Chapter 604 | Heroism, as Defined by Paperwork [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 604: 604 | Heroism, as Defined by Paperwork [CASTLE BONUS]

Dralun set his mug down on the desk, and the whole desk leaned. He crossed his arms, and the tail began a slow sweep behind him, back and forth across the floor, knocking a trash can over on every pass. He didn’t pick it up.

"Here’s how this goes, Primadonna," he said. "You’re provisional, which means you can’t touch anything, arrest anybody, or use that Aspect of yours in public without me standing next to you. You break something, it comes out of my budget, and my budget is a coffee can."

He jerked his chin at the shelf behind him, where there was, in fact, a coffee can with a hand-written label that said INSURANCE. "You mouth off to anybody on my route, and I send you back up the hill in a box."

"Understood, and I’ll try to keep the mouthing off to indoors."

His eyes narrowed. "I saw the footage."

I figured he had. Everybody had.

"That gold thing you did in the dome," he went on. He picked up the mug again and didn’t drink from it. "You pull that on my streets without a license, you’re a vigilante. I don’t care whose kid you are. I don’t care who was on the news crying about you. The Commission would love nothing more than a Halloran first-year in cuffs on Halverson Avenue, and I’m not giving them one."

The radiator clanked. Somewhere below us, a wok hissed and Grandma Lin yelled at somebody in Cantonese. The scanner on the filing cabinet crackled out a code I didn’t know and then went quiet again.

"I’m not here to be on the news," I said.

"Everybody from up the hill says that." He grunted, and it was a long one, and Ophelia made a gagging noise from across the room. "Then they get here, and they want to be on the news."

Ophelia came back with the stack.

I use the word stack because I don’t have a better one. She carried it in both arms, hugging it to her chest with the stuffed bear squashed on top, and it reached from her waist to her chin. Paper spilled out of manila folders at every angle. Some of it was yellow. Some of it was pink carbon copy.

A lot of it had coffee rings that suggested the filing cabinet wasn’t the only thing in this office older than I was. She staggered the last three steps, and the whole thing swayed like a drunk man trying to find the bathroom. Then she dropped it on the second desk.

The desk groaned. Not metaphorically. It made a noise.

A cloud of dust came up off the pile, and I watched a single loose form drift down off the top like a leaf off a very bureaucratic tree. It landed at my feet. I picked it up. IHL Provisional Supervision Agreement, Form 7-C. Somebody had filled it out in pen on only one line. The box marked Supervising Hero Comments had a single word written inside in heavy block letters: NO.

"This is yours," Ophelia said. She dusted off her hands and picked her bear up again, tucking it back under her arm. She gave me a look that suggested she had delivered exactly what I deserved. "Welcome to Eastside Protective Services."

I stared at the pile. The pile stared back. It looked like it had survived at least one major natural disaster and possibly two apartment moves.

"What is all this?"

"Your placement paperwork is on top." Dralun ticked items off on his claws and then gave up after two and just waved at the whole thing. "There’s the liability waiver, the IHL supervision form, and the Halloran community service contract in triplicate. Underneath that is the incident report backlog."

I looked at the pile again. It did not get smaller.

"How far back does the backlog go?"

"March."

"That’s eight months of reports."

"Nobody files them," Ophelia said. She hopped back up onto her desk, crossed her legs, and reopened the parasol with a snap. "I don’t type anything that isn’t cute, and incident reports aren’t cute."

"She’s part time," Dralun said.

"I’m artistic," Ophelia corrected.

"She’s part time and artistic, and you’re a Halloran kid with a hundred-dollar pen." He nodded at my jacket pocket. "Your file says you’re good at talking. Let’s see if you’re good at writing."

I picked up the Form 7-C off the floor and set it back on the pile. Then I moved the top folder aside and looked underneath. The first report was from April, about a car fire on Delancey.

Handwritten in what looked like blocky marker, the narrative section consisted of three sentences: FIRE. PUT IT OUT. NOBODY DIED. Under that was a May report about a Branded kid who had smashed a bus shelter during a tantrum, and the entire narrative section read TALKED TO HIS MOM. HE’S FINE NOW. The June entries were thinner. One of them, dated the 14th, said only RACCOON in capital letters.

I picked that one up and held it toward Dralun.

"This entire report just says raccoon."

"It was a big raccoon." His tone suggested the size of the raccoon was self-evident and should not require elaboration.

"The IHL requires a minimum two-hundred-word narrative for every logged incident." I dropped the page back onto the pile. "That’s the regulation. You know that’s the regulation."

Dralun took a long, deliberate sip of his terrible coffee. His tail swept the floor once, caught the trash can again, and knocked it over. It rolled across the cracked linoleum until it hit my boot and stopped. He set the mug down with a ceramic thunk and looked at me with those sharp brown eyes, the kind that had been reading people for longer than I’d been alive.

"Then you’d better start writing about the raccoon," he said.

Ophelia giggled from under her parasol, a high little breathy sound, and kicked her striped legs off the edge of the desk.

[INTERFACE: Main Quest pending review. The interface is examining whether filing 214 incident reports qualifies as heroism. The interface has concluded it does not. The interface wishes the Host luck.]

I looked at the pile, the dragon, and the goth girl twirling a parasol at me, and I set the raccoon report down on top of the stack.

"What the hell..."