Welcome to the Family™
This work contains CWs for: violence, drugging/intoxication, and descriptions of gore.
A Wondertastic and Splendidly Whimsical Employee Onboarding by mxsinister
Fables & Folklore
Truth and Consequence
Once upon a time, there was a seamstress who sewed garments for the royal family.
One day, the queen gave her two spools of thread. One, golden and tough, was called Truth; the other, silver and fine, was christened Consequence.
"You must never sew them into the same cloth," the queen warned the seamstress. "For fear the kingdom should face both."
For many years, the seamstress obeyed. She wove silver cloaks for the judge, golden hats for the general.
Then, one day, the prince came to her with a request.
"I am to be wed this winter. I will need proper dress," said the prince. "I must have a coat—gorgeous and bold, sewn of silver and gold."
And so the seamstress set to work, difficult as it proved to be. Truth kept getting tangled, and Consequence always drew blood. A needle holding both threads would burn bright white and melt between her calloused fingertips.
But alas, winter came, and the wretched coat had been woven.
On the day of the wedding, each guest was besuited in grand finery. None, however—not even the bride—were so well dressed as the prince in his dazzling attire.
When the prince opened his mouth, what spilled forth were not promises, but confessions. Truth of all the worst kinds—affairs, betrayals, crimes.
The royal family, under the eyes of all, had their secrets laid bare with nowhere now to hide. And so consequence arrived, uninvited, before the knot could be tied.
Only when his discretion had unraveled entirely did the prince realize what he had done. Mad with panic and regret, he decreed that dead men tell no tales. Gossip, he figured, could only go so far from the gallows.
Before the ceremony's end, the seamstress pictured her dangling feet. But better to hang, she decided, than to live past allowing truth and consequence to meet.
By “Piecework” Piper Elison, Class of 2017
pg.9
November 14, 2016
A songbird landed on Piper’s open window, tweeting once to get her attention. Upon closer inspection, its body was made of parchment paper, its beady, ink-black eyes staring curiously straight through her. As soon as she touched her fingertips to the top of its head, it fluttered apart and shaped into a perfectly rectangular and creaseless letter.
Piper let out a theatrical gasp as she took in the contents, gleefully finishing her second read-through when her roommate entered their dorm. Before Aya could say a word, Piper let out an excited shriek and threw herself into a hug. Aya swore in surprise, dropping her bag just in time to catch her. Every stitch in Piper’s body vibrated with elation.
“I got in, Aya! I got in!” She said, giggling joyously.
“Wha—” Aya cocked her head. “Wondertainment?”
Piper nodded fervently, then sat on the pink patchwork comforter of her bed before beginning to read the letter out loud:
“To one dearest Miss Piper Elison—Muchest Congratulations! We were certainly impressed with your performance and portfolio, and we’re curious to see how you’ll continue to wow us. If this job is something you really, really, really want (and really, why wouldn’t you?), then we’d like for you to come in as soon as possible to begin onboarding you. Please provide dates and times that work for you from the slots provided below, then return this letter to the sender in its original packaging. If origami isn’t your strong suit, we do have a PO box. Whimsically, Dr. Wondertainment and associates!”
Piper set the letter back in her lap and beamed.
“So that’s it, huh?” Aya said with a wry smile as she took a seat on her own bed. “You’re going corporate?”
Piper rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “For the most whimsical corporation in the worlds! Hardly counts, Aya.”
Aya shrugged. “Maybe if you’re an artist.”
“Mm, I’ll get paid more in marketing.”
“Very whimsical motivations.”
Piper shrugged in turn, a smile playing on her painted lips. “Some of us have student loans, luv.”
Piper thought that would be the end of it. She’d already started filling out calendar slots in pink glitter gel pen when Aya spoke again.
“So you’re going to spend your career shoving whimsy down people’s throats for forty hours a week?”
Piper did not attempt to match Aya’s overly sardonic amusement as her patchwork hands pressed a smooth crease into the parchment.
“It’s a matter of providing people the opportunity to embrace whimsy, thank you.”
“Ah, even better. You’re selling childhood to children,” Aya chuckled. “God, they’ve got you drinking the Kool-Aid already, huh?”
