Page 37 of The Spellreader and the Phoenix

Once they had everything tallied up, the cash went into Max’s safe in the back—it was in the spellbook room, so Rory assumed it was protected magically as well as in mundane ways. Max took his deposits to the banks only every week or two, because the vast majority of his transactions were via card, and he couldn’t be bothered to go to the bank daily for such paltry amounts.

“I promise I’ll be more present tomorrow,” Max told Alex. “I’m sure you did an awesome job, because I didn’t hear any yelling, and no one asked to speak to a manager.”

Alex scoffed, but they looked amused. “Yeah, we did alright.”

“I’ll come out tomorrow for sure. We can go over a bit more. Any questions or concerns?”

Alex considered this and then shook their head. “Nope, not so far.”

“It was great to work with you,” Rory told them. “You seem to like people more than Max does.” He winked. “At least a little.”

Max made a disgruntled noise. “People are the worst.”

Alex laughed, and Rory grinned.

Alex grabbed up their bag, where they’d tucked it behind the counter. “Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow. Thanks, Rory. Thanks, Max.”

“Bye,” Max and Rory chorused.

As Alex got to the door, they paused to say goodbye to Nōwē, who deigned to allow them to pet her.

“The shirt looks really good, by the way,” Max called out.

Alex flashed him a smile. “Thanks.”

And then they were gone. Max went to lock the door again, then turned back to Rory.

“You could have come to get me.”

“I know,” Rory assured him. “You weren’t very far away, and I was definitely going to call you if there was anything I couldn’t handle. But honestly, it wasn’t that busy, and we didn’t really need you.”

Max looked like he felt he should be protesting, so Rory tried again. “I know you didn’t exactly plan to hire two people just now. I know I’m not totally necessary, so I was hoping to help. But I could look at other job possibilities if you want.”

As expected, this resulted in Max immediately demurring. “No, don’t be ridiculous. This way, you and Alex get to deal with people, and I get to deal with books. It’s perfect.”

On Tuesday, Max gave Rory the spare key to the apartment, saying he should be able to come and go when he wanted if he was living there.

On Wednesday, he gave Rory a phone, telling him it was his old one, and Rory definitely needed it to “stay connected” these days. The only person Rory really wanted to stay connected with was someone he was living with, so he didn’t see why the phone was necessary… but having Alex’s number wasn’t a terrible idea.

And then Rory discovered cat videos, and he suddenly understood why mortals spent so much time on these little devices. He’d always known that cats were wonderful, evil, and hilarious, and now he had lots of evidence to back that belief up.

On Friday, Max brought Rory to D&D. Dungeons & Dragons was a game where humans pretended to be various mostly magical beings. It was sometimes played on a board with little figures, sometimes the players voiced the interaction they were having, and sometimes they just talked about what was happening.

Rory was fascinated. There were lots of rules, and several of the players had various books stacked beside them to double check things. Apparently, it was also all online now. (The people who liked the paper books were “old school.”) Rory supposed that if you weren’t actually magical, there had to be some sort of mechanism to understand how magic worked for everyone and how encounters would go.

Max handed Rory what he said were character sheets so that he could participate.

“You’re a druid,” Max told him. “Which means that amongst other abilities, you can shapeshift into various animals.”

He winked, and Rory beamed at him. Now if he said something weird, the normal people would think he was just getting into the game. Max was very clever. Whoever had invented this game was very clever. Rory wondered if they were a witch or a shifter, or if they somehow knew about the magical world. Or if they were truly just a very imaginative human.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” Rory told everyone cheerfully. “This is very exciting.”

They laughed and welcomed him. Max pulled up a chair next to him for Rory, who sat down gratefully. There were a number of speculative looks as the group stared at him and Max, but thankfully, Max seemed totally oblivious, and the looks soon faded.

They introduced themselves, and Rory peered at their lifelines and was pleased to see that they all looked healthy and should live long lives. (This could change, since nothing was written in stone, but there was nothing Rory needed to worry about right now.) They proceeded to try to fill him in on the campaign thus far, which left him hopelessly confused and laughing a lot.

It seemed that you needed a lot of dice to play this game. Not only did you have different ones with different numbers of sides, you needed lots of the same dice, even when you didn’t roll more than one or two of them at a time.