Detective Tusmon entered the car-washing line for at least the eighth time that week. If anyone was paying attention, they’d assume he had extreme OCD and couldn’t handle a single speck of dirt on his car. But the man couldn’t care less, and it wasn’t even his car. His actual vehicle, an old beat-up piece of zjik, was parked nearby at a commuter lot. He always made the swap either immediately before or after going through this car wash.
While the car he was currently driving was nicer in every way, it looked a bit too conspicuous and official for his tastes. It clearly belonged to someone of authority, and that was only a hindrance in the field. The only reason he bothered swapping at all was to make it easier on the other employees. Because when a car went into the car wash, the same car, or at least the same make and model, had to come out the other side.
Tusmon selected a very specific cleanliness package when he got up to the panel, one so pointless and egregiously expensive that no everyday citizen would dream of splurging for it. But that wasn’t the only aspect that triggered the hidden mechanisms. He also had to enter his credit card number. Most others would just insert the card itself, but he rarely kept it on him, and had memorized the numbers as soon as he’d gotten it. That was the password and identification code to grant him access.
As one last measure of security, there was a hidden scanner as the car went into the wash. It identified all occupants of the car, unable to hide from sight, and it also checked for any pendants that they were wearing. Once the package was selected, Tusmon was prompted to turn off his car and a hook came up and grabbed the axle.
Now inside and well out of sight, the floor dropped down into a ramp before the water could start spraying at nothing. Once the car had been dragged past all the mechanisms, there were several routes ahead of him that the detective could take. This wasn’t the most common entrance, but it still had ramps that led deep down into the bowels of Rathe.
Tusmon’s commute wasn’t far, though. He only had to drive to the seldomly used front entrance of the Central Peace. The receptionist perked up from his desk when the detective walked through the doors, always caught off-guard since everyone else who was coming through that entrance had an appointment for their registration. Tusmon, instead, came and went as he pleased, not giving anyone any notice.
And that was because he didn’t have to. As it stood, Tusmon was only the second employee who didn’t actually work for the Central Peace; the first being The Warden. No, he merely just worked out of an office there. As such, he didn’t actually have to follow most of the rules and regulations.
One he did have to follow, though, was wearing a pendant. This was simply for identification to prove he wasn’t an intruder and to allow him access to literally anywhere since the entire Central Peace ran on the pendant system. He’d almost been tempted to get it fused into his body like The Warden had, but they’d allowed him to incorporate the pendant into his detective's badge.
Even though it certainly wasn’t needed at this point, Tusmon flashed his badge at the receptionist before proceeding through the next door. Unfortunately, his office wasn’t on the ground level. He had pressed to try and convert a usually vacant room, but the facilities manager wouldn’t budge—even if all that was on that floor were meeting rooms for registration and weapons caches in case of an invasion. Those had been gathering dust since the headquarters was created
His office was actually just one floor down. In any other building, this wouldn’t be an inconvenience, but nothing was so simple in the CP headquarters. Since elevators were the only way up or down, and they had hundreds of floors to pass through, the wait was unbearable for such a short ride. Most workers had to commute several dozen floors, so they were used to the wait, but he just couldn’t stand it.
However, after working in the building for a few weeks, Tusmon discovered the emergency stairs that were normally completely hidden from sight and out of mind. Of course, when someone used them, an alarm on that floor was sounded, but he’d also figured out how to temporarily disable it for a single opening. This was how he always traveled to and from his office now, only taking the elevator if he actually needed to go somewhere lower.
Of course, he was caught breaking this clear violation of Central Peace rules and had been approached by The Warden. But… since he wasn’t really a CP employee, and clearly showed no remorse for his actions or plans to stop doing it, he couldn’t really be punished. So to stop all the errors and chance that he could damage a mechanism, his badge had been updated so that it could disable the alarm and record the occurrence properly.
Now finally down to his office, he frowned at the plaque on the door as he always did. ‘Det. Fallacy Tusmon’. Just why did they have to print his full name? The less people who knew of or used it the better. A lovely gift from one of his parents as a reminder that his birth had been the result of countless pointless arguments. He had debated getting it changed, but the man would rather live on in spite of it.
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Also written on the door was ‘Fiend Crimes Division’. That part didn’t bother him since it was straightforward and to the point. Too many other agencies tried to have fancy or clever names for their squads and divisions. As soon as he opened the door, he was met with the sound of a crash and a woman screaming.
“Guh, that hurts,” the woman dug herself out of the pile of binders and hoisted the fallen shelf off of herself. “Oh, but here’s the file I was looking for!” It had landed conveniently in her lap. Such things were rather common in her everyday life, but that meant their office was usually the casualty.
