Title: Office Subspace
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 3727
Summary: If evil artifacts came with instruction manuals, Rule One would be "DO NOT STORE IN YOUR WORKPLACE."
Note: Written for jack_of_none for the third round of newgameplus on Dreamwidth. This is an exchange that produces wonderful things and is well worth checking out!
Master Pokey was a pretty creative kid, leaving her puzzles like this. On today's list of special cleaning instructions, he had written "BUTTS."
Electra considered this, pursing her lips and tapping her feather duster against her leg. Yesterday Master Pokey had demanded one of her cigarettes during her smoke break, and she, of course, had obliged. After cleaning up the tears and vomit and swearing never, ever, ever to tell anyone about the incident, she'd gone out and bought a consolation pack of candy cigarettes to leave on his desk.
Most likely, then, the note meant that he had chewed all the sticks of cigarette-shaped gum and left them stuck to ashtrays both official and creative around the Monotoli Building. Electra was never bored working here.
Something hit her foot amid a sudden chorus of pings, rattles, and whirs. Startled, Electra kicked a bread crust across the hall and glared after the little robot rounding the corner in a cloud of crumbs. Apparently her "PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE ROBOT" signs weren't working.
One of the quirkier janitorial robots had recently developed a fondness for bologna sandwiches and a corresponding inability to notice the mess it made trying to eat them. Maintenance repeatedly claimed to have fixed it, but every call to maintenance resulted in a robot with a more diverse arsenal and an undiminished passion for sandwiches. Electra had stopped calling after it acquired missiles.
She retrieved a vacuum cleaner from her supply closet and set off in pursuit. Master Pokey's gum butt hunt would have to wait.
The trail of crumbs led her into Mr. Monotoli's office, which was, as usual, empty; he spent most of his time with the Minches now. With the power of the hose attachment, she sucked crusts out of the golden cushions of Mr. Monotoli's sofas, the fur of his stuffed bear, and the leaves of an unfortunate ficus plant that it wasn't anyone's job to water.
This left the closet. Electra braced herself. Something about closets made the little robot experiment with mayonnaise.
When she opened the door, she caught a whiff of spoiled condiments before her vision went explosively white. She tumbled backward with a yelp and tried not to think about the little robot's horrible collection of beams.
The floor caught her, painfully. She probably wouldn't have a sore tailbone if she'd been lasered to death, so she took a deep breath and forced her eyelids to stop squeezing together. After a bemused moment, she rubbed her eyes, screwed them shut again, and started over. The room was far too dark for what she knew of Mr. Monotoli's feelings on black paint, and every edge bled neon light.
On her third attempt to open her eyes and see the world as it was supposed to be, a man dressed like one of Mr. Monotoli's bodyguards appeared in her field of vision. In a voice like a slide whistle, he said, "Welcome to Moonside. Comewel to Sidemoon."
Her effort to take a step backward was stymied by the closed closet door. "Um, are you feeling okay?"
"No, just fine." He adjusted his sunglasses, and the lenses expanded, molding to his contours, until his entire head was tinted and shiny. "Ahh, that's even better."
Electra sidled three steps away before breaking into a run for the exit. Things hadn't been this weird even when she accidentally spilled bleach in the glass cleaner. If she could get back to her room, she could barricade herself inside and survive on her stash of marshmallows and candy bars until the world sorted itself back out or the ambulance arrived.
She skidded to a halt in the black hallway; the path back to her room was blocked by a jungle of overgrown ficus plants with leaves that reminded her of teeth. The bright gold lines of her door shone faintly through gaps in the foliage.
"I'm having a nightmare," she decided aloud. Her voice came out almost firmly enough to soothe her. Taking a deep breath, she tried to remember what she'd heard at the yoga class she once briefly interrupted while looking for her jazzercise group. "You're blocking everyone's chi," mostly. That didn't seem helpful now.
The sound of a someone booming, "Clock in!" behind her shattered all efforts at inner peace.
"You know, it's only a nightmare at night," said the boomer, a very blond man wearing the sort of loud shirt and ratty shorts that shouldn't have made it past security. He smelled faintly of salt water and sunscreen and wore sunglasses, an accessory that Electra no longer trusted. "That's why they wake you up. Otherwise, the sun can't rise."
"I'm pretty sure that's not how it works," she replied, but the man wagged his finger at her.
"It's always midnight in Moonside. And... clock out!"
Electra didn't move quickly enough to dodge the thumb he poked into her shoulder with enough force to knock her backward. She kept falling long past the point at which the floor should have caught her, tumbling head-over-heels through a neon-streaked void.
Her feet struck something solid, and gravity tentatively agreed that it was the ground. Years of dusting high shelves in high heels allowed Electra to catch her balance with minimal wobbling.
