Chương 230: (225) 4.4. The Screening Process

After heading back down into the Underside and using his Dungeoneering skill to temporarily disable the corridor barriers, Vin escorted the infernals all the way back to the Earthers' dungeon before handing them off to a tired squad of combat classes. The warriors looked like they needed some rest just as much as everyone else, but they remained diligent, setting up in front of the dungeon entrance and constantly monitoring their surroundings to ensure none of them were attacked by errant monsters.

Vanessa, the Ambassador from the third wave and one of the few people actually directly under him in the Foreign Branch, happily took over from there, answering questions about Terra and their fragment as a whole as she led the infernals over to the temporary housing the third wavers once used. Once he'd handed them off, Vin did exactly as Spur had ordered, heading back to his apartment and quickly conking out as the events of the day all caught up to him at once.

When he awoke the next morning feeling far more rejuvenated, he went out and grabbed a quick breakfast to go from the mess hall, bringing the meals back to eat with Lumel who was still a bit too shy to show her face around town. From what he could tell, Scule and Reginald were still sleeping soundly in their room based on the soft, high-pitched snoring, and Shia most likely crashed in the Sacred forest after having helped move monster corpses late into the night.

Unsurprisingly, Lumel wanted to further investigate the strange changes in the Underside before it reverted back to normal, which left Vin on his own as he headed over to where Spur had informed him Myers conducted her screenings.

"Vin," Myers smiled, waving him in and somehow looking as pristine and polished as always.

"Thank you again for your help. I've left instructions for you here, and they're pretty simple to follow. Just ask these questions and jot down the answers. I'll go ahead and take the larger group of infernals, so if you could handle some of the fourth wavers from Earth, that would be a massive help."

"Are you sure?" Vin asked, glancing down at the different sizes in their stacks of paper, easily spotting how much thicker hers was compared to his own.

"That gives you, what, like five hundred more people than me to screen?"

"I've gotten rather efficient after running everyone else through the process," she explained.

"Take a minute to look over everything. You'll have the room to yourself, as I'm going to personally head over to where the infernals are staying for now and ask Vanessa to help translate. Linda and a few other people will help lead the fourth wavers over and take them away once you're done, so all you need to do is focus on the questions. You don't even need to worry about making any judgement calls around strange classes or anything like that, just jot their answers down and I'll go through them later."

"I can do that," he said, thankful the process was so streamlined by now. With that, Myers headed out to get started, and Vin picked up the questions he was going to have to repeat exactly seven hundred and sixty three times that day. They were pretty much identical to the questions he'd asked Lumel when getting permission for her to move into Terra, minus the section about her old fragment. Most of the questions were rather straightforward.

He was supposed to ask people for basic information from their time back on Earth, such as their name, former occupation, and criminal history. Then there were the Edregon questions, where he was supposed to ask about their starting class and the passive that came with it. After that, there was a spread of questions that basically boiled down to 'are you going to cause trouble for everyone?' Deciding he was ready, Vin informed Linda she could start bringing people in, before taking a seat in the center of the room.

Myers had two chairs set up facing one another, and he saw no reason why he should do anything differently. The first Earther made their way into the room, a gentleman with a receding hairline who looked just the smallest bit skittish as his eyes swept the room before landing on him and widening at the sight of his golem arm. Guess I should get used to that reaction, Vin thought, offering him a small smile.

"Hello! I'm Vin, and I'll be conducting your screening. If you wouldn't mind taking a seat in front of me, I'll explain everything and we can get started." Nodding, the man took a seat without a word, his gaze finally going from Vin's arm to the clipboard he held with it.

"What is this, some sort of interrogation?" he asked, frowning at the sight.

"I thought Project Ark already cleared all of us."

"It's mainly just collecting information for our records," Vin said, clicking his pen.

"It'll make sense soon enough. Now, I'm going to cast some truth-detecting magic that works for yes and no questions. I'll ask you questions, and then repeat your answers back to you, asking you to confirm that they are true. Make sense?"

"Are you serious?" the man asked, looking like he was personally offended for some reason.

