It is a stock trope of these sorts of novels that the evil corporation wants to conquer Christmas for purely commercial ends, and replace Santa’s distribution of toys with their own. Such was not the case for Das Gleiche - it was an investment and development company. The only toys it sold were for adults, not kids, with a line in selfie sticks, phone cases, and the Bugato (a luxury car).

Nor was the assault on Santa’s Workshop inline with their usual modus operandi, for they were a conscientious consumer corporation and would have sought to preserve the elves’ corpses, to use the skin in crafting animal cruelty-free leather boots. (Reduce, reuse, recycle.)

Consequently, Caedes reasoned, they could not have set the fire. But Yaary was unconvinced.

“My dear sir, you’re examining the case like Sherlock Holmes, when you ought to be examining it like Sherlock Homes.”

“What?” said Caedes, who couldn’t hear homonyms.

“Sherlock Homes, innominate investigator of housebreakers, who used not induction, but impression. He’d examine the impressions - the phenomenal features of a case - and from there would deduce the deeper synchronicities that underlay them. So you see, it doesn’t matter if Das Gleiche is responsible for the assault or not - the mere fact that Young Master Naveen said the name implies that there was an association, however false, in his mind, and by investigating the corporation we will bring this association to light.”

It was still four in the morning, so before hunting down the Christmas corsairs our brave heroes took a catnap and, at six in the morning (cultivators need little sleep, and elves are outside conventional consciousness), went out to a lovely little breakfast joint Caedes knew for coffee and chocolate croissants. The waitress vaguely wondered why, exactly, her regular had brought his friend’s child in a full body reindeer costume, but given that he tipped the price of the meal she wasn’t inclined to ask.

They had decided to walk through the door and ask outright. This is not, strategically speaking, the finest tactic, but then neither was the finest strategist. Caedes was content to cause chaos, so long as it was corporate chaos, and Yaaroghkh wanted to finish the task before Christmas, so he’d be back in time for Santa’s Christmas Party on the 27th. Of course, they’d employ a rudimentary technique - they’d ask to speak to someone moderately high in the company, then disable them and rifle through their papers for leads.

Das Gleiche’s headquarters was situated in a large office building in an uptown, but not excessively upscale, district. The area was located near the university district, allowing the corporation to easily bring on students for co-op opportunities, in a posh office area that also included many of the major banks, papers, and the town hall. The building itself was utterly average - slate grey, flat, and uniform in appearance, with a sign out front identifying it as Das Gleiche’s corporate office and giving directions for where to park your bicycle.

The interior of the building was nominally better. After passing through a pair of double doors and wiping your boots on a mat, one walked into a marble hall. Pillars were evenly spaced through a massive, magnificent, and completely empty room, barring a single brown carpet leading to a clear plastic desk, where a young woman could be seen typing data into a typewriter. At this point the carpet split in half, one half leading to the right, where a stairwell was marked ‘Offices,’ while the one to the left hit another stairwell, this one marked ‘Basement - Private. DO NOT ENTER.’ The girl looked up as the man and his reindeer-suited buddy entered, cocked an eyebrow, and went back to typing away. They could tell from the tinge of poorly concealed demonic qi emanating from her that Naveen hadn’t led them wrong.

It wasn't until they were at the desk that she bothered to acknowledge them at all, slowly looking up and asking, in a monotone drawl, how she could help them.

Some might think this rude, but Yaaroghkh saw the dead look in her eyes and the ennui stretched across her frame, and tugged on Caedes' pant leg. Elfin bureaucracy was a delightful thing - their paperwork filled with jokes and riddles, their offices full of milk and cookies - but human bureaucracy was not. The elf had even heard that some places banned singing your presentations in cryptical rhymes, a fate that was worse than having no cookies.

Caedes acknowledged the tug with a subtle nod, and politely asked the admin assistant if they could make an appointment with the Assistant Director of Public Relations. She flicked her brown hair over her shoulder, flipped through some notes, then stared him dead in the eyes.

"No."

Caedes looked down at Yaaroghkh. "I told you you should have stayed outside."

"Oh, it's not his fault," the assistant, whose name tag read 'Anna,' deadpanned. "I don't know why your friend decided to dress in a reindeer suit, but here at Das Gleiche we’re fully supportive of people's Christmas choices. In fact, we love Christmas."

And she pointed to her desk, where a tiny plaster Rudolph was sitting sadly, the paint peeling off his red nose. A wan smile spread lethargically, tortuously across her face.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

"Ho."

"Ho."

"Ho."

"No," she continued. "It's not his fault. You can't meet the Assistant Director of Public Relations because he's not available. Nobody in the upper echelons is, not until after Christmas. I'm the best you can do before then."

Caedes rubbed his chin. "Well that's disappointing. I had a business inquiry I wanted to discuss, but there's no helping things. Do you mind if I ask why they're all unavailable?"

She gave a slight bow of the head. "I'm sorry sir, but I'm afraid that's confidential information."

"How are you responsible for that?"

"What?"