Ugh, I had just remounted that shelf, Tusmon stared in annoyance at his assistant, watching her diligently pick everything up since she hadn’t noticed him yet. Her name was Chiulu Drivvel, a Fiend known publicly as The Bumbling Bureaucrat. But she was colloquially known around the Central Peace as The Dancing Dunce.
Her backstory was an interesting one. Through a series of clumsy mishaps at her job as a filing clerk, she ended up knocking over an entire row of filing cabinets that crushed her boss to death. Turned out that the woman was involved in some unsavory business with clear evidence that she wanted to entrap Chiulu in it as well, so she’d been fortunate in that end.
However, the now-Fiend had a hard time finding work after that, most offices not wanting someone whose existence was a walking liability, and that was only exacerbated afterwards by her Curse. The only reason she ended up working at the Central Peace at all was because she accidentally tripped off of a sidewalk and fell in front of the CP hiring director’s car. She was offered employment as an incentive to not sue.
Since then, Chiulu had been passed around from department to department—only the administrative ones of course. It had nothing to do with her work ethic or her skills. Just no one else could stand the constant destruction. And finally, she’d been passed off to Tusmon—essentially her last hope before they gave her an office in a padded cell.
He alone had been able to put up with her Curse, finding its uses more advantageous than the negatives. It was called Lucky Foot—rather ironic. The Curse enhanced Chiulu’s innate clumsiness, triggering it far more often than before she became a Fiend. However, her accidents would always result in something positive; either finding a helpful item or triggering a useful event. It was an extremely powerful Curse, because it led to leads and outcomes that could never be found naturally.
“Good morning, Chiulu,” Tusmon greeted her, a clear grumble in his voice. Even if it was always positive, he couldn’t deny the annoying side, already planning to buy even stronger bolts for that shelf. “I brought breakfast, but it seems you’re not interested since you broke our deal. If you recall, I said that you could eat if the office wasn’t destroyed when I came in.”
“Wah detective! I’m sorry!” the woman whined and whimpered. “I was trying to get it cleaned up before you got here…”
“Ugh, fine,” the detective couldn’t take how pitiful she looked. “If you finish cleaning up before I finish eating mine, I won’t eat yours too.” Tusmon sat down and began eating his breakfast sandwich slowly and meticulously, trying to give his assistant as much time as possible as he read over a few crime reports.
When he’d finished his sandwich, he let it digest for a minute or so before he began unwrapping the other. This sent Chiulu into overdrive, who began picking up the piles quickly into one huge, unorganized stack in her arms. The moment she began moving towards the desk to put them on, though, she tripped and banged her head against the edge.
Her Curse didn’t always damage her surroundings, focusing on her body instead. But Tusmon knew better than to ask her about it or check if she was okay. Like a small child, if no one acknowledged her injuries or spoke to their severity, she barely seemed to notice—probably so used to having them that they no longer bothered her if there wasn’t a reason to dwell.
And like all other instances of her Curse, with the downside came a positive. All the files flew out of her hands, landing on the desk in a perfectly neat and organized stack. It was a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence for anyone else, but a several-times-a-day mishap for his assistant.
Chiulu got up and turned around with a smile on her face, satisfied with the outcome, not even noticing the huge gash on her forehead that was dripping fuchsia blood. Tusmon gestured towards the remaining sandwich with both hands, happy to hand it over after that display, more out of pity than anything else.
Now done with his meal, he turned his attention over to a large screen on one of the walls. It had a dossier of every Fiend and Lesser the CP currently knew about. He could arrange it by name or divide them up into their respective groups. There was also a feed of all reported Fiend-related crimes or if they were even suspected as one, just picking up on a few keywords.
However, to his begrudging acceptance, Tusmon would filter out the Fiends For Hire for the most part from that feed. One of the conditions for his backing from the Central Peace were that the Fiends For Hire were almost entirely off-limits. If he ran into one of them out in the field, or if he tracked down a lead that implicated one of them outside of their activities as part of the group, then he could take action to try and prevent further crime and damages.
But that only applied for the Lesser and regular Fiends. He had been given a strict order to not involve himself with the four Greater Fiends in any way. Even if he saw them commit atrocities right in front of his face, he’d be forced to turn a blind eye. It was unspeakable, and when he questioned the rationale behind it, all he was told was that it would interfere with other plans and to never ask about it again.
It really did restrict his jurisdiction, crippling his hand for the authority he could impose and the justice his department stood for. But there were still plenty of other criminal Fiends to pursue, though none came with the same prestige.