Elite Magical Protection Services had their contract terminated immediately.

‘Again,’ Amy sulked the next morning as she waited for coffees with Thomas on the bench outside the cafe under their office.

Thomas took out his phone and started searching for news about the mall. ‘I mean who’s going to protect that painting now? Who’s more available at short notice than us? They must be .. just terrible.’

The normality and familiar busyness of the street, the smell of coffee, and the bright sunlight warming up the pavement was a welcome relief after last night’s deserted mall and taste of failure. But with no sleep to buffer her between the night's failure and accusations of incompetence, Amy felt deflated and bruised. They had botched jobs before, but they had never actually been fired, told to pack up and go home. Their rough execution had finally caught up with them. Part of her just wanted to sit in this familiar seat outside this familiar cafe and let the day play out without any thoughts of business, security, and least of all magic.

‘The main thing is we actually foiled a crime Amy! We did it, the real deal,’ Thomas continued.

Amy looked up at him, disbelief emerging on her face. ‘That’s not the main thing Thomas! Nothing we did stopped that robbery, that was just dumb luck. And no one even believes it happened! We failed at the one real job we had, setting up the bloody cameras. It’s so easy! We never even got them plugged in! Again!’

Thomas recognised this tone, he hated seeing Amy like this.

Amy continued, her eyes threatening tears, her voice thick. ‘The galling thing is that’s not even why they fired us, they just thought we were shifty. They thought everything about us was suss and they were right. We are awful. We are the bottom of the barrel. Utterly incompetent at the easiest job in the world. I’m utterly incompetent.’

Thomas reached over and awkwardly patted her shoulder. He was so bad at this. He took a deep breath then took Amy’s hand in his. ‘You’re not incompetent, I know you think you are, but making a mistake doesn’t make you incompetent, and you didn’t even make a mistake. Baron and I made the mistakes. You will never be as incompetent as we are. I mean we’re just awful’.

Amy sniffed back a tear and gratefully squeezed Thomas’ hand. ’That’s true.’

She used her other hand to wipe her nose. ‘You guys are the worst. Thanks mate.’

Thomas recognised she was starting to come back to her baseline and decided to defuse the sincerity down to a more manageable level. ‘Although you were supposed to be managing this job, so technically it is your fault’.

‘Yeah I know. But I can't fire you or myself so what am I going to do?’

‘That’s also true.’

This was true. The business was an equal partnership between the three of them. They met when Amy had dropped out of a degree in Art History and found work delivering online orders for a supermarket. Baron and Thomas were assigned to pack her orders. Friends since childhood, they were not good at their jobs. Although they were employed at the same level she found herself falling into the role of their proxy manager, telling them what to do, fixing their mistakes, and making sure they didn’t get fired. They quickly fell into looking at her as their natural leader. This dynamic annoyed her as she didn’t want to be in charge of or responsible for them, but they were hard not to like. They were funny, friendly, and they were there, every day. They were almost smart, or at least sometimes they were both very smart in their own way. And other times they were shockingly dim. Amy had never been able to figure out if they were actually very smart or actually very stupid. They seemed to swing wildly between the two states, spending no time in the middle.

They moved from friends to business partners after Amy found the access to a house she was supposed to be delivering to blocked by a van marked ‘Magic Guard Security’. Two security guards were standing in front of it having a very loud argument with a Gucci clad older man holding what looked like a large hairless cat that was, inexplicably, emitting very aggressive high pitched barks.

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‘Are you guys going to be long? I have this guy’s groceries.’

‘We’re moving! No one’s going to steal that weird mole looking dog! It’s not worth the money.’

She noticed that the security guard had small bite marks on his hand, and the cat was actually a cat sized hairless dog, which made the barking more … explicable?

The Gucci man with the mole/cat/dog was sobbing, ‘You are so rude! You’re fired! Don’t expect any payment from me, don’t you dare try and invoice me! I told you not to look at him! That was to keep you safe!’