Piper’s rosy brow furrowed as she smoothed out the origami bird’s wing with her thumb, her polka-dot manicure still fresh from her interview.
“Congratulations, Piper,” she said in a snipped tone.
Aya cocked her head. “What?”
“That was supposed to be your only line,” Piper told her. “Congratulations."
November 19, 2016
The room she’d been in for her first interview had been decorated with polka-dots, smiley faces, and an unnatural amount of natural light. The room she was in now, by comparison, seemed sterile and official, with the diffused light from the overhead bulbs shifting slowly into a more crimson hue.
There, Piper met a very red man with red eyes, red cheeks, red lips, a red suit, and red red red everything save for his chalky flesh and the slash of too-white smile.
"Thanks for coming in today, Piecework," he said, shaking her stitched hand with a comparably synthetic one. "May I call you Piecework? You’ll find nicknames catch on very quickly here, so it’s convenient that you already have one.”
“Good to know. Yes, Piecework will do just fine," she said, smoothing out her skirt as she sat down, facing him across the table. "And what might I call you?”
“Mr. Redd—that’s spelled with two D’s. I'm a Chief Operating Officer around here." He steepled his hands in front of him, his fingerless red leather gloves revealing the chipped red polish on his nails. “As we said in the letter, we’ve already decided we’d like you in the company, so there’s no reason to worry, okay? I just want to ask a few more questions so we can get you properly onboarded.”
“Okay!” Piper folded her hands in her lap and focused on keeping her posture as perfect as possible.
“Wonderful! First, are you any good at poker?”
What an odd question, she thought. Then again, oddity was the name of the game around here. So, like any excellent poker player, Piper simply shrugged and replied: “I’m okay.”
“Hmm… any allergies?”
She bit the inside of her lip in thought, then perked up. "Synthetic fabric breaks me out. Does that count?"
"Yes, it does. Interseting…" Redd said, his eyes gleaming inquisitively. "What are you wearing, then?"
"This is all one-hundred percent cotton," she informed him, gesturing to her dress before tugging at a pastel patch sewn into the side of her hand so he could see.
"Ah, I see! Very nice." Redd said, smiling and nodding before casually blindsiding her: “Anyway, who helped you forge your documents?”
Piper tensed, her composure momentarily lapsing. The resulting silence was so absolute that even the ticking of the clock above the door seemed suddenly deafening.
“It’s okay,” Redd assured her. “You can say you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said evenly, fighting the urge to shift at all in her seat.
“Ah, that’s good! Very good!” He said delightedly. “Cards on the table, though: we know the documents in your Deer College admissions file are phony. Very good phonies, though, I’ll give you that! If they were bad, we wouldn’t be here. What I want to know is how and why."
Piper took a deep breath, squeezing her hands in her lap as she gave Mr. Redd the honest truth:
"I was friends with some artists I knew were doing forgeries on the side," she said. "I figured out what their respective specialties were and ordered accordingly. I told no one of them that I was doing business with any of the others."
"So you knew," Redd said, narrowing his eyes. "But why did you need them?"
Piper's thumb ran slowly over the golden floss at the seam between her skin and a patch of purple cotton. She'd picked out her modifications that morning specifically to emulate Wondertainment's brand colors, for all the good that might do her.
“I don’t have official documents," she admitted simply. "I don’t think I ever did."
Redd's head tilted. Piper held his gaze with determination, but she couldn't help wishing he would blink just once, for her sake.
"Oh? Please continue."
"My mother was a tailor, see—and she always told me that she wanted a little girl, so she sewed me. She died a few years later, though, and then I was on my own," she said emphatically, forcefully setting both hands flat on her knees. "You have to realize, by then, it didn’t seem like such a bad thing to live off the record. I figured, ‘hey, better to sleep in dye houses and art studios than suffer through the foster system.’ … It wasn’t until I decided to apply for Deer that I realized I needed to have been actually born and born in the right year.”
Redd’s red brows floated up. “You weren’t born in ninety-six?”
She shook her head, shame creeping up her spine one step at a time like a slow machine-stitch. “Well … all my classmates were born in ninety-five and ninety-six, ever since grade school. So I thought, why not me?"
