Maxi and her office mates ran into the nearest elevator. She hit the button and said, “First floor.”
The door dinged open, and Farhad held her back. “Wait, hold up. There is a faster way.”
While the door closed, he said, “What floor do you live on?”
“I don’t see how that's relevant,” Maxi said, glancing at the door. Every second mattered, and she didn’t want to waste any more time on riddles and half-truths.
“Just hit the button and tell it the floor of your apartment building,” Farhad said.
She pressed the button and said, “Floor ten of my apartment building.”
The elevator traveled like it normally did, and after the familiar lurch of it coming to a halt, the door opened, and her whole world changed.
It was the hallway to her apartment, with the same ugly vase and fake flowers decorating the space. She had broken the vase once when she was a little girl. The super told them it was no big deal and had another one the next day, as if they had an entire closet of ugly vases in the basement.
There was no time to wonder how she had traveled across the city in seconds, but for once she was glad the elevators happened to be a TARDIS, at least in their traveling capacity. She pulled out her sword and headed down the hallway, where she saw the front door of their apartment ajar. Yancy and Farhad readied their weapons, too.
She was aware that any neighbors looking out their peepholes would probably be gossiping about this for the next year, but she didn’t care. This was her mother, and Maxi couldn’t help but feel partially responsible for putting her mother in harm’s way.
They got to the front door, and Maxi motioned to go into stealth mode. She considered sending Yancy in first, but she knew the terrain, and more importantly, where the printers were located. There was one in her room, a craptastic $50 printer she bought on sale that jammed more than it printed, and her mother’s fancier one that also scanned and copied. Her mom used it to print out photographs for scrapbooks.
If Maxi were to bet which one beasted out, it was hers. The thing was already two steps away from being a demonic entity.
As soon as she entered the place, there were obvious signs of a struggle. The living room/dining room/kitchen area was a mess. There were broken dishes, shredded couches, and torn curtains.
The super of her building had also crashed through their cheap self-assembled coffee table and snapped it in half. He was bleeding from large bite wounds. Farhad knelt by him and checked his pulse. Once he determined that the guy was still breathing, he stuffed a gummy bear into the man’s mouth, and a few of the wounds closed.
Maxi motioned for Yancy to follow her into the single hall leading from the area. Her room was the first door, the bathroom was the second, and her mom’s was the last. All three were closed and she stopped to listen for any noise. There was the sound of something shuffling, but she didn’t know what it was, nor could she tell what room it was coming from.
She crept through the hallway as silently as she could and opened the door to her room. It was exactly as she had left it roughly a week ago, with an unmade bed and the dirty dish from her dinner crusted dry. Her mom never picked up after Maxi, even when she was a girl. If a dish was left in her room, it would stay there until Maxi brought it out to the dishwasher.
To her surprise, her little demon printer was exactly where she left it, under a pile of clothes. She realized that a printer had to jam to become a snarling creature and thought that her mom must have been scrapbooking when it happened. The printer was usually on a little stand in the living room, and between the nearly dead super and trashed place, she hadn’t registered that it was missing.
Which meant one of two things. Either her mom was safe after barricading herself in the bathroom or her room, and the thing had fled out the open door after mauling the super, or it was back there, feasting on her mom’s flesh. She checked the bathroom first. It was empty, with no signs of a scuffle.
That left her mom’s room. She listened at the entry and heard what sounded like a creature snarling with delight. She kicked open the door, expecting the worst, and saw something that took a few moments for her to comprehend.
Her mom was tickling the printer on her bed while it squealed with glee. Tara talked to it as if she were speaking to a baby. “Who likes to be tickled? You like to be tickled.”
The printer wiggled one of its feet like a dog, and a massive tongue flopped out on the sheet between its sharp teeth. The small black and white menu screen that had become its eye narrowed at Maxi when she burst into the room.
It growled and charged, and Maxi didn’t think. She hopped out of her body with a Mind Shard and sliced it with a samurai sword. Yancy embedded two shurikens into it before it bowled into Maxi, sending her and the thing tumbling into the hallway.
By the time she recovered, Yancy sliced it with his ninjatō. She noticed that his eyes had turned jet black and his expression hardened. The dweeby kid had somehow transformed into a battlemaster. The printer bit into her arm and pulled her mind back into the fight.
She conjured another Mind Shard, a giant hammer appeared in her ethereal hand, and she smashed into it. A chunk of plastic and guts burst off, and it toppled over into the living room.
Maxi charged and embedded her sword into the screen of the creature. It shook for a moment, then died with sparks and blood, its giant tongue dangling from its mouth. She pulled the sword from the thing and wiped it on her yellow shirt that would just clean itself up anyway.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
She turned and saw that Yancy was looking more like himself. Unsure of what to do next, she looked at her mother, who stood in the threshold of the hallway. The woman wore an expression that was somewhere between shock and anger. The first words out of Tara’s mouth were, “I had it under control.”
“Under control?” Maxi yelled. “The super is almost dead in the living room!”
“Don’t raise your voice with me.”
“Your printer tried to kill you, and you’re worried about what the neighbors think!”
“It’s too late for that. You killed that thing. We at least could have called Animal Control. Maybe found it a good home.”
“It’s a killer printer, Ma!”
Tara seemed to notice Yancy and Farhad for the first time. She smiled and said, “Are these your co-workers? You didn’t tell me they would be so cute.”
She ran her hands up Yancy’s leather armor, and he gulped.
“Mom!” Maxi chided.
“What? Mothers have feelings, too.”
“Your mom is taking this remarkably well,” Farhad commented.
“What?” Tara said. “My daughter could have been in a sex-trafficking cult for all I knew, and you expect me to not check up on her?”
