Quest Master was still there when I woke up.
That was inconvenient.
I’d slept for a little over three hours, which should have made the previous night easier to dismiss. Instead, the black square with the gold crown looked exactly the same.
So did the screenshot where it didn’t exist.
At 6:28 in the morning, that counted as enough investigation.
I showered, found the least wrinkled shirt I owned and went to work.
Aurelia was already busy when I reached the NEXT floor. People liked to talk about Future Leaders as if it were a six-month exercise in developing potential. At eight in the morning, it mostly looked like twenty-four people trying to prove they’d arrived before everyone else.
I got coffee and opened my laptop.
The ranking was still fourteen.
Quest Master was still impossible.
Neither had improved overnight.
I ignored the app for eleven minutes before opening it again.
The FIRST PLAYER quest was still waiting.
So was Assess.
Registering someone was out.
Looking at them was harder to argue against.
That distinction probably said more about me than I wanted it to.
I tapped the Skill.
ASSESS Lv.1
Range: 10m Targets detected: 3
Three names appeared.
Daniel Park sat a few desks away, eating yogurt while reading email.
As test subjects went, he seemed safe enough.
I selected him.
DANIEL PARK
RELEVANT ATTRIBUTES
INT 10WIL 9PER 10CHA 9PRE 9
That was it.
No biography. No secret trauma. Just numbers.
I looked over my monitor.
Daniel looked exactly like Daniel, which proved nothing.
Maybe the app was guessing from information it had scraped somewhere. Maybe the numbers were simply plausible enough to make me want them to mean something.
I closed his profile.
Then another name caught my attention.
Camila Reyes
I saw her a few seconds later, coming around the corner with coffee in one hand while talking to someone from Strategy.
She hadn’t noticed me.
That made what I did next easier.
I selected her.
CAMILA REYES
RELEVANT ATTRIBUTES
INT 12WIL 12PER 12CHA 15PRE 14
Fifteen Charisma.
Fourteen Presence.
I looked across the room.
So I hadn’t imagined it.
People looked when Camila spoke. They remembered her ideas. More importantly, they usually remembered that they were her ideas.
Twelve Intelligence.
Smart, just not in the same way I was.
And Intelligence wasn’t even her best advantage.
The screen changed.
AVAILABLE ROLES
EXECUTIVE
STRATEGIST
COORDINATOR
SECRETARY
I stared at the last one.
Of course.
Yesterday she’d joked about making me her secretary. Seeing the same word beneath her name produced a small, mean satisfaction.
I wasn’t particularly proud of it.
I also didn’t dislike it enough to close the app.
I tapped EXECUTIVE.
EXECUTIVE
Leadership Role focused on directing people and resources in ways that expand the Quest Master’s influence.
Role effects remain inactive until Player Registration.
I read that again.
Quest Master’s influence.
That was new.
I opened STRATEGIST next.
STRATEGIST
Planning Role focused on developing long-term objectives and solutions aligned with the Quest Master’s interests.
So it wasn’t simply about making Camila better at strategy.
COORDINATOR followed the same pattern, organizing people, information and resources around Master objectives.
Then I opened the last one.
SECRETARY
Direct Support Role focused on anticipating the Quest Master’s needs, organizing his affairs, removing minor obstacles and increasing his personal and professional efficiency.
Role effects remain inactive until Player Registration.
For a few seconds, the joke disappeared.
These weren’t jobs.
Not really.
They were positions relative to me.
A button waited beneath the description.
ASSIGN ROLE
I didn’t press it.
Until now, everything I’d done had been observation. Daniel didn’t know I’d looked at him. Camila didn’t know her attributes were sitting on my screen.
Assigning something felt different.
I read the description again.
Role effects remain inactive until Player Registration.
That answered one question.
Not the others.
Would she get a notification? Would my name appear somewhere? Would another black-and-gold icon suddenly show up on her phone?
For all I knew, pressing the button could announce EVAN COLE HAS ASSIGNED YOU THE ROLE OF SECRETARY across her screen.
That would make the rest of the day difficult.
I tapped the help icon.
Does assigning a Role notify the target?
Hidden Roles are invisible to unregistered targets.
Better.
I tried another.
Can the target identify the Quest Master?
Quest Master identity remains concealed unless revealed through an unlocked function.
I read that twice.
So she wouldn’t know.
Nothing activated until registration, and nothing appeared on her side.
As far as the System was concerned, this was configuration.
My phone buzzed.
Camila: morning secretary
A second message followed.
A GIF of a woman dropping an unreasonable stack of folders onto somebody else’s desk.
I looked across the floor.
Camila was watching me over the rim of her coffee.
She raised her eyebrows.
Then smiled.
I looked back at the word beneath her name.
SECRETARY
There were other options, probably more sensible ones.
At that moment, I didn’t particularly care.
Yesterday she’d taken my recommendation, accepted the praise for it, explained that letting her do it was basically my own problem, fixed my collar, rearranged my hair and then laughed about turning me into her secretary.
Now an impossible app was asking which position she should occupy relative to me.
I probably should have thought longer about that.
Instead, I thought about her smile.
Fuck it.
What was actually going to happen?
Nothing.
Not yet.
And if it worked—
I stopped there.
That thought was considerably more interesting than it should have been.
My thumb settled over the button.
I selected SECRETARY.
The screen dimmed.
ROLE ASSIGNED
Target: Camila ReyesHidden Role: SECRETARY
STATUS
Inactive
Player Registration required.
I looked across the room.
Camila had already turned back to her monitor.
No notification. No sudden reaction. No visible difference at all.
I watched her for another few seconds.
Nothing.
Somehow that was both reassuring and a little disappointing.
Then a new panel appeared.
TARGET CONFIGURED
CAMILA REYES
Hidden Role: SECRETARY Role Status: Inactive
Awaiting Registration
Below it:
REGISTER PLAYER
That button felt different.
Assigning a Role had changed something only I could see.
Registration sounded like something Camila might actually notice.
I wasn’t pressing that one blind.
Not yet.
I closed Quest Master.
The button could wait.