The seam across her nose began to itch, but she denied the impulse to fidget, focusing instead on truthfully telling a story she'd never bothered to keep straight.
"But it's like I said—I wasn’t really born, you know? My mom wanted a little girl, not a baby one. I’ve been walking and talking since day one, you see. I mean, it’s not like I’m going through puberty right now. I’m about to graduate college."
“Ah, don’t worry, you don’t need to justify any of that to me,” Redd said. “Actually, I’m one of the only other people in the world who might understand your math there. Myself, I wasn’t born either so much as I was created. So, believe me, I get it.”
“Oh,” she blinked, processing. “Oh! So this—” she waved a patchwork hand at their bland surroundings. “This is a family business, then?”
Redd flashed a smile of razored teeth. “Something like that. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, mm? Your birth certificate is inconsequential, but what about the grade school transcripts you submitted to Deer?”
“I … Well, what you have to understand is that Threeports is absurdly laissez-faire. No one was going to force me to go to school, especially not the artists I was keeping company with." A few of them work for you now, and twice as many wish they did, she thought before continuing:
“But sometimes, I’d go to classes when I had nothing better to do. I—” she laughed awkwardly. “Um, it’s sort of embarrassing now, but I didn’t realize at the time that you had to actually enroll, you know? I just thought you had to show up!”
Redd laughed in delight as she recounted this, which she took to be a good sign.
“But you did eventually apply for college,” he pointed out. “Transcripts, letters of recommendation, the whole deal.”
“Hey, those rec letters weren’t forged, I promise,” she said, wagging her index finger once at him. “I just asked very nicely for them.”
“Why bother?” He asked simply, knowing she would know exactly what he meant. Piper solemned up.
“Well, college is loads more fun than grade school,” she answered seriously. “And I knew if I wanted even a chance to get out of Threeports, I’d need a real education to get a real job and make real money. At the very least, the housing was better than where I was staying anyway, and while I won’t bore you with the state of the Threeports housing market, it was becoming less hospitable by the day.”
“Mm, that’s sound. Very sound.” Redd replied with a friendly smile and nod. “Everything in your past is but a silly formality now. Don’t you even worry about it. Now, if you’ll indulge my curiosity for just a teensy bit longer—may I see your hand?”
She extended her right hand, which he took gently in both of his, turning her palm to face up as if he meant to read it. He hummed to himself as he ran his waxy thumb over the seam down her median nerve, where a swatch of lavender cotton met the fibers of her natural skin.
Then, still with complete geniality, Redd said: “Don’t react.”
Piper had not seen Redd manifest a knife, had not seen him drive it down. Any of the specifics ceased to matter from the fraction of a moment in which Redd drove a black blade through the gap between her hand and wrist all the way through to the wooden table beneath.
The world tilted. If not for his warning, she would have screamed bloody murder.
Piper had a reasonably high tolerance for pain. If changing out the patches and grafts of her skin had ever hurt, it had stopped bothering her ages ago. By the same rationale, she was unafraid of sharp objects.
How little that experience mattered now.
There is a knife in my hand, she thought with a woozy, shocked calm as she felt all the blood drain from her face. I’ve been stabbed, and it hurts very, very badly.
“You … Oh my god,” Redd began to laugh with sick delight. “You actually listened! Wonderful! I suppose I should ask—do you feel pain at all?
“I do, yes,” Piper replied in a wavering voice. “Thank you for asking.”
She couldn’t look at his face, couldn’t tear her eyes away from the source of the most acute agony she’d ever felt in her life. The pure black blade was flimsy, really, no thicker than a playing card. It didn’t make it hurt any less when Redd removed the knife with a twist.
Even then, she didn’t dare move her hand, lest the electric pain become any more nauseating. He prodded the wound with the edge of the blade for a moment, then set it aside to pull apart the gash with his thumbs, inspecting the wound with a perverse and clinical curiosity.
Strangely enough, Piper was made of flesh, though the meat within her seemed barely denser than cotton. Though blood swelled from the cut, she watched the wound cauterize and rust as Redd continued to play with it.
I’m going to pass out, Piper thought. Or throw up on him.
