“So, Brad needs investors.” Lucareoth looked at the hellhound wiggling on the carpet and sighed. He shook his head, and his human glamour reappeared. His eyes flared and a mutt-shaped glamour shimmered down Rix’s body. It did not appear to help the carpet problem.
“I mean, I wouldn’t object to investors, either,” Morgan said. “Since I would definitely like to keep having a job.”
“It’s not that I like the job, I just like not being fired,” Lucareoth said, shoulders slumping. “And now I’ve pulled Morgan into the mess, too.”
Oh. Maybe she was overthinking this. Maybe he was avoiding her because he felt guilty? She yanked her mind back again.
“What can you offer them? You keep telling me there are rules to magic,” her roommate asked, pulling up LinkedIn.
“Uh, I think fame and fortune’s traditional,” Morgan started.
“You said he’s got, what, mind-whammy and luck as his power set? Sort of Professor X and… I don’t know, there’s probably some luck X-Man, I only watched the movies.” She scrolled idly. “Does the money disappear in the morning?”
“That’s fairy gold, totally different group of people,” Morgan said.
“Who would bet the farm, or their immortal soul, on a promise?” Gisele prodded.
“I mean, venture capitalists, clearly,” Morgan said. She groaned and slumped over on the futon. “But it’s not like investors talk to SDRs, you know?”
“They might talk to marketing reps,” Gisele pointed out.
“Junior interim marketing reps,” Morgan corrected.
“OK, fine, not investors. Who else is a bottomless pit of ambition. Actors? Writers?”
“How would I even find them? Put up an ad? ‘For sale, your wildest hopes and dreams, one soul or best offer, half decent or better people need not apply?’ I don’t think classifieds are even a thing anymore. I’ve never seen one.”
Gisele looked at her over the top of her screen. “You’re putting up an awful lot of obstacles to saving yourself here. How about helping me help you?”
“We don’t have forever,” Luke pointed out. “Not if your mother is looking for me. At some point, she’s going to figureit out and I’m not actually any good at fighting. It wouldn’t get you off the hook with Bel’aliol if I died and also, I don’t want to die.”
“I know, I haven’t forgotten that part,” Morgan said. At some point, she’d started to tear one of the notebook pages into little strips and now she looked down in surprise to find a pile of confetti she hadn’t set out to make. “I just don’t want to do this to someone who doesn’t deserve it.”
“That kind of limits your pool to just people you know personally and super famous people,” Gisele pointed out.
“And there’s no way super famous people would believe me.”
Gisele sighed. “Fine, so people you know. You complain about your coworkers literally all the time. Who at Zabloom deserves this?”
Surely no one deserved it.
But was that really true? They were awful. Well, no, if she were honest, they were mostly just really annoying.
But did she deserve it more than they did? If it was her or them?
It was a thought that she kept turning over in her mind, even after Gisele gave up prodding her. She tossed on her cheap mattress all night. It rolled around in her head on the subway.
She made moral decisions without thinking about it all the time, she knew. She wore inexpensive clothes that may have been made in sweatshops and used electronics that contained minerals that could have been mined by children and bought coffee that might have been raised on land clear-cut from rainforests. She wasn’t sure because she didn’t do a deep investigative dive before every ten-dollarpurchase. She bought stuff online from big companies with questionable ethics instead of small local businesses because of free shipping. She took ride shares even though they burned fossil fuels and exploited their drivers. Her barely-clinging-to-middle-class urban lifestyle contributed to climate change and microplastics and the exploitation of the lower classes both in developing countries and her own neighborhood. She spent most of her day trying to convince people to spend five or six figures on software she privately thought was stupid. She gave twenty bucks here and there where she could afford to, to wildlife conservation or GoFundMes for people she half-remembered from high school, and tried not to think about it all too much.
No ethical consumption under capitalism.
Was this really so different?
***
It wasn’t the best frame of mind to be in, going into her introduction to the ad agency.
Morgan had heard of this particular agency before starting at Zabloom—her mother had mentioned that it was owned by a siren who had helped start the very concept of the modern Madison Avenue firm as a way of keeping herself busy after millennia of swanning about luring individuals to their doom. Modern tech made it all much more scalable, not to mention profitable. The fact that Morgan had heard of them made her think perhaps Tim had been paying more than a small company like Zabloom could afford.
