Chương 19: Chapter 18: Paperwork

ARE THERE GOBLINS IN THE SEWERS?! The Grave Report: Fairy Edition CITIZENS, BOLT YOUR WINDOWS AND CHARM YOUR DOORS. Something is skulking beneath our streets! Multiple terrified witnesses claim to have heard guttural chanting and the unmistakable clinking of tools echoing from storm drains across the city!

"It's them. It's GOT to be them," declared a local sprite, who swore she saw eyes peering up at from a storm drain. * Experts warn that a single goblin can breed an army of HUNDREDS in mere weeks, and city officials have REFUSED to rule out that a full warren may already be nesting beneath our children's schools, our bakeries, and possibly YOUR OWN CELLAR.

Sewer maintenance guilds have gone SILENT, stating only that they were performing routine maintenance that day, which we find hard to believe if there were GOBLINS down there! The Council says "there is no cause for alarm", but isn't that EXACTLY what they would say to stop you from panicking?! Prepare for the worst. Stay indoors, keep your lanterns lit, and if you hear scraping beneath your floorboards, DON'T look down. THE GOBLINS ARE COMING.

*Excerpt from an unrelated interview on the local plague of vermin in the tunnels added for contextual emphasis. Far to the northwest, in the city of Weltbaumshaven.

"... Goblins now too?" she read, exhausted. The world was really falling apart at the seams. She had to get ready for work. The fairy sighed, rubbing her face as she turned, rolling in bed. Sophia Jinmae had woken up to a city that did not care whether she was tired. Everyone was tired. The alarm was a brass bell over her head, set for the sixth bell. It chimed on schedule, every day, indifferent to the fact that she'd been reading case files most of the night and had only slept four hours.

Her bed was large for her, a proper frame with a stuffed straw mattress and a carved headboard. Despite having the space, she slept curled anyway, knees drawn, wings folded tight against her back out of habit rather than necessity. Wedged at the foot of it was a rectangular cutout from a human-sized blanket that she had kicked away during the night. It was cheaper to buy one human blanket and split it between a hundred fairies instead of buying one single fairy-sized blanket made that way on purpose.

The economies of scale, regarding, well, scale, were a complete and utter scam. Everything 'fairy-sized' was more expensive per unit of weight than the same item made for a human. It didn't matter if it came to fabric or food. The fairy lay for a moment in the dark and let the bell ring itself out before throwing the newspaper she took home last night down onto the floor with the rest. The room was fairy-sized, and that was the whole of the miracle.

It was one compartment in a swarm house, a tall wooden block of dozens of little rooms, each with its own door the size of a matchbox and a window the size of a postage stamp. Inside, everything had been built to fit her: a narrow bed, a writing desk with a chair drawn up to it, a washstand, and a low shelf for her three books and her tea tin. The swarm-house sat on a high shelf in the laundry room of the boarding house on Ostmarch Street. The landlord, a broad, kindly human, had installed it years ago.

She liked having fairies about. They were tenants who fit inside a birdhouse, paid rent without complaint and never wore out the stairs. She dressed by feel, in the dark, the same as every morning. The uniform was the uniform. A blue-gray coat and silver pin on the left lapel and issued in the smallest size the division stocked. The sleeves hung past her hands until she rolled them, and the hem fell past her knees. She had been filing a request for a uniform that fit for years.

She pictured the queue some nights: a river of paper stretching to the horizon, her request drifting somewhere near the back of it, going nowhere. That was the metaphor for her life. Going out to get water from the communal boiler, she went back inside and ate at the window: bitter tea and cheap sugar candies from the paper bag on the sill. Six years. The routine was old and worn, comfortable now.

She looked out the window and down the length of the laundry room shelf it was situated on, and she was already gone in her mind, ten blocks ahead of her own body, thinking about the queue, the case files, and the stack of reports. She pressed her palm flat against the windowsill and made herself breathe. There had been a time, in a village of forty people and one road, when Sophia had been somebody's daughter, somebody people knew by name.

After the war destroyed that place, she found the city, a desk, and a queue and became an investigator, third class: a piece of the machinery, processing other people's problems until her own life ran out from under her, unnoticed. At twenty-eight she was unmarried, which in her village would have made her a pariah. In the city it wasn't so odd, but she was invisible here instead anyway, which she'd decided was worse. She was the last of her cohorts still alone.

She had watched them all marry and raise children, one by one. She had attended most of the weddings only in her mind since she couldn't afford the fare and also just didn't want to go because it would make her feel bad. And tonight, as every night, she would come home to the middle compartment of what amounted to a birdhouse on a shelf, open the door, eat more candy, and lie down alone and stare at the ceiling. She wanted a boyfriend and to start a family one day and admitted as much only to herself.