Her landing spot appeared to be the middle of Mr. Minche's office, or at least what his office would look like after someone dipped it in ink and picked out the lost contours with fireflies. Electra almost regretted her failure to experiment with psychedelic drugs in high school, as this would have prepared her better for her current job than keyboarding class.
She had cigarettes, at least, and she badly needed to smoke one. As she headed for glowing pink outline of the window, a series of rapid-fire clicking noises froze her. "Who's there?"
"Hello!" replied a tiny voice from the direction of the desk. There was no one near it, a discrepancy which resolved itself when Electra spotted a paperclip bouncing on top of a pile of its fellows. On closer examination, it had a tiny face to match its cartoon character voice.
"Welcome to Moonside," it added, in chorus with the rest of the paperclips. One clipped itself to the bottom of the first paperclip, dragging it into a jumbled chain. It giggled.
This seemed to be the sort of place in which the obvious needed not only to be stated but to be followed by a question mark. "You're paperclips?"
"Yes. Why would we clip paper?" Its tiny eyebrows arched as two more of its fellows hooked together with a shrugging motion. "We clip each other."
Electra had long suspected that this was their true function. "So you're clipclips?"
"No," it replied brightly. Another clip latched on above its eyes. "Welside to Mooncome."
"Wait." She glanced around for anyone who might be likely to clock her out though space before continuing, "I think I'm getting the hang of this. Everyone here says 'no' then they mean 'yes,' right? And 'yes' when they mean 'no'?"
The clipclip grinned. "No."
"And here is Moonside?"
"No. Why, you're practically a native!"
Despite everything, Electra beamed at the closest thing she'd heard lately to a compliment. "So how do I get back home?"
"Home?" The lead clip conferred in whispers with the others before replying, "This is home. In Mani Mani's home, the soup is always hot and the knife is always sharp."
Electra did not press for details. "I mean, how do I get anywhere else?"
"There's yeswhere else," said the clip. There's only Moonside."
"Only Moonside," the rest echoed. "On lymo onsi de."
"But there hasto be somewhere else, because I came from there. I have a job. And friends. I pay bills." The clipclips looked skeptical, and Electra was beginning to feel as if she were talking to her mother. "Okay, look. How can you welcome me to Moonside if there's nowhere else I could have come from?"
"Like this!" The clips drew in noisy little breaths and arranged themselves into a jagged circle. "Welcome to Moonside!"
She let out a noisy sigh and turned toward the door. Maybe leaving the building would help.
A quick whiff of the beach hit her as the door opened inward to reveal either the same obnoxious person she'd met before or his identical, equally unfashionable friend. He grinned and held up a hand in the shaka sign. "Clock in!"
Electra had once successfully sprinted four blocks in a tight skirt and stilettos to catch a purse-snatcher. Of course, her fleetness didn't come in quite as handy in an enclosed space. The "Clock out!" jab caught her between the shoulder blades, and she narrowly avoided twisting an ankle when solid tile broke her freefall.
The hand she flung out for balance struck a swinging stall door. This was what the forty-eighth floor ladies' room might look like if disgruntled former employees redecorated it.
On the bright side, this room was likely to be free of men who could push her through the floor. Probably. Maybe. Who knew how gender worked in Moonside?
The echo of Electra's rapid heel-clicks as she headed for the exit suggested that the bathroom was somehow the size of the entire Fourside department store. As she passed the last stall, something within gurgled what sounded like Mani Mani.
"Don't come out of there!" She brandished her feather duster and dug in her pockets for her lighter. For a giddy moment, turning the duster into a weapon of blazing destruction struck her as a fantastic idea. Then the moment passed, and she elected to back away.
"Seriously, don't come out," she added. "I think I'm going crazy, and you wouldn't like me when I'm crazy."
The gurgling intensified.
Balancing on her left foot, Electra pulled the shoe off her right, gripped the four-inch heel, and hurled it over the stall door. The solid thump of impact was followed by hideous squelching noises. When Electra removed her other shoe, a flicker in the corner of her eye drew her projectile panic.
She had exactly enough time to recognize her own pale reflection before the bathroom mirror shattered. She hoped bad luck didn't work the same way in Moonside. Wincing at the feeling of cold, slightly sticky tile against her stocking feet, she sidled away from the broken glass.
Metal bumped into her back. Heart thumping, she whirled and shook the feather duster at what turned out to be a hand-dryer. "Oh," she said, trying to ignore her own echoes. "Okay. Um. Sorry." Electra didn't usually talk to appliances, but she'd just carried on a full conversation with office supplies and didn't want to discriminate. "Didn't see you there."