"Please tell me your magical lie-detecting actually works. I'm well aware that polygraphs back on Earth are a load of hogswash, and I'd rather not get thrown into prison because your spell is just as bad."

"Myers actually left me a note warning me some people would have that concern," Vin admitted, going through the notes she'd left him. Apparently, she'd jotted down a list of the most frequently asked questions she'd received from the thousands of Earthers she'd already conducted the screening process with, and Vin skimmed through the list until he found the one he'd recalled seeing earlier.

"She told me to inform you that unlike polygraphs and their pseudoscience, the truth-detecting magic does work, and she's run it through quite a number of tests herself to confirm such. Obviously, we know actual, real-life magic is a brand new concept for you, so you're just going to have to trust us for now."

"Huh… Well alright then, let's get this over with," the man said, quickly sounding more bored than anything. Vin was aware the members of the fourth wave had received a brief crash course on the basics of Edregon yesterday evening, including the existence of things like magic and other races, so he wasn't too surprised the man took this in stride.

"Alright then," he said, starting at the top of the list.

"What's your name?"

The main takeaway Vin had from helping out with the screening process for the fourth wavers was that Myers was an absolute monster. He hadn't really given too much thought to how long something like this would take, and it wasn't until he'd gotten through his first couple of people that it slowly began to sink in that this wasn't something he could just bang out in a single day.

On average, with answering random questions and explaining everything people wanted to know, it took about three minutes to go through each individual person, and that was with Linda's help shepherding them in and out of the room. That equaled getting through about twenty people in a single hour, or about two hundred and forty if he spent basically the entire day doing nothing but screening people. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The fourth wave had more than three times that number. More importantly, Vin distinctly wasn't as efficient as he could have been. Not only did he have to take the occasional break to recover his mana, he found himself frequently taking the time to answer questions and reassuring people that things were going to be okay when they started showing how nervous they were about Edregon as a whole.

The civilians in particular tended to be a bit more fragile than the military members who'd come over with the fourth wave, and he oftentimes had to spend even longer calming them down. All in all, by the time he finally had to tap out for the day, he'd made it through a whopping eighty-nine people. Barely more than a tenth the number they needed to get done. When Myers showed up to ask how it all went, he could only hand over his clipboard and offer her a sheepish apology.

"I have no idea how you do it," he admitted, stretching and cracking his back after sitting all day.

"So many people had questions they wanted answered. I couldn't just turn them away!"

"It's a lot of work," Myers nodded, sifting through his notes with incredible speed as her eyes flew across the papers.

"To be entirely honest, I delegate a lot of the work these days, as I have plenty of crafting projects that demand my attention. Though I will say, the Night Owl passive is remarkably useful. And no need to worry about helping any more than you already have, I just wanted at least a portion of the fourth wavers to actually meet you in the flesh before they were exposed to all the rumors floating around. I know you've been doing your best to try and combat those."

"Thank you, I really appreciate it," he said, surprised Myers had been thinking about him.

"How did the infernals check out?"

"Got through a good chunk of them today, so far, not a single red flag of note," Myers said, pausing on a few of his own sheets.

"... looks like the same can't quite be said here, though."

"Yeah… there were one or two odd balls," he admitted, wondering how to put this nicely.

"One rather overweight man took the Gourmet class… Apparently, it comes with the Taste Tester passive to ensure nothing he eats is spoiled or poisoned. It's a support class, if you can believe it."

"Weird, but not really something to worry about besides the fact that he might not want to do any actual work," Myers said, shuffling his paper to the side.

"At the very least, the Chefs will love him. We can always just throw him at the Big Three and be done with him. Who else?"

"A woman who took the Mercenary class. Obviously a combat class, but not one I've seen before. Her passive is Golden Strength. Sounds like she grows in power depending on how much she's being paid to fight, to a certain extent, I imagine. Not sure how that's going to work exactly, seeing as money doesn't really exist on Edregon."

"I'll check in on her myself, good job flagging that one," Myers nodded, tapping a specific form he'd filled out.