That was her dream. The work was supposed to fill the gap in the meantime. But the way things are turning out, 'the gap' might actually be a bottomless pit in the end. She pinned her hair back tight, blew out the lamp, and went. Sophia climbed out of the little door and then let her wings buzz. Walking anywhere ever in a human city was not an option for a fairy. She'd be crushed in an instant, or worse, a cat would get her. Sophia, like all fairies, hated cats. They were the devil.

Flying, the commute took twenty minutes after she went three flights down, out of the door of the boarding house that was hopefully propped open so the fairies could get in and out, and out into the street. Weltbaumshaven was awake and moving, morning traffic a river of humans, orcs, dwarves, and the occasional elf, all much bigger than her, all moving through a world built to their scale, not hers. Even for them, the city was gigantic. For her, it was colossal.

The guild spire rose above the rooftops, the tallest manmade structure in the district. It was a white stone tower housing the administrative heart of regional operations, visible from every street, a constant reminder that the guild was always watching and, yet, perplexingly, still did not care about one's problems, even if they had been filed in triplicate. On the way, she passed the dungeon gate.

A massive arch of worked stone opened onto a descending staircase, down into the world, into the dungeon beneath it all. The largest on the continent and the most extensively mapped, a multi-tiered labyrinth producing monsters and treasure for centuries. The gate was the entry point for the farming operations that kept the guild's economy running. Adventurers went in. Monster parts came out. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The adventurers killed things, collected the parts, and sold them to the guild, and the guild turned parts into coin, coin into the salaries and infrastructure that kept the machine turning. It was the industry, and also one where the hazards included being eaten. The gate was busy, as always. Hundreds of adventuring parties, knights from the barony, and mages from the academy were moving in and out of the dungeon, as they did no matter what the hour was. She, herself, was not an adventurer.

She was an investigator, which meant she handled the paperwork behind all of the fun. It was less dangerous. The guild's main office filled the ground floor, one enormous room, and it was chaos. Workers moved in every direction, carrying papers, reports, and sealed letters in a frenzy of movement. All the paper a guild this size was generated in quantities that would have defied measurement if the guild hadn't, characteristically, attempted to measure them. The measurement was the reason for half the paperwork.

The other half was the measurement of the measurement because administration was unsure if the results were accurate or not. She rose above the desks, above the heads, leaving the chaos below her as she flew to her desk on the third tier, an inner balcony ring filled with desks. The desk and chair were human-sized, of course.

ENVIRONMENT Adventurers' Guild, National Headquarters The main office of the national Adventuring Guild organization, the headquarters, is the primary location where hundreds of bureaucrats work tirelessly in order to create structure and order out of the chaos that is the life of an adventurer. The fairy sorted the morning's reports by type and priority, dragging each individual sheet of paper with both hands and the effort of her wings from side to side.

It was a hard process for someone her size, turning the human desk job into manual labor. She picked up a report. Dunkelhollow Outpost: Monthly Summary. Hovering over it, she scanned the first page, moving her head from side to side to read each line of the human-sized page, reading fast and superficial, hunting for any anomaly that justified slowing down.

"Missing persons report?" she muttered, looking at it. Sophia set the report down and hovered. Adventurers went missing. This was normal. The frontier was dangerous and the guild budgeted for it. A party of four vanishing on a Class F goblin extermination was unusual but not alarming. A two-person recovery team going after them and then also going missing… well, that was more unusual. But… not in the realm of impossible things. Something about this bugged her, though. She checked the first page again.

Dunkelhollow was a frontier town she'd never heard of, in a region she'd never investigated, its guild presence marginal at best. It filed its reports and was forgotten by the central office until the next quarterly review. Three contractors had been hired and sent to a farm after that. But there was never a follow-up.

"... What is happening in Dunkelhollow?" she muttered, seeing that final tacked-on report. The records room sat in the basement, deep below the main office. It was the one place in the guild where the shelves weren't human-sized, simply because the room had been designed for storage rather than access. They were sized for giants. Two floors tall, the shelves were packed so tight and stacked so high that the only way to navigate them was via an exceptionally hazardous two-stage ladder system.

It was the one workspace where Sophia's small size worked in her favor. She flew between the shelves, pulling files by the reference numbers copied from the report. The cases bore quest IDs and party designations, arranged by date, region, and class, and the particular bureaucratic logic that governed all guild filing: the system made sense to its designer and no one else. She pulled Kohnrad von Vaevald's file first. Thick, twelve years of quest reports and completions, a career steady and reliable. Rank D.

