Chapter 9: Finally, Moving Forward
In physical therapy that day, which was held in the gym she had built into the main floor, she managed to go through the exercises with significantly more ease. On many of the tests, she showed a marked improvement, and was now able to lift 10 pounds overhead.
The physical therapist/trainer also noted that she had significantly more energy, so she was made to go through the entire set with a focus on form 3 more times before she was satisfied.
Katie Flannigan had been running a failing business in Tulsa, and she was sure she would have to shutter her doors soon. However, a freakishly tall woman approached her on the way to her car one night and asked her if she could make house calls. Ever since, she was financially stable as a rock.
No matter how many times she told them she only charged 50 dollars an hour, she would still be handed an envelope with a few thousand in cash for each individual session. The only requirements were she never told anyone about them, most especially about the girl she was working with, and she didn't complain if she was summoned at hours she might find odd. Like now, for instance, where it was 8 at night and her charge had apparently only just woken up and started her day. The sun had already set for goodness sake!
However, she kept these complaints to herself. Fuckit, if they wanted her to come over at 2 in the morning she would do it. The last requirement is she never tried to enquire as to how they had all that money to begin with. Perhaps they were the strangest and most polite drug kingpins on the planet. Didn't matter to her, as long as the bank accepted it when she went to deposit it.
Her charge, on the other hand, had been making markedly little progress so far. It had only been a couple of weeks, so she still held on to hope, but she was sure that Miss Belladori had managed to achieve the exact same level 3 days in a row. Then, she called it off yesterday and Katie was worried she would be unemployed. Only for her to come in today and watch the little girl progress by leaps and bounds with a satisfied smile on her face.
"Hey, I noticed after taking a day off you are doing a lot better than normal. Would you like to regularly incorporate off-days into your training going forward?" Katie asked this hesitantly.
Moira thought about it before slowly nodding. "If you tell me what days off you would like, say for religious reasons or just to be there for your kids or whatever, we will go with those moving forward." Moira had potentially missed the point of what she was being asked.
"Would it be okay if I simply took weekends off? I can call ahead if there are any events with my children's school that I need to be there for."
"Sounds great. Would you be willing to tell me about your kids?"
Katie was a sucker for this line of conversation, and even as they were putting all the equipment away she talked Moira's ear off for hours.
Moira learned that Katie actually had 3 children, a little girl of 11 that was already nearly the same size as Moira, who was just finishing Elementary school and would move to the 6th grade next year. This girl was named Sarah.
There was also a little boy, who loved to roughhouse and had gotten into a couple fights at school, many of which he had lost. He was only in the 3rd grade, and was still shorter than Moira. He was named Hunter. He was only 9 but already large for his age.
Finally, there was a little girl of just 7 years old just starting kindergarten, and she was called Ashley. Moira secretly thanked the heavens when she wasn't compared to this girl in height or size. She was trying her best, okay?
Without thinking, she absentmindedly told Katie that she could bring Hunter over and maybe she could give him a couple pointers. She was utterly ignorant of the look she received in response, and perhaps that was for the best.
It's perhaps further for the best that Katie never openly questioned this offer, as kings and emperors have gone to war to have the Warrior train their children. Just because this particular Weapon needed physical therapy didn't mean she wasn't capable of being a threat.
When Katie went to leave, she found herself drawn into conversation by Yulia. She was asked how Moira was progressing, where she thought Moira's strengths would be, and what Moira might need to work on. She said that Miss Belladori was progressing well, but she really wasn't comfortable discussing any specifics without her present. She did mention that Moira had made better than normal progress today, and hoped it was a sign of better things to come.
Apparently, that's the answer Yulia had actually been fishing for, as she disappeared down the hallway and reappeared moments later. She returned holding the typical unmarked envelope, but it seemed somehow even more full than normal.
Katie was escorted out in a daze, and she dimly heard the turn of a deadbolt behind her. She remembered very little of the drive home, and when she set her purse down on the counter, she dug the envelope back out, wondering what exactly made it so much thicker.
The answer was money. Apparently, Moira had had her wife put in about 40% more money than normal, and there was also a note, very clearly written by Moira.
Miss Flannigan, I truly enjoy our time together, and I am glad we are able to work together so well. That being said, I realize now that I have been selfish. You have 3 amazing young people you are raising, and they deserve to get to know how amazing of a mother they have.
To that end, I may have purchased your building and your business out from under you. A manager and an accountant will make sure things are going well on that end, and you will of course still be free to work there and all business decisions will ultimately be in your hands. Hands which, after hiring about 30% more staff, will be free to tend to your children, who I am sure miss their mother very much.
Also, if at any point you can not do a session because it would hinder your ability to be with your children, simply call and say so. I will fully understand. You can also bring your children out to visit, simply call ahead and we will make sure all the blood is put away along with the sharp implements.
P.S. I may have accidentally assumed you were single with no dependents when we first met, so I will now be compensating you more in order to accommodate the many expenses of raising children. Apologies and all that.
BEST REGARDS,
Moira Belladori
Katie was not fully sure whether to laugh or cry at the contents of this note. Apparently, her employer had an incredible soft sport for children.
What she didn't realize is that even Moira's lowest level employees were paid 10k a month, and that was with no certifications and no experience. She viewed Katie as an incredibly skilled, incredibly experienced employee with a degree in physical education and multiple certifications, as well as of course a medical degree and all that shit. All that education took time and money, and it was worth money to Moira. Moira had been paying her about 2500 a session, but she increased it to 3500 when she realized that her physical therapist had kids. She also paid more for sessions that seemed to take more out of Katie, or that made a lot of progress for her.