"What about this one? The guy who took the Butcher class? I see you circled the name a few times and wrote 'problem' beside it. What does that mean?"

"Yeah… So about that…" Vin paused, clearing his throat.

"He was the only one of any real concern in my batch. When I revealed I'd be checking their answers via magic, he seemed a bit overly curious. And when I asked about his criminal history, I sensed he was lying about having a clean slate. I think he saw me jot something down on the clipboard, as he whipped out a knife from his pocket and tried to stab me before I could even finish the screening."

"Did he now?" Myers asked, sounding more curious than concerned. Which wasn't surprising, seeing as other than the council, she was the only Earther that knew nearly the full extent of his abilities.

"So what happened?"

"I mean, what do you think happened? I slapped the knife out of his hand like he was a child and then used Enhance Gravity to pin him down. He's only level one, so he wasn't exactly any sort of real threat. He didn't even trip my divine boon. Then I asked Linda for some rope. He's tied up in one of the nearby closets at the moment."

"Good work taking him down without killing him," she said, giving him a small smile.

"It's not looking good for him, but we'll still give him an actual trial via truth-gem before we decide anything. Maybe he accidentally killed someone in the past and got away with it and just panicked when you asked about his criminal history, or maybe we got incredibly unlucky and the Gods grabbed an unknown serial killer. I will say, his choice of class certainly isn't doing him any favors. Either way, we'll toss him in the prison for now and get to the bottom of it when we have a minute."

"Sounds good," he nodded, before hesitating. The mention of tossing someone straight into the prison right from their screening reminded him of something he'd been meaning to ask about for some time now.

"Myers… I can't say how, but I heard you may or may not have a girl from the third wave still tucked away somewhere. Someone who took the Saboteur class. Are you planning on letting her go anytime soon? At this point, she's been locked up for weeks, right?"

"Ah, you mean Krystal," Myers nodded, putting away the papers.

"Yes, I remember you vaguely bringing her up to me and Spur a while back. And don't worry, I know Theodore has been sneaking peeks at my notes. I keep anything actually top secret in a different location he doesn't know about, seeing as he still has all of his fingers."

"Well that makes this a lot easier. So why is she still locked up?"

"Because from day one she hasn't stopped talking about how she plans to destroy any and all forms of authority and hierarchy on Edregon," Myers sighed, leaning back against her desk.

"She's a self-proclaimed anarchist. The only reason she hasn't been executed already is because she's adamant that she's not going to hurt anyone, but from her own mouth, she's explained numerous times that she will actively try to 'abolish the institution' the moment we release her."

"Oh… Yeah, I can see why you still have her in jail."

"And why she took the Saboteur class," Myers nodded, looking uncharacteristically tired for a moment.

"I've had more than a dozen conversations with her over the last three weeks, but we haven't gotten anywhere. She's too dangerous to just be exiled, which means unless she has a drastic change of heart sooner than later, we're going to have to execute her, regardless of the fact that she hasn't actually done anything yet. Golrim's already called us all idiots for letting her live this long."

"I guess I could try talking to her, if you think it would help?" Knowing how excited Theodore was to have someone else in Foreign Concerns with him, he felt like it was the least he could do.

"The offer is appreciated, but trust me when I say it wouldn't do any good," Myers admitted.

"The simple fact that you're a councilor and one of the people technically in charge of the town means that nothing you say has a chance of reaching her. Tell Theodore not to worry, I'm sure there will be at least one or two people in this wave that will be perfect for his subsection of the Foreign Branch."

"Alright," he said, still not a huge fan of simply letting someone die without trying everything he could think of. That said, he trusted Myers basically more than anyone else in town, after his own team, or Lumel and Alice. Not only had Myers never let him down, they had even fought together, and there was something about digging up bodies in the dead of night that really strengthened a bond between two people.

"In that case, I'll probably be heading out tomorrow to stretch my legs and keep working on my map. Sorry to leave you with so many people to still screen."

"Don't worry, Linda and I will have them processed in no time," she smiled.

"You just focus on making it back in one piece. I'm sure we'll have more than enough problems for you to help with when you return."