“Chez Manon” was a rustic coffee shop owned by Manon Labranche located in the depths of the 18th district of Paris. Apart from the occasional lost tourist, its main traffic consisted of local artists and social-media celebrities who didn’t have quite as many followers as they’d like, so they tried to gain the public’s sympathy by promoting small businesses.

“Chez Manon” was also located only one medium-length metro ride from my apartment. Unfortunate for me, I never took the metro. Like many other people with no combat skills, I deemed it highly unsafe; especially the lines that went under the Seine. Their annual recorded number of monster attacks was almost as high as that of the Wild Lands within the city, and that didn’t even take into account monster sightings and attacks perpetrated by smaller monsters such as goblins or imps. Thus, I travelled to work by bus, when the line wasn’t disrupted by strikes of course.

I would be lying if I said I liked my job. Its first and biggest flaw was the owner of the café, Madame Labranche herself. Her surname fit her perfectly as that woman always acted as if there was a branch stuck up her arse. She never failed to display her status window to whoever had the misfortune to ask, but worst of all, she held a profound disdain for people with a rank lower than hers, and those who refused to publicly display theirs. All four employees of “Chez Manon” fell into one, if not both of these categories.

Moping over how much I hated this woman, and having imaginary arguments with her had become a daily routine of mine. On particularly bad days, I would think of her when I straightened my bleach-blond hair, and imagine what it would feel like to hit her smug face with my hair straightener.

This Thursday morning was no exception.

“Stupid terrorists, stupid trains, if not for all that crap I wouldn’t have to put up with that damn woman.” I muttered as I put the last of my makeup on.

This had become a new routine of mine, ever since I started working in that cafe. Don’t get me wrong, I did care about appearances before, but not to this extent. Part of the reason why I put extra care into my attire every morning was because I feared being fired from this job I had worked so hard to get. The other reason was that Etienne, the only other full-time employee who worked on the floor with me, was extremely hot.

Of course, just like me, he had something to hide, otherwise, he wouldn’t have been working there. For me, it was my rank and my (very useless) skills. It felt a bit embarrassing to display them every time I met someone, so I eventually decided to edit my external status window (ESW) to only display the bare minimum. As a consequence, my ESW looked like this:

My internal status window (ISW) on the other hand was a hot mess. In the past few weeks, I had gained several new skills, but with the system being as annoying as it was and not telling me directly what they did, I was stuck with a horrible-looking unsorted list. I had already scheduled an appointment with an Oracle who specialised in ordering skills, and I could not wait for this work week to finish to get there.

I didn’t mind being terrible at combat, as most people nowadays were anyway, but what bothered me was the fact that my job prospects were highly restricted by what Oracles in big corporate HR deemed as ‘interesting and useful skills. Although I had a skill or two that allowed me to better blend in a crowd or memorise important information, my primary skills, those displayed in that dammed leftmost column, were useful for absolutely nothing.

As I locked up my studio and ran down the stairs to catch my bus, my mind went back to Etienne. All I knew about him, apart from his name, was that he was a year younger than me. Of course, I also knew that he came to work by bike and that he always kept a spare pair of trousers in the backroom in case it’d rain. I also knew that he loved dogs, but couldn’t afford one. Surprisingly enough, I knew a surprising deal about his lesbian sister, to the point where I sometimes wondered if he wasn’t trying to set me up with her.

I jumped on the bus just in time and spent the following half-hour thinking about Etienne’s dreamy brown eyes, and curly black hair that was just the perfect length to grab onto.

Needless to say, I almost missed my stop.

***

“Hey!” A familiar voice greeted me as I arrived at “Chez Manon”.

“Hey, how’re you doing Etienne?” I asked, as I quickly tried to fix my hair and the collar of my blouse.

“I’m good, and you?” He asked in his soft voice.

He had just turned the coffee machine on and watched as it hissed at him before starting the auto-cleaning process.

“Do you want me to put the pastries in the oven?” I asked as I put on a light-pink apron and matching headband.

Other than those two elements, we were free to wear what we wanted to work. Although male employees did not have to wear the maid-like headband, which I found somewhat unfair.

“Yeah, if you don’t mind.”

I nodded and went down to the kitchen. “Chez Manon” served only the finest de-frozen pastries and was not ashamed of it.

“I have no idea how people can eat that stuff.” I said as I slid several ice-cold trays into the industrial oven.

“And yet here we are, feasting upon the deformed and the dying.” Etienne joined me downstairs and tossed me a slightly stale muffin from yesterday’s unsold pile. “This one looks like a troll.” He added, showing me a cookie from the pile.

I giggled. The cookie did indeed look like a troll, with a square face, a large, protruding nose, and two lonely chocolate chips for eyes. No wonder no one wanted to buy it.

As I chewed on my muffin, which served as my breakfast, I suddenly noticed that the oven wasn’t on.

“Hey, Etienne, the oven is broken again.”

“Well, time for a little manual override, as we call it in the field.” He grinned in response.

He approached the oven, quickly checked if it was plugged in, probably to tease me more than anything else and put his hand over the side of the appliance. White sparks formed around his palm, as his eyes lit up with similar energy. Sparks flew where his hand made contact, and the light inside the oven turned on.

I clapped, to ironically congratulate him.

“Thank you, thank you.” He bowed, like a magician at the end of his show. “On a serious note though, I think I would have been fired a long time ago if Madame Manon wasn’t so stingy with her money.”

The doorbell rang, just as I was about to answer.

“Speaking of the devil.” I sigh.

With my manager in the store, this was bound to be another long day at work.