A ROUNDERHOUSE Joint
Supervisory Agent Alice Sterling sat at her small desk in her small office and stared at her large stack of paperwork. She’d been letting it accumulate for the past few days, mentally categorizing it as a garden that she was letting flourish naturally, until reality came pouring back in and she remembered that she needed to make rent, and to do that, she needed to not get fired.
She sighed, reaching behind and doing her red hair into a bun complete with a pencil speared through it. She fiddled with the beige computer on her desk, shifting and adjusting it. She realigned the stationery box with the wall, and wiped the dust off the framed photo of her golden retriever.
She’d almost worked up the courage to start the first page when the door slammed open not ten feet from her, smashing into the wall. From the force of the impact, she expected to see Calendar’s hulking form — but no, the only thing in the doorway was a lanky, toffee-skinned man in a sharp suit and sharper tie. He was doubled over, wheezing.
“Boss! You just caught me in the middle of some paperwork,” she lied unconvincingly.
He finally straightened, and she got a good look at his face. His eyebrows were scrunched together, his ears were red, and his lips were fixed into mid-snarl.
Oh, Jesus.
“You, uh, you okay, boss?”
“NO!” he spat. “No, I’m not okay, Sterling. And some FUCK has decided to ensure that will never be the case. Get your gun and follow me.” He turned on his heel and took off down the hall.
She grabbed her sidearm, her jacket, and jogged after him. He wasn’t running, but she noticed that his gait seemed to double in length when he was angry, covering entire small villages with a single stride. They made their way through Site-666’s labyrinthine underground corridors.
“Happened again, huh?”
“Yes, it happened again.”
“You really gotta stop taking this so personally.”
“I’ll stop taking it personally when you start doing your job, snowman.”
“You can take it personally.”
They passed a closed door. House slammed his fist against it in a heavy knock. For a few seconds, all they heard was a cartoonish thumping and rustling inside before it swung open, revealing Calendar mid-workout. House barely looked at her, very possibly a first for him.
“Move! Let’s go.”
He didn’t wait for an answer before heading towards the elevators. Calendar stared down at Sterling in confusion.
“I’ll explain on the way, come on.”
Despite her assurances, Sterling did not explain on the way to the elevators, nor when they were crammed into an elevator heading down. The Site’s elevators were large enough to comfortably accommodate multiple people (and demons) standing shoulder-to-shoulder; this ride, House dominated the front of the elevator with an aura of barely-suppressed rage that was almost palpable, while the other two tried to make themselves as small as possible in the corners. The task was difficult for Sterling — it was laughable for Calendar.
She leaned over and whispered in Sterling’s ear. “I don’t understand. How does so much rage fit inside such a tiny man?”
“It’s called a ‘psychotic break’—”
“Shut up! This is a perfectly sane reaction!” House snapped from the front.
“Boss…”
“I’m not gonna hear it, Alice. I’m not gonna hear it and I’m not gonna entertain it. I deal with enough crap every day from every corner of every dimension, from every demon and every dealer in Vegas. The absolute LEAST I can expect is the most basic level of respect for my appearance. Is that so much to ask, Alice? Is it? IS IT?!”
She got the distinct sense that he didn’t actually want an answer.
“The Foundation hires the best and brightest in the country. Fuck it, in the world! This is an organization staffed with enough geniuses that Einstein would feel like a particularly stupid fish at a MENSA meeting. And they can’t even get this right! I’m literally standing right here. I swear to god.”
His cocoa-colored skin had flushed to a dark red in his cheeks. By the time it returned to normal, the group were at the door to Dr. Thorner’s office. The Director unceremoniously threw it open. They heard the last twinge of a conversation before he did.
“They should have like, a kind of machine, that gets really hot, and can turn like, those little popcorn seeds into like, whole popcorns.” Alice recognized the dulcet tones of her dumbest agent.
“They do, Clark. They’re called popcorn machines,” Thorner said just before House stormed in. The small, mousey woman with the big glasses patted the wrinkles out of her labcoat as she stood behind her cluttered desk.
“Director House. What a neutral surprise. I wasn’t expecting you. Was I?”
“You were not,” he growled.
“You sound different. I would try to guess what emotion you’re feeling but I’m not confident enough in my mental simulation of you yet for complex emotions. Alice, what’s wrong with him?”
“He’s mad, Tess.”
“Ah. The usual or something more interesting?”
“Usual.”
“Ah.”
Clark started from the corner. “Boss, you gotta stop taking—” He didn’t seem to notice Sterling aggressively motioning for him to shut the hell up.
“Shut the hell up, Clark.”
“Yessir.”
Calendar finally managed to squeeze herself through the doorway. “It feels like everyone except me knows what’s going on. Someone explain.”
Sterling sighed, leaning against the desk. “Well, hun, Director House has a recurring issue—”
“IT’S NOT MY ISSUE. IT’S THEIRS!”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Point is, for some reason, people in the Foundation keep… what’s the word…”
“FUCKING UP.”
“Misrepresenting our beloved boss’s appearance. Sometimes it’s the little details. Eyes, ears, nose, hair… Jesus, you guys remember the one with the fucked up hair?”
