Knock. Knock.
"..."
A sleeping Gerald lies slumped across the bed with one arm hanging off it. His expression is, for once, serene.
BANG BANG BANG.
"GERALD. WAKE UP."
He comes off the mattress at an angle, gets tangled, recovers most of his dignity, and opens the door with one eye.
"Oh. Lisa. What's up."
She has her hands on her hips and a look of profound disapproval.
"Are you not aware what day it is?"
Gerald scratches his head.
"Isn't it day six?"
"YES."
"...So what?"
Lisa puts her whole face in her palm.
"Today a new department opens."
"Oh. Sweet." He starts to close the door. "Can I go back to sleep?"
"..."
"How should I kill you?"
Gerald steps back and laughs dryly. "Haha. Joking. Let me get ready."
"Good." She turns to go, and adds it over her shoulder like it's nothing: "By the way, the manager promoted you. Captain of the Control Team."
Gerald stops with his hand on the doorframe.
"...I've been an agent for four days."
"I know."
"Aren't I a little inexperienced for that?"
Lisa shrugs.
"I dunno. It's the manager's decision." She's already walking. "And besides. I think you deserve it."
She goes off down the corridor humming.
Gerald stands in the doorway for a while.
Four days.
To everyone else, four days.
...Alright. Let's go see who's in the new department.
— — —
He takes the long way round, past One Sin's containment unit, and pulls the document out of its bracket.
The managerial notes. The work log. The observation entries.
That's it.
He turns it over. He checks behind the bracket, and under it, and then flips the document again more slowly, one page at a time, in case a plain manila file the thickness of his thumb has somehow become invisible.
The document has been squared up. The corners are aligned. It's been re-filed by somebody who cared about doing it neatly.
...
Okay.
So somebody took it.
Somebody watched me put it there, or somebody found it, and either way that means somebody in this building is paying attention to what I do when nobody's looking.
He puts the document back exactly the way he found it, because he doesn't know who's watching now either, and walks away at a normal speed.
— — —
The bulkhead at the western end is open.
Gerald slows down without meaning to.
The seams are drawn back into the wall and the yellow tape is gone and the corridor beyond is lit at the same brightness as the one he's standing in, and there is noise coming out of it. real noise, feet and voices and a printer somewhere.
And the woman is walking.
She's mid-stride when he arrives at the threshold and then she isn't; she completes the step, the back heel comes down, and her arm goes down with it and sets the clipboard on the counter beside her without any particular ceremony at all.
She rolls her shoulder once. She looks at the clock on the wall.
Then she picks up a stack of folders and heads off down the corridor, and she does not look at Gerald, and she has no idea he has been standing on the other side of a window watching her not finish that step for the last four days.
...
Yeah.
He was right.
That is horrifying.
— — —
The Information Team break room is loud.
Three agents in the new department's colors and a handful of clerks moving around them, and one of the agents, yellow hair, sitting on the edge of a table like the table exists for him, is leaning into a clerk's space in a way Gerald recognizes from about six feet away.
Gerald doesn't walk over. He stops and listens.
"Hey... Gamma2. Y'wanna come back to my place after? We can get to know each other better. Heh."
"Uh. No. I don't really want to."
"C'mon, don't be like that. I'm very fun."
So he's a scumbag.
Noted.
The clerk has her shoulders pulled in as far as they will go. The other two agents are eating and looking at their food with the specific intensity of men who have decided this isn't their problem.
Gerald walks over.
"Hey. I'm captain of the Control Team." He says it to the room. "Came down to see what kind of people we're working with."
The yellow-haired agent straightens off the table and puts a finger into Gerald's chest.
"I don't care who you are, buddy. Keep out of our business and we'll get along just fine."
"It's my job to keep things in check." Gerald keeps his voice flat. "Captain of the Control Team, like i said."
"So? Do I look like I give a fuck?"
A vein starts up on Gerald's temple.
Punish him.
Not now.
He has—
Not now.
