My Lewd Reincarnation

Instead of heading through the set of doors, Arriana slowed to a stop in front of them and very casually slid an arm around the shoulders of one of the two bouncers standing guard there. In response, the bouncer in question barely reacted, only turning his head and giving her a slight nod.

"Now, these suit-wearing men you have probably seen here and there around the place are our best friends. You really do want to get along with them as they are responsible for our safety. Although it doesn’t happen often, sometimes we can get less than pleasant clients. In such a case, if anything bad happens, it's these men’s duties to step in and assure our well-being." Arriana explained as she continued to hang off the men in a rather seductive manner.

"Additionally, whenever you acquire a client willing to pay for your services, you’ll bring them over here. The client will pass along the coin to one of the bouncers for safekeeping, and then you will lead them into one of the private rooms beyond."

"Speaking of which, what are the prices like here and how much do we get to keep?" Cassidy asked with an excited glint in her eye.

"The basic price for an hour of time with someone just starting out like you is five gold, out of which you will get to collect four gold at the end of the day. As your reputation grows and your level rises, so too can that rate." Arriana dutifully explained as she slid her arm off the man and made her way past him into the hallway beyond the doors, but not before remembering something else. "Oh, but for you Evelyn, the Red Den will only take 50 silver from each hour of time you spend with a silent. Meaning you will keep 4 and a half gold."

"Why does she get more?" Cassidy immediately spat out with a rather noticeable amount of venom in her voice.

"Because Evelyn has a trait that means she doesn’t need to take tea of the nightlily or see the in-house healer, the largest of the Red Den’s ongoing overhead expenses." The red-haired woman responded, but although she didn’t openly address the other woman’s tone of voice, her own tone was short and sharp, in a very reprimanding sort of way.

"Now, these are the private rooms." As if nothing happened, Arriana immediately continued on with the task at hand as we all found our way past the set of doors into a hallway flanked by a couple dozen doors, all numbered with a series of engraved plates on their otherwise plain-faced exteriors. While a few of these numbered plates had a red tint to them here and there, the vast majority of them were painted plain white.

"While we used to have a system that involved the bouncers outside having to remember which rooms were occupied and which weren’t, we have recently upgraded to a more convenient system." She explained, walking up to one of the white number doors and opening it as she went on to further elaborate. "The lock on the back of the door knob doesn’t actually lock the door; instead it's linked to an enchantment that causes the colour of the number plate on the door to change. A red number plate means the private room is currently occupied, and a white number plate means that it is free. These enchantments are also linked to a small device that the bouncers have outside, so they can tell you ahead of time if all the rooms are currently in use."

"Once you’ve got a client and they’ve paid the bouncers for your service, you’ll want to find your way to one of the available rooms and remember to flip the occupancy switch. After that, well, that’s when it's time to get down to business." Arriana had a slightly amused smirk on her lips as she stepped further into the room and ushered Cassidy and me to follow her in.

Heading further into the private room, I found its arrangement to be fairly normal for a bedroom. There was, of course, a big, comfy-looking bed at the centre of the room, but there were also a few dressers and wardrobes, which I doubted had any stuff in them and would of mostly just for ambience. In addition to that, of note, there was a clock sitting on one of the dressers and an open doorway leading from the room into a little ensuite bathroom on one side. 

However, the clock wasn’t actually displaying the current time, nor did it have the proper series of numbering around its circumference. Instead, both of its hands were sitting upright in the position that should have read “12” but instead read “0”. Other than that though the numbers were in the right order, ranging from 1 to 11 as they went clockwise around the clock’s circumference.

"Inside the rooms, there are a couple of conveniences that you should get acquainted with. For starters, that clock over there doesn’t show the time. Instead, it is a timer. There are two buttons on its base. One sets the timer for an hour, and if pressed again while time is still on the clock, an extra hour will be added. The other button resets the timer." Arriana said as she went to point out which button was which.

Continuing on, she went over to the bed, reaching over it to behind one of the bedside drawers. "Back here, there is an emergency alarm which, if pressed, will alert the bouncers outside, who will immediately rush to assist you. Please, do not press this button unless you actually need the aid. It shouldn’t happen often but in case you do need the bouncers to come to save you from a violent or abusive client it's best if false alarms happen as infrequently as possible so that they are ready and alert at every possible moment. After all, every second they spend rushing to attend a false alarm is one second they aren’t keeping a watch of the floors and the other alarms."

"Other than those, the only thing left is the bathroom to the side. Sometimes you might want to strongly suggest to some clients that they get washed up before you engage in anything with them and sometimes clients want to get washed up with you before you have sex. However, once you’re done with a client, only use the bathroom to give yourself a quick clean up, so that you can leave the room without making a further mess."

"There’s a larger, more convenient bathroom for all of us workers further into the building that I will show you in a second, but that is where you will want to get properly washed up there. The reason for this is that as soon as you are out of the private room, we can get one of the in-house cleaning staff to give the room a quick clean, making sure that it's ready for the next person as soon as ever. On busy nights, a quick turnover of the private rooms is key."

As quickly as we had come into the private room, we were being led out of it once more. "Instead of going back out through the main floor after servicing a client, the door furthest down this hallway leads back around to the employee-only area," Arriana explained as she showed us this path and where it met back up with the changing room and Sophia’s office.

In addition, the red-haired woman also pointed out various other places in the building, such as a storage space for cleaning gear, the staff bathrooms, the space where the cleaning staff hung out until being called upon, and the breakroom, which was, as it turned out, more of a small cafeteria-like space as the Red Den apparently provided lunch and dinner for those working at those times.