Until the reliable line item stopped reporting. With both hands, she pulled the retrieval team's file. Halvi Durst, Oliver Spanner. All ranked C. It slid out of the shelf and flopped down to the ground after a long descent, landing with a heavy slap against the stones. That agitated the archivist by the looks of it. Sophia flashed an awkwardly apologetic wave toward him. But how else was she supposed to get the file? It was too heavy for her to hold. Buzzing down, she examined it.

Then she pulled the contractors' files. Thinner still. Contractors weren't adventurers. They were just unaffiliated people the guild hired for one-off tasks and jobs. It all led back one way. She pulled the posting file. The original quest: a Class F goblin extermination, posted by a frontier farmer requesting the elimination of a goblin warren raiding crop fields. Routine. A small fee for a standard assignment. The posting party was one Sarais Hexenfrau. A dark elf. She had a folder the size of a loaf of bread.

There was no way she could even start to get it out of the shelf. But Sophia could tell that the dark elf had a marked history as a participant in the war. Presumably, she was exonerated like everyone else after the Concord. The meeting was at the second bell. The director had run the Investigation Division for fifteen years. He gave the largest politically relevant cases his attention and let the smaller ones sink or resolve themselves.

Sophia stood on his desk, a logistical necessity rather than a power move: his desk was vast at her scale, the only surface there for her. She presented her findings.

"One frontier outpost, but I've got over a dozen missing at this point in the region, Director. Nine confirmed. I suspect a link to several others." The director listened, hands folded, already composing the reason he wouldn't act. She went on.

"The volume is unusual for a goblin den. Frontier warrens typically produce one or two casualties a year, mostly inexperienced parties. This many in four months, including a C-rank team, points to a threat level significantly underestimated."

"Or it points to a dangerous frontier and careless people," the director said.

"C-rank professionals do not generate enough revenue to justify a central-office field investigation." The sentence she had been expecting. The director shook his head, closing the file.

"The division's field allocation is committed through the end of the quarter. Dunkelhollow generates less revenue than a single field investigation costs. The numbers do not justify the expense."

"The numbers?" she asked.

"Director," she began. He cut her off with a raise of his hand.

"Sophia, I understand your concern. The pattern is noted. The file is to be flagged for quarterly review. If the local office escalates, we will revisit the allocation." He placed his hands flat on the desk, the gesture that meant over.

"Is there anything else?" Sophia held in her sigh.

"... No," Sophia said.

"That's all." She flew away. She spent too long on that excursion and was behind now. She worked through the endless madness. A report from the western district about a minotaur that a village guard had killed, not guild business, filed anyway because the guard captain was a former adventurer and putting in the papers was a reflex for him. A report from the north about a girl who swore she saw a dragon. A necromancer's den in the east, filled to the brim with porcelain dolls but not a single corpse.

Some swordsman reached level one hundred within the guild's system and was supposed to be awarded a token of valor but went missing after saying he heard a witch whispering his name. The intern appeared, young and human, pushing a cart of archival filings ready for permanent storage. He reached for the Dunkelhollow report.

"Wait," Sophia said.

"Leave that one, Richter." He left it and moved on. She didn't know why she'd kept it. There was nothing more she could do. It just felt off. Her guts told her this was wrong. Then she turned her head because a second document had surfaced on her desk, buried under the morning stack, and arrived with the afternoon overflow from a different region. A medical report. Quagwaters Church, Healing Ward: Intake Record.

Dated recently, having been passed on to the guild from the Holy Church's own offices and by serendipity alone to her desk. Sophia's eyes widened. Her palms hit the paper as she fell down on all fours and began crawling across it to chase after the letters beneath her. A patient was delivered to the church in critical condition, unidentified at intake, and treated for severe mana depletion and systemic organ failure. She was currently catatonic but alive.

The patient had been identified by guild tags recovered from her clothing. A C-rank sorceress. The tags read: Vironia Sonneman.

"... Mother Moon," muttered the fairy to herself in disbelief. Vironia Sonneman, the mage assigned to Kohnrad von Vaevald's party. How the hell did she get to a church in the northwest like this?

"Richter," she said, her eyes not leaving the report she was re-reading.

"Yes, Investigator Sophia?" asked the intern, leaning back over. She thought for a second.

"Do you know any fairies? My age? A boy, maybe?" He looked at her, confused.

"Ah, I mean… my friend Oros," he replied, unsure. Sophia perked up, looking his way.

"Strong little guy. Funny. Makes a good living." Sophia listened intently. This sounded very promising.

"He works as a chimney sweep in the iron quarter." That broke it again. The fairy sighed, slumping. A boyfriend with a life expectancy of under two years wouldn't do her any good. Fairies were popular in the heavy industries because they could reach the top of smoke plumes and the crevices between machines and auto-hammers for maintenance. It was exceptionally dangerous work.

"Forget it," she said, waving him off. Sophia looked back at the papers, getting back into focus. She had to go to this church.