“Looked like someone slapped a Pyrex dish on his head and went to work with a weedwhacker,” Clark cackled from the corner.
“See, I could deal with that. Moronic, but most people are shit at describing other people’s physical characteristics,” said the man with the skin the color of a varnished penny. “But this? THIS is a bridge too far. I won’t stand for it. Thorner, get to work.”
The woman heaved a sigh and flipped her laptop open.
Calendar ventured a question. “What’s ‘this’?”
“This,” Thorner piped up, flipping the screen around.
The demoness recoiled.
“Who is that?!”
She looked up, between Sterling and Clark stifling their laughter, and House’s face locked into a permanent grimace.
“But… he’s…”
“White! Yes! A… a snow demon! A yeast yeti!” he raved to no one in particular. “Look at me! LOOK AT ME!” He yanked down his suit sleeve, showing off the skin of his arm. “I’m not even in the same hex range as this thing!”
The whisper of a giggle escaped Sterling’s mouth.
“I swear to every fucking god that’s out there, Alice. I’ll make sure you go to every Hell that exists. Underworld fucking tour, baby.”
“Keep your shirt on. Unless you want to show us the color of that, too?”
Calendar had to pinch the collar of House’s suit jacket to stop him from lunging at his security chief, who dodged magnificently.
“Relax, relax! We’re helping you, aren’t we? But, yeah, that’s the gist of it, Calendar. I don’t see why he gets so up in arms about it, personally.”
“We all taste the same inside,” Thorner offered cheerily without looking up from her laptop.
“That’s because the three of you are whiter than the interior paint section of a Home Depot. You’re whiter than a polar bear in a snowstorm. Whiter than the inside of a bottle of bleach. Whiter than the Republican National Convention. Whiter than—”
“I’m red!” protested Calendar.
“Your hair is white!”
“Your shirt is white!”
“Shut up! The three of you don’t have enough melanin between you to dye a paint swatch. The point is, I’m brown as hell—”
“Hell’s pretty red, actually.”
“— my dad was brown as hell, my grandpa was brown as hell, and I’ll be damned if I let some chump researcher who makes as much in a month as I spend on a single suit erase that.”
There was silence for a moment. Then Calendar asked the obvious question.
“Well, what do you do about it?”
“Because I am a man of incredible means, I called in a favor and requisitioned a simple .AIC from Site-7. Whenever someone uploads an image to a Foundation service with the keywords ‘house’ or ‘site-666’ in it, I’m notified. Then it’s just a matter of lying in wait for my prey.”
“And after that? You tell them to stop?”
Just then, Thorner shot to her feet. “Got it. Area-14, Level 1, Junior Researcher Rob Berr. Huh. On the other side of the state. Not far if you use the jet.”
House grinned. “Nah, now we do this.”
Junior Researcher Rob Berr was laying in his bunk. Area-14’s isolation from the rest of civilized society afforded its personnel a few creature comforts — one of them was a separate dormitory for every researcher. Little more than a hotel room, but it afforded him enough privacy to perform his dark deeds sheltered from prying eyes.
Berr had a hobby. Graced with the gift of artistic ability, his hobby was to exercise that ability to draw unflattering, inaccurate, sometimes downright unfair depictions of the anomalies and personnel that crossed him. What ‘crossing him’ meant was often arbitrary and imaginary, but it didn’t change the fact that there was now a veritable collection of images on his tablet — the latest of which depicted a mayo-skinned man with a neckbeard and a shirt that had last been ironed some time during the Tet Offensive. ‘Directorhouse.jpg’; his finest work yet.
He was working on a follow-up when the door exploded open. He never had a chance.
A giant, red blur swooped in and grabbed him by the legs before he could lunge for his communicator, lifting him up into the air. Two agents took posts just outside the door — then a familiar, if upside-down, face came into view.
“Hey, chumpfucker. Remember me?” asked Director Randall House with a smile and a profoundly crazy look in his eyes.
Berr tried to burble out an answer.
“I’ll take that as a yes. I saw your portrait of me! Flattering, honest. Loved the fact that I look like I got a five-buck shave in a carnival tent, even though my actual shaves cost thirty bucks and almost never occur inside carnival tents. Asshole. But anyway, loved it! Just, uh, you missed one, teensy detail.”
The Director lunged, gripping the sides of Berr’s head.
“I’M NOT WHITE. I’m not a porcelain parasite, not a salt soup, not a cornstarch crusader, not an expired yogurt yeller, a chalk child, a Yakubian ape, no-purpose flour, bleach demon, a pro-police polar bear, a mayonnaise mirror, an unseasoned chicken, a vanilla gorilla, an arctic monkey, a norman neanderthal, a spicephobe, a too-pale ale, a tan repellant, a one-color Van Gogh, a truce-flag turkey, a European you’re-a-poor, or a white devil, you FUCK.”
He was breathing heavily.
“Got it?”
Berr blubbered out something that sounded like assent.
“Okay. Okay, cool.” House smiled. “Alright, break his legs.”
