Heard It in the Break Room
~ Dedicated to the Madness Combat Fanfic Revolution. ~
The break room was always full of smoke, harsh mutters and the occasional bark of laughter or curse aimed at someone across the way. The agents all gathered here during their time off, lounging around still in their suits, some with their handguns still at the belt just in case they were called out at short notice. This was the place where most AAHW agents who were not as involved in the corps as much as they'd have liked to would come, since they still had the time and carefree attitude to consider their jobs a punch-clock thing. Alcohol and cigarettes, very much restricted out in the line of duty, were handed out liberally here. There would also be parties should there ever be something to celebrate, such as the elimination of a high class enemy, but when there wasn't an excuse the men would amuse themselves with conversation or card games.
Two Elites came into the room and placed themselves at a far table in the corner. Out came the drinks, a cigarette for one of them and his partner produced a deck of cards which he began to shuffle.
They started playing, alternating between drinking and making their moves whilst occasionally shouting in a curse at how close one of them got to Gin before the other revealed his winning hand first. Their noise and activity blended perfectly into the ambience of the break room, and as they played away a few more agents filtered in and positioned themselves where they wanted to be with whatever they wanted. One agent came in and spotted the two card players at the back, making a beeline straight for them.
"Jim, Hal, nice seeing you guys in here," called the new agent, seating himself down next to the smoker and taking one of his cigarettes whilst he was at it. "What's up?"
"Nothing much Sid, just trying to catch this punk out," Jim (the non-smoker) grumbled, pointing at a grinning Hal who seemed to be confident he was winning this round.
Sid just laughed and called over to an agent loitering near the drinks table, "Get me a beer, could ya?" before he glanced at Hal's hand and smirked to himself. "Good luck with that. Get me in next game."
"Sure," mumbled Jim, knocking back the remains of his glass and squinting into it, deciding how much he could get away with before he was called back out and would have to do his job tipsy.
Hal drew a card, grinned, and after putting it into his hand flicked some of his ash into Jim's face as he showed his hand. "Gin!"
"Damn it, Hal," groaned Jim, throwing his near-completed hand down onto the table.
Sid joined in Hal's laughter as he lit up his own cigarette and offered Hal another to replace his last, and the agents quickly set up a new game including the third man. The agent Sid had requested a drink from earlier placed an open bottle of beer next to him before wandering back over to the bar.
"Hey buddy, want in?" Sid called out after him, but the agent just dismissed him with a wave of his hand and opened himself a bottle of soda with a pop and a hiss.
"Oh well, if we had another guy we could try poker and actually wager stuff," Jim said, starting to deal hands again. "What you been up to, Sid?"
"Training some grunts, induction and all that," smirked the other agent as he took the first turn and rejected the card he picked. "Not a bad lot, though they ask a hell of a lot of dumb questions, especially if they're from out of Nevada."
"What sort of dumb questions?" Hal mused, playing next.
"One of them started asking about the posters around the camp, why's it so dark, who's running this place," Sid scoffed. "Auditor help him if he actually gets anywhere around here before his mouth loses him his head."
The trio laughed to themselves for a bit and played on.
As Jim played his turn, he looked at Sid and asked, "Hey, why do you guys always use the boss's name like that anyhow? Is it just me who thinks that's weird or what?"
Hal made a noise in the back of his throat which sounded like a smoker's cough morphed into a laugh. "Yeah, just you Jim. No, seriously, have you not heard the joke? I suppose it goes round only with us guys who are asked to ship equipment. The ATPs tend to leave standard procedure and instructions pasted on weapons transport crates, and they always sign it off with something like 'Auditor help you if you are found to have breached any of these regulations'."
"Sort of became a running joke amongst us guys working there," Sid continued with a chuckle. "Come on, it's not like it's offensive or anything."
"Just makes me wonder though," Jim shrugged, carrying on with the game. "I mean, nobody here's ever seen the guy, have they?"
"Of course not," Sid snorted with a wave of his hand. "You think any higher authority is actually going to roam around with us lowly grunts? Nope."
"What about the ATPs and higher commanders, then?" Hal asked. "I mean, he must relay orders somehow, otherwise how are we getting co-ordinated? And also, some of the guys from the West 3B base that got transferred here say they'd seen him up close."
