamper off into his room. Sorry about that, he's actually a bit of an introvert. Needs some time to recover after meeting new people," she continued. "Finally, there's the storage rooms. Obviously, we're going to clear out one of those for you."

"Sorry, what?" I asked, suddenly feeling a bit out of my depth again.

"We're going to clear out one of the storage rooms so you have a room of your own," She repeated.

For some reason, I was once again surprised. "You really don't have to do that," I said, "You know I've got a place of my own, right?"

"You mean… you don't want to spend time with us?" Allen asked, his voice warbling as if he were going to start crying, though he was clearly just having me on. "Come on man, don't be a douche, just let us do the thing."

"It'd be easier if you had your own space here," Lauren said, "You wouldn't want someone in your family to find all your gear, would you?"

Damn, she had me there. If I was going to take this whole hero and villain thing seriously then I was going to be building more and more gear, advancing further and further with my crafting. I wouldn't be able to keep it all at my place, even if it were just because I'd run out of space eventually.

Lauren stood and cracked her neck from side to side, "Right, let's go check and see if Beck's in."

She walked into the corridor and rapped her knuckles on one of the doors. After a few moments, there was no answer.

"Always makes me a little bit stressed when she's out alone," Lauren grumbled as she came back to the sofa. "Always worried she's going to end up getting triggered by something or someone, end up doing something she regrets."

She took a deep breath as she sat back down, running a hand through her hair to move it away from her face.

"Right, so here's the deal," Lauren said, clearly back into business mode. "You're going to get a one and a half grand monthly allowance, just like we said earlier. That's your retainer for being on the team."

I nodded in understanding, I wasn't going to say that the money wouldn't be useful. I'd be able to pull a lot of parts from the reclamation yards for money like that.

"As part of the team you're also able to decide on what jobs we do, but when we do decide to do a job you're going to be on it no matter what. That's the price of being on retainer, got it?"

I nodded again. That made sense, if they were paying me for my loyalty I'd actually have to show up when they needed me.

"We've needed a crafter for a while, to be honest," she went on. "A team just isn't complete without a crafter in their ranks, you guys are just way too versatile. For a start, if we got you the parts, do you think you'd be able to craft us up some radio sets that would allow us to speak privately. You know, without getting spied on by the lads at the PHA?"

I only needed to think it over for a moment before designs started surfacing in my mind. It would be pretty easy to rig up some kind of solar-powered radio sets that broadcast on an encrypted subwave. Hacking into it would be no easy task, so the team would be able to operate without having any of their conversations listened in on.

"Yeah, that should be pretty easy," I said. "Though remember, anything I make is going to need maintenance every now and then, the curse of the Crafter."

While crafters could build just about anything they could think of, maintenance was a very real issue. For the most part, our creations had the ability to defy the laws of physics, and the truth of the matter was that physics didn't really seem to like it when things were going around defying it. Physics liked to fight back. So, while usually reliable if you kept the maintenance of the items up, crafter tech could be a little bit explosive if that maintenance wasn't done.

"Good, that'll help us out quite a bit," She said, with a smile on her face. "So, back to the subject of compensation. Our jobs usually net us anywhere between fifteen to thirty grand, which we used to split four ways. A quarter each, equal shares. Obviously, now that you're around that's going to be five ways, but that's still a pretty substantial amount."

It was like something in my brain had short circuited.

Split between five people a job at minimum would land me with a two grand payout, and at maximum would land me with a six grand payout. That was so much money.

Once again I couldn't help but think about all I could do with that amount of cash.

My mum and I would be able to move out. We'd be able to get an actually nice place.

If I ever found out a way to explain where the sudden windfall was coming from, of course.