“Oh. Ohh!” I said, as my brain temporarily short circuited. “Thank you, I appreciate it - I enjoy the work. I’ll have to thank István as well.”

  “Great!” Viktor said, a large sound from a large man. He clapped his huge hands, which practically had their own house numbers, together. “I look forward to seeing what you two can accomplish for me. Head on off, then. I’m pretty sure you know where to find him.”

  I nodded, then headed out the door. Viktor almost immediately went back to whatever he was writing, seemingly lost in his thoughts. I went down a floor, then found István’s office. He wasn’t there yet, so I found a chair and settled down. There was a selection of artifacts sitting on a table. I picked one up and looked at it.

  It was a small idol with overemphasized feminine proportions. As though someone took a lady with some serious curves and collapsed her vertically. I didn’t need to be an archaeologist to know this was a fertility idol of some sort. I was unsurprised when my special senses to told me it was Nature Aligned - the figure had a very “Mother Earth” vibe.

  I’m not sure when, but I’d started to view these as being “Aligned” instead of “categorized” as I’d been previously taught. I wasn’t sure why, either, just something in me told me that was the right route to go. It was almost an instinct of sorts. I wondered if I’d brought something back with me from my little rift-cation from reality. If I had, I was not about to question my good fortune, I was lost enough as is.

  I held up the artifact in front of my eyes. Looking closely at it, it had the barest hint of the shimmer, tiny undulations of like-colored energy making the edges of the idol appear to blur in front of my eyes, almost like it was a cloth with ragged fringes. The Nature Alignment was prominent, but the closer I looked, the more I could see hints of other Alignments there - tiny wisps of blue and others I couldn’t identify. I suppose it made sense that something like that wasn’t purely one Alignment.

  "Nature finds a way, doesn't it? Even when she stumbles out of a rift as nothing more than a weird lump of energy, she can not help but mold something... unexpected." István said as he walked into the room, making me jump a little. I could see a sparkle of mirth in his eyes. I held out the idol to him and he took it from me. “By far one of the most unique pieces I’ve seen pop out, bought it pretty much as soon as it was solid enough to hold.”

  “I still think that the process you describe with these artifacts makes no sense at all.”

  His smile hit a bit of a hitch in its giddy-up. “I agree, something feels very off about it.” He hung his rather nice coat on the wall after placing the idol into some sort of high-end container with satin inside. “But enough about rift oddities. I heard you have good news?”

  “I do!” I said, still curious but willing to shelve it like his idol. “Viktor said I’m your assistant now.”

  His face took on a distinct look of obvious joy I’d seen on him a couple of time when he encountered interesting artifacts out in the field. “Oh, that is truly excellent. Your special skills will save us a ton of time, and maybe even help with some particularly delicate research I’ve been doing. I truly do look forward to our collaboration!” He held out a hand and I shook it.

  Turned out there was actually quite a lot of paperwork to fill out for me to get my new position, which was weird because I figured the operation was more the kind of thing where Viktor sealed deals with bone-crushing handshakes and penalized violations of the terms with punches. Turned out there was actually someone doing something functionally equivalent to HR.

  They also did several other things, but HR was apparently one of them.

  “Okay, I think we’re set for now,” they said, taking a stack of papers we’d put my information into. “We’ll have a new employment contract for you at the end of the day, come up here before you leave to sign it.”

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  “Sounds good,” I said, leaving their desk and heading back down the hall to István’s lab.

  You learn a lot of things differently depending how you interact with people and places. Nothing drove the point home quite like my move to being István’s assistant. I’d been in his lab plenty of times before, but now that I was supposed to be working there I realized I’d barely scratched the surface of what he did on a day to day basis. Correspondingly, I hadn’t even seen most of the actual lab. There was a ton of expensive looking things in there, which made me nervous.

  I was not the epitome of grace and poise, and a lot of this stuff looked delicate. I actually mentioned as much to István - as much to set expectations as anything.

  He laughed, “Someone who takes after my own two left feet, I see.” He pointed to one particularly mangled instrument sitting over in the corner. “I have dropped, knocked off the table, or otherwise attempted to destroy that one more times than I can count. I’m not sure why, either, it just always winds up in the way somehow. I once managed to punt it halfway across the room walking through the lab. To this day I still do not know how it wound up on the floor.”

  “Well, that does make me feel little better knowing that it still works after all of that.”

  “Actually, it doesn’t. Last time I completely broke it. I have been meaning to fix it but haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

  “I’ll take back what I just said, then. About the feeling better and all that.” I replied in jest.

  “I would not worry yourself much. We provide a lot more value to Viktor than any of these instruments, so he brushes off the occasional mishap. Do not forget that a lot of these see field use.”

  “I do find myself surprised by him,” - which was true, I did - “I always figured he’d be a bit more…”

  “Shoot first and ask questions later?” István asked. I nodded. He gave me what I was beginning to realize was a trademark grin, one with just a hint of mischievousness. “Oh, that was very much him at one point. I met him after he sent someone outside of a dining establishment without using a door to get the other man there. Having known him years now, he takes very good care of his people, even if his disciplinary methods sometimes match his appearance.”

  He held out what looked like a snack cracker, using it like a pointer, and probably the third or forth time I’d seen him gesticulate with food. “You have to mess up pretty bad for him to actually get angry though. He’s made enough mistakes to know that we all do.”

  “Glad to hear that I’m marginally less likely to get lessons in physics than I thought I was after what he did to what-his-face at the last rift.” I’d never been good with names.

  Apparently István wasn’t either: “You know, I can’t remember his name, either. Either way, good riddance, that guy was always causing issues. You remember how you asked me about breaking artifacts open? That guy was not the asking type. He just did it. More than one time, I might add. I am surprised what happened the other day did not happen sooner.”

  István popped the cracker in his mouth. “Anyway, probably about time we continued our introduction to the lab. There is a lot of items to learn about.”

  He was exaggerating.

  At the end of the day, I went back down the hall, to visit my multi-talented coworker. He worked in a desk that was better by virtue of not being crammed together with all the other ones in the space. Quite honestly I had no idea we had that many people, and made a note to ask István about how big the company actually was. I had always assumed it was just one punch-happy man, and his small band of merry training dummies.

  Present company included in the ‘dummies’ bit, clearly. I was learning far too much about a place I’d worked for the better part of a year.

  So for not being an actual HR guy, this other dude was very prompt with his work. True to his words he had a shiny employment contract, freshly typed out, and with only a few bits of whiteout here and there. Considering I couldn’t spell my own name right some days, I wasn’t about to go throwing stones in a glass house.

  He handed the contract to me and I read through it carefully. There wasn’t much to say about it, except when I got to the bottom.

  “Is this accurate?” I asked, pointing at the location where the compensation was listed. It was the same as my current rate, only the big number and little number were reversed. The big one was now in front. It had to be a transposition. That was totally the kind of mistake I’d make trying to use one of the typewriters around here.

  “Yup,” said HR guy, not even looking up. “You get a much higher rate working in the lab.”

  Well, we didn’t have to worry about how to deal with Alessa losing her job anymore. I might even be able to afford to get some of István’s not-ice-cream.

  Thanks, not-HR-guy!

  not-ice-cream, my favorite.