"How can you take their word for it? Besides, I don't think he even exists," Sid said back, making his friends look at him funnily.
Sid just smirked and carried on casually playing his turn whilst explaining himself. "I mean to say, I don't actually think there is a single guy called the Auditor who sits in some secret office base like some Bond villain. I mean, look at that poster up there-" He pointed to a flier pinned to the break room's noticeboard, where amongst random reminders and messages to certain individuals, there was a motivational poster featuring the commonest depiction of the Auditor; a pitch black background with two slanted red eyes glaring out at them. "Look at that, that's some 'Big Brother is watching you' shit right there. The Auditor is just a symbol of the AAHW higher authority, like Uncle Sam."
Hal extinguished his cigarette and frowned over Sid's words. "Hold up. So you're saying there isn't a head of the AAHW at all, and this Auditor thing is just a made up figurehead?"
"No, I mean there has to be some big boss guy running the show for us, but he ain't the Auditor like that. He's probably just a very highly confidential guy since, you know, he's head of the AAHW and all. If the rebels found out who he was and got a chance to off him, well, we'd be royally screwed." Sid swigged his beer. "Or maybe like you said, he's just a figurehead. Maybe there is basically just a council of higher ups, likely made of ATPs or higher agent folk like that, who make it all up together and use the Auditor as a symbol of their power to keep us idiots in line."
"You're one of those closet conspiracy theorists, aren't you Sid?" Jim said, half laughing and half rolling his eyes.
"Hey, whatever they're doing, it's working right?"
Jim scoffed and shook his head, playing with his empty glass still. "Alright, Sid, I would kind of believe you, but this is you assuming things can't get a bit freaky round here."
"What do you mean by that, Jim?"
"I mean, do you even remember the time the sun suddenly went out and shit went insane out in the streets one day? And now all this weird stuff with the new red sun and it being dark even in the daytime? I saw a motherfucking whale fall out of the sky once. After that, thinking of some weird shadowy dude with red eyes being our boss is not out of the question."
This made the other two laugh, but Hal wasn't doing it derisively. Hal pointed at Jim and nodded in agreement, "You got a good point there, Jim. You two remember what I said earlier, about those guys from transfer who claimed to have seen the Auditor themselves before? Well, let me tell you what I heard from them."
The other two leant nearer to Hal as he spoke, momentarily ignoring their game. So intent on listening they were, they ignored a brief blare of a klaxon signalling for any agents currently resting in the break room to return to work, leaving only the three agents at the back and the agent at the drinks table. Some agents just off their shifts lingered since they had the time, but otherwise the trio remained in place and ignored.
Hal spoke in a hushed tone to the other two. "So I heard from these guys, one day their agency base was having a party to celebrate a successful hit. So that means none of it was unauthorised or out of bounds, but you know how some things tend to get wild after a lot of booze and lax supervision. There they were partying, dancing, cards, bets and all that jazz, when suddenly everything just went dead and the party stopped like that. The guys I spoke to said they were just off the side and just having a good time unlike some of the other guys who were completely shitfaced and stumbling around yelling stuff they would never be caught saying sober. The second things went quiet, they said, and I quote, 'it was like all the fun had been sucked out of the room' like some kind of Dementor shit. Everyone froze and looked to the door, and there was the Big A himself.
"Now it gets better; they were a little reluctant at first, but when I asked them what they saw I couldn't see any lie in it. They seemed pretty legit, since they seemed genuinely cowed about it and all of them said the same thing. As they have it, the Auditor is literally what we see in the posters – a black figure with huge red eyes that stare right into your soul. Apparently, he looks like a man if he were made out of black stuff, so dark he looked like a person-shaped hole in the fabric of reality. Even the drunkest guy there stopped dead when he saw who'd turned up, and I wouldn't blame him.
"So this is where it gets freaky. The Auditor doesn't like parties at all, especially when news had just come up in the meantime that another base had fallen to the rebels whilst they'd been celebrating. It was honestly nobody's fault in there, but it was no place for partying at all. So he stood there in the doorway, staring at all these guys, and didn't even say a thing for them to start packing up and haul ass out of there. However, some unfortunate guy who was standing too near and just crapping himself in fear of the Auditor, he got the worst demotion. One of the witnesses said he saw this poor bastard standing in front of the Auditor, and then the Auditor used his bare hands to punch into his torso and pull out his spine through his chest. Dropped it, blood, bones and all, in the middle of the ground, and disappeared in a puff of smoke. That was it."
