Somebody had written FRANK in two places on the new duty board, once in blue ink and once in red. The blue assignment started at sixth bell. The red assignment ended at sixth bell, three floors away.
Frank studied the board until he was sure neither entry was a correction. They were both signed, dated, and marked mandatory.
"That's a neat trick," he said to Moss. "I didn't know I'd been issued another skeleton."
Moss came around the counter with a cup of tea. She had been on the late shift, and the crease left by the edge of her helmet ran across one side of her forehead. "Ollo did the rota. He's supposed to be learning how the work is organized."
"He's organized me into being in two places at once."
"If you find out how, teach the rest of us."
The overlapping assignments were not Frank's only problem. Three other workers were listed against a corridor-cleaning job, but the depot held only two serviceable mops, and one of those had a handle repaired with wire. The machine scrubber was still in the east wing. Somebody had moved its return date forward without moving the equipment itself.
Ollo appeared from the supply recess, flushed and defensive before anyone had spoken. He'd spent the morning arranging replacement handles by length, a task at which he had become competent enough to notice how often other workers put them back wrong.
"I used all the jobs from the dispatch sheet," he said. "The morning crew finishes at sixth bell. The evening crew starts at sixth bell. That's how handover works, isn't it?"
"Handover means the next crew gets the room, tools and information they need," Frank said. "It doesn't mean a worker leaves the east stairs at sixth bell and appears three floors north before the same bell stops ringing."
Ollo glanced at the board. "The sheet said no gaps."
Moss lifted her tea. "Scheduling told him to remove idle time. Didn't explain that walking counts as work when you have to walk to reach the work."
"It doesn't on the productivity chart," Ollo said.
Moss rubbed the line that the helmet had left on her forehead. "Those charts are why everybody thinks we have more people than we do. They count a person while he's walking and count him again when he's supposed to be arriving."
Ollo swallowed. He wore the same tight expression he'd had during his first door-gasket lesson, when he expected to be scolded for stopping to measure. Frank pulled up a stool and asked him to fetch the actual task slips.
They spread them across the depot bench. The evening crew was supposed to sanitize the north passage, restock the emergency spill cabinet near the infirmary, and clear debris from the banquet service entrance. The morning crew had to finish the east stair scrub and return the machine before sixth bell. On paper the jobs formed a tidy line. In the dungeon, the routes crossed two reset gates, a locked material hatch, and a corridor that remained closed from the fountain rupture.
"Show me how you expect them to get from one place to the next," Frank said.
Ollo drew a quick route with his finger. It went straight through the closed north corridor.
"That's still barred," Frank said.
"I thought the new sign said it reopened."
"The sign got taken down. The floor's drying, but Construction hasn't signed the whole route."
Ollo hesitated, then marked the closure in red. His face grew more thoughtful as he worked. "So the evening crew has to go around the laundry. They can't use the scrubber because it won't fit through that passage."
"Right."
"Then if the morning crew doesn't bring the scrubber back until later, the first job can't start."
"Now you're looking at the floor instead of the chart."
The revised rota had scarcely reached the board when Nix came through the depot door with a mop head in her bucket and the snapped handle across her arm. She cleaned the public galleries, where visitors stepped over barriers as though the signs were part of the attraction. The fracture had raised a splinter long enough to cut her palm.
"I had to use this thing all morning," she said, dropping the bucket on the floor. "They told us the new equipment was coming. The new equipment was apparently one mop for five rooms."
Ollo began to explain that the approved staffing model assumed each worker could share a tool between assignments. Nix cut him off before he'd finished the first sentence.
"Do you want me to carry the water from one room to the other in my hands? Because that's what 'share the mop' means when the rooms are at opposite ends of the floor."
Frank inspected the broken handle. "Don't use that again. If Harl has an intact replacement, we can fit it today."
"Harl says Maintenance has them," Nix replied. "Maintenance says Harl has them. I've spent more time looking for a handle than cleaning."
Moss set down her tea and reached for the supply list. Her expression softened when she saw the cut on Nix's palm where the splinter had caught her. "Get that washed and dressed before you go back out. I'll find the handle myself."
