Twenty-nine-year-old Bernadette Wallace slid the key into the lock on her apartment. With a tired, but gratified, sigh, she slipped out of her coat tossing it in the general direction of her coat rack. Trusting that the spells that were set on the coat rack would keep the coat from simply falling to the floor.

Her current apartment was a stylish two-floor maisonette, a major step up from the place she was living in before. The building was in an area that had to be rebuilt after the Terran attack, but things were quickly improving for the neighborhood as investors and business owners set up shop in the surrounding area.

“Hey, Wally!” crooned Bernadette. Bending down to greet her doe-eyed basset-hound, poodle, mix. The little dog ran up to her panting, his long pink tongue out, and his tail wagging.

“Give me five,” said Bernadette. Proffering her hand so that the dog would place its paw in her hand. The paw was made of carbon-fiber and covered with sigils. A magical prosthesis she’d created for the dog since it was born with only three legs.

Bernadette no longer worked at the pet store, but she left the place with the friendship of Old Eugenia Miller, the owner. As well as the friendship of little Wally, who she took in as a puppy.

This had been a pretty good year for Bernadette. She hadn’t expected it to be. She had expected to have to deal with choosing between potential impoverishment and going back to her family on her hands and knees to beg for her some kind of financial support.

Then there was even a point where she kind of thought she might end up being killed when she inadvertently ran into her very estranged cousin Margot.

Thankfully, that was clearly not what happened. A week after her interview at the Division of Cosmic Artifice, she was shocked to receive a phone call from the office while she was in the middle of a shift at the pet store.

She was called in for a second interview. Bernadette’s first instinct was to turn it down and withdraw her application, the only reason she didn’t was that she was still kind of freaked out from seeing how terrifyingly powerful Margot had become both as a witch and in terms of influence.

The sense of helplessness she felt in the face of such power kept her from trying to run because Bernadette had spent the last few nights having nightmares about a glowing-eyed, flame-haired, horror just showing up in her apartment one day and either disintegrating her or turning her into something small and repulsive.

She didn’t ask for help from her family because based on what she already knew and everything she’d learned after hours of searching the internet they didn’t stand a snowball's chance in hell against the Division, Margot, or Margot’s mysterious and frankly terrifying new husband.

If there was any chance that Margot’s grudge was solely with her, or could be satisfied with just her suffering, Bernadette had enough of a sense of duty as a member of the Wallace family, to do what she could to try and keep that ill-will from spilling over onto the rest of the family.

Thus with a heart filled with regret and recriminations for the meanness and petty grudges carried forth by her younger self, Bernadette once again reported to the Division office in the city of Prospero’s business district.

She was shocked to find that the interviewer was one of those overly pretty blue-haired women that could be found wandering all around the office. She was even more surprised that instead of being shot, or bespelled, or simply disappeared away, she simply ended up having a fairly ordinary interview.

The surprises continued reaching their highest when a few days after that interview she was told to come back to the office a third time to accept a position working for the Division of Cosmic Artifice. She returned still mostly expecting something terrible to be done to her.

When she saw the contract and its draconian anti-breach clauses she thought she’d finally gotten some insight about how Margot was finally going to get revenge on her. Working for the Division required a contract that was enforced by magic and cosmic laws.

Some of the penalties for breach and betrayal of the organization were frighteningly harsh. Bernadette couldn’t help hesitating before she signed the dotted line. If she thought she had a say in the matter, Bernadette might have turned the job offer down.

In any ordinary circumstance, an employment contract that allowed the employer to shatter one’s soul if they thought you’d betrayed the organization, was far from the norm. Thankfully the contract at least seemed to limit those kinds of punishments to extreme circumstances where the employee attempted to cause the destruction of the organization, or purposefully caused the deaths of a large number of the organization’s members without due cause.

Bernadette wasn’t sure what to make of what happened after she signed the contract. The atmosphere at the Division was kind of muddled. The people who were able to make a good impression, or make some connection with the Division’s leadership were more or less happy with the way things were run.

The people who hadn’t been able to make contact with the leadership, or gain any real traction with the Division as a whole weren’t happy. And for most of the people there, working at the Division was just a job. A well-paying job with fairly decent benefits, and a more than adequate work-life balance thanks to the odd ways time seemed to flow within the confines of the office, but still just a job.

Bernadette couldn’t tell if the initial experience actually was Margot getting some small amount of revenge on her, or if newbies at the Division just generally had it rough. She got sent to the rawest, more hostile, less developed channels, and worlds. She was given the most tedious and degrading duties.

She was sorely disappointed when that one universe of killer-leeches and sapient mosquitos, where she almost got bitten to death, was cleared as an addition to the clockwork world.

Also for the life of her, she still wasn’t sure why she spent three weeks in Terminus-Earth Time, and an additional three months in Uhrwerk time, working in what seemed to be a chicken…*cough*...cocktrice suit. Was that an actual thing? Or was she just being messed with? She wasn’t even angry about it anymore, she just genuinely wanted to know.

The itching and heat had been so nightmarish that even now she’d sometimes wake up after having nightmares about the experience. Also, the suit seemed to have been bespelled to make her act and think like an actual cockatrice, and occasionally she’d see farm fowl on tv and find herself...having thoughts. So at this point, she kind of just wanted to know what the hell that actually was.

Weirdest of all, was the fact that eventually it all just kind of stopped. At some point, Bernadette realized that she wasn’t getting as many weird and shitty jobs anymore. The work got more normal. She found herself getting a little more respect around the office as she became less green.

Occasionally she’d run into Margot, or the enigmatic Mr. Kaylan, the office was big but not that big, so it was bound to happen. Eventually, as those little meetings kept happening the dread she felt towards them began to fade. She’d still frequently hear stories about one or both of them doing something unbelievable and existentially terrifying, but on a personal level, she’d kind of gotten used to them. Everyone at the office had.

Margot was polite but distant. The conversations with her were always kind of awkward. Though things seemed to be maybe getting better, after that one time during an elevator ride where Bernadette finally worked up the nerve to try and apologize for being such a cruel little shit when she was younger.

As for Montogomery, he was personable, but aloof. He was almost always smiling but it was near impossible to know what he was actually thinking. Those sometimes red, sometimes green, eyes of his seemed to see far too much. As if peering into a person’s soul. He had a way of putting people at ease, ‘and’ getting people’s hackles up at the same time, that left people unsure about how to feel about him.

There was also a certain air to the man. He had a certain charm that made it so that each passing day more and more people slowly were converted into being his quiet supporters. Breaking ties with whatever external groups that they may or may not have originally had ties to as Monty won their loyalty.

Overall, the two bosses of the Division of Cosmic Artifice were just slightly too normal on a personal level, for people to stay scared after the first couple of meetings. They weren’t the type of people to keep people walking on eggshells.

And unless one royally screwed up, or one ran into them directly after some idiot in one of the countless alternate realities tried to test their patience, one didn’t really get to see the part of them that made them sound so much larger than life when various groups reported on the Division’s activities.