Mira An was seventeen years old when she decided that she would work for the Ministry of Rift Security one day. She stated it to herself when she stared between the walls of Freeman Alley, looking at the threads of blue, violet, and silver that went into a a liquid mirror and reflected traces of mana. At that sight, she felt an arrogant pleasure at the way a sheer line of distortion cut through the air. It did not belong in midst of the graffitied walls, among the MRS personnel that surrounded it, and the equipment that dimmed under the light --- but there it was. The threads of light that shined on its own, and the mechanical sounds of the equipment that obsessed over it were like a compulsion she had to satisfy.
It was not a sudden decision, but only the opportunities that sealed words of doubts. In unspoken understanding, as if bond by vow, she had given herself to the dungeons from the first conscious days of her adulthood.
She held a bored indifference toward the dullness of the world around her, and found it to be regrettable to be born without the desire to explore the natural joys of the world. For a while, she thought herself to be stuck in an empty shell. Until, she happened to catch that glimpse of another world and she knew it contained anomalies that could never be explained by humanity. She had to learn she thought, and grow up to that world.
She was eighteen years old when she told her younger brother to take care of their parents while she inspected dungeons. She was nineteen when it occurred to her she was a low-ranked awakener and that D-ranks don't inspect higher-ranked dungeons without bodily injury. To hell with that, she thought --- and never pondered about it again.
She went to work at the Ministry of Rift Security at the age of twenty. She started out as an Rift Safety Office intern at a small MRS base in Clifton. She had to work part-time for the first few years, while attending university.
Marcus Voss began his career in MRS at the same time; he was twenty-eight. He started out as the Head Inspector of the New York Sector.
Later on, Mira took positions in MRS teams who were responsible for High Risk Re-Evaluations (dangerous MRS missions that reassess unstable dungeons showing abnormal mana activity with the possibility of threat levels spiking unpredictably mid-operation) because there was no one else that wanted to take them. There were a few rare folks around her who survived, and the few that remained began retiring one by one, year after year. As the years followed, higher-ranked awakeners who held more prowess than her, seemed afraid to use it to conduct High Risk Re-Evaluations, so she did the work with or without a team. For every mission she did, she was equipped with enough experience and fame to be the Senior Rift Safety Officer.
Her parents seemed astonished and proud of her, but they said nothing and there was a sadness in their eyes whenever they looked at her. She was twenty-five years old when she left the house. "You are always welcome to come back," were the words they said before she closed the door behind her, not realizing it would never open the same way again. They had looked at her with an odd glance: it had the qualities of warmth and of regret, together.
Marcus Voss was thirty-three when he became the Ministry of Rift Security Supervisor. Mira An had expected the higher-ups to elect him, but she never understood why they did it so eagerly. They talked about his gift of "making rift security important," his "charming reputation," and his "good aura." He did, however, seem unusually skillful at obtaining favors from guilds.
Mira knew nothing about his "good aura" or what such a thing implied. But it seemed to be necessary, so she dismissed it with the thought that there were many kinds of work that were undesirable, yet necessary, like making sure the toilet worked: somebody had to do it, and Voss seemed to like it.
At twenty-five, sitting at her desk, watching the shadows of her colleagues that walked past, she thought she had entered her kind of world. In the years since, she had learned she hadn't. The dangers she found herself to face was not worth the beating; it was not the dungeons that brought her joy, it was the joy of knowing there was something to come back to.
Mira was thirty years old, when she decided she would retire. She had dedicated ten years of her life to MRS.
It was time to stop. She had done her part.