"I can't leave yet," Nix said. "If I go to Sella's room, it'll put me over the shift limit, and Payroll will say I chose to stay."
Moss's hand tightened around the list. "I'll authorize the visit as work time. Put your name on this incident sheet so there's a record of what happened."
Nix filled out the sheet reluctantly. Her letters shrank toward the bottom of the sheet, crammed into less space than the form allowed.
Nix kept one hand around the pen. "If Payroll decides I stayed voluntarily, will they charge me for the treatment?"
Moss wrote WORKPLACE INJURY above Nix's signature before answering. "They can dispute the minutes with me. Go get the splinter out."
"It's just the hand I clean with," Nix answered, a sharpness in her voice that surprised even her. She put down the pen and apologized a moment later, too quietly for anyone beyond Moss to hear. Moss shook her head; she was more concerned with getting a clean cloth around the splinter wound than with being addressed politely.
After she left, Ollo stood very still. "I thought there were three spare handles."
"There were last week," Moss told him. "Two got fitted, one broke in a fall. That's why the actual stock matters when you're writing the rota."
"Nobody told me the count changed."
"You didn't ask," she said, then checked herself. "And I should've shown you where to look. You're learning. I shouldn't have handed you a chart and expected it to describe the whole dungeon."
Ollo looked relieved by the admission but not absolved. He erased a line from the duty board and began again.
When Frank left to fetch the chalk, he heard Ollo ask Moss whether he should cross his own name off the planning duty. Moss didn't answer immediately. She gave him the stock book and told him to count the usable handles before he drew a single new line. Ollo stood there with the book open, trying to work out whether this was punishment or a better way of learning. Either way, he started counting.
Frank helped by walking the routes with him, carrying a piece of chalk to mark the points where two crews could safely share a corridor without passing equipment through the public areas. On the east stairs they found the scrubber still in use by a team that hadn't received the new handover time. They were cleaning a broad landing where a party of adventurers had spilled an entire barrel of lamp oil while opening a chest.
The distance looked shorter on the wall chart. By the time they reached the second reset gate, Frank had stopped speaking and was listening for the change in the mechanism's cycling. Ollo tried to make conversation about the new rota, then fell quiet when Frank raised a finger to wait for the gate to finish moving. The young goblin had to stop himself rushing ahead twice. Frank's steady pace was not hesitation. He'd measured the space that could kill them long before Ollo was hired.
"How long does it usually take you?" Ollo asked once they were through.
"With an empty cart or a full one?"
"There's a difference?"
Frank let him push the cart through the next turn. The answer made itself felt at the bend.
The team leader, a broad-shouldered goblin called Mara, refused to stop halfway through. "The floor's already slick, and I've got one worker at the top warning people off. You can't wheel the machine away until the oil's up."
Ollo opened his mouth with the scheduling sheet in hand, then looked at the sheen across the landing. "How much longer do you need?"
"Another half hour, if the scrubber doesn't clog."
"Then I'll move the west gallery crew back and put the hand cleaning first. We can send them around the service passage without the machine."
Mara studied him a moment. "You giving me permission or taking notes?"
"Both, I think."
She smiled, then went back to guiding the scrubber around the outer edge of the spill. Frank caught the young goblin watching how she worked, adjusting speed where the tiles were uneven instead of pushing the machine harder. He didn't interrupt. Some lessons were easier to learn from someone who wasn't the person already explaining them.
By midday the rota had become a workable, untidy compromise. Ollo shifted the start of one job, Moss secured an extra handle from Harl, and Frank arranged for the evening crew to take the laundry service passage after the linen carts were finished. Not every assignment fit. The north corridor still needed an inspection before full cleaning, and the spill cabinet restock would have to wait for a delivery. Ollo wrote those delays where everyone could see them rather than hiding them under a green COMPLETED box.
The Core found the revised board during a morale visit.
"I'm noticing a little empty space in our schedule," he observed. "Let's be mindful that paid time is a precious resource."
