Original Length: 1011 words.

Post Revision Length: 1028 words.

“LET ME GO! I’M NOT GOING THROUGH THE QUEUE! IT’S MY RIGHT TO REQUEST BEING SENT TO Prison! LET ME GO, I SAID!”

I never said I was a rational person.

I do like to read a lot, and I might give off the impression that I’m some sort of a refined intellectual—even though my mother once said no one had ever thought that nor referred to me as one, and I was the only person labeling myself as a ‘refined intellectual.’

Well, back to the present problem, I’m trying to shout, flail my arms around, and run away from my doomed fate. I could have been facing a Dragon, and I would have simply died in a few seconds, charred, had I not picked up the damn heavy book that was still with me.

Many guards are looking at me with an amused look while Lucillus and Antoninus are literally dragging me, with my legs gone limp, toward the room where I’m supposed to have the interview.

“Can’t we throw him away for a while?” Antoninus grumbles.

“Sure, and you tell Captain Drusillus we are taking up space in a cell because an idiot doesn’t want to speak to a clerk. I so want to spend my next two weeks on the graveyard shift on the walls.”

A woman Elf, the first I see up close, comes out from the room, storming and shouting at the two guards.

“What’s all this ruckus?! I was taking notes on my studies, and I almost broke my pen because of this commotion!”

Antoninus and Lucillus hoist me up, already wincing since they expect me to scream again. But now, all the talk has gone out of me.

The woman I have in front of me is not just a younger Elf than the two guards, but she is most definitely my future wife. She has shoulder-length hair, a bit tomboyish, eyes so green and deep I think I just ended up in the Amazon Forest.

“Haha!” I kickstart my legs once again and pat the astonished Antoninus and Lucillus on the shoulders, freeing myself from their grasp.

“We were jesting, miss, my deepest apologies. Antoninus and Lucillus were just a bit down, and I was trying to cheer them up. It wasn’t my intention to disrupt your important work,” I give her the most shameless smile in my life.

The two tall guards by my sides have nothing to say because what just came out of my mouth was so absurd that they are still catching up with reality. The woman eyes me with a bit of suspicion, but then she wrinkles her beautiful nose and gestures toward the door.

“You are here for a mage-conducted interview, right?”

“I most certainly am,” I say with the broadest smile a person can muster.

I put the spell-book that I had been holding to my chest under my armpit again, and I follow her into the room, winking toward the two wide-eyed guards and closing the door right behind me.

…

“I am Officer Lucinda,” my future wife says, “and I will conduct this interview under a truth stone with you.”

She whips out what looked like the medieval version of a legal pad.

“First and last name, please.”

“Joey Luciani, single, not married,” I state candidly.

The truth stone, a simple gem on the center of the table, shines a bright green.

“Didn’t ask that last part,” she replies while not taking her eyes off the pad and only glancing once at the stone.

Once she has my identity down, she continues.

“Mr. Luciani, what’s your order of business here?”

“I… found myself without a penny under unknown circumstances, and I would like to find a job as a baker in the city to pay for accommodation and food. Maybe even buy a book or two if they are not too expensive.”

The stone flashes green once again, and she jots down what I just said with mechanical precision. She doesn’t just have the accuracy of a machine, though, but also the coldness.

“Mr. Luciani—”

“Please, call me Joey,” I smile.

“Mr. Luciani, so is [Baker] your main class?”

“I have no classes.”

The stone flashes green, but she doesn’t write on the pad this time.

“No classes?”

“Yep,” I nod while pointing toward the truth stone flashing green.

“How old are you?” she asks me with a frown.

“Well, officer Lucinda, it kind of depends on how old you are and if you date younger men,” I return the question with a smile.

See, I have every problem in the world with approaching a girl without a pretext. I’m not good at cold approaches. But once you say even just ‘hello,’ well, we start dancing, baby.

“It is in your interest to know that I can declare you not just unfit to receive a city approval to work here, but I could also flag you as a dangerous individual.”

The truth stone flashes green.

Oh, it goes both ways.

That’s interesting.

“I would rather go to prison than have to go through all the forms for the city,” I say with a bright smile, “but I’m happy I got the most beautiful Officer in the city with me, so beautiful I could even go through a library card registration process if you were my library clerk.”

Green, green and green.

Not a lying bone in this body, Officer Lucinda.

She narrows her eyes, clearly not happy that a human weirdo was trying to hit on her. But as I always told my mom, dating is like game theory.

And that was pretty much it. I have no idea how game theory works, but neither does my mom.

Officer Lucinda bends to fish something from her loose robe and slowly rests a stick – oh, that’s a magic wand! – on the table.

“I am entitled to use force in case the subject has any intention of harassing me in any way.”

Green.

Oh boy.

“I wouldn’t mind you using force on me, Officer Lucinda,” I flash a wink at her.

And the other thing that flashes is…

Green, baby.