The Lightning Mage

24 | The Hiatus, Part I

☮❣☮❣☮

It was a Friday night and the bar was bustling and lively. Large groups of people gathered around the leather couches, chatting and sipping on drinks, while a jazz band filled the air with their rhythmic yet laidback melody. At the bar table, Raph was tapping his fingers and humming along to the live band. As he lifted his glass of beer to take a sip, something—no, someone—crashed onto him from the back. He choked on his drink and almost toppled the cup all over the table.

Without turning around, he already knew who it was.

"Millie!" he groaned.

Indeed, the olive-skinned woman was clinging onto his neck like a koala bear. Her long, curly hair tickled Raph's face as she squealed, "Raph! I missed you!"

Raph's ears turned bright red. He hurriedly struggled out of Millie's grasp. "Millie, I told you not to creep up on me like this," he mumbled. "I have a weak heart..."

"But I haven't seen you in forever!" She giggled before settling down on the seat next to Raph.

That was quite an inaccurate statement; they had met just last week for a drink as well. But compared to seeing each other every single day since elementary school, a week apart did feel like forever.

Millie raised her hand to order a margarita. It had taken Raph a full half-hour to get the bartender's attention, but for Millie, a simple flash of her teeth was enough to have her order taken within seconds—or millie-seconds, he might say.

She turned to Raph and gave him an excited grin. "So, what have you been up to?"

"Nothing much. Crazy busy as usual."

Ever since he joined Blue Cross of Clerics, his work-life balance, or whatever that was left of it, was completely decimated. After all, Blue Cross was a top guild with most of the world's best healers, and thus they get a lot of joint commission requests from other guilds and teams with less experienced healers (or sometimes even no healers at all). The result? An inundation of requests for the healers, with each quest drastically different from the other. Sure, Raph was learning a lot from his six months stint in the guild, but it was probably at the cost of his sanity.

He let out a slow sigh. Maybe he should have taken up his friend Shubham's offer to get back to the clinic instead. However, as he glanced at the bubbly Latina brimming with anticipation, he decided against it yet again.

"What about you? How was your latest commission?"

"Oh, it was so fun!" Millie went straight into an elaborate storytelling mode, spending almost one hour describing every single detail of her quest. She and Irene had been doing freelance quest work together, teaming up with random teams or solo questers who needed additional manpower in their commissions. It was not an easy feat, since their abilities were a little niche, but they were still able to make it work and even made a name for themselves after six months.

"I'm glad you got to do a fun one this time," Raph commented, recalling the first few weeks of Millie's unending complaints and laments. ("We were just asked to put out a fire! How lame is that?")

"I know! It took some time, but we can finally get some fun commissions now. Although..." Millie's mood took a sharp drop. "I don't know... I still wish Lyn would come back soon. I want to be in a permanent team again. After working with so many different fighters, I... I realized that I'm not a fan of most fighters out there. They can be... very rude."

Raph nodded. He had been through similar experiences by now; working with teams of strangers, most of whom had ego problems, was not fun at all. "Yeah, some of them can be pretty full of themselves, even more so than Lyn."