"That's travel time," Ollo said before Moss could speak. "The crew has to carry the tools to the job, and sometimes they need the service route because the public hall is closed."
The Core beamed. "An excellent opportunity for efficiency training."
"We tried to remove it," Ollo said. "That made the jobs impossible."
A long silence followed, broken only by the scratching of Moss's pen.
"Well," the Core said at last, "the important thing is that we're learning together."
After he vanished, Moss leaned over the counter and looked at Ollo with something close to surprise. "You answered him."
"Was I not supposed to?"
"You were. I just thought you might wait another month before you tried."
Ollo rubbed the back of his neck. "He did ask about the empty space."
Frank returned the chalk to the drawer. "You told him what it was."
Ollo waited with his pencil lifted, then understood Frank had finished. He copied Nix's incident onto the evening crew's list without asking whether it would make the figures look untidy.
A quiet seven XP appeared in Frank's ledger for safe work sequencing and equipment recovery, raising his Rank 1 experience to seventy-five. Moss signed the joint plan, then added paid overtime to Nix's incident entry before filing it with Personnel.
"They'll argue," Frank said as Moss wrote the extra minutes.
"They always argue," she said. "At least this time we've got the broken handle and the blood on the form to tell us what the argument's about."
At the end of the shift, Nix returned for the replacement mop. She tested the new handle with both hands, thanked Ollo for making sure it was on the board, and headed out to finish the gallery. Ollo watched her leave, then crossed out his own shift-end time and wrote the later one he had actually worked.
"Is that allowed?" Frank asked.
"Moss said to put down the real hours." Ollo folded the chart carefully. "If the number doesn't fit, Payroll can come and walk the route."
Bob passed the open rota on his way back from orientation. RB, who had been dozing beneath Frank's cart, climbed onto the rim when Bob stopped in front of the duty board. The rat's ragged ears went flat. "Frank, which shift is the real one?"
"Both of them."
"Then why does this one say night when there are lamps?"
Frank pointed him to the duty bell schedule. Bob studied it, nodded, and asked where it said daytime. Ollo took the pencil gently out of Bob's hand before he could mark the wrong column. "Let him ask Personnel," Frank said. "We've already finished tonight's rota."
RB gave a long, aggravated chitter from the cart. Frank took the meaning readily enough: Bob was in the way, and RB would appreciate his departure. Bob turned toward the noise with a delighted expression.
"Hear that, Frank?" Bob said. "He says I should come back tomorrow. Says it makes his day when I stop by."
RB'S THOUGHTS
(⊙_⊙) (¬_¬) ┐(￣ヘ￣)┌
"That isn't what I got from it," Frank said. RB's little claws scraped the rim as Bob reached toward him, and Frank laid his forearm across the cart to keep the two apart.
"You listen to the squeaks, but you miss what he means," Bob explained. "I'm getting pretty good at understanding him." RB snapped his teeth at Bob's hovering fingers. Bob withdrew his hand, apparently deciding the rat had finished speaking, and wandered off toward Personnel. Frank waited until he was out of earshot before lowering his arm.
RB'S THOUGHTS
(ง'̀-'́)ง (╬ಠ益ಠ) ┐(´д｀)┌
Ollo left an ugly gap between two jobs and signed the rota with ink already streaked across his wrist. At least the gap was visible to whoever came on duty next.
On the way out Frank found Ollo standing at the dining-room door, his ink-stained hand resting on the latch. Two people from his old kitchen shift had saved him a chair. They were arguing about whether the evening cook had salted the stew or the pot, and they waved when they saw him. Ollo looked back toward the depot. "I was late finishing the rota," he said. "I could still go check the night handover." Frank looked at the friends waiting for him. "You put the real time on the sheet. You can spend some of the rest on yourself." Ollo opened the door. By the time Frank reached the stairs, he could hear him laughing at something that had nothing to do with work.
Near the stairs, Nix passed with the new mop in her uninjured hand. She lifted it in greeting and went on checking the floor ahead of her. RB stayed beside Frank's boot, interested in the clean new metal ring at the top of its handle but apparently willing to let her keep it.