Amy was surprised not looking at the dog had been a problem. He was hard to look at. The security guards climbed into their van and backed down the driveway. One of them leaned out the window and yelled ‘We don’t want your money! I hope your mole dies!’

At this, Gucci man shifted gear from sobs to wails, and despite the fact that her dog had obviously bitten the guard, Amy felt for him. She had Thomas and Baron in her life so she knew what it was like when you started to care for weird looking things. ‘I’m sorry sir, that was completely uncalled for.’

‘People are always threatening to kill him! My ex-husband said he was going to hire a magician to set him on fire, that’s why I hired them! Where am I going to get another security guard now?’

The opportunity hung there in space, taunting her. Almost impossible to resist. It was madness but her escape path from delivering groceries had appeared before her. All she had to do was reach out and grab it. And it was perfect. Amy hated magic and this job was all about stopping it. There were only two people she could think of that would be malleable enough to quit their easy jobs and join her.

The rest is recent history. They were dog guards for three weeks, and discovered that the cameras weren’t activated for the first two weeks of that job. Learning from this mistake they then moved on to working for a connection of Gucci man, and performed this job flawlessly. They then repeated their orgional mistake in the next two jobs. But nothing was stolen and they were working! They were actually making money, and over the next two years Amy registered the business, Baron improved their systems, they bought better gear, moved into an office, and created a niche of stepping in when better known security firms weren’t available. Not who you wanted, but who was available.

They went inside to collect their coffees, adding armfulls of pastries to their order. Amy opened the door to exit the cafe with her shoulder while Thomas used the hand that wasn’t holding his coffee to continue to scroll and tap on his phone. Amy stepped out onto the street. ‘We really need to get our act together, how long before this kind of thing becomes our whole reputation?’

Amy noticed a van was parked across the street. The two large men inside looked away, but they had obviously been looking at her and Thomas. She noted it was comically sinister, but their office was in a comically sinister alleyway so maybe that tainted how she saw everything. She was having a good hair day, wild and dramatic, so probably they were checking her out and who could blame them with how bad-ass her hair was looking. Or maybe they were looking at Thomas. But somehow Thomas looked even more lanky and unwieldy than usual, and his curly mushroom haircut was even dirtier looking than usual so she doubted it. She stole a second glance at the van. The guys inside were determinedly looking elsewhere now but her stomach was really tugging on her brain, not in a ‘some asshole is doing magic’ way but in a more general ‘something isn’t right’ way. She knew she was on edge and ignored it. She was probably just constipated.

She turned to the door next to the cafe they had just exited from, again used her shoulder to open it, revealing a steep staircase that led to their office. She paused, the edge of anxiety nudging at her as she looked up towards the office door at the top of the stairs. ‘Or maybe this is a sign. Maybe we should pack this in. This is so much more stressful than I thought it would be, I mean it’s not like we have to go back to the supermarket …’

Thomas cut her off. ‘Far out! Amy, I found it! We’re in the news!’

Amy’s anxiety ticked up a notch. ‘No, no, no, why?’

Thomas read out from his phone ‘Security firm stops robbery of painting by cherished local artist.’

Amy took a moment. ‘What?’

‘They think it went well! We’re heroes Amy! Everything is the opposite of what you thought it was!’

‘This can’t be, really?’ She leaned over to try and read the article on Thomas’ phone but it was obscured by the appearance of a message. ‘You’ve missed like five messages from Baron.’

Thomas opened his alerts to indeed see five messages from Baron all reading ‘OFFICE NOW!’

They exchanged a look then sprinted up the stairs as fast as their load of pastries and coffees would allow. Amy kicked open the door and they both tumbled into the room. Baron was sitting on the couch that smelt like a dog looking as awkward as anyone has ever looked. Taking up an entire bench seat across from him was an enormous man with a ginger beard who seemed to be dressed as a monk. Amy’s stomach began to churn. The monk was humming with magic.