As if he knew what was going through her mind, crimson eyes flickered back up to her.
“Smile, Miss Elison, it’s only pain,” Redd told her affably. “If you can lie about this, you can lie about anything.”
When she flashed a smile, she found her teeth had begun to chatter. Redd removed his gloved hand from her wrist and set it around her jaw, methodically jamming a thumb under her top lip to slide it across her teeth and gums. He leaned in to look at her pearly whites, smelling of rust and burnt sugar.
“What nice teeth,” he said, pulling back with a pat to her cheek. “See, the trick’s to hold the truth and the falsehood at once. It hurts and it doesn’t hurt. A toy kills a kid, you maintain it's harmless. It doesn’t matter that these things are contradictory—you can accept both. You must accept both."
As a consequence of a liberal arts education, Piper's brain contributed only: 'Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.1
She clenched her eyes shut to keep the tears from falling. Redd sighed, and she heard him open a drawer in the desk and dig around for a bit.
“Here,” he said, sliding something across the desk. She cracked open her eyes and found a white and red milk carton, labelled For Internal Use Only. “Drink it. It’ll help with the pain.”
With her good hand, she managed to rip it open and bring it to her lips. Despite coming from the drawer, it was ice cold and artificially sweet, the concoction tasting like childhood dreams and cherry cough syrup. After her first sip, she registered just how unquenchably thirsty she was, and Redd didn’t even have to encourage her to finish it.
“Assuming you’re not completely bonkers, I’m sure you’re wondering what sort of company this is, if you’ve come to the right place, all of that,” Redd said, bracing his chin on his hands as Piper slumped back in her chair and cradled her bloody hand to her chest. “I promise, you absolutely have! I really think you’re going to be a splendid fit.”
Piper tried to stop the room from spinning, to no avail.
“But the thing is that you’re not here to be a toymaker or a candy tester. You don’t make wonder. You curate, disseminate, and preserve it. You ensure that everything that leaves this town about this town and this company is spotless and shiny. You follow?”
She felt pressure bubbling up painfully in her chest as her senses submerged in that sweet, chemical haze. Sobs and laughter burst from her in fits, causing her to seize as sweats and chills passed over her body.
After an eternity in the blink of an eye and a moment that lasted forever, the pain in her hand no longer existed. No part felt real, save for her laughing lungs. All her body was a stitched-together amalgamation of terrors and euphoria.
“We don’t have cracks or seams. We make toys! We spread fun! The Doctor does not make mistakes, nor do you or I. Dr. Wondertainment Inc. and all it creates is perfectly whimsical. Image is everything. Reputation takes a lifetime to build and five minutes to destroy. Do you understand?”
She understood perfectly well, though it would not save her from this.
Visions danced across her eyes—ballerinas on puppet strings, churning dye machines, the rapidly pattering stabs of an automatic sewing needle, her mother wearing a face she couldn’t focus on.
“Hey, smile,” Redd cooed. “Didn’t I tell you to smile? It’s what you have teeth for.”
Piper smiled, or at least, she thought she did. Every shadow in the room was smiling too. Smiling and dancing and laughing.
Redd asked her something else, and if she managed to respond, the words were swimming too much in her head to try and guess what she’d said. This must have been when she started to throw up.
She must have fallen out of her chair before that, too, though she hadn't noticed until she rolled onto her back and realized wait, this is the floor.
She was sinking down, down, down into the cold linoleum, swaddled in fleeting, lovely memories.
She was six years old again and helping her mother pick out fabrics, her fingertips catching on the fibers when she reached out to feel the bolts of material. The shop owner gave her complimentary caramel squares and nothing bad had happened to her yet.
She was ten, trying to keep her ice cream cone from melting onto her hand in the summer heat. The bad things that had happened to her didn’t seem so bad, looking back.
It was two in the morning during her freshman orientation week at Deer. She was laughing with her new friends in the common room, nevermind that she was down twenty bucks at poker. All the bad things seemed worth it if they’d brought her here.
“Hey… Heyheyhey, Piper… Oh, rats … ”
Why did Redd sound so nervous?
“Wait, please don’t actually die. I'll be in a lot of trouble if you actually die.”
Was she dying? That couldn't be right.
