Here it is! A day late, but it's here! Curtisson Week 2023! I hope you're excited for some (hopefully good) food!
This was wasn't so hard to write at all, though that may have been because I tried to keep it "brief" (let's see how well that turns out...)
Anyway, Day 1's prompt is: First Meet! Here's a little thing that I thought would be a fun way for these two to get to know each other. See you at the bottom of the page!
And… send.
Burt leaned back in his chair and blew out a long breath. The week was almost over; he just needed to do the evening announcements and then he'd be free to leave the communications office.
It was his first week as the Head of Communications for the Toppats, and while he had completed every task near perfectly and on time, that didn't make it any less exhausting. The sun was going down (or so he assumed, since he didn't have any windows to look out of), so while it was probably a bad idea to get some coffee at this hour… He could use the energy to finish his last task.
Murmuring a brief AFK message into his headset, Burt pushed his chair back, stretched until his bones popped, and got up to head for the break room. His fellow communication workers idled around their own desks, some nodding to him as he passed while others were too absorbed in their work to notice. He didn't really know most of their names, but that was fine. He didn't come into work to make friends.
Burt left the office and turned down the hall to the break room door. No one was around, which was nice for his slowly impending headache. No people meant no boring conversations he had to pretend to be interested in. The thought was so enticing, actually, that he visibly jumped when someone started screaming from behind the break room door.
Burt blinked rapidly, listening to the barely muffled shouts on the other side, then sighed through his nose. He couldn't imagine what anyone would be screaming about at this hour. There was no way someone broke into the base and ended up in the breakroom; someone would have spotted them long before then. If the person screaming wasn't physically dying at that very moment, then Burt didn't care why they were making that racket. He just wanted some coffee. He opened the door and stepped into the room, observing the source of the noise.
He had never seen this man before- or maybe he had, but he just couldn't remember; he wasn't good at faces. A man in a blue suit with a matching top hat appeared to be in the middle of some sort of elaborate dance, bouncing from foot to foot and waving his hands around wildly. It was a wonder how his hat managed to stay on his head, given the way his short blonde hair seemed to be bouncing right along with him.
"Hey," Burt said, just loud enough to be heard, "could you keep it down?"
The man whirled around and stared at Burt. His blue eyes were wide, and he looked particularly gaunt and frail in the artificial lighting. He was shorter than Burt, too, by a good amount, a fact that wasn't well hidden by the man's not-so-subtle heels in his shoes. It was almost cute, in a way.
Deciding this stunned silence was the best he'd get, Burt walked further into the room towards the coffee pot, only for the man to suddenly leap at him like a wild animal. Burt grunted as the man wrapped his arms around Burt's neck, clinging to him like a koala to a tree and pointing frantically at a spot on the floor while shouting into his ear.
Burt looked to where the man was pointing, and spotted a decent-sized cockroach, lying on its back and twitching its little legs around. Ah, so that was the problem. He'd have to make a request for pest control to come in and do something about it later. Until then, it seemed it would be up to him to solve the problem. And so, without any pomp or circumstance, Burt stepped forward and squished the roach under his shoe, grinding his toe in for good measure. When he pulled his foot back, the roach was very dead.
"I fixed it, you're welcome," he said to the man gaping at the roach from his position around his neck. He carefully pried the man off of him and set him down on the floor next to him. A mistake, apparently, since the man's rage was suddenly turned on Burt.
He grabbed Burt by the collar of his shirt with both hands and started shaking him rapidly, yelling in his face. Burt watched the man's lips move, wondering vaguely how someone as short as this guy could be this loud. "Din dumma man!" He was shouting. "Varför skulle du använda din sko för att döda den? Det är äckligt! Du är äcklig! Gör aldrig det igen!"
Was that Swedish? Burt might have been able to understand what he was being yelled at for, if only the man would stop shaking him so much.
The door to the break room opened, and Burt was mildly surprised to see it was the chief's Right Hand Man who walked in. Burt managed to doff his hat to him while still being shaken. The man attempting to strangle him to death, however, didn't seem to notice the right hand until it was too late.
"Shut the hell up!" The right hand snarled, startling the Swedish man into letting Burt go. Burt stumbled back, managing to catch himself before he hit his head against the wall. "Why're you making so much racket, anyway?" The right hand continued. "Don't you have more important things to be doing?"
The Swedish man flushed a deep pink color, trembling either from suppressed tears or anger, but he managed to catch himself enough to start rambling loudly, too fast for Burt to catch anything of real meaning from.
The right hand man listened for a moment, before giving up and grabbing the Swedish man by the wrist and dragging him out of the break room without so much as a glance in Burt's direction. Burt could hear the Swedish man jabbering for a solid minute after they left.
When it was finally quiet again, Burt rubbed his temple and went to the coffee pot. Whoever that man was, he was a person of interest to the chief and his right hand, which wasn't something that happened often. Who was he? Would Burt even know who he was if he had caught his name? Probably not. …A part of him kind of wished he did, though.
His coffee mug finished filling up, and he walked back towards the office to finish his last task of the day. As he went, he glanced at the smear that had once been a dying cockroach and grimaced. Someone would have to clean that up.
…Not him, though. He was busy.
The Next Day…
The chief had called a mandatory meeting for everyone, and Burt found himself drinking from his first cup of the morning as the chief talked on and on about the legacy of the Toppat Clan. Burt was only mildly paying attention, just enough to be able to pass if he was quizzed on it later, when the chief suddenly said, "And now, I would like to introduce the newly selected third in command for the clan: Sven Svensson. Svensson, if you would?"
Burt blinked in surprise as the Swedish Toppat in blue from yesterday stepped to the front of the crowd, looking around at the others like a nervous school boy about to give a presentation in front of the class.
Burt sipped his coffee quietly, looking over the man behind the rim of his mug. Third in command, huh? Burt wasn't sure what he had expected from whoever the chief was going to choose as his eventual successor, but it definitely wasn't the loud, blustery man he'd seen fretting over a cockroach yesterday. Maybe that was just an act?
Sven's eyes suddenly fell on Burt, and without putting much thought into it, Burt winked at him with a bland expression. The reaction was instantaneous. Sven's face turned bright pink, and his hands clenched into fists as he visibly bit his lip to keep from shouting to the high heavens. The right hand man was giving him a warning look, making the man tremble all the more.
Burt smiled into his coffee. Sven was awfully cute, like an angry puppy. He wondered how else he could make the third in command lose his cool like that…
Sven's Swedish rambling, according to Google Translate: You stupid man! Why would you use your shoe to kill it? It's disgusting! You are disgusting! Never do that again!
...Yeah, it's nothing creative, but it gets the job done.
Burt definitely strikes me as the kind of guy who wouldn't go to work/get a job to make friends. But he's also a bit of an "accidentally-on-purpose" troll. He thinks Sven's over the top reactions are funny, which is why he decides to keep an eye on him. Sven, I assume, does not see the humor in the situation at all, but I imagine he'll eventually come around, especially since Burt doesn't like participating in boring conversation, and Sven hates getting interrupted. Sven does a lot of talking, Burt does a lot of listening... it works out.
Day 2's prompt should come out today, hopefully, in a few hours. Of course, I'm not the best at keeping to a schedule, so we'll have to see how that turns out. Oh well! I'll see you in the next one. Leave a review and tell me what you thought! Until then!