A/N: This is 3 chapter prelude to Modern Magic, introducing each of the main characters, Emmi Tabris, Aleeri Adaar, and Marian Hawke.
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"Well, that's surprising, isn't it?"
Emmi Tabris hadn't meant to say that out loud, though it had been an inevitability, considering how often it passed through her mind of late. Sarcasm was something she normally reserved for home, and she normally managed a professional façade at work.
Though, normally did mean so much these days. Normally, she wasn't so exasperated as to slip up as she had. After all, she wasn't stupid. She knew she couldn't talk that way to her boss and get away with it.
This place had seemed promising. The original manager had been a good sort, she liked most of her coworkers, and the customers had been pretty decent, too.
This place had started to feel like a second home, a place where she stood on equal ground without having to constantly challenge the people around her just because she was an elf working in a predominately human part of town.
And then her beloved manager had been promoted to a regional position—she'd liked him enough to help set up the going away party for that—and the new management had come in.
At first, she hadn't thought much of it and had continued working as usual. She trained the newcomers coming in for the summer and stayed late to help prepare for the morning shifts, often working overtime.
That had been her normal, a routine that she could more than live with, one she could love.
The former manager had promised she would be promoted to trainer, so that she'd actually get paid for training new people. So that she'd be qualified. He'd stood with the new manager and asserted that he too would uphold this promise.
The man had sworn he would, hand over his heart and a grin on his face.
Then suddenly the shem girl who came in about one day a week and filed her nails more often than take orders was promoted to trainer, even though none of the trainees knew her as anything other than the 'pretty blonde bitch'.
When Emmi had tried to go to the manager about what had happened, it had been pointed out to her that she couldn't train people because she hadn't taken the proper courses, and if she claimed that she had been doing that job, then the restaurant was going to have problems because none of the employees she'd trained had been trained 'properly'.
It would shut the whole place down. Did she want that?
She'd tried to get in contact with the old manager, but when she did, he'd very kindly told her that it was out of his hands. He had too much on his plate as it was, and couldn't micromanage all the restaurants under his jurisdiction.
She'd felt betrayed, but hadn't voiced her grievance. After all, this sort of thing happened more often than not, and a little voice in the back of her head had been counting the days until this latest 'opportunity' fell through.
Even so, she loved this place so much. She'd tried to see the good, tried to weather the changing times and wait for the new manager to come around.
And he had, in the same way a storm blowing back over an area it had already ravaged came around.
This time, her hopes of promotion already dashed, he came for her overtime.
She'd worked overtime for three months before the change, and it had never been a problem.
Yet when she'd gotten her paycheck today, it had reflected barely half of the hours she had worked.
When she'd brought the pay stub in, her boss had smiled and apologetically explained that they weren't authorized to pay for overtime. He said that he'd assumed she was volunteering. After all, if she was working over, then that meant she was working fulltime, and she was a part time employee because their business couldn't afford to employ full time employees.
Not with the new legislation in the works that would make them cover their employee's health care.
And that was why she'd slipped up. It was just so clear that this bastard was going to fuck her over as many times as she'd let him, and her sarcastic inner self had bubbled up to the surface.
She hadn't meant for him to hear, but this was ridiculous. She needed this job, needed to pay rent, but more than that, she'd wanted to save up so that she could get this little place on the edge of town, a nice house outside of the Alienage, with a yard and room for a small garden…
She'd been figuring how much money it would cost and counting on all those overtime hours to help her get there in a year or two.
And now…
"Excuse me?"
Her boss's usual smile was just barely hanging on, a rather dismissive light in his eyes as he looked her over.
If she apologized, made up some dumb excuse about stress or something equally stupid, begged for her job, she might be able to keep it.
She could keep working excessive hours just to make minimum wage, paid for 39 hours a week even when she worked closer to 70. She could go home exhausted, never any closer to her dreams, watching her fingers get even more calloused and stiff than they already were.
She was twenty-fucking-five, and already she had old lady hands.
Well, her cousin Shianni said they were fine, but Emmi could see the weathered scars from kitchen grease and the small burns and nicks that covered her fingers. She could see the how they would look in another few years, so much work done and nothing to show for it.
Nothing but a broken body and broken dreams because of broken promises.
The light in the bastard's eyes told her he was waiting for her to grovel, waiting for her to beg him to keep her little elven ass on staff.
Quitting wouldn't help her any, but neither would working here.
"I said it's surprising, but it shouldn't be, really. It isn't the first time you broke your promises," she stated, standing a little straighter. "And I quit."
