Meeting Expectations

James sat down at his desk for the first time in what felt like a long, long time. He had been busy, the whole group had. Gone were the days of a simple banker making his money, collecting interest, organizing trades, and running markets. No, his life was a little different now but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sam was a pretty cool guy, as good as any to work for, albeit, a little unorthodox at times. So here he was, finally getting back to his job and he started daydreaming thinking about, of all things, people. People were all well and good, but not as reliable as numbers. The numbers didn’t lie. Sure they could be tampered with and fib, but that wasn’t their fault, it was in fact the fault of the one manipulating them. So, with a little effort James managed to refocus on the important things in life, the numbers before him.

It wasn’t his job to handle the inventory of the ship or deal with purchases, but to make sure they had the money they needed when they needed it. “Number crunching ” if you will, though with his computer there was less “crunching” than one would think. The actual purchases were left to Addie. James just liked to make sure it was all adding up, not that he doubted his own software. 0ne just could never be too careful when someone else was involved. He never thought he would be one for laundering money, but it was incredible the many ways he could find to send money out into the world and bring it back clean as crisp new bill. But back to the matter at hand: checking the inventory against the invoices to see how the money was spent and to see if any could be saved easily...

Cases of rum x 20 (scribbled note by Sam…”top quality only next time”…) =
Ammunition x 500 box x 300
Rations x 3 x 5 x 60
Spices x whatever we can get (another note from Sam…”Rations taste terrible”...)

And so the list went on for some time, every once in a while something being noted by one of the crew explaining their reasoning for this or that. All seemed to be in order. Nothing out of the ordinary for a pirate crew. James had read a few books about them in his youth.

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Wenches x more (…He wasn’t quite sure what to think on this one... looking around, hoping for a note, he found nothing. No indication which of the crew had requested this, or why…not that he needed or wanted one there…)

Feeling a little uncomfortable with that part of the list, he made some adjustments to his software, making a note to leave some wiggle room under his “leisure” category for the crew…

With a shake of his head, he pushed himself up from his desk and decided to return to the hangar to work on some more modifications to his mobile suit’s programming.