Jim and Sid shared looks after hearing that tale, Sid looking like he was ready to laugh again and Jim just looking unsure.
"That sounds like some horror movie trash than an eyewitness account," Sid said to all that. "Are you sure they were sober, or you weren't smoking something that wasn't tobacco at the time?"
"Yeah, very funny," Hal huffed. "And alright, there's no way confirming it, but that's what I hear. I mean, if a good handful of guys can come up with the same story at once and weren't conspiring for some elaborate prank or mass hallucinating, who am I to say? Like Jim said, I don't think any of us here have seen this Auditor guy ourselves."
"But listen to yourself," Sid argued. "Are you telling me our boss is some spine-ripping Eldritch abomination made of darkness who can disappear in thin air? What the hell even makes that remotely reasonable? Why would some demon thing like that run an entire military agency, and not just use magical mumbo-jumbo and stuff ghouls do?"
"I don't know, but I also heard from some other guys he does use magic, or something pretty supernatural too," Hal shrugged, waving his hands as if to defend himself from Sid's criticisms. "Like, not only can he appear and disappear anywhere, but they say sometimes he looks like he's covered in flames, and he can actually use them, and he can summon shit like weapons out of nowhere and vanish them again."
"Now you're just speaking crazy," Sid scoffed.
Jim, quiet since they'd started having a go at each other, interjected; "Going back to what I said, though, is it really?"
The other two stopped their debate and turned to the third man, listening to what he had to say on the matter.
"Guys, you know about that stuff with the sky and whales falling out of nowhere, right?" Jim asked. "You ever heard how they say it's all actually something the secret research the top of the AAHW are doing? They say it's all science, some sort of secret experiment into other dimensions and manipulating the laws of physics and probability. I'm not a scientist, but I can believe in that more than mysterious supernatural stuff. Maybe the Auditor is linked to all of that somehow."
"But in what way?" Sid asked. "You mean that he just dropped out of the sky like that whale you were talking about?"
"Or maybe he operates on that sort of 'science'," Jim suggested. "Maybe he is a person who got transformed by all those reality warping experiments, whether on purpose or on accident I don't know. So that could explain all the crazy accounts surrounding him, and then all this paraphernalia and stuff using the image is bouncing off all of that."
"Right, so we've either got a made-up figurehead image who is like Uncle Sam crossed with Satan, a demon abomination or a science experiment gone wrong," Hal said, sitting back and gesturing at the other two. "Take your pick."
"Sid's theory would make sense if only we could actually believe in normal things any more around here," Jim sighed, shaking his head. "You know, maybe we're all right in our own way. Maybe the transfers from West 3B did see someone getting killed at a party, maybe by means unnatural but not improbable, and then the accounts all got twisted up and changed as the rumour mill went on and they're all now using it as a horror story to keep us in check." He raised his hands in a 'don't shoot me for what I said' gesture. "Just saying, maybe we can't ever know."
"I think that's a cop out, Jim," Sid said back, finishing his beer and putting it aside. "Come on, there has to be one answer, or at least one thing we think is the answer we can agree on. Hal, what do you say? You sticking with your horror stories?"
Hal scowled back. "If you're sticking with your higher power conspiracy, I'm actually inclined to believe what those agents said to me in some way. Like Jim said, maybe it was exaggerated, but it still stands I think there is something unnatural going on."
Huffing, Sid then glanced around the now-emptied break room and spied the only other person left in there: The agent quietly sipping at his soda who was hovering near the drinks table.
"Hey, you, you were listening to all that right?" Sid called, getting the lone agent to pause and tilt his head slightly their way. "What do you think?"
The bystander agent slowly finished his drink, and set the empty bottle back down the table very calmly, before turning around. He then started to emit a low, crawling chuckle as he made his way towards them.
The three agents could only stop dead and stare in shock, eyes wide and mouths slowly falling open as the man's suit and his skin started to burn off, lapping with pitch black flames, until his agent appearance was entirely gone from sight.
"I think, gentlemen," said the Auditor, "that break time is over."