Getting Hired
People always said a mid-sized company didn’t even bother with interviews, and even if they did, who the hell ever failed one?
“Uuuugh… everything’s spinning…”
To every last one of those people, I had a single reply I wanted to deliver.
“Yeah…. Right here, you bastards!!!”
I figured I at least had to finish high school, so after graduation I sat through more interviews than I could count. Would anyone believe me if I said I even flunked the interview for a convenience-store job? That was me. The people who knew me called me the one-hit wonder of interview failures. “How do you even manage to fail that many?” was a question I got more times than I could remember.
Not that I failed every single one. Every now and then I actually got an acceptance call. The next day the company would go bankrupt, or the boss would skip town in the middle of the night, so I never actually got to work anywhere. Still.
“Is this really how my life’s supposed to goooooo?!”
Was burning my entire existence on interviews the right way to live? Having that thought this late in the game was pretty funny, though. If I gave up… what exactly was I supposed to become?
“Kyahahaha! Today marks my one-hundredth interview rejection! Take that, world!!!”
How could one person’s life get this tangled? I grabbed every certification that looked even remotely useful and learned every skill the academies claimed would help. I even sent résumés to the companies everyone else avoided. Nobody hired me.
“I’d rather just get struck by lightning and die already so I can sleep forever!”
My heart was that gloomy and dark, yet the sky overhead was perfectly clea—
“KRAAAAAAA-CLEAR@#$!!!!”
That was the exact moment I actually got hit by lightning. Was this that thing they talk about? A bolt from the blue? Sure, I’d yelled that I wanted to get struck and die so I could sleep, but did it have to take me literally?
Fuck… lightning really is tingly and completely disgusting…
Twenty-five years of life and my first lightning strike. I don’t know who else has been hit, but for anyone who wants to get struck or is about to, let me tell you: lightning is tingly, and it feels absolutely filthy.
My vision slowly flooded with black, and that was where my consciousness cut out. A life paved with defeat and dropout… I fell asleep right there.
“Please wake up.”
Mmm… who the hell was waking me when I was finally getting some decent sleep?
“Five more minutes…”
“Five minutes is long enough for ditch water to turn foul. Get up this instant!”
The sharp scolding jolted me awake and my eyes snapped open.
“Wh-what?! Is this… heaven?”
I’d always written off the idea of an afterlife as pure nonsense, but it actually existed? Was this place heaven?
For heaven, it feels weirdly familiar…
It didn’t match the image of paradise I’d always pictured. This place had a smell that was both familiar and… not exactly nostalgic.
“You’re finally awake.”
I turned toward the voice. A black-haired woman in a suit and glasses stood there, watching me with an odd expression.
A reaper? Pointed ears… some kind of elf reaper?
My best guess was that this was the afterlife, so she had to be a reaper of some sort.
“Um, are you a reaper by any chance? …Huh?”
The sense of wrongness I’d been feeling finally crashed over me like a tidal wave.
“My voice… sounds weird?”
It wasn’t my voice. It rang out clear and pure, like someone had jammed a music box into my throat. More importantly, it wasn’t a man’s voice at all. The sound coming out of me was unmistakably female.
“You still seem disoriented. Take a look at your entire body and you’ll understand.”
The woman I assumed was a reaper flicked her fingers. Space warped, and a mirror popped out from the distortion.
Reapers use magic or something?
I had no idea whether reapers could cast spells, but she clearly wasn’t human, so why not? Anyway, she said looking at my whole body would explain things, so I decided to play along. I held the mirror up and checked my reflection.
“Whoa… this look matches the voice perfectly—clear, beautiful… that’s me!!!”
The person in the mirror had short bright-blonde hair, green eyes, and pointed ears. A woman.
Damn, the midsection is outstanding.
I still had no clue what was going on, but one fact stood out as critically important: this body’s midsection was outstanding. That was a major development, no question about it… right?
Since this is the afterlife, did I turn into the form of my subconscious desires?
With that thought, I asked the reaper,
“Excuse me. When do I get to go to the underworld for my trial?”
An old movie I’d once seen popped into my head—something about the dead spending forty-nine days on trial in the underworld—so I asked.
