It sounds so glamorous when you drop it into a conversation. What do you do? Oh, I’m a magician. People’s faces light up when you tell them, they talk about how smart you must be, how they wanted to get a degree in magic but had to settle for poli-sci or marketing, how you must have such a successful career. When you add that you’re a magician at the National Prometheus Magical Refinery, well, that’s even better. My parents are certainly proud. Every time I take them out to dinner, my dad has to mention my job to the waiter, to the table sitting next to us, to people passing on the street. It’s embarrassing, but he’s always beaming when he tells them that his son the magician works for the most important facility in the country.
Right now I don’t feel so important. Right now I feel like I’ve got an ice pick in my neck and pins and needles in my legs. I’ve been lying on the concrete floor in the service tunnels for close to an hour and a half now, trying to reroute power to a new segment of line that I put in earlier tonight, but the only possible way to get where I needed to be was to unbolt the grate and shimmy myself under the wiring panel. My shoulders are aching from holding my flashlight in the crook of my neck, my face is grimy with dust and sweat, and I’ve burned myself twice on the soldering iron because there’s hardly any room to move. That’s my luck for being assigned to Animus, the oldest block and the top westward horn of the horseshoe that makes up the facility’s layout. It’s the original building, back when the PNMR was a spell factory some seventy or eighty years ago. When it was converted to a refinery, setting up the proper infrastructure took a fair bit of creativity, creativity that I’m currently paying the price for.
“Glamorous,” I mutter to the tangle of wires above my face. “This sure is the life.”
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