"Archer. That's enough."
The grey-haired agent at the table hasn't raised his voice and doesn't need to. He puts his fork down and looks up.
"Don't you think you've caused enough trouble today?"
Archer sucks his teeth and shoves both hands in his pockets and goes.
"We were doing fine without Control Team intervention. Just so you know."
He mutters something else on the way out that Gerald can't make out.
The silence resettles. The grey-haired agent shakes his head.
"Sorry you had to see that for a first impression. He's a good kid. Just misguided."
Is he, Gerald doesn't say.
"My name's Cooper. This is Hunter."
He points at the black-haired agent working through a plate of mashed potatoes.
"Greetings." Hunter puts out a hand. "I hope we can get along amicably in future."
"Likewise." Gerald shakes it.
Then he turns to the clerk, who has not moved.
"You okay?"
"I— yes. Yes, sir."
"What's your name?"
She blinks at him.
"...Gamma2."
"No." He crouches slightly. "Your name."
There's a pause of the kind he's getting used to.
"Iris."
"Gerald. Control Team." He straightens. "If he does it again, you come find me. Not Cooper, not your Sephirah. Me. I'll handle it and it won't come back on you."
Iris looks at him like he's said something in another language, and then nods twice, fast.
Cooper watches the whole exchange without comment. Then he clears his throat.
"We weren't told today was the day Control Team comes down. Any particular reason it's now?"
Gerald thinks.
"Manager got Joint Command. It came up on everyone's LC-230 yesterday." He shrugs. "Cross-department work orders. Means I can be sent here."
"Ah. So that's how it is." Cooper picks his fork back up. "Alright. We'll be in your care, then."
Beep. Beep.
[GERALD — COMMENCE ATTACHMENT WORK: O-01-92]
Gerald wishes them both a good day and excuses himself.
— — —
A cold hand closes on his wrist before he's ten feet down the corridor.
"Hold on just a second, Agent."
A dark purple box steps into view. Slightly taller than Malkuth. One enormous purple eye, and it is doing something with the eye that manages to be a glare.
"Did you get approval from the manager to enter my department?"
"Yes, Information Team Sephirah Yesod. I'm here to work O-01-92, per his order."
The eye narrows further.
"I see. But did you also get permission to enter the department break room?"
Gerald frowns.
"No. I guess I didn't. But doesn't Joint Command entail—"
"I don't care what it entails."
Yesod releases his wrist.
"We handle very delicate work here. An outsider like you does not need to be complicating it."
"...Alright."
Yesod sighs, at length and with production values, and walks off to do whatever it is he does.
He needs to get that stick out of his ass before—
...Wait. Ass? Circuits? Compartments?
Whatever.
— — —
There's a small screen mounted outside O-01-92, showing the interior feed.
Gerald looks at it for a good while.
On the camera there is a net, hung across the back of the room like laundry. Stitched into the net, spaced out, are five human faces.
They are all making a different expression. They are all dripping.
...
He opens the door.
The smell arrives first, rotting meat, thick enough that he can taste the shape of it. Below the angry face there is a pair of legs, and behind the net, something is looking at him.
"Hello...?"
"SHUT UP."
Something corrosive gets into his head at the same moment his skin starts to bubble along the forearms.
Black damage.
That's what black is.
"Hey. There's no need to be angry, I was just trying—"
"I DON'T CARE. YOU ARE ANNOYING."
More of it. Skin and mind at once, eating inward.
It's not that bad, actually.
Which is a horrifying thing to be able to think.
Maybe my tolerance is just up.
"WHY ARE YOU HERE."
Gerald shrugs, and lets the bubbling do what it's doing.
"I'm being forced to talk to you. That's why."
The thing behind the net goes quiet.
The eyes stop glaring. It looks away from him, and moves, the legs carry it sideways along the net until it is standing behind the neutral face.
"I see. So you're like me."
...
What is this guy talking about.
Should I play along?
"...Yeah."
