Mattheus had severely underestimated how good business would be after renovating the pub.
He thanked every god who might or might not exist that the official opening had happened on a weekday, giving him a few relatively “calm” days to adjust to everything.
Serving more than three customers at once was not the problem.
Mattheus had worked at a bar every summer since he was fifteen, and summer was by far the busiest season back home.
He knew how to take orders, pour drinks, clear tables, and deal with several customers demanding his attention at once—the problem was doing all of that while also making food.
Had he opened on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, he might have died, and he was not exaggerating.
Well, perhaps it was a slight exaggeration, but it certainly had not felt like one while he was trying to cook six burgers, keep three pizzas from burning, pour drinks and explain to an increasingly impatient man that Pizza alla diavola was supposed to be spicy.
Crossroads was not busy at all hours of the day since Gothamites respected the sacred tradition of allowing bartenders periods of false security before trying to murder them with work.
The mornings remained mostly calm.
He served coffee, breakfast sandwiches and the occasional beer to customers whose lives had clearly taken a wrong turn somewhere.
Around eleven, the pub would still be quiet enough for Mattheus to have something to eat, check his inventory and foolishly believe the day might not be so bad.
Then noon arrived.
One moment, the pub would have two customers and the next, there would be fifteen or twenty starving customers demanding to be fed, sometimes more.
The burger, fries and drink combo had become his greatest triumph and his worst enemy.
Fifteen dollars for a good burger, a generous serving of fries and either a soda or beer was an excellent deal in this part of Gotham, according to his customers.
Several people who worked nearby had begun visiting Crossroads almost every day for lunch or dinner, and some brought friends or coworkers with them.
Mattheus was not an outstanding cook.
He was decent, certainly (he could follow most recipes), and was getting better through constant practice, but he would not be winning any culinary awards.
The ingredients did most of the work.
Everything he purchased from the Store was top quality.
The vegetables were fresh, the meat was excellent, and none of it contained preservatives, artificial flavoring or any of the other strange ingredients that appeared on food labels and sounded as though they belonged in a chemistry laboratory.
Good ingredients made good food.
Good food brought customers.
Customers brought money.
Money brought happiness.
Unfortunately, customers also brought exhaustion.
His daily profits had increased from around one or two hundred dollars to four or five times that amount.
On particularly busy days, he made even more.
His wallet was delighted, but the rest of him wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.
Energy drinks had helped at first.
Then one had become two, two had become three, and eventually they stopped doing much beyond making his heart beat faster while leaving him just as tired as before.
So Mattheus had begun spending SP on minor stamina potions.
They were not expensive, but using magical potions merely to survive his workday felt like cheating.
More importantly, he was fairly certain that becoming dependent on magical drugs could be the beginning of his supervillain origin.
Mattheus Octavian, the supervillainous bartender charging 20 bucks for a soda and offering no snacks.
The peak of evil, ladies and gentlemen.
He really needs some sleep…
Mattheus was leaning against the counter during a rare lull in the afternoon.
His feet hurt, his back hurt, and guess what?
His shoulders hurt.
One of his oldest customers looked at him with growing concern.
Jay was a short, balding accountant who worked a few streets away.
He had first entered the pub during Mattheus’s first week in Gotham and had become a regular since then, usually stopping by for a beer after work, and now that he served food, he would occasionally stop by for lunch.
At that moment, Jay was halfway through his burger while Mattheus contemplated whether falling asleep standing up would count as an impressive skill.
“You all right, Matt?”
Mattheus slowly raised his head.
“Never better.”
Jay looked at the dark circles beneath his eyes.
“You look like you need a drink more than I do.”
Mattheus glanced longingly at the bottles behind him.
“You’re not wrong.” He sighed.
“But that would do more harm than good right now.
Thanks for the concern, though.”
“You should hire someone.”
Mattheus chuckled.
“I came to that conclusion sometime around the third order of eight burgers today.”
Jay nodded toward the kitchen.
“You can’t keep doing everything alone.”
Mattheus looked around the pub.
Only five customers remained from the lunch rush, but the evidence of the earlier invasion surrounded him.
Dirty glasses waited beside the sink, several tables needed cleaning and he had a small mountain of dishes in the kitchen.
Hiring someone would solve most of his problems.
The question was who.
He could not hire just anyone—actually, right now Mattheus couldn’t legally hire literally anyone since he had no ID in this universe, and his business did not legally exist.
On the bright side, no taxes.
Yay.
On the less bright side, hiring employees became somewhat difficult when, as far as the government was concerned, neither you nor your business existed.
The Store sold everything he needed to fix that problem, of course.
A legal identity would cost him 5K SP, while all the licenses, registrations, and other documents necessary to make Crossroads a legitimate business would cost another 20K SP.
25K SP he did not currently have.
He would soon, with how well business had been going (either that, or he would be dead).
There were also a few smaller problems to figure out.
Money, for example.
Every bill handed to Mattheus automatically disappeared into his SP balance, though he could turn that feature off in the app’s settings.
He hadn’t because leaving it on was very convenient.
His money went somewhere no thief could ever reach, and the system automatically provided the exact change whenever necessary (no counting coins, worrying about running out of smaller bills, or discovering at the end of the night that some asshole had slipped him a counterfeit fifty).
If a customer bought eight dollars’ worth of drinks, handed him a twenty, and left two dollars as a tip, the app absorbed the twenty and gave him a ten back.
That problem had an easy solution.
He had bought a cash drawer during the renovation and placed it behind the bar counter to keep the illusion that Crossroads was a perfectly normal establishment.
If he hired someone, he could just disable the automatic conversion while they were working, operate with cash normally during the day, and deposit everything into the app after closing.
Easy.
Other problems were considerably harder to solve.
Like trust.
Employees stealing from pubs and bars was common enough back home.
Gotham—
Mattheus stopped himself.
He did not want to be racist against Gothamites.
…Would that even count as racism?
(Gothamites weren’t a race.
They were poor soul who could not help being born in a city where organized crime was practically an employment sector and, depending on the continuity, the home of an eldritch god)
Still, he did not want to hire someone who would steal from him, start fights with customers, or sell drugs from the bathrooms.
Or try to drug him to take his money and his kidneys.
“I would need someone I can trust,” Mattheus said.
Jay wiped his mouth with a napkin.
“You could ask for references.”
“References can be faked.”
“Background check?”
“In Gotham?”
Jay considered that.
“Fair point.”
He finished his burger and returned to work soon afterwards, leaving Mattheus to think about the problem between customers.
The Store offered several possible solutions: he could buy an employee—well, “buy” made it sound horrible.
He could purchase a robot or artificial life-form programmed to work in the pub.
The Store had hundreds of thousands of options from across the multiverse.
Some were even specifically designed for customer service, such as Shush from Honkai: Star Rail (an adorable little robot bartender who could prepare drinks, clean tables, and chat with customers).
But those kinds of robots were expensive—besides, buying one would also create questions he was not ready to answer.
While this universe had robots far more advanced and dangerous than Shush, they were not that common, and a random pub in Gotham having one?
Yeah, bad idea.
He did not want any big corporation, government agency, or supervillain with interest in technology to show up at his door.
Mattheus was not yet ready for people to realize just how unusual the place truly was, so for now he needed a human employee—one that would not rob or try to murder him.
His standards were not high, but Gotham made them difficult to meet.