Visiting IT involved lots of fighting. In the time it took the elevator to take her from the one of the Worker Office Pools that had the unlucky encounter with bunny-cat-dog hellbeast, the door opened to IT where a large number of call center professionals in yellow shirts should have been answering calls. Instead, it was pandemonium.
Her first clue something was wrong was a man in a yellow shirt running past while a copy machine bounded towards him with crab legs, large teeth, and drooling tongue dragging on the floor behind it. On further inspection, she saw all sorts of IT yellow shirts struggling with office equipment of their own.
One was holding back a small desk printer snapping at him with jaws where the output tray should be. Another man was waving his bloody arm while a monitor clamped down on it. A third was being strangled by a phone cord. Being the murderous office electronics and the various origami minions pecking at the dead, IT was in serious trouble.
Maxi shoved her hand in her pocket and downed a Muddy Buddy of Grutomaton Deterrence, just as a massive copy machine growled and trundled towards the open elevator door. It roared at the invisible barrier the morsel had given her, and quickly lost interest and ran towards a woman with red hair who was swatting paper bats away with the arm she had liberated from one of the large paper slicers.
There were too many of the grutomatons, and she was too low on health. Her inner Daisuke yelled at her, saying that she would be no good to them if she was dead. She pressed the elevator button to retreat, but it didn’t react. The doors didn’t close, and it was only a matter of time before one of the creatures who stopped to check her out rolled its resistance to the Muddy Buddy.
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“Terry,” Maxi yelled. “What’s going on?”
“There seems to be a grutomaton outbreak in IT,” Terry said in his always chipper voice.
“Clearly, I can see that!” Maxi yelled. “Why doesn’t the elevator work?”
“This elevator seems to be out of service.”
“Out of service? How can it be out of service! It just got me here!”
“All the elevators are out of service.”
“All the elevators? Like the multiverse of elevators?”
“I can only verify the functionality of the elevators in this dimension. That is why we suggest you use the stairs in the event of the emergency.”
“Stairs! None of the Office Pools have stairs! All we have is the damned elevators.”
“They do in the event of an emergency. The building is adaptive to company needs.”
Sure enough, Terry’s words rung true. A fire alarm sounded, and Maxi could see a door to the stairwell materialize out of the doorway across the way from her. Red flashing arrows in her glasses pointed her towards the emergency exit.
Many of the surviving IT professionals began fighting their way towards it. Maxi stepped out of the elevator and turned down the hall.
“Maxi,” Terry asked. “This is not an advisable course of action. There are likely more enemies in the direction you are going. There is a good chance that the outbreak started when a grutomaton escaped from the monster holding area.”
“My quest directed me to talk to Von Patrick,” Maxi said.
“It is likely that Von Patrick is dead.”
“No one ever said questing was easy,” Maxi said and pulled her sword and proceeded down the hall.