Chapter 605 | Administrative Negligence, Meet Four Extra Hands

Chapter 605: 605 | Administrative Negligence, Meet Four Extra Hands

"What the hell is this, a hazing ritual?"

"Minus five cute points for swearing in front of Mr. Stitches." Ophelia lifted the bear and pressed its lumpy face against her cheek. "He’s very sensitive, and you’ve traumatized him."

"The bear has buttons sewn over his eyes."

"He sees with his heart, Belmont."

Dralun grunted once, which I now understood to mean yes, and dropped into his chair. The chair had already survived years of this abuse, and it screamed about it anyway. He propped one steel-toed boot on the edge of his desk and let the tail curl around the chair leg until the whole arrangement settled into something I would have called comfortable if the chair had consented.

I did some math, because math was the only thing in this room that wasn’t going to insult me. The pile held roughly two hundred reports, give or take a raccoon. At two hundred words each, that came to forty thousand words of narrative, which was a short novel about fires, tantrums, and at least one wildlife encounter. I had a hundred Intelligence and the typing speed of a caffeinated court stenographer, and I was still going to lose my entire first week to this pile unless I got clever about it.

"Do you have a computer?" I asked.

Dralun pointed his mug toward the corner without looking. Sitting on a folding table beside the radiator was a laptop so thick it could have doubled as a riot shield. The lid bore a sticker of a cartoon bat wearing sunglasses, and the hinge had been reinforced with duct tape in three separate places, each strip a different color like someone had given up on matching halfway through. I crossed the room, lifted the lid, and the fan roared to life with a sound loud enough to drown out the wok downstairs and possibly the traffic on the street beyond.

"It runs," Dralun said.

"It’s wheezing at me, Dralun."

"It runs, and it wheezes. Both can be true."

I pulled over a stool that had one leg shorter than the others and spent the next thirty seconds finding the angle where it only rocked when I breathed. The laptop took four minutes to boot, which was approximately three minutes longer than most people would have tolerated and one minute shorter than I had already expected from the age of the tape. During those four minutes I stared at the pile of incident reports, which I’m fairly certain grew a centimeter out of pure spite the longer I looked at it. Somewhere under the raccoon report, a napkin with coffee stains had been filed as documentation.

My interface had stopped offering opinions, which told me it found this funny.

Here was the thing about having a Legendary-adjacent loadout hidden inside a Rare-tier file. Most of the time, the gap between those two numbers felt like a loaded gun I had to keep in my pocket.

Every so often, though, the gun turned out to be useful for opening pickle jars, and I was looking at one very large jar with the lid screwed on by years of administrative negligence. The Oracle Feed had gone quiet, which meant it was watching to see how I handled this.

Fine.

I’d handle it with four extra hands and a typing speed that would look perfectly reasonable for someone with a registered force manipulation Aspect learning to multitask.

"Is your office considered public space?" I asked.

Dralun lowered his mug two inches. His eyes narrowed until they were brown slits in a bronze face, and he took a long look at me before answering.

"Why."

"Because I can sort this faster if I’m allowed to use my hands," I said. "All of my hands, including the ones I technically don’t have."

"You mean your Aspect."

"I mean four telekinetic constructs that would very much like to organize this disaster by month."

Ophelia sat up straighter on her desk. The parasol tilted back, and for the first time since I’d walked in, she looked at me as though I might be interesting instead of a stain on her floor. Her grey eyes flicked from my hands to the pile and back.

"Oh, I want to see it," she said. "I want to see the gold boy glow."

"It’s amber, actually, not gold."

"Gold trends better, so you’re gold now."

Dralun took another sip of coffee. His tail swept once across the floor, found the trash can for the third time, and sent it rolling under Ophelia’s desk. She kicked it back out without looking.

"Door’s shut, so nobody’s watching," he said. "Nobody’s watching, so it’s not public. You break a window, I’m billing Halloran."

That was apparently all the permission I was getting. I rolled my shoulder once, felt the last of the Demigod repair tug inside the joint, and let Spectral Reach come up out of my palms.

Four amber arms unfolded into the room. They came out of me in smoky ribbons and then solidified, each one ending in a hand with long fingers and more joints than a hand should need. The warm light spilled across the pressed-tin ceiling and turned the grey filing cabinets briefly beautiful. I gave the constructs a job and let them go.

The first hand plucked the top folder off the pile and held it open in the air in front of my face so I could read the date. The second hand took the loose pages and fanned them out onto the empty floor by month. The third arm started stacking March, and the fourth one hovered over the pile, waiting for its turn.

It went fast. Faster than I’d let myself go in any classroom at Halloran, because nobody in this room had a clipboard, and the only person keeping a file on me was a stuffed bear.

April landed on the floor. May landed beside it. The pink carbon copies drifted down in little arcs and settled into their piles like birds going home for the night.

Ophelia had her phone up. Of course she did.

"Don’t post that," Dralun said.

"I’m not posting it." She tapped the screen twice, and the camera shutter made its fake click. "I’m archiving it for historical purposes, since this is the first time anyone has ever filed anything in this office."

"You’re posting it."

"I’m posting it with a filter, because the lighting in here is a hate crime."