The clerk had been standing by his counter after Michelle had tripped and exposed her thigh.

  Oh la la.

  After which, the man had sped off with a blush.

  Now she was left standing there, not really sure what to do next. She hadn’t planned for her tripping up get the clerk flushed. But because of that, he had left without telling her anything more about what she was going to do now.

  Thankfully, that problem was solved by the arrival of a woman called Bethany.

  “James said that you would be joining the team. Not sure why he is no longer here, but anyway, are you ready to get started?”

  It would seem that Bethany would be training Michelle on her day-to-day activities as an Accountant within the Merchants Guild.

  And, as far as first impressions go, she was a nice enough woman.

  “Let me give you a tour, then I will take you to your desk.”

  The tour went off without any issues. As you would expect, really.

  She showed Michelle around the building. She took her through the offices and showed her all the facilities, including the restrooms, the employee rest area, the kitchen, and the dining room for all the staff.

  Once that was done, then came the on-the-job training, where Bethany more or less shadowed Michelle, telling her what she needed to do with the invoices that came through, who they needed to go to, what needed to be added to each one, blah, blah, blah.

  “Wow, is this what it’s like to have a full-time job. There is no way I can stick this out for longer than a week. I might not even be able to last that long.” She thought to herself.

  Thankfully, the training itself went off without a hitch as well. With Oriana’s intellect, she could handle the tasks easily and showed Bethany she was made of the right stuff.

  And once that was over, Bethany just left.

  She did mention that if there was anything troubling her, she should come to her or one of her colleagues, but that was it.

  “For something as serious as practically handling coin through trade deals and the like, I would have thought there would be more to the training. Saying that, surely there should have been more to the job application as well.”

  She could be shocked at the situation, rather than ponder the ramifications of the Merchants Guild’s poor security when it came to hiring people, but decided against it. It was something, ironically, that Oriana was going to be taking advantage of anyway, so all’s well that ends well.

  But enough on that, she decided to just get to work.

  She figured she should make sure she ingrained herself as a good worker for the first day. She didn’t want to get fired straight away, so before the fun could start, she knuckled down and started dealing with invoices.

  “Five crates of Tarbistian Spider Web to be sent to Baron Samdie. No issues here, everything is filled in properly, so…approved.”

  “Twenty crates of grade one Mana crystals to be sent to the magical academy. No problems either…off you go then.”

  “Two crates of Pike Blaze to be sent to Scott Tully. Isn’t that a drug? Pretty sure such a thing can only be sent to the Healer’s guild.”

  The first dozen or so orders went off like that…all dealt with in the proper way.

  She spoke to Bethany on the Pike Blaze situation, and thankfully, she was correct. How it had managed to get past the clerks, she didn’t know, but Bethany said she would look into it.

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  While that was all going fine, she got bored pretty quickly after that.

  “Okay, I think that should be enough to show I can do this job. Now, what can I mess around with?”

  To start, however, Oriana didn’t want to mess around with orders and invoices just at Michelle’s desk. That was sure to lead to problems down the line if all the orders got traced back to her.

  So, the next best thing was to get to know her co-workers…and see what they had going that could be messed with.

  “Hi there. I’m Michelle, Michelle Afraud. I just started today.”

  “Err…great. Why are you talking to me?” said the man at the desk nearby.

  “To get to know my work colleagues. If we are going to work together, we should at least know a little about each other.”

  “Yeah…I don’t think so.”

  The man turned back to his desk and just assumed that Michelle had walked off.

  “Well, that was rather rude. I think I know who’s going to mess up his next set of orders.”

  Using an illusion, she sent herself back to her desk, but actually remained by the rude man’s side using an invisible spell.

  Then she took the time to go through the upcoming documents that the man would be signing off on.

  As far as she could tell, while he seemed like he wanted to get back to the work, it was clear it was only so that he could power through the documents…probably so he could leave early.

  Just the right person for this job, someone who could plausibly get things wrong by powering through them.

  From his pile of documents, she could see that many were actually quite important.

  Important because they deal with some fairly high-level people. She could see the names of nobles, with ranks of viscount and marquise. There were also trade deals with merchants, involving goods worth ridiculous sums of coin.

  And a few of them looked to involve trade across kingdom lines.

  Now, this she could have fun with.

  For the trade deals, which were probably fairly common and easy to just skim through if you know what you are expecting from the document, Oriana made a few simple changes.

  All she did was change the names and addresses on the letter.

  With a trade agreement in place that would determine what would be traded between the two groups for the next few months, having the merchants sell and buy the wrong items was not going to go down well.

  Once these went through, they were going to have both merchants barging into the Merchants Guild, looking for answers as to why they were buying items they already had or selling items they wanted to buy.

  And with the number of documents she had adjusted. Well, they were not going to be short on angry merchants.

  For the trade deals with nobles, this was a little tricky.

  They were not standard, so the rude man seemed to pay a little more attention to them. But the thing that Oriana did notice was that Nobles requested some of the most ridiculous stuff.

  One such noble was requesting any heroic artwork depicting Sir James Kraven, one of the heroes who brought peace to the land.

  Sir James Kraven was the group's guardian. A shield and sword were his weapons of choice, and he defended the party of heroes throughout their time together.

  Once peace was restored to the land, he retired and now lives with his family in this city.

  And given that the Marquise is looking to buy any artwork depicting the hero, he must be quite the fan.

  Or obsessed weirdo, or stalker. Whichever one works best.

  With such a request, why not spice it up a little?

  To do so, she changed the wording so that the Marquise is now asking for art depicting the hero's embarrassing moments. The stranger the better.

  Just another bit of fun, and compared to some of the other requests from nobles, this change almost seems tame. So much so that the rude man hardly saw any issue with it when he signed it off.

  It might be a while before Oriana hears the outcome from this one, if at all.

  In amongst her fiddling with the rude man’s documents, she had cast her illusions again, visited some of her other coworkers, and actually got a much nicer response from them.

  To which she responded in kind by changing some of their documents as well. She even headed back to Michelle’s desk to do the same to some of her own. The rude man had the most changes, but she figured she had to be equal, lest it seem as if one person had been targeted or had failed to do his job properly in such a spectacular fashion.

  That was sure to lead to an investigation, and Oriana felt it might look better if it were spread out rather than being against one person.

  Probably.

  On her rounds, she only saw a few trade documents between Kingdoms, and only the accountants who seemed to be of a higher level received them. So, it was fairly obvious that messing with such a form was sure to cause quite a bit of chaos.

  Back at the rude man’s desk, she found one such document, where this request seemed to be from the Elven Kingdom, requesting a number of supplies from the Human Kingdom. And while she could have changed a few words here and there, she felt that maybe something more…serious could be done.

  So, with the addition of just a single zero, which was easy enough to miss, she managed to get the trade form accepted without issue.

  All that was left was to wait for the fireworks to show.

  But before all that, she still needed to figure out a foolproof way to earn some money from all this. And not through actually completing her…job.