Office Relations

Chapter 8

Amidst the towering spires of the arcane nexus, a single figure was running toward a rapidly closing door. The elevator in which Law stood, making no move to stop it even as the desperate figure hurried to catch it.

"Hey, hold the-" Neutrality called out. He'd been running hard from the entrance, knowing there was no telling when another elevator would arrive.

"Neutrality," Law said indifferently just before the doors closed completely.

Neutrality looked at the closed door with apathetic rage. There was no formal rule on the subject, so Law could do as they like. It didn't make them less of a bastard in Neutrality's eyes.

His only solace was the fact he wouldn't actually have to endure the ride in Law's company. They didn't interact much since Neutrality transferred to a different office to get away from them. He'd almost forgotten what it was like to be trapped with someone who knew every single rule down to the clauses and wouldn't shut up about them.

Neutrality shuddered at the memory. He'd been happy once and the subject of envy when he'd not only been promoted to system admin and placed in the same office as Good and Law. It was almost funny to remember now.

After two weeks, he'd been caught between transferring to preserve his sanity or alcoholism to numb himself. Despite choosing the former, he was still on the fence about the latter. His new office and coworkers were different if not precisely easier to get along with.

"Nu?" Chaos called from across the elevator lobby. Neutrality turned and found them holding a door open—the entrance to the janitor's closet, to be exact.

"Chaos," Neutrality called back, managing a smile. Chaos waved him over, and they entered the closet only to step through and into Chaos's cubicle. The cubicle that was ten floors up from the lobby. Neutrality knew it wasn't good to think too hard about anything involving Chaos and didn't ask how it was possible.

He applied the same theory to rummaging in Chaos's mini-fridge for snacks. Noticing a case of mystery beverage, he felt like his morning was starting to look up—one of Chaos's old colleagues microbrewed it themselves.

Taking a can and a fist full of frozen mini burrito's Neutrality felt a bit better. It wasn't much of a breakfast, but it was better than the nothing he'd had after realizing he was going to be late. Feeling generous, he emptied the contents of his pockets into a coffee can labelled "currency?". He knew Chaos would enjoy whatever random collection of garbage turned up more than money. He still added some of that too, though. It felt too weird not to.

On the way to his desk, he glanced over at the communal refrigerator. It would have been nice to keep things in it, but he gave the idea up immediately. Evil used it, and once Evil claimed something as its domain, it was best to just leave it be. Much like the closest bathroom to the office.

Reaching his desk, he paused, taking in its ransacked state.

"Who-" Neutrality started only to fall silent. His first impulse was to blame Evil, but he knew better. Without hard evidence, he'd been in for the verbal tongue lashing of the century.

Looking through the mess, he couldn't find anything actually missing. It was possible that Chaos had done it. They might have needed a pen and tore the desk apart, looking for a specific one. Ignoring the cup full of them next to the view screen for arcane reasons.

Despite knowing better, his eyeline still drifted toward Evil. He was on time, but they were already in the office. Either having shown up early or never leaving in the first place. It was hard to tell which it was.

No matter what else he might fault them for, enthusiasm for the job wasn't on the list. They were already diligently marking help tickets as complete and closing. All without looking at the content or glancing just long enough to make sure they were sending the wrong Q&A links for resolutions.

Deciding to let the matter go, Neutrality busied himself with cleaning up his desk. Once that was done, he felt a bit better. It was time to get to work.

"Hey, Nu, got a minute?" Evil asked, head peeking above the office dividers between them. They all had names, but none of them bothered to share. It was easier to address each other by alignment faction.

"Is there something I can help with, Evil?" Neutrality asked though he'd have preferred to immediately refuse. Evil wasn't the type to care about rejection. They only concerned themselves with getting what they wanted.

On the flip side, they would definitely remember any refusal or interference. No one said anything, but it was an open secret that Neutrality’s job had opened up after the prior admin had crossed Evil. Chaos had mentioned it once while glancing around fearfully. Something about a potluck sign-up gone awry.

Even without that, it was better to approach them with a bargaining mindset to Neutrality's way of thinking. He didn't enjoy accumulating needless grudges. That was more Laws domain in his experience.

"Funny you should ask," Evil replied and laughed. Neutrality didn't join in on the false mirth, and it didn't last long.

"Sooo, there are some features that have to be enabled for a dungeon core interface. Only, of course, with so much going on, that doesn't always happen," Evil began with a grin.

"Weirdly, I can't shut the help ticket for this one DM," Evil began cordially, but their smile wavered.

"I'd really like it to stop blinking at me," Evil finished, eye twitching ever so subtly.

"Uhm… I'll need your login and password to access your help desk," Neutrality replied blandly. It wasn't unusual to find others pushing work off on him, but this was the worst case to date.

There weren't hard rules about helping each other. They were expected to with inter-department or close alignment cases. The trouble was that dungeon masters fell under Chaos and Evil. Neutrality had zero access to them because of that.

