Because the director had never actually told me anything about magical training to exercise my mana pool, I spent the rest of the week basically raising and lowering the temperature of the garage or basement while using my new toy. Even though cultivating one's mana pool was supposed to be the same as working out it was still not quite as fast at bringing benefits. However, Si-Pon said that this would help to fine-tune my control over how much mana I use at once.
At first I only had enough mana to raise the temperature In the large basement by ten degrees all around in a single hour/ the next day, my mana pool could sustain an extra minute of icy winds to reset the temperature before I ran out of mana. In this fashion, I spent about ten minutes from every hour hiding in the basement building fireballs or guiding winds.
By the day before when Director Carlyle was supposed to measure me once again, I could use magic without stopping for a little over fifteen minutes. Considering I could barely lasted for a couple of minutes the first time I used magic, this was a wonderful increase. My mana pool might well be nearing mid E at this rate.
However, I spent the day before my measuring simply resting and playing video games. I did not want to give the director anymore excuses than he already had to keep dragging out the amount of time that I was stuck on vacation. Mostly I was worried that exercising my mana pool would directly relate to my Mana Points level the way most mages would
When the director finally showed up late in the morning I invited him in to enjoy the breakfast that I had made with us before we finally got down to business. Breakfast ended up lasting about half of an hour, though, because the director wanted to talk business with Lucinda. About my level of activity in portals.
Lucinda had already told me I could do three portals a month, now, but she said nothing to the director while he kept arguing with himself over the pros and cons of my doing my portals. He even started adding benefits such as priority portal picking and even a slight boost in how much contribution I received on every assignment. Finally, though, when the man seemed to talk himself into a corner without any help from Lucinda he basically demanded to know her thoughts.
At that point, Lucinda just flashed a smile in my direction and says, "If you can ensure the special treatment you've been promising, then I see no reason why Malcolm cannot do three E grade portals a month. When he moved up to D grade he can only do two portals a month, again, but he's most of the way through D grade as it is. Just take good care of my son and he'll take good care of you."
I could not help but wonder if Lucinda had not been a queen or something in a past life because she handled all of this smoothly and gracefully. She had already told me that I could do more portals but now that somebody else wanted to ask she wanted benefits. AND SHE GOT THEM.
"What have you been doing?" Director Carlyle asks me flatly after breakfast, looking down at the meter my hand was resting on the orb of. "You're MP level went up to two-sixty-three and mana pool is almost one-ten. I TOLD YOU TO STOP TRAINING!"
"I figured out how to use magic with tools, I couldn't help it," I admit sheepishly, knowing I had messed up in some way. "It was just so much fun, I finally get to play with magic! You can be mad if you want but I won't regret it."
Narrowing his eyes at me, Director Carlyle says, "One day and one point. If your MP rating goes up by one point by the end of today, I'm punting you straight to your old instructor! I bet you'd follow his orders, wouldn't you?"
"What did I JUST say about taking care of him?" Lucinda asks in exasperation, probably feeling like all the 'work' she had done over breakfast was for naught.
"He won't take care of himself, let alone me!" The director argues, having something of a valid point. It was a two-way street and I just kept going my own way every time. "Fine, I'll give him two points. If he exceeds two-sixty-five by the end of the day then I don't know what I'll do with him but you can bet none of us will be happy about it. I might just suspend his business license for taming."
"Whoa," I say loud and fast after those last words entered the air. "Come on, man, that's a bit extreme isn't it? Can't we work something else out? Like, that's the one thing that kept me sane this entire vacation. If I really have nothing to do and can't leave the house I'll go crazy and get a real job just for something to do with myself. Imagine THIS making burgers."
"I don't want to hear that from somebody who cooks like you do," Director Carlyle states flatly. "That'd be a waste of ALL your God given talents. If you dare flip burgers for a living, boy, I will come find you. If you're not killing something you at least belong somewhere with good food."
I just gave him my best Eliza face and said, "I need something to do with my time. I'm sixteen, D grade, and a guy with little going in his life. Why do you think I ended up playing with magic all week?"
"You need a girlfriend," the director replies with a very tangible and harsh pity in his voice. "When I was your age, if I had a goblin with boobs I'd probably never leave my room. There's something wrong with you, Malcolm."
"With ME?" I ask incredulously after what I just heard come out of this man's mouth. "Did you just say you'd screw your goblin if you had one at my age? ARE YOU THE POT OR THE KETTLE RIGHT NOW?!"
"I never said anything about getting AIDS," the director clarifies as Lucinda starts laughing so hard she has to lay on the table. "I said boobs. At your age, boobs should me one of the most important things in your life. Hell, they're still one of the most important things in my life and I'm almost forty. But you… what kind of sixteen-year-old has priorities?"
"The kind that was trained and educated as a soldier to fight and potentially die for his country and planet since fourteen?" I ask rhetorically, wondering how any of this was an issue to begin with. "How did we even get on this subject? Stop thinking about my goblin's boobs, dammit! Maybe you're the one who needs a girlfriend!"
Sipping from his recently refilled coffee cup, the director shrugs and says, "I have a wife and kids, of course I need a girlfriend. Am I going to get one? Hell no, I cheated before we were married so if I cheat after we've been married for ten years then I'm a dead man. You'll understand when you're older."
