Finley Cai Aies Regalis-Olcay June 1st,20XX

“Mr. Hall! Mr. Hall!”

Aleka yelled for me around the office and her heels clicked threateningly on the ceramic floors. The sounds of paper rustled as she carried a stack of more work for me to do.

Her footsteps finally stopped mere inches from my hiding spot, the underneath of an absent intern’s desk and I heard the sound of her dialling a now-familiar number.

“Nikolas! Yeah, he’s gone again. I’m on the third floor.”

It took mere seconds for my vice-CEO to arrive on the third floor. It didn’t make much sense why he was personally tracking me down since he should have just as much or even more work than I did.

“You’re finally here. This floor was the only one with deactivated security cameras, so I know he’s somewhere here. It’s just a matter of where.”

I debated my chances of escaping her and Nik’s surprisingly fast paces if I took off running and decided to stay still. But that wasn’t really an option either as Nik had an uncanny ability to find anything missing. He had an acute spatial memory and had an uncanny memory of how everything usually is. I’d once challenged him to a spot the difference challenge and had been annihilated.

Nik rotated around the room once or twice and the bottom of his feet pointed in my direction.

“Mr. Hall, I hope once we’re done this you can return to your office and send Squire a proper response.”

He referenced the social media company we often worked with. They weren’t as big as some of the others but as an offshoot of a larger publicity agency, Kingdom, they weren’t bad partners. Their CEO, a woman by the name of Joyce Knightly was also a decent business partner in that she ran her company well and wouldn’t try to skew the deals between us unfairly in her favour, as others tended to.

The only thing to be cautious about was her sudden spending on buildings on the outskirts of the city and her sudden recruitment of seemingly random kids into an unidentified program. It smelled suspiciously like the ‘future star’ program I had been inducted into as a child.

I didn’t have any proof so I couldn’t and wouldn’t shut off any communications with the company. I would just have Will keep an eye on them and cut off communications as quickly as possible if they turned out to be doing anything unsavoury.

The main reason I was hiding though, wasn’t because of any of that. Rather it was because they had gotten the idea to make me do an official inauguration and show my face to the world. While I didn’t particularly care about hiding my identity anymore, it was a whole different ball game to publicize it.

On one hand, I understood that they just wanted people to know my face so it would be easier to track me down if I managed to go missing for a whole week again, but that was just another reason why I didn’t want them to publicize my face. Currently, they just thought I was good at running away, but if under those conditions I still managed to slip past their attempts to find me, then they might panic more than they already did.

Nik’s shoes, shined to perfection and missing as much as a single cuff mark stopped in front of the desk I’d hidden under and pulled it back, exposing me to the judgemental gazes of Aleka, Nik and the three other interns that were present.

I had arrived here during the lunch break, so no one had been around, but I guess it was over.

What type of lunch break is so short anyway?

I made plans to extend the lunch break as Nik pulled me up to my feet. He swiftly brushed me off and Aleka glared at the interns to mind their own business instead of taking pictures. I was once again reminded that the only reason I had any sort of reputation left was because of these two’s and occasionally Will’s hard work.

“How much do I pay you two anyway?”

Aleka rushed me through the halls and back to my office as she responded curtly.

“More than enough sir.”

She then followed up with another warning before I could offer to give them a pay raise again.

“If you give us any more pay raises, we’ll be investigated by the government sir. Please don’t make things harder than they already are.”

Nik jumped in with another reason to discourage me from padding their paychecks a bit more.

“And while the company’s finances are currently fine, we’re planning to debut a lot of new artists. We should reserve excessive spending while we still can.”

Not to brag or sound annoying but money could barely be viewed as a consideration to me, never mind a problem. Even if every project we launched this quarter failed, I would be able to comfortably make up for the losses with my personal funds. And if those ran dry then I could casually grab a flower or tree branch from the Fairy world and auction it off to make a profit.

I’d gotten a flower I figured was the closest in composition to gold and had gotten it appraised here to make sure it wouldn’t make any huge waves before I tried to sell it. It was then that I had found out there was no way I could sell the flowers as they were, but if I could make it into an amulet or another piece of jewelry, then it would sell pretty well.

Ah, but I still had about a week left until I could return to the other world.

At first, I had thought that I would even enjoy the break from the other world, but I didn’t realize just how much my trips there had integrated into my life. I found myself stuck with an excess of free time and missing the ones I’d left behind.

I shook off the sudden sadness that clouded my mind and got to work. My actual job wasn’t actually all that difficult since it was just reading over things Nik, Will and Aleka had put together in easily understandable documents, Silencing stockholders by threatening to crash the company and start a new one without them, and the occasional phone meeting with a potential business partner.

What really kept me busy, funny enough were my school project for the showcase in a month and renovating my apartment before I could convince Jake to move in with me. I wasn’t planning to ask him to move in with me for any nefarious reason, but he had mentioned trying to find a new apartment after he graduated. I figured we would both benefit, He would get a free place to live that was close enough to his school, he could borrow any one of my cars whenever he wanted and I would get someone to deal with the housework and make food for me to eat. A total win/win.

Sparrow had somewhat struggled with re-adjusting to her friends so I’d had to spend more time on campus than I’d originally wanted to, and since Jake had taken an extra week off to settle his family and convince them he was okay, I couldn’t pawn the job off him.

Although, there was a sort of awkwardness between them that was difficult to pin. They weren’t mad at each other rather it seemed to be the opposite. But until they both sorted it out, I would keep my nose out of it.

Page after page of pristine white paper, dotted with black text flashed across my desk and my eyes as I sorted through them, stamping what needed my approval and putting dog ears in those I wanted to revisit.

Eventually, I stumbled across a plan to debut a new group from the rookies in the company. As an entertainment company we did accept talents and train them up to be able to debut, but Volui mainly focused on actors and actresses, music was a relatively new branch for us.

There were one or two talents that did both acting and singing in the company, but no one that could be called a musician. That was why I was surprised to see the proposal for a singing and dancing group on the table. I read through it carefully and looked over the budget plan, then I took special note of the name of the head of the project and asked Aleka to look into it.

The day flew by like that, and as soon as the clock struck four in the afternoon, I rushed out to the Sparrow’s apartment which had been reclaimed as the center for the showcase project. I didn’t even know what it was about, as many changes had occurred in the week Sparrow and I had gone missing but I was willing to fund it and help the kids get as much fun out of it as possible.

After I graduated, I was planning on approaching the school about adding a sponsorship aspect to the showcase. Because they had the budget to create proper art, I’d been able to see my fellow student’s talent and planned on bringing them into the company after they graduated.

While I didn’t particularly like the school, I had to admit it was one of the better ones around. They gave out the most scholarship opportunities around and did as much as reasonable to help students develop their respective talents.

If my plan went through then the students would be able to bring forth their group's proposals to the participating companies and would receive the funding to create something properly, instead of the unimpressive displays of the years before.

This way, they would have experience working with a real budget and if their showcases went well, they would be able to impress some companies and have an in when they graduated university, well, if they chose to go.

I didn’t use the company funds, as Jake probably thought I did and used my personal funds, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to clear my name until after graduation.

Haaa.

I threw myself back into my work