At one point, towards the end of our tour of the establishment, the three of us walked past a set of stairs leading up further into the building, but Arriana paid them no attention. In fact, the woman had yet to mention anything having to do with the second story of this building, something that made me, in no small part, rather curious. As such, I just had to ask her about it. "What’s up the stairs."

"The second story is reserved for more renowned and established workers. A series of specialty and personal rooms are set aside for them so that they will always have a place to see clients, even on the busiest of nights, most of which is actually scheduled as opposed to the more free-form hiring that happens down here. But you two won’t have to worry about going up there for a while now." Arriana momentarily explained before immediately going back on with the tour, which came to an end in the cafeteria, in front of a calendar hanging on one of the walls. Only this was no ordinary calendar.

Although the naming convention of the months, weeks, and days was different from what I was used to, back on Earth, they had a relatively logical layout to them. Apparently, it was the second day of the first week of the third month, a rather unimaginative way of naming things if not extremely clear.

Other than that, though, the calendar was fairly typical. Weeks had seven days, months had four weeks, and a year had twelve months. The only thing that stood out to me was that all the months were precisely four weeks long, or twenty-eight days, which would actually make years slightly shorter than I was accustomed to, but not by much. The exactness of it all would seemed like it would make keeping track of time all that much easier and made me wonder why we couldn’t have had such a style of date-keeping back on Earth. 

Who knows, there’s probably some reasonable explanation why it wouldn’t work on Earth.

"Now, the last thing to show before we get to the proper part of working here is the schedule." Arriana said as she gestured to a big book sitting on a table right under the calendar, something that I had completely missed in light of discovering how dates worked in this world.

Drifting my gaze down onto the book, I found that it was essentially a more focused calendar, covering the hours of the day instead of just days. The two pages that were currently open covered this week and the next week, with a large plethora of names written in and repeating over various time slots. As expected, the later parts of the days had more names than the earlier parts.

Interestingly, the only parts of the day with my or Cassidy’s name written in them were this morning all the way through to late at night today, with a couple of hour breaks for lunch and dinner.

"One of the best parts of this job is that you can pretty much make your own hours. How much time you spend working and how many opportunities you take up, really determines how much you will earn here." Arriana said rather proudly, taking great pride in her work here." That said, though, even though it is very much a choose-your-own-hours type of thing, the mistress insists that anyone that wants to work writes down their hours in advance."

"The reason for this is simple: we need enough workers to cover every shift, including the slower ones. Being understaffed is bad for business and hurts our reputation. As such, sometimes the mistress or I acting on behalf of her might ask you to work one of those shifts because not enough people put their names down, and although you are not required to do so if we ask, I would advise you do. Being consistent in working and being present at the Red Den is a good way to get a reputation with the mistress for being reliable. And the more she likes you, the more opportunities you will see heading your way."

Reaching down to the table, Arriana picked up a pen sitting by the open schedule book and held it towards Cassidy and me. "All that's left before we move on is for you to put down any days you want to work this week and the next. Feel free to think it over before you do, though. You can always put your name down for more hours, but we ask people not to remove their names during the current week of scheduling unless, of course, they have some sort of emergency and clear it with either myself or the mistress first. Since you two are just starting here though, we won't be as strick with this for your first couple of weeks."

"So… which one of you wants to put your names down first." The red-haired woman said with a bit of a smirk, but her eyes were more keenly watching, observing our every action.

"I’ll go," I said without a moment's hesitation, taking the pen right from the woman’s hand.

Putting the pen to paper, I started to scribble my name over and over again on the pages, taking on quite a few hours of work over the next two weeks. That said, I paid careful attention to leaving a few mornings or nights off here and there so that I could spend time with my girlfriend. By the time I was done, I had quite a schedule ahead of me.

"My, my, my, someone’s really trying to be a go-getter, aren’t they." Arriana chuckled when she saw just how many times I had put my name down.

 Suddenly feeling rather nervous that I might have overstepped some unspoken boundary, I needlessly apologize, "Sorry, is that too many hours?"

"Maybe…" Arriana strung her words out, not easing my worries in the slightest. "It really depends on you. I’d hate to see someone as promising as you burn out, but if you can really work that much right off the bat then… Well, then I think you are going to be a great fit here.”

"But if you can’t keep up with that pace at the beginning and need to take a few of those hours off, no one will judge you. The mistress doesn’t tend to take new workers into account when finalising the schedule, not until they have finished a full month here. Sadly, sometimes people really aren’t suited to this line of work despite our trying to determine that prior to them working here and the only way we can truly discover that is the hard way."

"Now, what of you, Cassidy?" Arriana turned her head to the dark-skinned woman by my side as she continued on with the matter at hand. "Are you fine putting your name down now, or do you want some time to think it over? As long as you do it by the end of the day, it should be fine."

"No, I’m good to do it now!" Cassidy instantly responded by snatching the pen from my hand and sprawling her name down on the pages.

I’m not sure if it was because of whatever negative feelings she had for me and thus wanted to show me up or if she was just a very competitive person, but the woman very quickly found herself writing down her name for just as many hours as I had put myself down for.

"Well, well, well, another little go-getter. Your spirit is good, just don’t let it consume you. Remember to know your limits." Arriana warned, looking between not just her, but me too as she said this.

"Then all that is left is getting to the fun part of the job, but to get there we have to find you two someone to fuck first… I mean service." Arriana said as she excitedly walked off in the direction of the main floor. "Sorry about that slip of the tongue. Sometimes my love of the work slips through. Although at the end of the day, our job is essentially having sex for money, we at the Red Den try to be more dignified and classy about it. And you will be expected to keep up such airs as well."

"As such, you will hear many workers here saying such things as service, accompany, or spending some time together, but that’s just in public. In private, when you are alone with a client, feel free to speak and be as naughty or lewd as you like, so long as the client enjoys themselves, that is."