"Sweet, It's Admin6942069, caps on the first letter, no spaces. Password gofuckyourselfkevin all lowercase no spaces," Evil said with a grin.

"Okay, I'll get on it now," Neutrality replied evenly through sheer force of will. He had no idea how Evil knew his name, but there was no chance it was a coincidence. Evil looked a little disappointed at his lack of reaction.

Once Evil retreated in defeat, Neutrality fired up his screen and got to work. Logging in wasn't difficult as both the username and password worked. Though Evil hadn't given the account ID number, Neutrality found it quickly.

The problem help ticket was the only one at the top of the queue that didn't disappear after a few seconds. Selecting the dungeon master profile, Neutrality found himself looking at an image of a new core. One less than a week old.

The picture didn't leave much of an impression. Neutrality didn't have an interest in dungeon masters, and her photo had been taken mid-transfer. Predictably she looked nauseous and terrified.

What caught his attention, aside from her eye flames' rather attractive color, was her lack of a type code. It wasn't exactly essential, but a type code indicated the reasons an individual had been chosen to be a dungeon.

Neutrality didn't usually find them relevant to his work, but the lack was a giant red flag. Opening her files, he started taking a more in-depth look at what was going on. He found two significant anomalies before long.

The first was that she'd received a glitch invitation. Neutrality had been tasked with hunting down and eliminating the root cause of those when he first signed on. After a year, he'd given up. He responded to progress inquiries with a vague 'I'm working on it' while doing anything but that.

What glitch invitations did was straightforward. At least in comparison to how they came about. The dungeon master, when she was still human, had encountered another candidate and bested them.

Looking up the original candidate, Neutrality didn't find anything interesting. The initial would-be dungeon master's ventromedial prefrontal cortex had been poorly connected to his amygdala. His amygdala, in turn, had been undersized. By themselves, those problems were a classic recipe for a used car salesman.

His upbringing had exacerbated the issue. His parental guardians had only cared about compliance, not mental health. Instead of addressing the underlying problems he'd been taught to maintain a thin veneer of normalcy. That indifference combined with the physiological problem had created a boilerplate psychopath.

The probability scenarios for the encounter were hilarious. Neutrality took the liberty of making copies to pass around. It was against policy, but it wasn't like he was under his own login anyway.

His favorite began with her bailing from the car, then feinting to get back in and lock her passenger out. When he didn't give up and smashed the driver's side window, she'd caught him by the arm. Holding on tight, she accelerated, crashing him into a pole. The look on his face as it happened was priceless.

The close runner-up started the same, but she took the tire iron and beat the ever-loving shit out of him. It seemed like a mismatch in the original candidates favor at first. He had the knife and reach on her, but it didn't help him.

Not once she nailed him on the wrist with the tire iron. He lost his composure and grip on the knife.

Neutrality immediately emailed the clips to some friends in other departments. With his fun over, he got back to his main task. The second anomaly was her recruiter.

Like the type code, the field for it was blank, which was odd. Dungeon masters and related positions were handled by evil personnel. Though they could be lazy and awful, they didn't forget to take credit for things—especially ones that could net them bonuses.

It was a bit mysterious, but he shrugged it off. It didn't matter who'd been her recruiter from his perspective. What mattered was figuring out why the help ticket was stuck. He opened the queue to examine the ticket.

Looking at it, Neutrality had to fight down laughter. It wasn't a ticket. It was a chat log. Unlike a ticket that could be closed, a chat had to be responded to change its state.

Since Evil never bothered helping, they'd missed that minor issue. It was strange that a help chat had been opened instead of a ticket, though.

Tickets were easy to make, so most new dungeon masters started there. Neutrality looked through the dungeon master's accounts permissions and found what he expected. The help ticket function was disabled.

Humans needed visual and audio cues to navigate the system. Evil had disabled most of those functions, but the system's ways of interfacing weren't so limited. The dungeon master Evil had sought to inconvenience had accessed one of the alternatives. Not an easy thing to do.

Neutrality was tempted for a very long moment to enable all of the account features. It would streamline the process of helping the dungeon master, but in the end, he didn't. Evil would turn them back off but leave the help ticket on so they could ignore it.

That would either put them back at the start with the dungeon master using the workaround or giving up out of frustration. Neither option was appealing to Neutrality. Instead, he made up his mind and opened the system coding interface.

It was the long way around to make the dungeon masters interface a subsystem and edit it, but it was the best option. The changes would only show up in the build log, which Neutrality doubted Evil checked. Even if they did, they'd have to manually roll back the changes.

That wouldn't be a small amount of work, and Neutrality felt confident Evil wouldn't bother. Since Evil had so graciously handed over their account details to him, it was only fitting that he had some fun.

"Go fuck yourself Kevin, indeed," Neutrality mused to himself with a cold smile.