The first day at any job is scary, probably, but something about working at one of the most prestigious law offices on this Earth—or, indeed, even far beyond—does add an extra bit of tension to the whole thing. Just the elevator ride up was tense enough to age me a few months in a few minutes, riding up the biggest skyscraper in the country while sharing the ride with an elf that seemed to be asleep standing up, snoring like it's nothing. I was practically frozen, because how do you even react to that? Is that normal? I don't know! I couldn't even imagine how long he must have been standing there, just riding the elevator up and down while snoozing, but I figured I wasn't in this business to immediately poke my nose where it doesn't belong. I know elves are the junior lawyers here, and they absolutely outrank me.
Thankfully, the onboarding conversation I ended up having with the demoness running HR—because of course HR is run by demons—did clear up a few questions. Me getting this job in the first place was a quite mysterious affair, being told to show up here for a lucrative business opportunity by a scroll deposited in my mailbox one day after I dropped out of law school, signed in triplicate by Asmodeus, Belial, and Chernobog, the demonic lawyers whose names command respect even in the highest echelons and across dimensions. For a moment, I even wanted to just ignore it, figuring it to be a scam of some sort, but if there was one thing I learned in law school, it's when ABC comes calling, you pick up. The demoness secretary explained to me the basic issue, namely that the junior lawyers here, due to what she called a "misadventure in corporate messaging", have been cultivated into total workaholics, which seemed good at the outset, but has now allowed some ugly issues to rear its head.
To make it short, the lawyers here are overworked, tired, and grumpy, and I'm here to fix that. Attempts to allow them to take vacations have failed, so the bosses are taking a new path, and that's where I come in. I, as ABC Law's new "personal assistant", am to go around the office and try and find out two things: who's the most overworked, and how I can get them to no longer be overworked. I am to use whatever corporate jargon I can come up with to explain to them that my measures are under no circumstance a vacation, but rather a new initiative to improve workplace performance. For this process, I have remarkable freedoms within the company, and it has been communicated to the lawyers that if I come to them and ask them about coming on a "team building exercise"—or whatever other term I come up with for it—they are to go along with it in the name of the company. Hopes are that this will make them more willing to engage.
So that is now my job. It's a strange one, but it pays well, and I don't have to practice law either, so really, that's a win-win. To get me started, the demoness—whose name I now know to be Xarana—gave me three names in particular to focus on. First, we have Velros, a reclusive drow that's constantly cooped up in his office, blinds down and lights off. Even she doesn't know if he's even left the office in months. Second, there is Oras, the wood elf that I saw sleeping in the elevator earlier. He's so tired that he just constantly falls asleep, and as such, it can be a bit difficult to find him at times. Finally, she told me about Shadiol, the high elf wunderkind that worked his way up the internal ladder to become the clear headliner amongst the junior lawyers despite only being a few centuries old. Brash, arrogant, smokes like a chimney and seems like he hasn't taken a break in years. With that in mind, I decide to start by