The hand-dryer raised its metal vent like an elephant's trunk and blasted her with a gust of air powerful enough to knock her out into the hall.
"I said I was sorry!" she shouted back at the bathroom door. In the next moment, she caught a faint whiff of sunscreen, realized that she wasn't far from the elevator, and took off at a run.
The door between her and the elevator opened to admit her new least favorite person. Electra turned and darted into the conference room on her left, slamming the door shut and locking it behind her. Not that a door was likely to stop someone who blithely ignored the laws of physics, but it made her feel better.
"Hello," said a woman's voice. With some trepidation, Electra turned to find that the speaker was perched on the edge of the conference table and outfitted for surgery. The mask over her mouth did not at all muffle her voice, perhaps because it was painted with candy-red lips that moved as she spoke. "Please be quiet. It's almost time."
"Time for what?" Electra asked, and was shushed. She shrugged and made her way to the pink outline of the window, which afforded a magnificent view of Fourside—or what Fourside would look like stripped down to skeleton and corners, set aglow, and put out to drift in a black abyss. Going outside probably wasn't going to help, after all.
But what mattered at the moment was that the window opened. Electra shook out a cigarette, flicked her lighter, and improved her day. The surgeon didn't seem to mind, even when she inhaled deeply and blew a smoke ring out into the void.
Her little moment of bliss ended when the phone on the table began to ring Mani Mani, Mani Mani. Every phone in the Monotoli Building rang loudly enough to catch the attention of an old man three rooms away, which was probably intentional.
"Time to operate," said the surgeon. A shiny scalpel flashed into her hand, and she pulled it delicately along the plastic seam of the receiver until the ringing stopped.
There was no good response to this. Instead Electra took another long, soothing drag on her cigarette and, after a quick check for a face, flicked the ashes into the nearby wastebasket.
The surgeon's painted lips curved into a grin. "Congratulations! If you take good care of that little guy, maybe someday you can have a real fire."
Electra opened her mouth to protest that she didn't understand, but then suddenly, gloriously, Mani Maniously, she did: a little orange flame gazed up at her from the wastebasket, pricking its ears and wagging its tail. "Aww!" she cooed. "Good boy!"
"Are you sure you're ready?" asked the surgeon. "You'll have to feed it."
"Yes. I mean, no. I mean..." Electra bit her lip and nudged a tray of paperwork over the edge of the table. The little flame devoured them eagerly. "Maybe. Sit, boy. Stay."
It blazed higher but remained in roughly the same place, so she rewarded it with a legal pad before heading back into the hall. A quick glance in either direction revealed no rogue beach bums.
A security guard strode by with his head encased by his glasses. Electra caught herself thinking that this was sensible for a man whose bald head probably envied the pampering of his eyes. If her hair fell out, her scalp would probably get all sorts of ideas. She wondered how her hair held on so tightly, anyway.
A ficus plant shook its leaves at her in what she understood as a greeting. A wandering fax machine sucked up sheets of paper and stripped off their text. A shadow grinned at her, giving her a glimpse of what cast it from the inside out. Mani Mani, Mani Mani, beat the heart of the world.
Electra felt a little strange.
"Oh," she said. "Oh. I think I get it."
A deeply tanned shaka sign shook in front of her face. "Clock in?" asked the man attached to it.
"Clock out," she replied, and dived laughing through the wall.
Mr. Monotoli's office was four seconds west of anywhere and a lovely place to pass the time, especially when the stuffed bear was alive. When the bear wasn't, Electra rolled the fancy chair into the center of the floor, tucked her knees to her chin, and spun until all the world was streaks of black and neon. All the world was Moonside. The moon was all worldside.
She slowed when the door to the hall transformed into an open doorway. Through it walked a harried old man who looked remarkably like her employer, at least until he stepped on the patch of floor that turned things into hat racks. He took another step and became a man, because of course a hat rack couldn't walk.
Electra put her foot down to halt her revolution. "Is that you, Mr. Monotoli?"
He scowled at her. "Yes, of course."
"Of course!" She laughed and spun again in the chair, trailing pastel lights. "What would Mr. Monotoli be doing here? Welcome to Moonside. Edisnoom ot emoclew."
The man who was not Mr. Monotoli backed away, wobbling as he briefly became a hat rack again. "You're in, aren't you? How did that happen?"
"Shhh." She tapped her finger four times against her lips, Mani Mani. "I'm busy."
"No, you're sitting in my chair. Snap out of this and get back to work."
She tapped her lips again, more insistently. "I amat work. I'm cleaning up the noise for Mani Mani."
"Don't be ab—urph!" He tipped backward, arms whirling, as she sprang at him and shoved her feather duster into his mouth. The sounds were clean now. None of his language.
