The office was always an unfortunately chaotic place. Order was maintained, but there was always that one joker trying to break the tension in ways that went just slightly too far. Alfred Honeywell was a middle manager of a tech giant company that was just high enough on the ladder to make a ridiculous yearly salary, while being low enough on the corporate ladder not to be well-known himself or in the public eye.
He considered himself rather fortunate to have the position he had, even if he was often sent to other offices to smooth out fires or help a particularly troublesome employee find a better area to spend their excess energy. This particular day, he had been back in his home office for a few weeks, an absolute rarity these days, as the “superhero outbreak” had caused the troublemakers in every office to have more energy than they knew what to do with. Alfred also thought himself particularly overqualified to handle just about any form of chaos, even super-powered chaos. He had helped more than one employee work their way through the awkward first few weeks of being powered.
Having just finished such a case in a satellite campus in Kansas, he came back to his home office to find one of his regular problem coworkers being silly, but not really disrupting anyone's work too much with his antics. Having already redirected the said coworker's silly office skits into a mostly productive in-office mini-series on the company intranet, and making sure he knew not to spend more than a certain amount of time per work day on it, Alfred was now relaxing in his office, looking through his emails to check for anything else that he needed to take care of.
There were no high priority items, so he started responding to low priority complaints and helping the local managers to either understand better, or make small suggestions to, their particular problematic employees. It was rewarding work, as he was able to smooth the wrinkles and grease the squeaky wheels that would otherwise have reduced the profits of the company and, just as bad, let chaos and disorder ruin everyone's days at work. Once he finished his work for the day, and it was quitting time, he left the building, and made his way home.
The next day, things continued along the same theme, no big messes to clean up, nothing truly stuck out as a particularly difficult problem to solve. That is, until he was walking back from the break room to his office at the end of his first break. As he passed a certain coworker's cubicle, one certain person he frequently counseled with, he suddenly slipped on the carpet as though it was the slickest of ice.
“Amanda! What have you done this time?” Alfred groaned as he got up. This was a new one for her, as she usually liked to spread silly, mostly harmless at first glance, rumors. Ones that quickly grew to be much more disruptive than she intended.
“What boss?” Came the reply, as the troublemaker in question popped her head out of her cubicle to see what was going on. Her confusion and concern looked quite genuine, as did her surprise when she saw him. After helping him get back up, much to both of their surprise, she saw him slip on seemingly normal carpet once more, and as she took a step forward to help, she also slipped, and fell right on top of him. “Ooomph!”
“Owww... I take it this isn't your doing then? I didn't think this was the type of thing you liked doing, but your cubicle is right there...” Alfred rambled, as he got his thoughts together. Whatever was going on, Amanda didn't seem to be the one responsible for it. And as he got back up again, he and Amanda helping each other to achieve the surprisingly difficult feat, he realized that their troubles were by no means over.
As a crowd gathered, they kept slipping and sliding as though they were putting on a skit, much like the kind the fellow he just finished helping liked to put on. Being who he was, and well enough known at least in this particular office, everyone else quickly realized that something was indeed not going right. As the number of people slipping and sliding grew, and the number of people working shrank, Alfred knew he had to change how he was handling things. By now he and Amanda were surrounded by several people in both directions down the hallway.
As he observed the situation further, Alfred realized something strange; the further they got from him, the more people recovered. Acting on his suspicions, he had everyone but Amanda back away, and hold onto something for a bit. Soon only he and she were still slipping on everything, and he tried having one person help each of them move away from each other. As Howard from a few cubicles down grabbed his hand, they kept slipping, and Amanda and her helper slowly got better.
“It's me?” He wondered aloud. “Well, there's a first time for everything I guess. Howard, help me to my office, and I'll handle things from there.”
Stolen novel; please report.
Soon Alfred was back in his office, sitting on his – now much slipperier – chair, he took stock, and gathered his wits again. Protocol dictated who he should notify, and he began typing the email, which took far longer than it should have as his fingers kept slipping off of the keys and hitting other keys. After sending emails back and forth with his supervisor for a while, it was determined that he should spend some time in the company “special house” getting the hang of his new condition.
The company had long since come up with the retreat for retraining employees who awakened such that they could continue their lives, leading to more than one local hero gaining control of their powers and quietly helping their communities in their off time. He had never imagined he would find himself there, his life was quite how he liked it, order was important to him, after all. But being sent there turned out to be the beginning of yet another troublesome session of chaos unleashed.
