"Thank you Mrs James."
"Oh what are you saying? Thank you, my sweet child. My lawn hasn't looked any better than now."
"Just doing my job, Mrs James."
"Alright, in that case, there's no need to thank me as I'm also paying you for a job well done."
"Alright, alright, I get it. Thank you once more, Mrs James."
From there, Kael also did other stuff — like a lot of stuff. A lot of odd job stuff. He helped the baker and the blacksmith. He polished the soldiers' boots, armour, sword, and shield. He cleaned village and town gutters. Any work he could get his hands on, he did.
All the things he did were in order to take care of his sister and himself. Before he focused on doing odd jobs, he was a small-time crook and had even joined a gang in another village, the village where he and his sister originally stayed.
Life wasn't always like this for Kael and his sister Lyra. It was only when his parents were declared dead that things started changing. When their parents were alive, they lived in one of the towns outside Cindralith, the capital of Caelrith, the human kingdom.
They were soldiers who constantly engaged in rift wars, and as far as Kael can remember, they were said to die from an ambush of rift monsters. He was eight years old then and his sister was five.
After that, they moved in with their aunt, who lived in the village where Kael would eventually join a gang after his aunt died, which was a year later from the time she took them in. The doctors said it was a high fever.
Kael could remember bits of what one of their neighbors was saying that day, "high fever my ass, they think they can hide it but it has something to do with those rifts I tell you..." Some months later that very neighbor of theirs wasn't seen again, and it was said he went on a trip. Kael might have believed it then, but now it was a different case. Well, it wasn't like he was going digging or anything, as the thing on his mind was how to get a better life for him and his sister.
When their aunt died, Kael and Lyra had no way of taking care of themselves; after all, they were little, and there was also no orphanage in the village. Some of their neighbors gave them a little periodically. Everyone there lived hard lives, so while it might seem like nothing, it was a great deed they performed.
Two years after his aunt's death, when he was eleven, was the time that he was fully exposed to the rot of the world, but he did his best to make sure his sister didn't get to see those sides. What he didn't know, though, was that Lyra was no fool, and she knew just how cruel the world was, but she saw how hard her brother was trying to take care of them and decided not to add to his burdens.
She made sure to always behave herself, never stayed out late, and also planned that when the time was right, she would get a job as maybe a maid or something, and support her brother also.
Kael and his sister were educated and could read, write, and speak at least three languages all thanks to their parents. They were properly schooled, and when they got home, they still received another round of "torturous learning" according to Kael.
So with this, apart from the petty thievery he engaged in, he also carried out scam operations on travellers passing through their village. But with all this, Kael never thought he would join a gang.
It so happened that his luck ran out and he stole from the wrong person. This person turned out to be the boss of a local gang, who were in turn a subsidiary of a larger criminal organization.
Recognizing Kael's smarts, he inducted him, and soon later, he used Kael's smarts to start rising through the ranks of the organization slowly, but surely, and with the way things were going, the boss of the local gang, Troma, could feel the expansion of his gang branch approaching, 'more accolades' he always thought.
A little later, Kael discovered that the boss's name wasn't spelt "T-R-A-U-M-A" as he expected, but "T-R-O-M-A". Using tact, he asked the boss why his name was Troma to which the boss replied, "... cuz I always leave me opps with PTSD..." Kael had to use every ounce of composure he had in him not to laugh.
Kael didn't find it difficult in the gang as the things he was tasked to do were things that he usually did, and on top of that, he was earning well enough for him and his sister to eat good food at least one to two times daily, unlike before when what to eat wasn't really a sure thing.
Things went on like that until about a year later when he killed someone for the first time, out of self-defense. It was on one of his normal missions, well not that normal as the stakes were a little higher now but all the same.
He was undercover in a town trying to gather information about an item that the organization had tasked his boss to, in their words, "liberate". Apart from watching out for law enforcement, he also had to watch out for other gangs as this area was not controlled by the organization.
Things were going smoothly until he bumped into someone, someone drunk, someone he knew, someone he had scammed, and it also turned out that this person was a member of one of the gangs residing in that town.
"I'm sorry Sir..." Kael apologized for bumping into him.
"Oh it's fine, it's fine, after all the place is extremely crowded. Better watch your steps lad, you won't find many as kind hearted as me in these parts, hahaha!" the man replied.
The man was still saying something when something clicked in his head, 'haven't I seen this lad before?'