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What irresponsible, fucking— ugh! Who the hell shuts a drawer this tight?!

I let out a small noise of frustration, rattling the entire metal filing cabinet as I wrestle with the one drawer that I need to stick this report in. That noise is the only hint that I'm losing my cool, and to a piece of furniture, no less.

You would think that working at a company chaired by a board of undead and a spearheaded by a fearsome necromancer, this kind of petty thing would be expected. On the contrary. I expect my coworkers at Evil Inc. to have some standards for how they file things away.

I step back, dusting off my shirt even though it's barely out of place. I take in a deep breath that's supposed to be calming.

Mediating tough conflicts is usually my strong suit. But it's not exactly my arena to negotiate with badly maintained shelving.

My day hasn’t been great, admittedly, but this is pissing me off. There’s no reason anyone should be jamming the drawers closed this tight. This is ridiculous. I’m about to get the label maker and stick ‘Janice’s drawer, DO NOT FUCK WITH’ on this, just so people will stop slamming it closed and making this more difficult than it has to be.

I take in another not-nearly-calming-enough breath that makes my nostrils flare.

No, I'm not going to do any of that.

I'm going to go back to my desk and write up an email reminding people about policies regarding damage to company property, and send it out to everyone on this floor and anyone I suspect may have used this cabinet. Then I'm going to send out a company-wide reminder that performance reviews are just around the corner, so that the emails show up next to each other, and it makes someone sweat.

I'm going to cast a shadow of unease over anyone who even dares think about using my drawer.

That course of action, however petty, does un-ruffle my metaphorical feathers.

I give up on trying to pull it open, but I slap the filing cabinet for good measure, one final release of aggression.

The IT department has asked me to stop slapping my computer when it gives me trouble, but for inanimate objects, I’ve always found percussive maintenance to be the most persuasive. I can't exactly Bcc furniture into submission.

I do glance around real quick to make sure no one saw that completely unprofessional little outburst, though. The door is open, but I–

“Do you need, uh, help there?”

I turn around completely at the voice, straightening my appearance, all the little things that I'm constantly rearranging back into place – hair, shirt, glasses. I don’t usually let anyone see me as less than composed. It’s important to be a little detached when you work in HR. If you let the little things get to you, or take other people’s problems personally, you’re going to have a bad day every day.

Luckily for me, the voice doesn't belong to anyone I recognize.

Neither does the nearly ten foot tall shadow that overtakes the doorway.

The thick black frames on his face compete for attention with the ivory tusks protruding a few inches from his lower jaw. He takes up just about the entire doorway, his shoulders wider than the frame. He’s stooping through it to avoid knocking his head on the top, and a curtain of dark hair falls forward.

He kind of hunches in on himself as he steps fully inside, trying not to bump into anything. That's a task in itself just based on how he makes the storage room feel much smaller than it already is. With how he keeps his gaze to the floor though, I can't help but wonder if there's a self-conscious element in the action.

I can see that the right side of his head is shaved to the scalp, in typical Orc fashion, revealing a pointed and torn up ear, a number of sharp looking piercings through it.

My eyes draw down his button up shirt, the way the fabric strains at those poor little buttons whenever he breathes in. The pocket protector on the left side of his shirt is wide enough to hold four different colored pens and a calculator.

He must be from accounting or something.

“It’s stuck,” I say, nodding my head to the cabinet. I spare a glance at his arms, which are probably about as wide as one of my thighs, if I had to guess. I know Orcs are big-boned, but I imagine there’s enough muscle there for him to pry the cabinet open.

“Probably because of that dent in it,” he nods, talking more to my shoes than to me. Now that he mentions it, I spot a little dent in the bottom corner. “May I?”

I nod, and shuffle around him in the tiny room to let him at the corner filing cabinet.

He kneels before it, about eye level with the stuck drawer, and gives it a tug.

Nothing.

At first, I think it’s because his fingers are a little too large to get a proper hold on the little drawer handle. The second time he tugs however, the whole filing cabinet shifts forward a couple inches out of its indents in the carpet.


Tags: Kate Prior Paranormal