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eryiss · 5 months ago

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[Jet x Freed] Cubicle Capers - Chapter One

Summary: Jet was meant to do more. He was meant to do something with his degree. He was meant to have a purpose. He'd taken a job at Grimoire Pharmaceuticals to work his way up into a lab position, but found himself stuck in a cubicle. Every day the same. At least he had a new boss coming. Freed Justine. He’d be like the rest, though. Boring, outdated and.. hot as hell?

Notes: Hi all. This was requested by @jethro-art, and I’d forgotten how fun these two are to write for. They might be a little OOC for the first chapter, but they get back to themselves pretty soon. Hope you all enjoy it.

Links: Ao3, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Epilogue

Chapter One - The New Boss

Jet

Every morning, Jet would walk to his cramped cubicle to three stacks of paperwork. He'd be disavowed of his hope that the buzzing light overhead would have been fixed, he'd log into his PC knowing full well he'd be watching the spinning circle for the best part of five minutes, and he'd idly wonder what it would be like to just up and leave the office never to return. Every morning was the same, and yet it never stopped being so sad.

This had meant to be a step onto the ladder. Who cared if he was on the bottom rung? He'd just climb up to where he wanted to be. That's what he'd thought five years ago, as a fresh-faced college grad with a degree in chemistry. He'd been wrong.

"Morning Jet," someone said in passing, not bothering to slow down their pace as they walked past the cubicle.

They were gone before he could see they were, so he didn't bother replying. Instead, he flicked on the paper scanner which gave a clunk of protest and got to work removing the staples from the nearest stack of paper. They got caught up in the scanner if he didn't. How was a guy meant to spend eight hours scanning documents, and then copying the exact same information he'd just scanned into a spreadsheet, without a working scanner?

He'd thought he would be working in a lab by now. That's why he'd taken the job. Grimoire Pharmaceuticals gave the hard sell during the interviewers when talking about internal promotions. Jet had been naive back then and believed them.

"You fucker," he hissed, biting his thumb as a little drop of blood spilled from it. He'd nicked himself with the staple remover. Perfect start to an inevitably shitty day, really.

Typically, he wasn't quite so morose. He hated his job on the best of days, but he could mostly console himself that it paid the bills and let him live alone and on that wonderful day when he did quit, it would look amazing on his resume. Hell, on a good day he'd carve out a scrap of individuality and slip in an earphone and listen to a podcast. The hours didn't fly by exactly, but they picked up the pace to a slightly favourable lollop.

Today, though, they were getting a new department manager. An outside hire - internal promotions my ass, Jet had nearly said when he'd heard - who would inevitably be the same golf playing, gin swilling, employee hating douchebag they all were. Another asshole higher on the ladder that Jet could no longer leave.

One day, when the endless towers of documents eased up, Jet would put some time into pinpointing the moment he went from a carefree kid to… whatever he was now.

Sometime in the morning – it could have been early, could have been late, all Jet knew was that the first stack of papers was half done, and he'd accidentally been copied into three emails meant for an accountant called Jeremy – the general manager plodded into the office and called for everyones attention. Jet, just like every one of his colleagues, stood up with lethargy and boredom evident in his movements, and peaked his head over cubicle.

"Everybody," began Mister Stinger – heaven forbid you call him by his first name – called in introduction. He was the general manager for a few departments, and a corporate dickhead in every sense of the word and seemed to be always ready for a screaming match. "This is Freed Justine. He's you're new manager."

An office full of gazes shifted to the man beside him, Jet included. Jet found his brow raising on its own, equally shocked and impressed. The new manager was not what he expected.

Pretty tall and pretty young, Mister Justine looked like he still had life behind his eyes, a rarity in the office. He stood tall and didn't show much on his face, and gave Stinger a small nod of appreciation for the introduction. He stepped forward, a confident step as he looked over his employees. His skin was pale, his features sharp but not exactly delicate, and his hair, long and green, tied up high. He was handsome, but that wouldn't last. The office had a habit of draining the life from things.

"Thank you, Mister Stinger," he spoke, and his voice had a honey-like quality behind the authority. That would go too; Jet idly wondered how long until he'd hear a tired rasp wearing away that firmness of tone. "I've heard good things about this department. Hard workers and dedicated employees. Looking over your numbers, you tend to hit targets fairly consistently, so you're doing something right. I don't intend to fix what isn't broken, so I assure you I won't be barrelling in with new ideas. Should everything go as I intended, you'll barely notice the change at all. Except, of course I'll be aiming to get that rate of meeting targets from fairly consistent to resolutely consistent. That's for another time, though. I wouldn't want to take up anymore of your morning break."

Jet wasn't shocked. Neither that they'd waited until the morning break to make the announcement rather than on company time, nor that this new guy was as much a corporate mouthpiece as the rest of them. The fancy suit and the glitzy watch gave that away.

Still, at least he was good looking. He wasn't a middle-aged slob like most of the managers they'd had, and as he turned to address the rest of the room, Jet let his eyes flicker down his new boss's form. Mister Justine wore his suit well. It hugged his thighs and drew subtle focus to his firm looking ass. A bit of eye candy would be a welcome distraction, for as long as it lasted. Jet had to wonder what exactly would make Mister Justine unattractive; would the life be drained out of him, would he reveal himself to be a total ass like the rest of management, or would he simply be promoted before Jet could truly appreciate the man's appeal?

"While I have an open-door policy, I expect you all to take initiative and only interrupt my work as a last resort," Mister Justine continued, and Jet might have rolled his eyes if Freed hadn't turned to face his side of the room again. "Respect for one another's time is tantamount to a good working environment, so if you give me respect, I'll do the same to you."

