Brenna “Brandy” Kane was sitting in the back office with Ellis. Enough time had passed that Brandy had somehow managed to rate a minor promotion. She had gone from being a clerk to being a senior clerk, which might or might not be the exact same title she’d had before. However, it was definitely a promotion. If the shop had more actual locations, versus its current scheme of timeline folding, she’d have likely just been made a proper manager. Albeit, maybe, a junior one.
Brandy had received a sizable raise with her promotion, though she didn’t really pay that much mind. The money didn’t really feel real to her. It’s not that she couldn’t touch it, or there was something dodgy about the accounts. On the contrary, if she went into any major financial institution in any of the worlds that the Holst’s set up an identity for her in, she’d be treated like royalty. Complete with the prerequisite uncomfortable amount of flattery, fawning, and sycophancy.
No, though she’d generally be far too embarrassed to say so aloud, what made the money feel like it was illusory, was the fact that she had far too much of it. Even after donating large portions of it to various reputable charities and social interest groups, there was still ridiculous amounts of it sitting in her various accounts. She was faintly aware that she had unilaterally changed the fates of several countries by simply electing to properly pay her taxes within their borders.
Now that she thought about it, Brandy was pretty sure she’d had this problem before, when she was first starting out. Her obscene paycheck was even more obscene than it had been before. She’d been a probationary junior-clerk, at the start and she was getting paid with enough zeros and commas to make up an entire family’s inter-generational wealth.
Now after her promotion, Brandy now had so much money, she truly didn’t dare try to move it all at once. If the economies of the various worlds could be likened to an ocean, the money she now made in a year was enough to make her the kind of unfathomable eldritch being of the deep that could cause tidal waves and tsunamis with a single careless move. Brandy was now wealthy enough that if she ever deigned to go back to her hometown, it wasn’t inconceivable that she could by most of the countries of her former-world. She made in a month what most wealthy nations would proudly count as a good GDP.
However, this strange feeling of suddenly being too rich to even wrap her mind around the reality of it, wasn’t new. Brandy had now lived and worked with the Holsts to under that they paid her as much as they did because A) that’s how much they valued her, and B) the actual money was valueless to them.
The first matter was a heart-warming if slightly troublesome thing. She’d learned enough about that to see that they didn’t warm to people quickly but when they did warm to you, there was very little they wouldn’t do for you. Satisfying one’s pecuniary needs by essentially drowning her in money, was the very least of the things they’d offered her since she’d started living with them.
The second matter was a view that Brandy herself found herself slowly adopting as well. Money was just a game mortals created for the sake of making trade and barter conveniently universal. An abstraction on the sum of a person’s value and assets in and to society. In other words, money itself was roughly meaningless.
With enough knowledge, with enough resources,...with enough power, one could essentially print as much money as one wanted. The only thing that held uniform, near-absolute value was time. Only time could be considered universally precious, because even immortals couldn’t retrieve an important moment, or hour, once it was lost.
It didn’t help that Brandy lived and worked in a place where the impossible happened nearly every day. A place where she regularly handled things that were essentially priceless, and rightfully were only able to be given a price and placed on the store’s shelves, because the owner was doing so forcibly. It was hard to get excited about having the wealth of several nations at her fingertips when just last week she tossed a batch of miracle panaceas that could cause world-ending wars if released to the public into an incinerator.
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In truth, maybe the whole issue with the money wasn’t that much of an issue for Brandy. After all, she’d been working for the Holsts for a while now, and living with them had indeed led to her adopting various views of theirs to some extent. Such as their lack of concern regarding mortal currencies. No, right now, all this fuss was just Brandy’s way of distracting herself. She’d recently experienced another breakthrough in her cultivation. A breakthrough that had resulted in a comprehensive improvement of all her stats and abilities.
Brandy’s psychic-puppetry and general psychic abilities seemed to have experienced a high amount of general growth. More important, Brandy’s physique, especially her nose, had also experienced a fair amount of improvement. As a result, she’d found that troublingly enough Ellis’ scent was just as attractive as the face that lay beneath his facade. Or rather, she’d found that Ellis’ everything was covered by that same facade, scent, present, and look were all blanketed in a shield of abnormally dense mundanity and Brandy’s six senses were now just sharp enough to properly notice the incongruity.
It was kind of driving her a little mad. Especially in moments like now. Where she had to sit in the same back office with the man and do her best to try and pretend like everything was normal and she wasn’t suddenly finding herself paying special attention to his presence.
“Ah…Bother…”
“H-, Hm? What’s wrong, boss?” said Brandy. Doing her best to not act frazzled, and only barely pulling it off.
“Nothing, my pen just died…One moment…” said Ellis.
Ellis got up and left the room, and Brandy loosed a sigh of relief. Her shoulder’s sagging as her mind was freed from its state of compulsive curiosity. Then Ellis came back but he paused at the door.
“Brandy?”
“Y-, Yes, Mister Holst?” said Brandy.
“Has my ###### been off-line this whole time?” said Ellis. His normally unflappable look was replaced with an expression of mortification.
“I…I uh, I’m not entirely sure what is, sir?” said Brandy. Blushing.
“Ah…Right, well no matter…In the future, if you find yourself feeling any form of cognitive interference in my presence, please do say something…I try to keep track of these things myself but for various reasons…I’m simply not capable of doing so. Nor have I yet come up with a completely foolproof means of creating a piece of technology or magic that can do so for me…Er, my apologies if I’ve been making you uncomfortable…” said Ellis. Sighing dejectedly.
“Uh…D-, don’t mention it? You…you didn’t smell bad at all…It was um…It was actually quite lovely,” said Brandy. Trying not to fidget. Face beet red as she now realized that what she’d been picking up was likely abnormal. Like a dog gaining the ability to see the full range of colors in the world, in the midst of a strange meteorological event that bathed the world in strange hues.
“Smell?…Oh, no…It’s getting worse…” muttered Ellis. Looking pale.
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Meanwhile, beyond the shop’s back room, a little girl wandered the aisles of the shop looking for some fairly ordinary wares. Humans were quick to adapt and children could adapt even quicker. Thus another young girl, who only a year before had been homeless on the street, with no good prospects, could now wander through a shop of miracles looking through their selection of normal notebooks, pens, and pencils.
The girl wasn’t alone in this. Over the years, the store’s many regulars had gradually come to see the store as just another store. It stood above the other stores of course, but they were no longer quite as in awe of the place. Which was as the store’s owners would prefer it. The store had become a place where people would simply come when they had any particular need met. Not just the extraordinary needs.