"No, I don't think I will," I say with no uncertainty whatsoever. "I'm pretty sure I'll probably grow up to be miserable and alone and alive for a really long time after having had this conversation. Thank you, Director Carlyle, for single handedly destroying my views on the institution of marriage that has been around for thousands of years."
"A couple thousand years ago a kid named David cracked open a couple of giants' heads with rocks and grew up to screw hundreds of wives and many times more concubines," Director Carlyle mumbles under his breath, looking bitterly up at the ceiling. "That's the institution of marriage I believe in. Marry a king's daughter in exchange for a hundred Palestinian castrations? I could do that."
Unable to even face the direction of the table anymore, Lucinda groans and says, "This man is not using David and Goliath to justify his libido, is he? Malcolm, do something, I think I might be sick soon."
Nodding my head in agreement, I ask, "So… why are you still here? Don't you have a job or something? Wife? Kids?"
Giving me the kind of look that said he had no effs to give, the director says, "I'm here until I scan you again, making sure you don't waste any more of every body's time playing with magic or irradiating the city limits. I see you've got some gaming systems set up over there. I've been playing games more than half as long as they've been around. Show me what you got, kid."
"Do you play Terra Odyssey?" I ask curiously, wondering if the little bros would be on any time soon.
"I'm in the top thousand players of the North American server," the director states proudly, throwing out the name of the second biggest server in the game and his rank in it. "Where do you play? I bet a kind like you probably plays in the Asia server to try and talk to Asian… I take that back, this is you I'm talking about," he adds in an oddly disheartened way, getting up without excusing himself and walking to the living room to turn on the TV.
"He's really going to babysit you, isn't he?" Lucinda groans again while resting her head on the table. "I bet if you went up to your room with Poniard and had her start jumping on the bed, he'd leave."
"I'm leaving," I say stiffly, getting up from my seat and walking toward the front door.
"Suspension," the director calls from the couch where he was going through the channels looking for which one which console was on.
I meekly turned around and went to the living room to play games with the director.
That was how I ended up spending what I hoped would be my last day on leave, playing video games with my unofficial boss who was somehow BETTER than I was. His profile skills were all maxed out so everything eh did was slightly faster and slightly better than me and I used to be proud of how efficient I was. However, after only a couple of hours, the bros got on and we started a new private server.
During the introductions I simply called the director my coworker and then quickly introduced the bro who had a cousin I would eventually be meeting. The director got the hint that he was not supposed to act like a big shot because kids could make things really awkward really fast. Instead, when the bro asked if his cousin would be meeting them I said probably not because we had different schedules and my medical leave was ending soon.
Once the pleasantries were out of the way and we all started a search and destroy challenge with each other, though, things really got interesting. Since the bros had been practicing ALL of the profile skills since we started playing together they were all pretty much at my level. Even if the director was better than us individually, there was nothing that could stop the bros whenever they decided to be bullies and team together.
I did not even build a base in the first game, I just climbed to the top of a giant alien scrap pile and worked on making explosives while the director and the bros fought it out. The director decided to play aggressive during our unspoken three-day grace period. This made the bros team up on him even though he did not know.
The director almost got all of them at once because it was early on, but a handful of remote explosives scattered about the forestry of their area kept him distracted so they could run. After they, everybody went into deep hiding while looking for me. I was the camper playing both ends against the middle and nobody liked to be third-partied.
Needless to say I ended up dying first after being hunted down by the overly aggressive director whose character already had a light mech suit on the fifth day. I did not die in vain, though, I led him through numerous traps and explosives over the course of thirty in-game hours before self-destructing in the heart of his own base. After using everything he had on him to survive and repair, losing his base was a huge setback.
The first game only lasted for another hour after that as he took over a wrecked alien carrier ship near the edge of the map as a new base. The bros had already come together to make one big stronghold but the director made it clear he was now the captain of his ship and he would be going down with it. The bros had to go to him.
In the time it took them to get their shit together and then get to him, the director had taken over the entire screen and replaced his previous suit with a much larger version and refashioned the guns from the ship into a scattering of support turrets all over the structure. He had basically turned himself into the final boss while the bros moved in with teams of drones and mechs of their own.
Even Lucinda stopped in her work to watch the final battle as dozens of air and ground drones occupied over a dozen giant alien guns and three small robots fought against one big behemoth. After turning on a second TV so that I had my own screen, I went into spectator mode and watched everything from off to the side in the air. It was worth it.
Numbers eventually won over firepower as the drones took out the turret systems with a combination of aerial maneuverability and explosive rounds from the ground troops.
The bros had taken a serious beating until now, emptying all of their weapons systems until they were down to plasma swords and unarmed tactics. Now that that the handful of drones remaining could change focus, though, the director's super mech began taking a steady stream of low DPS that wore away his already burning shield generators. Once the generators finally blew and took a chunk of his mech with them, though, the director went berserk.
In the following thirty seconds after losing his shield, Director Carlyle unloaded every last weapon at his disposal destroying everything within a few hundred feet of him before setting his mech to self-destruct. One of the bros had already died in the barrage with the drones and the other two had lost their mechs. Now, it was a race to see if they could escape the doomsday explosion and director's maniacal laughter.
Nobody won that game even though the director died a few seconds before the other two bros.
*