Pants

“What do you mean I can’t see him?” Loren was not the kind of woman who let anything, or anyone stop her.

“Ma’am, you can’t just walk into the palace complex and go where you want.” The speaker was a nervous looking young mage, wearing the green robes of an imperial administrator.

Administrators were the grease that kept the machinery of the empire moving, an army of them worked with each minister and department, and they did everything from schedule meetings to collecting taxes.

In Loren’s experience though, they were bureaucratic piss ants that pretended to help people, but really just wanted to exercise their authority whenever they could. They hid behind rules and process, rather than actually getting things done. If Loren had tried to innovate farming closer to the capital, where these administrators held sway, she would still be filling out applications for the right to change the spacing between her grape vines.

The Administrator smiled, and the little glint there told