She was having too much fun.
Dying couldn't be this fun …
Before the maw of the other side could open up to swallow her whole, a monstrous creature sprang forward out of the shadows and…began to lick her face?
She blinked once, twice before her eyes would stay open. A dog’s tongue swiped her cheek again and began to bark. The pitchy yaps did not drown out the baritone of an unfamiliar voice.
“I'm mad and I’m disappointed,” a man scolded harshly. “But not surprised! Oh, no, no, never surprised. I decided a long time ago to quit being shocked by your antics. That does not make this any more acceptable, Redd.”
“Would you calm down, old man?” Redd sighed in exasperation. “I don’t know why you're overreacting. Having new recruits drink the Kool-Aid is common practice, anyway.”
“It's not called that!” The man was yelling now. “You didn't even dilute it! You’re lucky you didn’t kill her!”
As Piper felt her heart tap-dancing ecstatically between her laffy-taffy ribs, she wondered if the jury wasn't still out on that.
“Ugh…” she groaned as she tried to sit up. “Oh, fuck …” Another wave of weakness washed through her body, and her arm collapsed flimsily when she tried to put weight on it.
Another dog licked her ear as another tugged at the hem of her dress with a whine. She had to stare at one of the animals for several seconds before it would come into focus. What were these things called? Corgis? That didn’t sound like a real word. It wasn’t, was it? Corgi, corgi, corgi …
While she tried to decide, saying it over and over to herself in her mind until she was one-hundred and ten percent certain it couldn’t be right, the man strode up to her.
“Shh, move, Jeremy,” he said gently, brushing a dog away from her face. “You too, Jeremy. Give her some space.”
Piper found it exceedingly difficult to focus on him. Still, she could make out the colorful and spindly shape of his silhouette, tapering up into a head of fiery orange hair crowned by the purplest purple top hat she’d ever seen. That was enough to confirm what the functioning sliver of her mind had already suspected.
Dr. Wondertainment took her hand in his. The gash in her wrist smelled like rust.
“Oh… Redd,” he whispered, sounding almost heartbroken. “What have you done to her?”
With complete impassivity, Redd replied: “I wanted to see what she was made of.”
“You broke her,” Wondertainment lamented, quietly at first before his words shot up in volume: “You broke her like you break everything! Like you break your brothers and sisters and all your toys … Oh, Redd, my boy … What is wrong with you? Where did I go so wrong?”
“What’s wrong with me? Ha! Please! I’m shocked you don’t keep a running list.”
There was a long moment of silence in which Piper stared at the blood around her and wondered how all of that could have come from her.
“… I should take you out back and put you down like a mad dog,” Wondertainment snarled.
Redd barked a nasty laugh.
“Yeah? And then what? You let Izzy handle all this nasty business?” He asked in a taunting tone. “We both know you don’t care if my hands are red so long as hers stay pristine. Do you think she’d faint if she saw all this blood?” He sounded morbidly delighted by the prospect. “Think about it—nothing’s gonna protect her like a good publicity team.”
Wondertainment pursed his lips into a thin and regretful line beneath his curly orange mustache. He simply shook his head as he pulled out a crisp white handkerchief and began to gently swipe away wet tracks from under her eyes, then whatever mess had crusted around her mouth.
“Look, you said it yourself,” Redd said, crossing his arms petulantly. “Engineers and artists are a dime a dozen, but all you need to spin tales are a few good liars—sorry, storytellers. I mean, if the faces of our company can’t keep their composure—”
“I don’t care.” Wondertainment cut Redd off. “This is the last employee onboarding you do. For this department or any other.”
“Dad, she’s fine,” Redd replied, the eye-roll evident in his drawling voice. “Piper, tell him you’re fine.”
“Shush. You needn’t say anything, dear,” Wondertainment told her with a sigh of exasperation as he cradled her wrist once more. “Jeremy, would you bring me a—yes, thank you.” Dr. Wondertainment took a small sewing kit from the mouth of one of the puppies.
“I can do it,” Piper offered weakly.
“No, you can’t, and that’s alright,” he dismissed her as he wiped the gore off her wrist with his handkerchief. Somehow, the white fabric never stained. “Though, it may be easier if I just put a new patch over it all. Would that be alright?”