It would be inconceivable to pay Katie only 50 dollars an hour, as even full time she would maybe break even with the janitors at Forge Industries. She was paying Katie under the table right now because the IRS had specifically designed the tax code in recent years to capture sudden windfalls to the middle class, and Katie needed a lot of help getting her finances back in order. She was more than willing to pay whatever taxes that would create at the end of the year all in one lump sum.
Surprising nobody, the amount of money Katie was being paid had exactly 0 impact on Moira's finances, except she now had to fill out separate paperwork for payroll taxes while she was used to the Forge Industries payroll taxes being done automatically by her personal AI assistant, Angel. Moira ensured her employees were paid at the minimum the equivalent of $120k a year after taxes, and this meant that technically she paid her employees taxes for them. She could afford to do all this shit because Forge Industries was on the cutting edge of magnetic technology, fusion, weapons research, and security, while also making several really expensive pieces of tech the rich loved to waste lots of money on.
Basically, having mastery over the elements as a witch allowed her to find many like minded and abled individuals. Together, they explored the true limits of magnetic field theory. This eventually led to them being able to put together viable fusion reactors. Viable fusion reactors allowed them to make all sorts of tech with high energy requirements that would be useful in medicine, finance, engineering, as well as many other fields. Then Moira would come along and see what they had made, and find a way to use it in the most evil way possible to make it into a weapon. She would prototype this, then dial it back a notch or 10, and sell the less diabolical version to governments and private individuals alike.
With the money from the weapons sales, she would then bankroll the mass production of the original purpose of the tech, 'accidentally' phasing out production of the weaponized version at the same time. She would usually have plenty of money left over at this stage in the process to fund further research into refining the product. Of course, when the parts for the weapons wore out, she would outwardly pretend that they had mysteriously lost all the tooling to make them. Secretly, of course, she made sufficient each year to do routine maintenance on the ones her own security guards were holding, which is how they got such a stellar reputation in security.
There was a dark period in her history where she had sold hand held rail guns to Russia while using the money to research faster and more efficient monorail technology for Europe, which of course led to those trains later being hijacked or blown up by the Russians. The outcry was not small during this period, and she decided in the future to ensure that the weapons she sold would not end up in direct conflict with her end goal in such a dramatic fashion again.
Luckily, Railguns have a surprising amount of super finicky parts, so Russia modified the ones they could afford to into cheaper to operate but much crappier versions and the rest were scrapped. On the other hand, Moira and her company got to build trains in Europe twice!
Well, that was all in the past from her perspective, but technically none of that would happen for another decade or so. The reason she had so much money now was quite simple. She took a bunch of American dollars from the year 2300, when the currency had long outlived the country, and then took them back to the early 1940's, when the stock markets were on the verge of collapsing under their own weight for only the second time in 2 decades. Since she used gold dollars to do this, all she had to do was melt them down, get them re-minted, and then deposit them at a severe loss. 10 million dollars was more than enough to reinvigorate the economy, which was certainly producing more than enough goods, and when things recovered to some version of normal the stocks she was holding ended up skyrocketing in price.
Then, she just had to sort of nip in once a decade or so to make some intelligent selling and purchasing decisions, and she ended up creating a mythological entity called "The Fund" which managed to own nearly 4% of every company listed on the exchange. Of course, now she just had Angel manage it because the internet was more than robust enough for her to play with it. As a secondary benefit, by having such a significant chunk of the market remain unresponsive to panic trends and sudden spikes in popularity, it served as a significant stabilizing force to the otherwise chaotic markets.
A significant portion of these stocks were low yield but had guaranteed monthly dividends, most of which were once again reinvested. Of course, Moira had forgotten the actual chaos that would soon consume the markets, so this alone had made a significant impact.
Suffice it to say that she accumulated almost a billion dollars in real assets a year, and paying somebody about 100k a month wasn't ever going to hurt her finances.
Katie's business had finally been seized by the bank after quite a few bills had not been paid, and while she was trying to repay them now it was too late. Which is how Moira came to own it. The business was in and of itself sound, the issue is all the employees were stretched too thin, which led to unavoidable compromises that sometimes lost them business. This in turn made it difficult to hire more staff, which compounded the issue.
Moira had already firmly admonished the business manager she had hired that he was strictly to keep an eye on the business side of things. Let the trained physical therapists run things their way, just keep things running on the backend smoothly enough to facilitate it.
She did not foresee any major disasters, but she was more than willing to bring her barely functional body into that building to personally readminister this lesson should he somehow fuck it up.
Katie, on the other hand, was glad to know that her business would be able to remain open, even if it was no longer fully hers. By not having to wear multiple hats as a manager, accountant, and physical therapist, only one of which she had formal training in, she would have a lot more time to do her actual job and also a lot more time for her kids, as Moira had suspected.
She was indeed single, as her job and her business had taken up so much of her time that she hadn't had much to spare for her kids, let alone her husband. If she was honest with herself, maybe it wasn't so surprising that she ended up catching him cheating one week after having seen him last two weeks prior, because she had been sleeping in the office trying to work out taxes and payroll and a whole bunch of shit that just didn't fully make sense to her but was utterly essential to running a successful business.
However, just because she understood it didn't mean she would be forgiving him any time soon. Plus, he never visited or tried to arrange visitations with his own children. Maybe she was a bad mom, but he wasn't exactly trying really hard to be a dad.
Katie decided she might take Moira up on that offer, just to see what exactly Moira might be able to teach Hunter about fighting and maybe so Sarah could teach Moira a little bit about clothes and makeup and nail polish. She had noticed large quantities of the last two just sort of sitting unopened, as if she had lost the courage to actually use them.
They talked over the phone, and agreed to the meetup in 2 weeks time.