Paperwork Woes
His glasses were blotched with faint stains. Bobby raised his fingers off the keyboard, discerning how besmirched his vision had become from blearily glaring at his computer screen. Leaning back in his reclining rolling chair, Bobby slipped off his glasses. They were slightly crooked with fingerprint blemishes. He fervently rubbed them against his Psychonauts uniform, squinting enough for his brow to furrow.
He had started losing his eyesight when he reached adulthood. His sight was a sliding scale as a boy, decreasing slightly each year until his vision plummeted when he hit eighteen. Initially, Bobby was irritated with the notion of wearing glasses. As a child, he broke glasses, but karma retributed his bullying with his pitifully poor vision, and he cursed his younger self. It took a few months to become used to the weight settling on his nose, the constant adjustments when they slid just slightly, and the way he could, at times, misplace them in his voluminous bangs when he went to simply rest them on his forehead for a brief moment.
Bobby set his glasses back in their proper place. He leaned away from his laptop, rubbing his eyes with his calloused thumb and forefinger. Monotonous clicking filled his ears with idle chatter from the hallways. He was stuck in the office section of headquarters as other agents went off on missions. Considering his hatred for paperwork, he detested himself for ignoring his important files until they were due on the very last day of his shift.
He felt trapped within the confines of the private room. The fluorescent lights were glaringly bright. His laptop obstinately whirred and fumed with heat from hours of use. Even the cool table had begun to heat up under the immense burning of the laptop. Bobby willed his laptop to remain strong as he returned to maddeningly finish his report on his last ten missions. The stack of manilla folders in the adjacent chair next to him contained all of the information he needed for transcripts of his recent mental interrogations and brain-stealing missions. Bobby thought he could have had an intern formalize everything and return it to the higher-ups without needing to stress himself.
Unfortunately, Raz reprimanded him for trying to "shirk off" his duties to a barely teenaged intern. It took all of Bobby's willpower to try and not firestart Raz' goggles whle Raz lectured him on the Psychonauts' honor. He was positive the intern filmed them, so when the satisfied Raz left, Bobby snatched the boy's pocketed phone and found the humiliating video. Bobby, channeling his inner Maloof, cut a deal with the boy. The video was deleted, and Bobby would write a stunningly stellar report on his internship if he kept quiet until the incident with Raz passed.
He was trapped muttering his irritation about Raz and only had himself to blame. He wasted time watching online videos and making plans about upcoming missions including many concerning the underground psychic street fighting scene. He craved excelling in his physical prowess, battling opponents in psychic duels. Anything went. Psychic street fights never played by any bound rules. It was like a haven for Bobby.
Even with the clock ticking in his mind, Bobby waited right down to the wire to complete his paperwork before the midnight deadline. Since he had been consistently late with paperwork, he was certain to be penalized by being taken off the street fighting missions. He dreaded such a despairing thought, knowing exercising in the gym or firing off PSI blasts in a safe environment like Chloe and JT suggested would not fully quell his aggressive tendencies.
Bobby gnawed on his peppermint gum. His fingers stabbed the keys as he telekinetically shifted through papers, typing into the forms presented on his screen. He maneuvered through manilla folders, muttering confidential information under his breath and sighed. Bobby's gaze shifted as the rapid words appeared, and he continued saving his progress every few seconds to ensure his headway.
Bobby reclined in his seat and gripped his face. A guttural groan emitted from the back of his throat. His fingers ached from his feverish typing. A faint sheen of sweat dampened his brow from the overbearing lights. Standing up, he stretched and cracked his back. He rolled his neck, hair bouncing with each movement. Taking off his glasses, he set them on the stack of compact folders resting on the table. He scrubbed his face with his worn uniform, and he shuffled to reach his glasses.
Through his blurred vision, every color meshed. The fuzzy outline of his own arm slowed as he clumsily clamored for his glasses. With a swat of his hand, Bobby snatched his glasses and knocked the entire stack of folders onto the ground. Eggshell white papers coated the weathered carpet. Documents from various missions mixed, becoming a blank canvas of sullen black lines.
Bobby's mouth flopped open, and his gum rolled out of his mouth onto the papers. He sputtered, nearly squawking over his baffling mistake. He fumbled as he slipped his glasses on the bridge of his nose. Bobby surveyed the chaotic mess of intermingling papers covering a plethora of missions and had no fathomable idea how he would organize them all again before the deadline. Checking the watch Chloe bought for him, he cursed as the midnight deadline dawned on him with only two hours remaining.
Bashing his heel into the ground like a ferocious beast, he failed to hear the door click behind him. As the door creaked open, Bobby dropped to his knees and scoured the documents. He grasped multiple pieces of paper, furthering the confusion of his miscellaneous missions and uttered wild expletives in human and alien languages.
"Um, need some help?"
The jarringly comforting yet subdued voice startled him. His knees slipped on the papers as he snapped his head over his shoulder, forcing him to fall on his bottom. The embarrassing situation dawned on him as hot crimson burned his cheeks. He covered his mouth, preventing more uncouth words to tumble out.
Crystal peered down at him, hands on her knees. She had been watching from the hallway since she noticed Bobby knocking over his array of folders. When other agents passed her and chuckled to themselves at Bobby's frenetic display, she was compelled to try to assist her fellow Whispering Rock alum. She carried a sleek laptop bag with two water bottles poking out of the unzippered portion.
