Unnatural consumption. Was I like this in my previous life? --53.1 Seconds Post-Integration.
Clark stared at the monitor, dumbfounded. 'Mandatory overtime.' He knew it was possible. He just didn't think it was going to happen -- not to him, not to his party.
"We should've known," Hera said. "One of the biggest sales of the year. Of course we would be doing overtime."
Theo took the news hardest. He was banging his head on a nearby support beam. Slowly, but with force.
As the de-facto team leader, Clark had to keep his group motivated. "Let's grab another bite to eat. It's been at least four hours since that last lunch we had and I'm starving. I'll grab us some cappuccinos."
"More coffee... great..." Theo moaned.
"Then how about some black tea?" Hera replied. "Less uppity on the stomach while still providing some caffeinated punch."
"Whatever. I just want to be done with this. I'm so tired!"
Per the norm, their lunch break ended in the blink of an eye. Clark liked the black tea. As Hera said, the tea was less rough on his belly. It had a higher botanical taste than the coffee, signaling it to be a handy boost when the go-go beans weren't something he was in the mood for.
"Before we head back out," Hera asked the team. "Do we want to share a stamina dandy?"
"Feck-yes!" Theo grubbed his fingers together, indicating he wanted nothing more than a nice tonic.
"I have one, Hera. Don't worry about it," Clark took from his bag the stamina dandy. He took several sips and passed it around. "Hera. Are we going to have to worry about side-effects from the stamina dandies like the other dandies we had? While on our misadventure?"
"If we have too many in a short time, we would, but splitting one? Nah, we don't need to worry about it. Even if we had to worry, overuse of stamina dandies only results in an upset tummy," Hera replied, taking a deep swig herself.
"So, they're safe? Good to know." Clark finished the bottle on the second pass.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
"Safe as any dandy can be if overused, yeah," was where Hera ended the topic. "Normally, I would say we should save dandies for combat. Considering we don't know how long this shift will be, a single dandy won't hurt."
Nodding along as Hera spoke, Clark felt much better. The dandy coursed through his body. He felt as though he had taken a nap with a hearty snack after, not including the meal he and his team shared in the dining space. "Do dandies always make you so refreshed?"
Hera shrugged. "More or less. It can depend on your level of fatigue. It might do you well to know that advanced dandies exist for elevated conditions. Such dandies are typically only sought out by highly ranked Climbers, so I don't think it will apply to us anytime soon."
"Good to know! I bet those advanced dandies cost an arm and a leg, yeah?" Clark asked, tucking the empty bottle into his sack for recycling.
"They do, so you best not buy one without good reason."
With that, their workday resumed.
Their labors were the same as before -- using their group dynamic to their advantage, they were able to leapfrog their way up several flights of stairs, getting lucky on some floors, and being able to skirt by several checkpoints without being called to action, while getting unlucky on several others, and being forced to partake in tedious labor.
As the hours passed and their fatigue once more grew, they reached the forty-ninth floor.
Here, they encountered the most pitiable thing of all -- a construction block.
"Now what are we going to do?" Theo looked dispirited. "We've practically doubled our Metrics. We might want to just sit around and do nothing. Maybe wait out the shift?"
Clark clamped down on that notion fast. "No way! Mine is close to two -- TWO, Theo! I ain't giving that up without at least a fist fight. We will get the lay of the land, remember?"
It didn't take a rocket scientist to understand Theo's displeasure at being asked to work. His rolling eyes said everything he thought.
Despite Theo's theatrics, the group split off and went to scour the land, which was to say, the layout of the floor, jacking their System Links into any port which accepted System Links. Which was all of them.
As they worked, customers would occasionally come to them for help. They assisted everyone who came, biting down their displeasure when the request took them away from port jacking for too long. Hour by hour, though, they built an alternate route, and Clark had to be thankful for his team's assistance. He didn't want to imagine how long it would've taken him without their help and by how much his Metrics would've dropped if he had been trying to do this by himself!
Their search for ports took them to the far ends of the store block. It was in one such 'end' Clark found a stunningly large crevice open up in real time, swallowing an entire shelf into the Interior beyond. "Shet, shet!" he stammered as the crevice spread, a fissure spreading along the floor as if an earthquake had decimated the area. An alarm went off and he sent an emergency voice message to his team to meet up at his location. When the shaking didn't stop, he asked SIMP what was going on.
"A major crevice has opened. Several floors have been affected by it, as you have seen," SIMP replied.
"And this is something I am going to have to handle, isn't it?"
SIMP didn't get a chance to respond before Noir Slimes by the dozens lurched from the opened crack.
Have You Ever Refused 'Mandatory' Overtime?