Satisfied, Electra stopped believing in floors until her feet found a more interesting one.
"Get down from there!" shouted a voice from the ceiling.
She peered up at an old man with feathers clinging to his suit. He looked exactly like an enraged version of Mr. Monotoli and the other old man who looked exactly like Mr. Monotoli but wasn't. One more would make a lucky quartet.
Electra grinned to show him all her teeth, including the ones that didn't belong in her mouth. "Wolcemo te Moonsedi."
Muttering in red, the man stomped over to the door behind which the world pulsed hot and sharp. As the doorknob took his hand, the walls began to scream.
"I don't need this today," he said, followed by all manner of colors. The door fell away from the undying heat and unblunted edge. "That's enough."
The world flooded with fluorescent light and implacable gravity.
Electra blinked and watched Mr. Monotoli's beige rug swim in and out of focus just past the tip of her nose. The stuffed bear wasn't laughing at her, which seemed less absurd as the surface beneath her continued not to be featureless darkness. She pushed her upper body off the floor and attempted to make sense of herself. The piercing noise wasn't helping.
"You've been hallucinating," said Mr. Monotoli's voice. Electra twisted her neck to find him seated behind his desk, flipping through his overstuffed rolodex. "You don't want to talk about it."
She didn't. "Is that the fire alarm?"
He stopped a falling card with his forefinger. "You have the rest of the day off. Go on, shoo."
"Um, shouldn't you leave the building, too, sir?"
"No." As Electra got unsteadily to her feet and tottered toward the exit, Mr. Monotoli dialed his phone and began, "That's a nice café you've got down there, Jackie. Shame if anything were to happen to it. ...Listen, never mind the noise..."
When she reached the door, two concerns occurred to her; first, that she had sixty-seven flights of stairs to descend, and second, that she had a strange and sudden void in her life. "Mr. Monotoli, sir, have you ever heard of something like 'Mani Mani'?"
He cupped his hand over the receiver and snapped, "Get out." He'd been terribly cranky lately.
With a tired shrug, Electra padded down the hall to the emergency exit.
The world still felt fuzzy the next morning when Electra emerged from her room in the Monotoli Building, possibly because she'd had two bags of candy and a pack of cigarettes for dinner after the firefighters finally let her back inside. She hadn't slept well, either, being irrationally terrified by the prospect of bad dreams. Her rational terrors centered on whether she still had a job today, though the fact that Mr. Monotoli hadn't fired her yesterday gave her hope.
Either way, she was never going to clean his closet again, even if he asked nicely.
Genia sat behind the first-floor reception desk today. Normally this would be the highlight of Electra's morning, but she wasn't much inclined to talk about yesterday, and the look on Genia's face as she waved Electra over suggested that yesterday would be the only topic on the table.
Just a little too loudly, Genia whispered, "I still can't believe it! They said you trashed a bathroom and started a fire, but it wasn't your fault because you had ninety-nine ice coffees, and if you'd had a hundred, you would have died." She paused to lift a ringing phone's receiver from its cradle and drop it right back in place. "I didn't even know you liked ice coffee."
"Neither did I."
Another phone failed to be answered in the way the caller anticipated. "Anyway, I sure wish I'd been here yesterday. They shut the whole place down, and everyone got to go home early. That's so much better than that dumb gas leak that had us standing around in the rain for an hour."
"Yeah, I remember that." At least the gas leak hadn't been Electra's fault. She fidgeted a moment before asking, "I'm still on the payroll, right?"
"Oh, of course! Mr. Monotoli said it really wasn't your fault about the ice coffee." Apparently he was still a good guy, despite how gruff he'd been recently. "But the repairs are coming out of your salary." Just not thatgood.
Still, Electra had kept her job, and keeping her job meant that she wouldn't have to move back into her mother's home anytime soon. "Home" was a mildly disconcerting word now; yesterday's hallucinations, whatever had induced them, were already fading out of memory, but something lingered in the gaps between her heartbeats.
Mani Mani, Mani Mani, rang one of the telephones. Electra shivered and excused herself.
When she returned to her room, she found a memo slipped under her door, informing her that today's special task was "TROUT YOGURT." After failing to interpret "trout" as any sort of verb, she was forced to conclude that it was a flavor. Master Pokey was turning into a real gourmet.
Fancy yogurt flavors seemed like the sort of thing to be found at Fourside's department store, which was also, coincidentally, just the place to buy a new pair of shiny black heels. Electra took a bag of flavored marshmallows from her private stash, scrawled, "Hope this tides you over!" on a sticky note, and headed down to Master Pokey's office on her way out.
In a cloud of discarded bolts and breadcrumbs, the difficult little robot scampered across her path. Electra resolutely ignored it.