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The inside of the Bounty Office is crammed with people and bereft of AC. A line of customers-in-waiting wraps itself around the maze of sticky, reddish pleather seats that make up the waiting room. Some are filling dozens of forms with two-inch pencils. Others are motionless, head-in-hands, or fighting for a position directly under one of the two working fans. The yellow paint is peeling off of the walls in places. Some parts have been strategically covered up with informative posters on housing assistance and fraudulent bounty-claiming, as well as ads for the larger local guilds.
The only way to claim a bounty is to be a registered bounty hunter first. You hope the process won’t be too involved; your mind is swimming in unpleasant smells and sensations right now, and you don’t feel capable of filling out application forms. You had more than your fill of those while working retail. You scan the rich variety of sweaty faces around you. Most seem to be newbie bounty hunters, around your age or younger, probably in the same predicament as you. There’s a wyverian woman who’s struggling to fit into the ostensibly human-sized seat; her horns extend outward in a wide arc, and one of them is nearly poking into a rattling ceiling fan’s cage. There’s a rather aristocratic-looking celestial man with sparrow-colored wings crumpled between his sweaty back and the wall, who looks positively embarrassed to be there. You wonder just how wrong your life has to go for you to belong to one of the “regal races” and still end up in this situation. Well, maybe it was their own fault, you think, not without taking some pleasure in their suffering.