"We can't just let those people decide who we are. Right?" The voice has gone conversational. "Can't we just have the freedom to express who we are?"
Gerald opens his mouth to agree tactically and finds that he actually does.
"Yeah. That's true."
It moves along to the happy face.
"That's exactly why I ripped my skin off! So I can show everyone who I really am without being shy anymore!"
...
This went from zero to a hundred very fucking quick.
How do we get from freedom of expression to hanging your face on a net.
"...Good for you."
The thing seems delighted. It does a small dance behind the net, which does terrible things to the way the faces hang.
"Does this mean we're friends!?"
Gerald arranges his own face into the friendliest thing it can currently produce.
"Of course we are. My name's Gerald."
"My name is—"
A pause.
"Sorry. I'm not comfortable sharing it."
"That's fine." Gerald says it without thinking about it, and then thinks about it. "I don't mind."
It shuffles along to the smiling face.
"I like you! Do you need a way to express yourself too?"
Is he about to give me an E.G.O gift.
"Sigh. Yes. It's so hard expressing myself."
"Okay! Close your eyes! No peeking!"
Gerald closes his eyes.
He hears the wet sound of something crossing the floor toward him. He keeps them closed, which costs him.
A hand takes his and puts something in it, and the sound retreats.
"Okay! You can open your eyes now!"
He opens them.
There is a face in his hand.
A skin face mask, still slightly warm, and, no offense to anyone. Visibly rotting.
...
I will not be putting this on my face.
He looks at the net. Five faces. Five, and it has just given away a sixth.
"Y'know," Gerald says slowly, "this has actually given me the motivation to express myself in a different way."
The thing behind the net jumps back.
"Really!?"
"Yeah. But it's a secret. I'm, uh. Shy. I'm too shy to tell you."
It goes very quiet.
"I see. Well. I can't intrude on your new findings."
Gerald nods, and holds the mask up over the net.
"That's why I won't be needing this. This is your way of expressing yourself."
A red hand comes up through the net and takes it back, and the relief that comes off the thing behind it is so total it's almost audible.
"C-can you take a step back now? You're getting close to my personal space."
"Sorry." He steps back, and smiles. "It was nice talking to you."
"Likewise. Friend."
And Gerald leaves.
— — —
He was nice.
His hygiene is questionable. But he was nice. Just a little shy.
The performance chart outside starts red, a run of red bars, one after another, for the first stretch of the work.
Then the reds get further apart.
Then they stop.
[25 PE-BOXES PRODUCED. GOOD WORK.]
Gerald has, at this point, stopped being surprised by the number.
He's started being surprised by how quickly he stopped being surprised by it.
He begins the walk back toward the elevator hub, and gets about halfway.
A perfect meal.
An excellent substitute.
He stops.
The voice is not an Abnormality's. He knows what those sound like now, and this isn't one. It's flatter, and there's more than one of it, and it comes with a smell of turned soil.
Then the floor comes apart.
Five of them come up through the tile. Slug-bodied, segmented, each with a set of claws that don't match the rest of the animal, and they land and orient on him and clack their teeth in unison.
One leaps.
Gerald has Penitence out and into the blade before it clears the apex and takes it in half lengthwise. Orange fluid goes across his chestplate.
The other four come at once.
His senses do the thing they do now, the corridor slows down, the four of them separate out into four individual problems. He changes the weapon's shape mid-step, blade collapsing into the sphere, and sweeps the white across all four in a cone.
They resist it. Not much. Enough to be interesting.
Then the carapaces start convulsing and the orange comes out of the seams and all four of them go down.
Sheathing it, Gerald jogs for the elevator hub and hits the call button.
What the hell was that.
Some kind of breach effect?
Whatever it is, I need to get up to Control and make sure nothing's coming out of the floor up there.
He takes a handkerchief out and starts wiping the orange off the plate as the car begins to rise.
...
Can this elevator take any longer.
[ERROR. ERROR. POWER SYSTEM CUT. INITIATING EMERGENCY MODE.]