Piper nodded, the motion making her viciously lightheaded and reminding her that she was nowhere near sober.
“Perfect. Do you have a color preference? I assume red’s out of the question—”
“Oh, come on—”
“I’ve had enough of you today,” Wondertainment said. “Go to your room.”
“Dad—”
Wondertainment’s head whipped around, and he bellowed: “I SAID GO TO YOUR ROOM, MR. REDD!”
Before Redd could say anything, he was catapulted up into the ceiling and swallowed up by a steel trap that shut with a resounding clang. Immediately, Wondertainment turned back to Piper and resumed his gentle bedside manner.
“Terribly sorry about that. Between you and me, he gets carried away sometimes. Here, I think this blue will go lovely with your undertones. Bring out those pretty eyes of yours.”
Except those pretty eyes didn’t want to stay open. Wondertainment reached for her shoulder with his free hand and easily sat her up, only for her head to keep lolling to the side.
“Ah, not yet, my dear.” He tapped her cheek twice, a sparkling shock flitting through her. “Stay awake for me … Piper, is it?”
“Mhmm… ” she confirmed, watching him tidy up her mangled wrist with seam rippers and thread scissors. “And you’re the Doctor.”
“That’s right,” he confirmed as he packed the wound with cotton. “A pleasure to meet you. You’ve been very brave.”
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“Sorry? Whatever for?” He asked, moving the needle in and out of her skin with a skill and precision that stood as a testament to his centuries of practiced craftsmanship.
“I heard I’m not supposed to swear here,” she said, watching the steady, uniform stitches.
Wondertainment gave a merry laugh. “Oh, I think you earned that one.”
He tied off the thread and patted the finished product.
“There. That didn’t hurt too badly, I hope?”
“Not at all,” she said. She wasn’t lying, either, not even fibbing. She still couldn’t feel a damn thing besides dull electricity travelling up and down the fibers of her body in waves.
“Wonderful,” he said, his smile growing as Jeremy hopped up onto Piper’s lap. She did her best to pet it with a trembling hand. “Oh, look at that! Jeremy likes you.” His eyes, twinkling with mischief and crinkled at the edges, flickered up to meet her gaze. “I’m sure he hopes to see you stick around. You’d make an excellent addition around here. Oh, and you’d get to meet my daughter! These are really her dogs more so than mine, you know. She’s far more personable than her brother, no doubt. But ach, now you probably think I’m just an old man rambling—”
“Doctor?” Piper interrupted.
Wondertainment tilted his head, his top hat remaining perfectly fixed to his head. “Yes?”
“You should hire me,” she said, meeting his eyes and finding them to be the exact shade of when you laugh so hard your cheeks and stomach hurt. “I’ll say all the right things. Promise.”
A smile cleaved his face in half.
“Well, it’s splendid to see kids these days still have work ethics!” Wondertainment said joyously.“Welcome to the family, Piecework, and an early Merry Christmas.”
Then, Wondertainment playfully tapped his finger to the tip of her nose, and the world immediately went lights-out.
Funsbury!2™ 28, 2017
Cool sunlight speckled down on Piper through the vibrant foliage of the trees lining the street as she skated to work. The bright and early morning struck her as particularly beautiful, even for Wonder World!™'s standards of magnificent weather.
The first time she’d gazed upon Wonder Tower, it was part of a field trip for her first-year economics class. It had been the most marvelous, colorful beacon of hope she’d ever laid eyes on. Now, here she was waltzing into the building through doors that wished her good morning by name.
“Good morning to you, too!” she replied to the entryway—as was good manners—before tapping her feet together to transform her ruby roller skates into kitten heels of the same color. She summoned the employee elevator and took it straight to the eighth floor.
Humming to herself, Piper strolled through the lemon-colored lobby and twisting hallways that eventually spat her out into the office proper.
The headquarters of the Department of Public Relations was as awake as it was any hour of the day, already alive with the buzz of conversation. This part of the floor was furnished with colorful cubicles, computers, and tables of assorted shapes. She loved every inch of the space, but by far, her favorite feature was the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the City of Sugar. Truly, if she wanted to view paradise, all she needed to do was simply look around and view it.
