INTERLUDE - A NORMAL MAN

"Coffee?" A pretty young woman asked him as he stepped into the conference room.

"Oh?" he asked. He was, admittedly, a little thirsty, and maybe a little frazzled. His stomach was in knots, but that was always the case before this kind of meeting. He made sure that it didn't show on his face or expression. Cool. Confident. He needed to be both. "What kind is it?" he asked.

The secretary smiled kindly, and he was keenly aware that she was pretty. Too pretty. A ranker, then? E, at the very least. "It's a blend from COMPANY. From a C-rank world. It's quite tasteful," she said.

"Ah, well, no thank you. It's sweet of you to offer," he said. "Do you have water, perhaps?"

"No coffee, Phil?" Someone at the table asked.

He finally turned to see who was here already. Five of the seven members of the board were seated, though the atmosphere was casual. Three men and two women in suits, all with mugs nearby, all with heavy augmentations of the subtle and futuristic looking sort, and all rich beyond the comprehension of the average person.

"No," he said. "I've been laying off the caffeine."

It was a lie. One that the others ate up, though. They'd all had their times when they tried to kick a habit or another, and he was able to walk up to the front of the room, a fresh and cool water-bottle in hand, while making small talk and complaining about the nasty headaches he had.

The truth was more complicated.

He didn't want to be a ranker.

In fact, he wanted nothing to do with magic. And yet, the more he looked, the more he found. It was everywhere, slowly infecting the world. The people sitting here had all paid their way to E-ranker. The nice young secretary by the entrance was a D-ranker. The number of rankers was rising every single day, and it was significantly outpacing the rate of birth.

And it was a disaster.

Every drink these board members drank today would pass through them. As E-rankers they might absorb between 30-60% of the magical energy in the food. That tiny amount would circulate in their bodies for a while before winking out. It would empower, cure, envigourate. It would make them more.

These people would never be D-rankers. Not with the life they lead. For that, they'd need to face true hardship, or feel something more.

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D-rankers absorbed more magic still, and produced it ex-nihilo as well.

All that excess magic would go down the drain, pissed away. It would collect in the sewers, be pulled into the water supply, and come down as rain. Factories that produced magical items burned some away. Some packaging was trashed. Some magic was lost.

At least the magic from portals was so pure that it didn't tie itself to anything.

But it didn't matter. The world was slowly gaining in magic, like microplastics only a million times more disastrous.

He had to do something. He had to help the world become less vile than it was becoming with each passing day.

More than once, in his career, he'd been encouraged to ascend. To pay the relatively low cost to become an E-ranker, to leave behind normality. Normal people were poor people.

Hasn't that been the truth of humanity since the first man discovered the concept of power and wealth?

He planned on fixing that.

There were two paths ahead of him. Either everyone was rich and powerful, in which case no one was, or the world worked to remove the wealth to begin with.

The last two members of the board arrived and took their seats. He chatted, smile on, good mood elevated. He remembered names and little details, made small talk and gossipped, slipping in a few jokes. He was charismatic. He knew it, and he'd worked hard to be better at it.

It was work, too. Memorizing names and stories and details wasn't something that came naturally to him. Perhaps, if he was better, but he'd refused betterness in order to focus on making the world a more fair place.

"Thank you all for coming here," he said as he addressed the entire room. There was a monitor behind him that came on, linked to an interface on his eyes. That was one thing he didn't mind so much. Betterment by technological means had a place.

If he had his way, it would be a great place.

"We're here today to discuss Project Guardian. We're nearly seven months from early deployment, and things have gotten quite interesting. I think you'll find that this, more than any other project our R&D division is working on, might well cement our place in the future."

***