“The underworld? What on earth are you talking about? This is not the afterlife you imagine.”
“Huh?”
What? This wasn’t the afterlife? Then why did I look like this?
“Not the afterlife? Then how do you explain this body?”
“Your name was on the Alf candidate list drawn up by the Fairy King. When we went to retrieve you, your body had already been burned to a crisp by lightning.”
I definitely got hit by lightning, but burned too?
“…How badly was I burned?”
“Wouldn’t a normal person start by asking who the Fairy King is and what an Alf candidate list even means?”
“I don’t particularly care about the Fairy King or the Alf candidate list, but I do want to know how badly my body burned, which is why I asked.”
“…What kind of strange human ends up on the candidate list?”
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
The woman I’d thought was a reaper cleared her throat and continued.
“Since you’re curious how thoroughly you burned, I’ll answer. You were completely incinerated—reduced to crumbling charcoal.”
“Hmm… so basically like dropping a piece of meat under the charcoal grill and finding it burned to a crisp later.”
“The analogy is strange, but essentially correct.”
So my body had gone out in a blaze of glory. Then what was this body?
“Did you transplant my brain or something? Are fairy tech levels that high-tech?”
“Brain transplants are possible, but that is not what happened to you.”
So it was possible. Ohhh, technology!
“Then what?”
“We reconstructed your body.”
“Reconstructed?”
The word instantly conjured an absurd image of them breaking me down to atoms and molecules and rebuilding me into a new form.
“You didn’t actually break me down to the atomic or molecular level, did you?”
“A living body cannot be broken down that far. But it is similar. In any case, through that reconstruction you have gone from human to Alf.”
“And what’s an Alf?”
“That is the question you should have asked earlier, but I’ll answer. Alf is the collective term for all fairy-type races—Elves, Dwarves, Fairies, and the rest. Judging by the wings, you are a Fairy.”
So an Alf with butterfly wings was a Fairy. Now that I knew what an Alf was, I tossed her another question.
“So what’s your name?”
It was a name question. Communication without names is a real pain, after all.
“I’ll answer that belated and rather odd question. My name is Idun. I am in charge of new recruits at the Support Fairy Company, and my rank is Section Chief.”
“Support Fairy Company? That name sounds an awful lot like a corporation. The rank too.”
“It doesn’t just sound like one. It is a company.”
It really was a company. No wonder the place smelled familiar yet not the least bit nostalgic. It belonged to the exact category of “company” that had twisted my entire life out of shape.
“You will be joining the Support Fairy Company as a new employee. Because you were on the candidate list, you skip the Intern stage and start as a Regular Employee.”
“So… I’m going to work at a company?”
“Yes. You… Oberia, are from this moment forward a new hire of our company.”
Idun had just called me Oberia, but that wasn’t the important part right now.
“I’m really going to work at a company?”
“That is correct. Which is why I am standing in front of you, Oberia.”
“Woo-ya-hot!!!”
There’s a saying that no tree stays standing after a hundred chops. Of course, even on the hundredth try that tree never fell for me. But on the hundred-and-first—though I no longer looked like my original self—I had finally gotten hired by a company. Granted, I hadn’t actually sat through an interview. No… turning into this Fairy body was probably the interview process itself. Probably…?
After getting struck by lightning I woke up in a place I didn’t understand, learned I was now a Fairy—one type of Alf—and somehow, despite the suspicious name, I had managed to join a company.
In that case, I should ask the important question.
There was something I’d always wanted to say to a superior once I finally got a job.
“Um… about the salary, is it by any chance… huh?!”
The very instant I tried to ask the top item on my wish list—how much does this company pay?—Idun suddenly stripped off every piece of clothing she was wearing right in front of me. But the reason I was so startled wasn’t because she had suddenly thrown her clothes off.
I thought she didn’t have any, but she does have breasts.
That was the real shock.
“Everything I am about to do to you, Oberia, is part of new-employee training, so please do not misunderstand.”
“What do you me—mmph?!”
I was about to ask what she meant when Idun launched a guerrilla kiss that would have put the Normandy landings to shame…
More importantly, when the hell did my clothes come off?