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She got out her pen and notepad and whispered to me, "I outline the gist of the meeting—who's sitting where, what they look like, then each major point of action and what everybody's agreed upon. Before the meeting ends, I hand my notes over to the meeting leaders, then they check for any discrepancies before adjourning the meeting. The other side has their own verifier. If there's a discrepancy on either side, they hash things out before they leave."

It sounded complicated, and more than a little paranoid. I'd have to ask someone how often people tried to use illusion in a business deal. It must happen often enough, considering that I'd already caught someone trying to fudge a contract and I hadn't even been on the job a whole day.Advertisement

Some of the MSI people were already at the table, and then the doors opened to admit a new group of people, all wearing dark business suits. "This is a corporate client," Kim whispered. "We're doing some custom spell work for them."

I recognized a few of the MSI people from lunch. One of them flashed me a quick smile, and I felt a lot less out of place. I noticed that none of them acknowledged Kim.

The meeting began, and it was pretty much like every other business meeting I'd ever sat through. There was the usual amount of hot air being blown around, only sometimes literally in this case. It seemed that they felt the need to show off by adjusting the room's temperature to their personal preferences, summoning food and beverages, and generally doing a lot of arm waving. Kim's pen moved constantly.

I didn't have to compare notes with a magical person to tell who was trying to pull something. Their body language was a good enough clue. It was just like being able to tell when someone was lying to you and thought they were getting away with it—shifty eyes, ill-concealed smirks, body twitches. Both sides seemed to be playing the game, but the visitors were more flamboyant about it. I didn't get the impression that they really were trying to cheat, just trying to test the waters. The MSI guys were doing just enough for gamesmanship. It was almost like watching a congressional debate on C-SPAN, only a lot more interesting.

Finally, all the blather came to a stop and both sides called their verifiers over. Kim handed her notebook to the head of the MSI faction, and I watched his reactions carefully. "The guy in the red tie was trying to pull something," I said, more musing out loud to myself than actually saying anything, but the MSI executive, someone who'd been introduced to me as "Ryker, Corporate Accounts," looked up sharply.

"That is what it looks like," he said. "But how did you know if you didn't see the illusion that masked it?"

I shrugged. "He looked shifty. And he was saying things I was pretty sure you wouldn't agree to."

Ryker nodded and continued reading Kim's notes, cross-referencing with his own notes from time to time. At last both sides reconvened and hashed out the details.

They checked notes one last time to make sure everyone was still being honest, and then the deal was sealed. By the time we got out of the conference room, the workday was almost over. I dreaded going back to the verification pool, even for just a few minutes. As long as I was out of the office, the job didn't seem so bad, but there was something soul-sucking about the verification room.

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It didn't help matters that I'd managed to seriously piss off Kim, who seemed to think I'd deliberately stolen her thunder in the meeting. Great, now I was seen as a threat by the ambitious person whothought I was out to steal her promotion, while the lazy people saw me as a threat to their cushy jobs. I'd get to be universally hated in the office, and I'd only just started. Maybe I should have learned to keep my mouth shut, at least for a while. My old job had taught me plenty about how unwelcome a simple, common-sense observation could be. Too many people liked things complicated and difficult. I guess it made them feel more important.

"That doesn't seem like a very efficient way to handle things," I commented to Kim as we walked. Maybe if I gave her an idea for an improvement she could suggest to the boss, she'd see that I wasn't so bad. Or was that naive of me? Back home, I'd found that if I could figure out what someone else wanted and find a way of helping them get it, they'd be easier to deal with. So far, that hadn't been very effective in the New York business world.

"What do you mean?" she snapped, proving the point I'd just made to myself.

"Well, if you wait until the end of the meeting to make sure nobody pulled a fast one, you almost have to start all over again because you don't know how much was affected by the trick." pqdm.com