“You’re in-luck Rico, I had one of those little travel bottles of ibuprofen stashed away next to the paper clips,” Will said, popping his head back over the cubicle and rattling the bottle in his hand.
“What happened,” I whimpered. My mind was in shock at finding myself back in my cubicle after having just been killed by a monster. Maybe I did have a stroke and my brain was fried from lack of oxygen or whatever it is a stroke did to you. Wait, was it a stroke that did that, or an aneurysm? My mind wasn’t processing things correctly and I kept getting pulled into random thoughts.
“Dude! Why are you naked!” Will shouted, dropping the pill bottle which pinged off the cheap metal file cabinet in my cubicle and rolled under my chair.
The shouting shocked me into action, as I was indeed sitting there on my wobbly office chair without a stitch of clothes on. Cold air from the annoying vent above my cubicle, the one I could never reach high enough to close, blew on my bare skin. My clothes lay in a messy pile in front of the chair, and I frantically began to paw my way through them, trying to grab my pants before anyone else spotted me.
My left hand didn’t seem to want to cooperate and was closed with a death grip on something. Grasped in my hand was a small leather pouch that I shoved into my pants pocket as I fought to pull them on. I was almost done pulling my khakis on when I heard a horrified shriek from behind me.
“What are you doing? I’m calling human resources,” Barbara said, choosing the worst possible time to use her office ninja skills to appear at my cubicle. I struggled the rest of the way into my pants after unwittingly mooning Barbara.
Like a field full of groundhogs, everyone’s head popped up in their cubicles to look at the spectacle. All I could do was continue to pull on my clothes. I felt wobbly and uncoordinated but managed to finish getting dressed just as HR showed up with the security guard. Of course, I was informed that my employment was immediately terminated, and I had to leave the building right now or they would call the police.
I was in a haze of confusion as I piled the few personal possessions that I had into the box that the HR lady handed me. Did the HR people just carry those boxes around with them when they walked through the office? Maybe it was standard practice if they were responding to someone who was supposedly naked in the office. Is this type of scenario something they go over in HR school?
Thankfully, I didn’t have much in the way of personal possessions, so the process wouldn’t take long. The only things I had in my cubicle were a couple of pictures of my parents and sister, an empty leftover container that I could never remember to bring home, and a few office supplies that I’d purchased with my own money. My few possessions looked rather pathetic in the box. It was the sum of what I’d bothered to bring in during just over one year of employment here.
“Your final check will be mailed out to you. Do not bother to return to these premises or we will call the police,” the HR lady, I think her name is Suzanne, said as she escorted me through the building and toward the exit.
I just nodded my agreement, ready to get out of there as fast as possible. People gave me horrified looks as I walked out. Nothing travels faster in an office building than interesting gossip, and an employee stripping buck naked inside his cubicle was sure to have spread across the whole company in the few minutes it took for me to gather my things and walk out.
For a moment, I thought about protesting, telling HR that it wasn’t my fault and something terrible had happened to me. I knew I wasn’t the smartest guy, but I was smart enough to realize that this story would sound crazy, and instead of being escorted out of the building, I was more likely to be escorted into the loony bin. I’d rather walk out quietly and hopefully be forgotten than cause some kind of stink that might backfire on me later.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
The trip home was made in a haze, and the thirty-minute bus ride allowed me to calm down a bit. I was convinced that I had just experienced a mental episode and that maybe it was better to check myself into some place that could help. Maybe if I did have some medical condition, my former employer would have to hire me back since it wasn’t my fault. Everything must have been a hallucination or some kind of mental freak-out after all.
I never really liked the job, but it paid the rent, and the benefits package had good health insurance and a retirement plan. Now I was going to have to go job hunting again, and I was dreading the “why did you leave your last position” question during future interviews. No, before I even thought about another job, I should see a doctor before my insurance ran out, and deal with whatever was wrong with me.
Back at my apartment, I tried to gather my thoughts as I took a good look at the place. The building was an older one and a bit run down, but rent in Los Angeles was insane, so I was willing to put up with an old building to be relatively close to the office. I kept the place clean, and it had nice, but inexpensive furniture. Since I didn’t have a girlfriend currently, or anyone to impress, I had never spent that much on decor.
It was a small studio apartment and while the neighborhood was a bit rough, it wasn’t as crime-infested as other parts of the city were. I’d never had any trouble, and not having a car meant that the most common crimes, auto theft, vandalism, and car jackings weren’t an issue. I did feel very limited in my travel options. The public transit service wasn’t exactly stellar in this town and if I wanted to go outside my immediate area, I usually had to spend money to rent a car or use a rideshare service.
Dropping my box of personal possessions onto the couch, I thought about the hallucination that I had just experienced. It seemed real, well, except for the floating in the void part, which could be much more easily chalked up as a dream. Maybe I had just passed out from the pain of my headache and had a freakishly realistic dream.
I could still see the girl from the dream and remembered the look of fear on her face as we faced the orc. The force of her command was absolute, and I had to obey her, my body acting almost on its own. Feeling not in control of my own body was what disturbed me the most about the whole episode, well, other than the whole getting cut in half by an orc part.
What was with those strange words that had appeared before my eyes? I played some games last night, and I did enjoy single player role-playing-games and first-person shooters. Maybe the games I played were stuck in my mind when I went bonkers.
“Your rating was abysmal,” I muttered to myself, remembering the last prompt that had appeared. It kind of annoyed me that my own personal hallucination thought so little of my performance. Next time I went nuts, I’d be sure to make myself seem much more heroic.
“Oh, and my rewards reflect my performance,” I mumbled, thinking about the other part of the announcement.
As I said it, the image of the small leather pouch popped into my head. I pulled the nearly forgotten pouch from the pocket of my khakis and looked it over. It wasn’t something that I had ever seen before, and I don’t remember grabbing it before my hallucination started.
The pouch was small, about the size of a little kid’s toy coin purse and it gave a metallic jingle as I shook it. Untying the thin leather strap, I opened the pouch, surprised to see several coins inside. I leaned over the coffee table and shook out a total of five pennies from the pouch.
Well, they looked like pennies at first, but these coins weren’t real money, they were something else. The coins looked crude and ancient, like something from a museum or a movie prop. Images were stamped into the coins, but I couldn’t make out any details, given their worn condition. I told myself that these were just something I had found on the floor, not proof that what had happened to me was real. As I stared at the coins, a dull throbbing started in the back of my head once more.
“Oh no, not again,” I said as I sat listlessly on the couch, holding my head as the pain ramped up much quicker than before. I felt too miserable to even get up and find some medicine. As the pain reached a crescendo and my eyes felt like they were going to pop out of my head, the mysterious voice returned.
“You are summoned!”