Caedes shrugged. "You said you're sorry, so I assumed you must be somehow responsible.”

The woman assumed a vaguely froglike expression for a moment as she thought about this, then burst into laughter.

“No, thankfully. I’m not sure what I’d do if I was responsible for that sort of thing.”

Yaaroghkh nodded seriously, and said with a deep and gravelly voice: “It would be a poor fate. I’ve been told that human firms only have Departments for things like Finance and Human Resources, and not for things like Polka Dots.”

The admin assistant gave the man in a toddler’s reindeer suit a funny look, but before she could say anything the three found themselves interrupted. Someone had come out the door to the right, and unlike Anna he was not concealing his demonic qi in the slightest. Caedes raised one eyebrow, as he considered the man. He was thin and reedy, in a pinstriped suit, and his smile was as oily as his combover. His watery grey eyes were not dead, but on the contrary were filled with a clear malevolence, and he unconsciously licked paper-thin lips as he examined the pair.

“And how can we help you today?”

Caedes took off his hat, and swept down into a formal and exaggerated bow. “An honour, sir, an honour. I am Caiden Yarmouth, and this is my cousin, Aaron Yarmouth, and we’re here with Yarmouth Fisheries Holdings. We’re seeking to expand into the city, and heard wonderful things about Das Gleiche from our friends in ChristMassive, who recommended we contact you for a business venture. Might I ask if we could talk to, or arrange to imminently talk to, someone from your Public Relations or Marketing Departments?”

The man’s thin lips stretched into a grin, a grin made all the more hideous as it was reflected nowhere else in his face. “My dear sir, if you want to talk to any of them you need first get through me.”

His hands spread with a flourish, moving out to his side and then flickering until they were on a par with his shoulder. “Here at Das Gleiche we pursue only the latest iterative integrations, empowering optimisations through innovative synergistic energy solutions to proactively enhance your feature sets and thereby revolutionise transparency. No need to circle back: with realistic growth hacks for intuitive, real-time functionality, we’re recontextualising what it means to pivot. So, tell me about your core competencies.”

As he spoke, purplish, stinking qi poured out of his mouth, snaking across the floor towards Caedes and Yaaroghkh. The Doc’s eyes widened. It had been years since he’d seen the Logorrheic Poison Sect’s Corporate Jargon Technique in action. He quickly checked out the elf, who hadn’t left his cosy paleogean abode for three hundred years and wouldn’t have seen the technique before. The latter, he was distressed to see, was whimpering.

“But I don’t understand…”

Caedes was starting to form a dagger with his qi, but Yaaroghkh continued. “Let’s take the first clause of your statement. You pursue what you refer to as ‘iterative integrations.’ ‘Iterative’ is the adjectival form of ‘iteration,’ which refers to the process of repeating a series of operations until one derives a superior result. This might reasonably be paired with ‘integration,’ which of course means to bring together, but a problem then arises when it comes to the clause ‘empowering optimisations through synergistic energy solutions.’”

The cultivator in the pinstripe suit began to back up nervously. He had thought the Grammatical Pedantry Arts were long dead, and wondered what antediluvian monster had clawed its way out of the blackest pits to counter his poison arts.

“To ‘empower’ means either ‘to give official power to,’ or ‘to promote the self-actualisation of.’ Yet when we combine either meaning with ‘optimisation’ - ‘to make as excellent as possible’ - in respect to ‘synergy,’ which denotes ‘combined action,’ we reach a quandary, for…”

The man in the pinstripe suit spit blood, falling onto the floor. He continued to back away, panic clear in his face. Caedes was impressed. He’d underestimated the little elf. The tiny reindeer-suited figure continued relentlessly.

“Accepting, for the sake of argument, that we’re promoting the self-actualisation of making things as excellent as possible through combined actions which solve a problem energetically - already a strange enough statement - then the question arises, combined actions how? A ‘solution’ is an action which solves a problem, so accepting that this action is combined in some way we next need to know what are the combined constituents under discussion. And another thing - why are we speaking of empowerment with the indicative tense? Surely the subjunctive would be more appropriate…”

“No! Please! Stop!” The terrified man cried, blood pouring from his mouth.

“But if we would like to be charitable, perchance more charitable than we ought to be, then we might examine the sentence as a totality and examine your earlier sentence in the context of your stated goals of improving, with initiative, the cluster of qualities we possess - and this one I really struggled with, for were you talking about our persons mathematically or making reference to a mathematical technology within our possession - and changing totally the nature of pellucidity - an admirable goal, may I say, as a fellow Hannian. I do have to ask, however…”

By now, the empty front hall was in a mess. Anna was calling security (admittedly, not very swiftly), Caedes was dying of laughter, and the pinstriped cultivator was dying, full stop. Dying, and then dead. His poison technique had collapsed in upon itself, and then a stake had been driven through his heart by unwholesome arts birthed in chthonic cities of fathomless age (aka Mary’s English Class).

Caedes clapped his hands. “Well, I suppose we’ll just have to take our business elsewhere.”