She waited for the food to arrive and had a rather lavish sandwich feast with all of her former coworkers. They were so happy not to have to pay for food and especially not to have to go somewhere to get it, that none of them really noticed how many of the sandwiches she was downing. Anyone who did, certainly wasn’t about to bring it up to the person who bought them lunch.
Kaori said a final round of goodbyes and left a mysterious book on coding in the new guy’s chair. To her older co-workers, kaori imparted many words of wisdom, especially concerning how to handle all of her old clients. When she was heading out, the receptionist thanked her profusely for the meal. Kaori had to hold in a peal of laughter as she pointed out the chocolate cream on the man’s cheek. Wellness was wished all around as Kaori departed one final time from this building.
Kaori had intended to take an extended vacation to the hot-springs or the beach more likely but that could all wait. Her main reason for taking a vacation was so she could clear her head and come up with a solution to the anthromorph problem. She had no real clue about how to proceed with making them and her plan somewhat hinged on having a lot of varieties of them.
Now that she had some idea of how to find out how to make them, she didn’t need the rest and relaxation as much. What she really wanted right now was to find the solution to her problem. She jumped in the car and took it back to the rental lot then walked back to her alley behind the temp service.
Once Kaori was in her own apartment dimension, she thought of her destination. The office of Descartes Malefecto was the only other place she had ever been but she felt a need to be super stealthy about this for some reason. She turned the handle to her apartment slowly but at a steady pace so it would be less likely to attract attention.
Kaori peeked out of the door where she had cracked it the tiniest bit and sure enough, there sat the cat-anthromorph. He was furiously writing on a piece of paper and didn’t notice her peering at him. Kaori kept her presence to a minimal but felt the other side of the door beneath her just enough that she could make an appearance there. She didn’t want to linger looking at Descartes for very long because people always seem to know when someone is looking at them.
Kaori closed the door and prepared her appearance. She formed a stack of documents that had to do with the revisions to the planet she was in charge of. She also had a clipboard with some permission form to begin experiments on anthromorphs that she had thought up quickly for an excuse to be there.
Her personal deific interface was currently running a map program that would fill itself out as she explored. It was a very simple program that she had added to half a dozen games. All it did was reveal the map as you explore the game and it worked well enough for the PDIs. She was a bit interested in the office of her superior god and thus intended to have a look about while she waited.
Kaori opened the door from her apartment into the offices opposite Descartes’s door and walked out with confidence. She looked up from her stack of papers to scan the room and saw that it was a typical office setting with numerous desks settled front to front and side by side. There were only a few of the desks occupied at the moment and nobody bothered to look up when she entered.
Kaori closed the door and chose a direction at random and began walking right. She shuffled the stack of paper a bit as she walked but didn’t stop. The key to not being spotted was to act like you belong there. She had done this several times in college, once even sneaking into the professorial offices to retrieve a cell phone that had been taken up during class and hadn’t been returned after.
The people in the office took no notice of yet another office worker in the office. They must see a lot of different people come through from time to time. Kaori just kept exploring and discovered that the office complex was pretty big and had regular offshoots.
The pattern seemed to repeat and Kaori began to get a gist of how things were set up as she walked further. She stopped short of entering the next section at that point. By her estimation, she had passed the main offices of about seven deities of the same relative level as Descartes.
Each of the sections seemed to have a similar layout. There would be an office on the right that had a name on it followed by a couple offices that didn’t seem to. To the left, there were rows of desks in a cleared out working area and then there was a hallways past that area. Kaori hadn’t explored any of the hallways but she had a guess what would be down them. After the offices or rooms of whatever sort on the right-hand wall, there would be a short hallway before the next office with a name on it and the pattern repeated.
Stolen story; please report.
Each of the cleared out areas with desks next to each other were different depths with more or less desks in them. There were very few people in most of them but the one in front of her next was positively packed with people. The crowd ahead of her all seemed to be reveling in some way and more than one of them looked to be drunk and carrying around drinking horns. That was why Kaori stopped short of that one.