“Elison! Good, you’re here,” a calico-haired gentleman caught her attention as she dropped her messenger bag at her desk. “So, get this—”
“Morning to you too, Emmett. Let a girl get tea first,” she said playfully before her colleague could launch into a full exposition. “Walk and talk?”
As Piper crossed the room to the well-stocked station of Wondertainment brand coffees, teas, and colas, Cat Emmett matched her stride with an expected feline grace. Despite her suggestion, he didn’t speak until Piper began to brew a vanilla pear tea. He leaned back against the wooden bar, his hazel eyes sweeping their surroundings skeptically.
“Okay, so,” Cat started in a hushed voice. “We may or may not have oopsied. Just a tiny bit.”
“Oh?” Piper dropped a lemon slice in her cup. “How tiny’s the bit?”
“It’s about the Take-You-Anywhere Machine,” Cat informed her. Her brow furrowed—
“The one we issued a recall on?” Piper asked, sparing a glance over her shoulder before pouring the hot water from a polychromatic electric kettle, the skin on her hands decorated with harlequin-patterned swatches of pastel blues and oranges.
Cat replied with a terse nod, then dropped his voice another octave. “It didn’t take.”
“… Who has our bike?”
“That’s what the Recall Rabbits are trying to figure out. Technically, getting it back is their department,” Cat said. “Literally, right before you got in, Holly went up to the fourth floor to put her fingers on the pulse, cause if they can’t do their job, it’s our fire to put out, you know?”
“Mm, what an unlucky bunch they are,” she remarked, picking up her drink with both hands to blow lightly on the steaming surface. “No one ever wants to give up toys.”
“Especially now that it’s vintage,” Cat agreed, shaking his head in disappointment as he grabbed a carton of milk from the magnet-plastered fridge.
“Gut feeling, who do you think has it?”
“Em-Cee and Dee,” he said without even a guise of hesitation.
“I’m inclined to agree,” she said with a frown just as a colleague walked up to the coffee machine. Inconspicuously as he could, Cat walked back toward their cubicles, prompting Piper to follow. “Except Em-Cee and Dee wouldn’t give up pocket lint for free, much less a limited edition item.”
“Exactly,” Cat scoffed with an air of contempt as they got to his cubicle. “We’re thinking if they have it, they won’t tell us. I mean, they’re not liable for what happens after they sell a product.”
Piper took a contemplative sip of her tea as she leaned against his desk. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but best case scenario is that he ends up in one of the Foundation's little boxes."
“Agreed,” Cat sighed, ears pinning to his head. “I loathe the outcome, but we can only hope they might treat him well. So long as we can ensure no harm comes to the product, we’re in the clear. Still, heaven forbid something happen, I need you to write a press release to have on standby.”
“Company condolences if this thing goes nuclear, got it,” she said with an over-pleasant smile. Her comment caused Cat’s hair to stand up slightly.
“Shush,” he hissed. “Like I said, the item itself isn’t our issue right now. What bothers me is that we had the bike back, and then we didn’t.”
Piper’s eyes widened as she realized what he was saying. “Inside job?” She whispered, practically so quiet as to mouth the words.
Cat nodded, sipping his milk with a grim countenance. So, they had an associate who thought it okay to violate a mass recall order in exchange for what? Extra cash and maybe a favor? Well, that was going to be an exceedingly bad business decision.
“You stay here and write,” Cat told her definitively. “I’m going to pay a visit to Accounting and see if we can’t follow the money to our Judas. If nothing else, we’ve at least got to plug a hole in our boat.”
“Mm, agreed,” Piper said with a melodic sigh as she got up as well. “Hey, totally unrelated, but I heard Lauren in R&D talking about some candy cane crowbars she made for you~”
“No idea what you mean by that,” he said with a sharp, predatory smile that came up just a bit in the middle. “Catch ya later.” He waved a silk-gloved hand as he walked off, only for the elevator to kick in and propel him to his desired floor.
Piper took her tea back to her desk and got to work, using a glitter pink gel pen to scribble down a few more items on her to-do list and thinking to herself: gosh, it really is a wonderful life.