Everything stops.
The lights go to red. The hum dies. The car settles with a small unpleasant drop and then holds.
"What the fuck?"
— — —
(Pov: Yuri)
What was that voice?
It's not one of the usual ones.
(...)
It was coming from inside my own head. And I don't think that's actually possible.
Yuri stands in the Control Team corridor looking at a hole in the floor that was not there four seconds ago.
The things inside it look up at her, hungrily, and all of them move at once.
Am I going to have to fight?
I don't know if I can.
The creatures are not interested in her opinion. The first one hits her at the hip and takes a strip of the suit and a strip of what's under it, and the second gets her forearm.
"A-ahh. That— that hurts—"
She throws the baton at the nearest one, which does nothing whatsoever, and runs.
The storage closet is eleven feet away. She gets into it and gets the door shut and puts her back against it.
Where the hell did those come from.
She touches the open wound on her arm and her vision goes white at the edges.
Where's the first aid kit. It should be on this wall—
It's on the floor. For some reason it is on the floor, which she will think about later.
She gets it open and gets bandages onto the arm, badly, and then something starts hitting the door.
"S-shit."
She finishes the knot with her teeth.
Then she looks at the door. And at the frame. And at the hinge.
...This might work.
(...)
Shut up. It'll work.
She steps back and lets the door swing.
— — —
The door opens on an empty storage closet.
The insects come in with their mouths already open, expecting a meal, and find shelving.
Four of them get inside.
Thud.
The door slams. The fifth one is still in the frame.
CRUNCH.
Its lower half separates from its upper half. It squirms for a while and then it doesn't.
Unfortunately, there was a sixth, and it never went in.
Yuri turns and gets a faceful of teeth.
It takes her to the ground and rips part of her face off before she can get an arm up.
"AHHHH— FUCK—"
She gets both hands under its shell and puts every single thing she has into throwing it off her.
It hits the ground, rights itself, and comes back to finish.
Yuri grabs the lower half of its dead comrade and tears the plate off it and holds it up in front of her body like a shield.
The insect leaps and rebounds off it.
She smashes the shell down onto its head and it stops tracking, eyes scattering in different directions, and she kicks it into the doorway and puts her foot on it and holds it there while it tries very hard to take her leg apart.
Then she closes the door.
The frame caves it in with a sound like a stepped-on crate.
...
Yuri sits down on the floor of the corridor with her back to the wall and her face open to the air.
"Hahaha... I really pulled that off."
"Like one of those stunts from an action movie."
"Hahaha..."
(...)
"...Yeah, yeah. I know."
She closes her eyes and decides to rest right there.
— — —
(Pov: Gerald)
Cough.
I don't think anybody's noticed I'm in here.
Gerald looks up at the CCTV camera in the corner of the car. The red light on it is off.
Fuck. Am I wrong to think this shouldn't happen?
I mean, it's been fifteen minutes.
The elevator has an emergency panel, a call button that does nothing, and a ceiling.
He tries the ceiling.
Two panels come away. He gets his hands on the lip and pulls himself up onto the roof of the car, into a shaft that is entirely dark except for the red emergency light leaking up from below him.
The cable goes up.
I guess the only thing I can do is climb.
I really wish I had a light.
He climbs. It takes a long time in the way that things take a long time when you can't see them, and it ends with his head connecting solidly with the underside of something.
Ow.
Right. I'm here.
Now how do I open the doors?
He gets a hand on Penitence and lets it flow into the blade, and works it into the seam between the doors, and puts his shoulder into it. His arms are, he has noticed this before and keeps not thinking about it, stronger than they have any business being.
The doors give.
He squeezes through into the Control Team hallway and stands there breathing.
Finally.
I wonder if the bugs came up here too.
He starts moving. Fast.
He finds two clerks with their hands wrapped in gauze.
"You. What happened."
The clerk clears his throat.