Also, the attire seemed to differ a bit between each of the different sections. The revelers all seemed to be wearing red and gold dresses or perhaps robes. The people sitting at desks in the section prior to that were wearing plate armor of some thin flexible make in shades of grey. Kaori realized that she stuck out pretty badly in the sections other than the one belonging to Descartes and decided to hurry back.
When kaori started back, she opened up her PDI and looked at the map. She denoted that there were eight sections present with the eighth being only a sliver or what she could see of it without going into the chaos. Also denoted on her map was the position of every person in those offices.
Kaori went back to the section belonging to Descartes but changed her look up a little in case anybody was paying attention. She did away with the stack of papers and put the clipboard under her arm. She also turned off the display of her PDI as she walked further. Upon entering the section for Descartes, only one person looked up but then went right back to what they were doing.
She turned to the right and filed past all of the desks and headed down the hallway. Each of the doors had a different sign on it and were right next to each other. Kaori was about two thirds of the way down the hall when she came upon a sign that had her name on it in Japanese. Kaori was a little astonished to see that but decided that if it bore her name she should be able to go in.
When Kaori opened the door, she found herself in the top of a somewhat familiar tree. This was the same tree that she had first arrived at on the planet she was assigned to. Kaori grinned to herself and closed the door. She then concentrated on her heavenly office and opened the door again. This time, the door opened near the center of the set of doors on the back wall of her own office space she had created. It looked like the linking was successful. From now on, she should be able to come and go from this door.
Kaori looked at her PDI as she moved aside to let a couple of other deities pass. They gave her a very strange look as they did. It didn’t take a genius to realize they were looking at the display of the PDI but they didn’t make a fuss and just kept walking.
Kaori waited almost an hour before the dot representing Descartes moved from his office desk. It went around the office a couple times then back to the desk. Kaori was just about to complain when it moved away and out of the office. It was time to move!
Kaori summoned a new stack of papers that was bigger and bulkier than the last one and walked to his office. When she got there, she had to fumble with the stack and balance it to get ahold of the door handle. The door was thankfully still unlocked and opened right away. Kaori slipped inside while balancing the stack of papers and as she had expected, the only one who saw her was pretending they hadn’t because they didn’t want to help.
Once inside, she unsummoned the papers and began looking at the stacks of papers while keeping an eye on the PDI. Kaori had briefly rummaged through the contents of one stack and just started on the second when she noticed something. There was a notice about anthromorph formation in the top little bit of a stack a little to the right of her. The stack was a bit haphazard and the notice was on the top of a stack that stuck out a bit from the rest due to being on parchment paper.
Kaori took the top of the stack off of the notice and took out her cell phone. She reminded herself to go through her cell phone and add the same kinds of programs to the PDIs. For now, she turned on the camera and took pictures of all of the pages pertaining to the anthromorphs. There were only six pages and the top three were past date according to Descartes’s computer which turned out to be some magic device that only looked and functioned like a computer. A magic computer was still a computer as far as Kaori was concerned.
What Kaori noticed though was that there was another god who was supposed to be creating new anthromorphs soon. She had all the information on which world it was and what the god’s name was so it was time to book it. Kaori set the pile back the way it was before walking out of the office. As a final touch, she left a copy of the report she had typed out on the edge of Descartes’s desk and it was almost the same size as the stack she had formed before entering.
There was one person looking at her so she made a show of forgetting to close the door and having to go back and do it. The one who was looking at her was the same one from before who didn’t help her with the stack of paper she was supposedly leaving. Kaori looked at him like he was useless and shook her head before walking down the hall and he averted his eyes again.
Mission successful! Kaori opened the door to her own realm and walked in. There was a bit of commotion as the various gods under her spotted her walking to her desk. She could hear grumblings about overworking from at least one of her direct subordinates and she supposed she deserved that but now wasn’t the time to be worried about it. She finally had a direction to go in.