"Oh, hey, uh…" Bobby trailed off. He cleared his throat, suddenly realizing he was sitting on a pile of papers and blurted, "I'm fine."
Crystal hummed, tilting her head. Her updo ponytail shifted, and the two long bangs framing her round face reminded Bobby of Milla in her Whispering Rock days. Crystal crouched, carefully selecting a few papers and skimmed them. She shrugged off her bag into the closet seat.
"Uh, those are my missions," Bobby said, feeling as if he had thoroughly embarrassed himself enough that his hollow words were pathetic.
"I know, Bobby," she chirped, grasping papers seemingly at random. "When I was an intern, I was in the paperwork section of HQ, so I had to do a lot of organizing. Lots of agents really turned in their formal documents super late, so I was part of an intern team that would help people set up their folders full of everything they needed. Y'know, kinda like what you have here."
"My damn intern wouldn't even bother to help, and Raz chewed me out for trying to make him type it," Bobby grumbled, watching Crystal piece together his documents with a light-hearted smile.
Crystal reached for a paper under his leg. When she hesitated, Bobby levitated back into his seat. He observed her for another moment and then glared at his reflection in the dusty laptop screen. Pushing back his chair, he knelt by her and shifted the through the papers.
"So, you went on the Heraldo mission? I heard that one was super tough," Crystal said, fascinated gaze fixated on her completed stack of papers for one of the folders.
"Oh, yeah. That one was about a month ago," Bobby said, lifting his head in remembrance and smirked. "His goons kept tryin' to get Chloe, but I spinkicked 'em into the wall while she saved the President of Honduras' brain."
"That sounds like something straight out of an action movie," Crystal said, fixing the second manilla folder. Handing it to him, she added, "Looks like you've gone on a lot of missions recently."
Bobby stood up, setting the two folders on his desk. "Yeah. Although I, uh, kept putting all the paperwork off. That's why there's so much of it."
He normally would not have admitted his lackadaisical error so plainly to anyone. He would have tried to conjure some excuse or blithely brushed off the situation by acting resiliently onerous. Even with Chloe, there were rare occurrences when he refused to admit to his faults until absolutely proven wrong.
"That's cool. I've been on mostly recon lately. Elka, Kitty, and I went to Harajuku to learn about a psychic yakuza crime lord, and it was seriously tough!" Crystal admitted, handing Bobby a third file. "I was kinda panicked, but Kitty and Elka kept their cool the entire time. Compared to them, I still feel like a junior agent."
He noticed the slight drabness twinging her smile. Her fake happiness had been implanted in the minds of the former Whispering Rock cadets, and her childhood agony had partially been caused by him. He was the one who even ordered Benny to steal her baby blanket and drown it in the lake with heavy rocks. A fleeting feeling of guilt compressed his heart, and he pursed his lips.
"I mean, you're still a Psychonaut, right? That's what counts," Bobby said, scratching through his hair. He quickly sat by her, stumbling through random papers only for Crystal to quietly tell him they were actually part of the same case.
"Let me guess. You knew that?" Crystal playfully asked, plucking the papers from him and swiftly organizing them.
Left briefly flustered, Bobby cleared his throat. He glanced at his watch again, finding his deadline looming over his shoulder, and Crystal caught his stare. She handed him a few more the folders bursting with papers. With only a few remaining sheets left, she let Bobby collect the stray remnants of a former mess and slap them onto the table.
"There we go! All set!" she gushed, standing up with him. "I hope you get everything settled, Bobby."
"Thanks. All this paperwork pisses me off," Bobby said, crossing his arms. "It's all transcripts and notes that I gotta make all proper for the higher-ups."
As Bobby pressed the power button on his laptop, Crystal watched him grumble over the properness of the Psychonauts. She glanced at the page count, finding he still had an extremely long way to go before completing his work.
"Sounds like you could use an assistant," Crystal noted, beaming and pointing at herself. "How about me?"
"Deadlines are so goddamn stupid. The lousy old-ass agents wanting all the-huh?" Bobby's eyes widened as he looked at her. "What'd ya say?"
Crystal gestured at her laptop bag. "I finished all my work for the day, and I was about to take off for the night, but I'm not tired at all. Besides, I've got so much experience with organizing paperwork, and since you have so much of it left to do, you'll definitely need my help!"
Her chipper voice matched her heartfelt enthusiasm as a child. All faint traces of morbidity vanished in an instant. Bobby was briefly flummoxed by her claim, but mulling over the prospect left him with little choice. He already received earfuls from his superiors berating him for his lateness with paperwork, and he desperately wanted to remain on the upcoming street fighting missions.
"Ya know what? That sounds like a great idea," Bobby said, sitting down, and she followed suit, opening her laptop bag. "I, uh, really appreciate this. Thanks."
"No problem! Just hand me like half of that stack," Crystal said, and Bobby gripped a fistful of the folders.
Crystal accepted them and promptly went to work. He gandered at her, watching her straightened back and poise, wondering how she could have changed from the frail girl from summer camp to a confident, composed agent. She was much more inclined to working in an orderly fashion, and even if she had some doubts, she managed to strive with a smile.
"You've, uh, always been the kind of person to help no matter what, huh?" Bobby asked, and Crystal momentarily stopped typing.
She sharply grinned at him. "About time you noticed, Bobby. I didn't realize you were that blind."
The remark jarred him, and she snickered. His dumbfounded expression slowly warped into amusement, adding his own chuckling. In tandem, they continued typing in comfortable silence, finishing before the formerly ominous deadline.