"Those things dug up out of the floor. All of them went for Miss Yuri first. She got away from them, and then—"
He stops, and starts again.
"Then they came for us. Me and four others locked ourselves in the break room. We don't know what happened after that."
"But we found her sitting in the hallway. With her face bleeding."
Gerald grows quieter with every sentence.
"...Thank you. You're dismissed."
He walks into the main room.
Yuri is on the couch. There is a dressing over most of one side of her face and it is not holding, and someone has put a blanket on her that she has kicked mostly off.
She opens the eye she has available.
"Haha. Don't you think you're a bit late?"
...
That goes in deeper than anything the bugs could have managed.
"I—"
Yuri shakes her head, and immediately regrets it.
"It was my fault. I couldn't defend myself, and I'm an agent. That's the job." Her voice is thin. "You've got no reason to blame yourself."
Gerald grips his palms until they go white.
I'm the captain of this team.
They gave me a title and the first thing that happened under it was one of my people getting eaten in a corridor while I was standing in an elevator.
They should be punished.
Who.
...
Yeah. That's what I thought.
He turns and leaves to find something that will help with the pain, because it is the only thing he can currently do, and because if he stays in that room another thirty seconds she'll see his face.
— — —
(Pov: Manager)
"What were those things, Angela?"
"They are called The Perfect Food. An Amber Dawn Ordeal."
The manager sits with his cheek on his fist and watches the corridor footage go by again.
"Can you explain to me what an Ordeal is?"
"There is limited information in our database. They appear to become active from Day Six."
"...I see."
He rewinds. Runs it forward at quarter speed. Watches an agent in a Control Team suit put five of them down in under twenty seconds.
"I'm not sure if it's just me. But either those things aren't very strong, or Gerald is."
He taps the screen.
"Look at this. That went through the shell like it was butter."
Angela's eyes twitch, very slightly.
"...Manager. Do you recall assigning Gerald a bladed E.G.O weapon?"
Wait.
Do we even have one?
"No. I don't recall."
Angela leans toward the screen and studies the frozen frame.
"It appears very similar to the Penitence E.G.O weapon."
"What makes you say that?"
She indicates the base of the grip.
"Here. Identical to Penitence, except that there is a blade where the cross section should be."
The manager sits back and picks up the cactus.
"So the weapon changes shape."
He turns the pot.
"If so — why haven't any of the other agents managed it?"
Angela clears her throat, and glances at the yellow folder still sitting on the corner of the desk.
"I think we both know the reason."
The manager frowns at the frozen image of a man in a brown suit, wiping orange off his chestplate with a handkerchief.
"It doesn't make sense. Gerald doesn't seem like that kind of person."
Angela walks over to the coffee machine.
"People can be deceiving, Manager."
She sets a cup down in front of him.
"Please exercise caution."
He looks at the stack of files that arrived from Information at the end of the day.
"This is the first day that man's department has been active and he's already submitted a full day's paperwork."
"Yesod is thorough."
"Yesod is a menace." He rubs his eyes. "Looks like I've got my night cut out for me."
He drinks the coffee.
"Oh, one more thing. I was going over the energy logs. Power on the route to Information Team was cut."
"For twenty-two minutes."
"Right. Can you look into what that's about?"
Angela nods.
Then, as she reaches the door, she says:
"Manager. Regarding the employees who have been coming to your office."
He looks up.
"There are no regulations preventing them. Whoever set the rules did not anticipate a manager who would entertain them." A pause. "It is a good opportunity to appear generous. Thank them for their effort. Tell them you hope they keep up the good work."
"But please keep in mind that you do not have to do everything they ask of you."
The manager thinks about a perch.
"Give them a vending machine," Angela says, "and next they will come knocking, demanding a bar."
"...Noted."
"I expect you to make the right decision."
And she steps out into the corridor, and the door closes behind her, and the pleasant thing goes out of her face entirely.
"So we're interfering already."
Her eyes are very cold.
"Benjamin."
.
.
.
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