Chapter 126 - New Skills

"Oh my god! This is so boring... how much longer do we have to do this?" Jeff complained.

The fur boys in the admin team have been sorting files and archiving those that were older than five years. Samuel had taken over the role of the cleanliness manager and cleaned every single dust-covered file before packing them into carton boxes and sealing them for archiving at a warehouse. Jeremy was in charge of carrying the heavy files and boxes alongside Issac while Jeff had the most tedious job of sieving through every file for doc.u.ments to match them with the database. If there were any doc.u.ments unscanned, he had to run over to scan it in the directory.

"Don't complain," Jeremy said and carried over a stack of four more thick ring files. "We did tell Jasper that we would help him, right? For those without degrees and aren't geniuses, we can only put our bodies to work."

Issac nodded. "Game testing is easier than game creation. I think that none of us would be able to do that even if we were given two years."

Jeff sighed. "This sucks. I really want to help them create games too. I'm very good at story-telling!"

Jeremy snorted. "Don't make me laugh," he rolled his eyes. "If anyone is good at story-telling, that will be Scarlet. She's a writer, remember?"

"Oh ya..." Jeff droned and immediately fell silent, depressed.

The boys worked without much chatter until it was lunchtime. They had been working on the archiving for the last week now. Who knew that a company like this would have so much backlog work to be done?

"Why did they suddenly decide to archive everything?" Samuel asked after too much silence passed.

Issac sighed. "Scarlet said that they've been wanting to do this for long but the admin department was always short-staffed. It's something about going paperless? They want to keep everything a digital record for file-sharing or something."

The germaphobe hummed. "I guess we're stuck doing this for now. Pass me more wet tissues, please. The last pack just ran out."

Jeff tossed the wet tissues over and Samuel immediately started wiping the shelves. Jeremy didn't pay too much attention to the boys. He was on a different mission. Jasper told him that the archiving was a good opportunity for them to learn more about the company and how the business worked. According to him, even Scarlet and Alex worked here for a while before they were posted to different departments when they first started. Jeremy might not have a good head start in life but he hoped that while he worked here earnestly enough, he could secure himself a position at the company so that his parents wouldn't have to worry too much about him.

While the four boys slogged away in the admin department, another boy was working up a different kind of sweat.

"Why can't I find the missing three hundred thousand dollars?"

Jasper felt like throwing up again. He never knew that a job in the finance department would be so stressful. He was alright with learning how to use the software and simply checking the postings to the invoices for starting work. However, the reporting supervisor liked his efficiency and decided to teach him more.

Right now, Jasper was looking through drafted report generation. He had to tally the system's balance to the actual amount of invoices received. However, as the finance department was severely short-handed with many of the workers working overtime on a daily basis, Jasper wasn't able to ask for help and could only suffer in silence trying to understand what went wrong.

Initially, Jasper thought that he could learn how a business moved their money and worked if he was in the finance department. While he got his wish and was allowed to view confidential records such as how much money was going to which department and the vendors that the company had, Jasper didn't think it was a worthy trade. With the pressure of his game creations and the band practice, Jasper didn't think he needed additional stress in the form of numbers. He was almost certain that by the time school started again, he would be traumatised by them.

"Have a coffee," someone pushed a cup of coffee over to the stressing out boy and Jasper thanked the person without looking.

Only after the first sip of coffee, the brain cells revived enough to prompt to Jasper that something was odd. He finally turned to look at the person who handed him his cup of coffee and nearly fell from his chair.

"M-Mr Wilde?!"

Wilmer grinned. "What's up? I heard that you looked like death was coming for you."

Jasper gaped but couldn't answer immediately. Wilmer leaned over to study the excel report and the invoice piled in front of his future son-in-law then grinned. "I see that you've done quite a good job at tracking the paper trail. I believe you can find the missing numbers you seek from the e-invoices. There should be a record in the emails sent straight to the finance department's general billing mailbox."

The boy turned back to his screen dumbfounded. With one glance, the CEO was able to tell this much. Wilmer patted the kid on the shoulder and encouraged him before leaving and Jasper watched his back as the man left. What should he do to become someone as reliable as Wilmer? Could he ever become good enough?