“But divulging Company secrets is punishable by termination,” Yancy croaked.
“What did you find out?” Maxi said.
“Come,” Tara said. “We need to talk.”
“If it’s all the same,” Farhad said, “we should be getting back to the office. If we linger too long, it will count as unauthorized leave.”
“You two go,” Maxi said. “This is my mother, and I’m already in debt. What’s another couple thousand?”
“Your debt ratio factors into your Company performance,” Farhad said.
“Go,” Tara said. “I’ll be fine. I’ll email. Your personal email. But we do need to talk.”
Maxi embraced her mother and felt a pit of emotion. It was nice to not feel alone with her secret, and while Yancy and Farhad may have been shocked that Tara was taking it so well, Maxi wasn’t. Her mom had been through multiple layoffs, the death of her parents, the loss of her brother, and the death of Maxi’s dad. What was a killer printer compared to all the shit her mom had mucked through?
Not that Maxi hadn’t been through her fair share of shit. While her grandparents and uncle had died in an accident before Maxi was old enough to remember, she had seen her father’s decline. He would disappear sometimes for days, weeks, even months on end. Each time, he'd come back looking worse than before he left.
Ultimately, he didn’t return. The story was that he had fallen on the train tracks in the subway, no doubt not paying attention while he tried to sell the watch off his wrist for more gambling money. It was a closed casket funeral as the body had been too mangled. The last time she had seen him, he was haggard and his eyes were always wandering, like he was searching for something.
Her group went back to the elevator in her hallway, and Farhad pressed the button. Maxi was half expecting her dingy apartment elevator to open, but sure enough, it was a Company elevator. They piled inside, and the door shut.
“How do they do that?” Maxi said, and hesitated pressing the button.
Farhad answered, “Once you are an employee, you always have access to the Company elevator network.”
“But how?” Maxi said. “I’ve lived in this building my whole life and I’ve never seen this elevator before.”
“That’s because you have to be an employee to summon it. Now that you are, every elevator in the world will look like this one, and you can take them to any elevator door in the world, assuming you have permission.”
“So no going to the Pentagon or the White House.”
“Non-Company buildings aren’t that secure. I’m talking within the Company.”
“Wait? So I can go to the White House?”
“If you enjoy getting arrested, interrogated, and terminated, sure. We usually have our more discrete employees handle monster attacks in high profile areas. You want to press the button? Janitorial will be here any moment, and we don’t want to be there when they arrive.”
“What are they going to do to my mom?” Maxi said. “They aren’t going to mind wipe her, are they?”
“No, they may make suggestions to a traumatized person. Lead them to believe it’s a burglary or a botched robbery. But they can’t wipe a person’s mind or use mind control or anything. Your mom seemed so unaffected by it that I doubt there is anything they could do to convince her otherwise. Your super, on the other hand…”
“But that woman I saved the other day...she didn’t even recognize me!”
“Do you make a habit of remembering people you met once?”
“No, but if that person saved my life...”
“Even more so in that situation. People repress traumatic events all the time, and we have aftermath specialists who are particularly skilled at helping that process along. Everyone wants to think memories are these fundamental parts of ourselves, but memory is malleable. Do you know they did a study after 9-11 where they asked a bunch of people to write down what they were doing that day? They checked years later, and most people’s memories had changed from what they originally wrote. But if you ask anyone what they were doing during one of the biggest terrorist attacks in the United States, they all are very confident about their answers.”
“I’m just saying, I think I’d remember a monster attack.”
“I’m not saying Janitorial can do it for everyone but get enough of the group all telling the same story, then that becomes the truth. On top of that, if you control the media narrative…”
“The Company controls the media?”
“It just has a very good PR department.”
“Have you seen the requirements just to get into the Janitor class?” Yancy added. “It’s one of the toughest classes to choose. Not only do you have to be good with people, but cleaning blood spatter and dead bodies is grueling work.”
Maxi hadn’t even looked at the Janitor class. She had figured it was somewhere as undesirable as Worker, but with a quick scan of her phone, she realized that the stat requirements alone were beyond what someone could reasonably expect to get at level twenty, not to mention a trial that was described as one that made the Paranormal Investigators' look like kindergarten.
“The Janitors are the elites?” Maxi said.
“Not just the elites, but much of the Power Twelve are Janitors,” Farhad said. “Tier 1.1 is a Janitor. Tier 1.2 Paranormal Investigator. They have a bit of rivalry going on.”
“Janitors run this company?”
“Upper Management runs the Company, but the Janitors are their arms and legs. Why do you think they charge so much for unceremoniously dumping your body back on your chair of resurrection? The fee only goes up the higher Tier you are.”
Maxi pressed the button and called their Office Pool. Moments later, the door dinged, and they were back in the office. Yancy summoned the bathroom, and Farhad pulled up a privacy screen for his cubicle so he could change, after a brief exchange with the others about how it went. Maxi sat down at her computer and checked her message logs.
Quest Printer of Never Jamming Part II Complete. +10 Levels +4 Ambition, +1 Dedication, +6 Creativity, +8 Luck. +20 Stats +40 SP. Skills Honed: Listen +4, Mind Shard +6, Melee Weapons +2, Sneak +4. Awards: 10000 Credits. Acquired Pet: Irritable Inkjet of Nipping. Pet Irritable Inkjet of Nipping deceased and has been removed from your inventory.
In addition to extra stat points, learned skills, and better items, Luck could also hone her skills beyond their max level and give what basically accounted for free SP. She could level her already-learned skills just by going on quests.
However, before she could strategize her next move, the Printer of Never Jamming Part III popped up on her screen, along with an urgent message about the boss raid for this month. It seemed that the Antitrust Lawyer was winning, and all the bottom Tiers were on the chopping block.