The normal way people were sent to the Special House was to be bussed there. The problem with this was that as soon as he touched the bus, it started sliding away from him. He quickly released his hold on the doorway, and soon it came to a stop. They decided that he couldn't take a bus there, and the next thing they tried was to send him there on a helicopter.
People usually don't think about the physics involved in how a helicopter flies, but to make a long story short, they don't do a very good job of flying when the friction between the blades and the air is taken away. They are also much quieter when the blades don't have to push the air out of the way. This was a new experience not only for him and his supervisors, but also for the drivers and pilots he variously met as they tried to figure out a way to get him to the Special House.
Eventually they settled on putting him in an enclosed sled, which was attached via chains to a truck which was then driven to the retreat. To say that there was much awkwardness and chaos involved in the process would be putting his frustrations lightly. Alfred did NOT enjoy chaos, he enjoyed resolving chaos, bringing order to disorder. Being the solution to the problems the company faced was the main thing he liked about his job. It was what sent him home with a smile on his face.
It actually took a few days and the eggheads in the development department to come up with the method that finally got him to the Special House. They were strangely excited to interact with someone who seemed immune to friction, and even made him a few sets of clothes specifically designed to be less.... awkward... for a person with his condition to wear. Buttons tended not to work quite right, as did velcro. Zippers worked OK but they needed easier to grip handles.
Alfred spent his time at the Special House with people who seemed to enjoy the chaotic energy and atmosphere of the place. Having helped nearly everyone who was there to get there, he had to experience the embarrassing reunions with each of them almost one at a time, as they tended to need unique environments during the early days of getting used to their new powers. They all seemed quite happy there, and their enthusiasm helped to calm his nerves and help him to settle in.
The young woman with sticky fingers, literally, everything she touched got sticky, was a surprisingly useful friend to make. Whenever they hung out with each other, their powers interfered with each other, usually making life easier on both, other than the times when they seemed to switch and suddenly everything was both slippery AND stick, in unpredictable ways. Clearly, they were not each others' solution to controlling their powers. But Alfred did seem to learn more about controlling his powers when he spent time with her, and she seemed to have a similar effect in her attempts to control hers as well.
As it turned out, when his powers were going haywire and behaving unpredictably – in other words, when he was least happy – was when it was easiest to feel them working, and how they worked. Seeing as that was the first step to learning to control them, both Alfred and Hazel, the sticky girl, were happy to spend more time with each other. Hazel was much happier than Alfred though, as she seemed to thrive on the chaos, and he... well, he did not enjoy it one bit, which gave him that much more focus and determination to gain control.
A few weeks after entering the Special House, another powered came whose powers interacted directly with theirs showed up, someone who was also familiar to Alfred. Amanda had shown up, and her powers were something he would have never thought of. In fact, they were so strange it was nearly impossible to describe what they even did. In any case, they spent a lot of time together with Hazel, and the other residents started teasing Alfred about his little harem, which was absurd, as he did not even think of coworkers romantically ever.
There was no company policy against it, but he had seen enough chaos caused from couples at the company coexisting poorly when at different levels of the company ladder, that he had long since stopped looking at people at work as potential romantic endeavors. Anyways, as he spent more time with them, he understood more about how his, and their powers worked, not well enough to describe Amanda's powers to anyone, but enough to get a better hold on his own. It was somewhat embarrassing to have someone from his home office watch him occasionally slip up, often literally falling on his backside right in front of her.
A few weeks later, they were spending time with each other at Hazel's villa, and Alfred thought he had a good control over his powers, when Arthur came over for a visit. His powers were rather unfortunate, making him cause people to look at him at random times, unable to look away for a few moments before being able to continue acting as they wished. As Alfred looked at Arthur, his concentration was disrupted, and everything in the entire villa suddenly became slippery, completely frictionless. This wasn't that different from how it normally was, as Hazel's powers made it necessary to put her in a very slippery environment in the first place, to help offset her powers. Events like this were happening less frequently now, and Alfred knew he would soon be able to return to work.
A week later, he was proven right, as he finally could control when his powers triggered, for how far, and for how long. As he returned to the office, and started getting back to solving problems, he occasionally had to fix problems he had caused in a moment of distraction, bringing his visits a new level of enjoyment to those he tried to help, much to his embarrassment. Another power had appeared, and a new entry was made, as another person came to understand their new capabilities.