Jasper thought about it. Initially, he thought that he shared a lot of similarities with Wilmer who was born into an ordinary family like him who married into the rich. If Alex was like Orita, Jasper felt that he should become at least someone like Wilmer to be worthy of Alex's company. He had been trying his best to support her for a long time but ever since meeting Scarlet, Alex had started to choose her own path to walk.

Jasper wasn't dumb. He knew of Alex's affection for him in a non-platonic way. In fact, he returned similar feelings for the girl and intended to become a man worthy of her hand in marriage somewhere fifteen years into the future. The idea of wanting to start a company of his own to rival the Wilde Empire was something that Jasper thought would make him worthy. However, after seeing how easy Wilmer handled something like that, he had to think twice.

"Yo! Why so gloomy? Are the numbers still playing tricks on you?" a cheerful voice scared Jasper out of his thoughts.

"For someone interning in the HR department, you seem to be very idle."

Rowan laughed. "Not really. I'm just good at time management. Speaking of which, it's lunch now. Are you joining? The admin boys are cleaning up and Benedict is already waiting for us at the canteen. He saved seats for everyone."

Jasper looked back at his work and sighed. "I'll join," he told the sociable boy and tidied his desk before leaving.

At the lift, Jasper and Rowan met with the girls and Elfie who were discussing the game creation. Hearing that they had made progress, Jasper felt slightly bad. It was initially his idea to start a game creation company but in the end, he was leaving the work to others. That was simply a new reason for the gardener's son to doubt himself.

Everyone had things to share over lunch and even Benedict claimed that he acquired a new set of skills that might prove useful when it came to studying.

"You? Study?" Rowan asked then laughed without a care in the world, riling the delinquent up badly.

"Yes, you got a problem with that, girly face?"

As they bickered, Alex wondered how working in the logistics department could give inspiration for better studying techniques. Still, she congratulated him. A new skill learnt will never be in vain or wasted even if it wasn't immediately useful. Her mother always told her that while she was born into a blessed household, all of that could be taken away from her easily at any time because the future was always unpredictable. However, the one thing that nobody can take away from Alex is the skills and knowledge that she gained for herself.

Right now, the Wilde princess looked at her sister and her crush. They were working hard to build up their own fortress and skill repertoires. It was encouraging to know that while Alex struggled with perfecting her one craft with art, her sister and Jasper were also working hard at things that they've chosen. However, like Jasper, she was still feeling insecure about what she could do.

"Aren't you going to show him?" Scarlet whispered when she noticed that her sister wasn't bringing up the topic of the game character drafts that she doodled while the design and marketing departments were in a meeting with the product team. Scarlet, Elfie and Alex talked over the chatroom to come up with a few possible versions of the game for Jasper to select from or point them out in the direction he wanted.

Alex shook her head. "I will show him only when I improve on them," she told her sister. "It's still too ugly."

Scarlet didn't comment on it and nodded, not bringing the subject up again. She understood what Alex was going through because it was exactly the same feeling she had when she had to present her new novel's draft to Debbie. Ever since Sixten is a Gang was accepted, Scarlet felt as if she wouldn't be able to create anything good again that was as original as that so the young writer was still working on it. It's the same with the lyrics that Lin Lin has been demanding from her. Scarlet simply didn't feel confident enough in her ideas to show them to anyone, she would rather spend time perfecting it before she allowed anyone to view it.

Elfie yawned. Unlike the other children, his day had been uneventful apart from stupid office ladies who didn't know how to plug in a computer and hit the power on button. He didn't know why people would put up with such ridiculous troubles for the sake of earning money. After hacking the entire company's network and rewriting a few scripts to fix the bugs and improve on the security, there really wasn't anything worth doing now. The search about Anastasia's activities was also not very fruitful and Elfie eyed a certain doll-like girl. Of all the people he met so far, Scarlet was the only one who continued to impress him by challenging her fears and limits, often succeeding.

There were many kinds of geniuses but none quite like Scarlet. If Elfie had to find a way to describe Scarlet's capabilities, it would be a monster with no boundaries. As long as Scarlet sets her mind to something, the hacker didn't dare to believe the petite doll wouldn't succeed.