Jet could guarantee that at four thirty that afternoon he'd get another stack of invoices to scan, and he'd be working at least an hour late to get them all scanned. Nobody had respected his time in five years.

"Quite right," Mister Stinger agreed, then addressed the room at large again. "Chain of command is still the same. Want to speak to me, do it through your manager. Anything else you want to say to them?" Freed gave a small shake of his head. "Back to work then."

Mister Stinger walked to the hallway, Mister Justine walked to his new office, and Jet collapsed back in his squeaky chair. Break time was over. He'd have to wait until lunch to get himself another mug of coffee. Great.

New day. New manager. Same shit.

———

Freed

Maybe it would be unfair to say that the office seemed lifeless, but that was the first conclusion that Freed had made. He didn't really like much of it, so far. Too many cubicles, too many computers that looked like they should have been trashed during the Y2K panic, and far too many people who looked like they'd rather repeatedly slam their heads against the wall than work another day in the office. If this was the reality of corporate America, Freed wasn't a fan.

Still, needs must. When one returns to their hometown, they must get a job. Grimoire Pharmaceuticals paid well, they gave reasonable benefits to management and above, and as pharmaceutical companies went, they weren't totally immoral, which was a win in Freed's view. He'd just have to get used to this world; he'd see the good aspects of office working soon enough, no doubt.

A nagging voice told him he'd made a mistake.

He'd seen the world in his past job. Being a translator for higher with thirteen languages under his belt had given him opportunities seldom seen for most people. He'd visited country after country, worked with politicians, dignitaries and the uber-elite. But he'd also been nomadic, and it was time to settle. The office might seem a little bleak, but it beat the hell out of the liminal mind fuck of staying at yet another chain hotel night after night, living from a suitcase with no home to call his own. Endless corridors of the same carpets and doors haunted him, and an office was a welcome relief.

No, it was time to put down some roots. If working a nine to five was how he got those roots down, then so be it. He could live a boring life, everyone else seemed to be doing fine with that. Yes, they looked dead behind the eyes, but maybe that was just something Freed needed to get used to too.

Looking over the past year's performance reviews didn't lend him much confidence. There was a growing theme where dedication to the rules were prioritised over any advancement. The more subservient – perhaps there was a better word, but Freed didn't find one – an employee was, the better their review. Any employee who did as they were told was more likely to get their meagre raise when the opportunity came. Those who questioned things were seen as troublemakers.

The performance review of a young man named Jet made that clear. A bit too loud. A bit too boisterous. Happy to voice his opinion. A possible union starter. A troublemaker.

Warning after warning had been hidden in the language of corporate speak; clearly this Jet was the dissenter of the group. Good to know. Freed pushed away from his desk, left the little private office latched onto the far side of the floor, and walked through row after row of cubicle, looking for the ginger hair that had snagged his gaze earlier in the day.

He saw Jet before Jet saw him, which gave him a chance to see how he worked. He checked a document for staples, scanned it when he was sure there weren't any, moved the scanned document to the other side of his desk, and typed on his keyboard. Simple, effective, boring as all hell.

Freed approached, a small, antagonising smile on his face. Jet was a troublemaker? Well, so was Freed.

"Why are you cluttering your desk like this?" Freed said in lieu of greeting. It was rude, of course, but Freed felt you saw a man's true self if his feathers were ruffled a bit. "Surely it'd be better to take the scanned documents to the recycling after you don't need them anymore."

Jet looked at him like he was a moron. That was fair; Freed's suggestion had been purposefully moronic.

"That'd be kinda…" Jet was clearly trying to think of a diplomatic word. Freed had to wonder what words he was dismissing. "-slow. Getting up and going all the way over to the trash cans. I can be fast, y'know, but not that fast. Don't wanna get behind."

Freed let the point lay in the air. Jet didn't offer an alternative point of deference. Good. "Up to you."

He walked away without further words, and as he turned a corner in the maze of cubicles, he could see the look of open bafflement and irritation on Jet's face as he tracked Freed's movements. Freed didn't look over his shoulder as he returned to his office, somehow knowing that Jet wouldn't be following Freed's frankly ridiculous advice in an attempt to suck up to the new boss. He still had some pushback in him, and that was something Freed was glad about.

Sure enough, when Freed flicked on the monitor with the CCTV feed on it, it didn't take him long to find Jet's desk just as cluttered as before. More-so, actually. The stack of scanned documents which had been pretty neat before were now splayed out and a little precarious, hanging over the edge. Had he messed them up out of spite?

It wasn't good to have a favourite employee, especially after having essentially no contact with him or anyone else in the office, but Freed felt a tiny glimmer of happiness. He liked spiteful people, if they were principled with it. Maybe Jet would have that.

He switched off the CCTV monitor – it felt terribly invasive to be watching his employees from cameras he wasn't sure they even knew about – and went back to the performance reviews, hoping to weed out more rebels in the office. None came, and by day's end Freed could only conclude that this office had leeched the life out of all of its employees to the point of banality.

Except, of course, for Jet.

#Jet X Freed #Freed x Jet #jet fairy tail #freed justine #Fairy Tail #Fanfic #Writing #Multi Chapter #Modern AU #Office AU

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cnstv · 6 months ago

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6/4 Naturalization interview. I know all the answers just like in school, when it wasn't supposed to be that anybody was this good. I had just memorized the one hundred questions and answers on flash cards, and of course I knew them all today. I had practiced them one last time on the subway. It didn't seem like I was answering questions, I just talked.

The lobby of the building is brand new, and yet, as I nervously walk through the empty switchback lanes, and at the end of them, pour all my things into the bins at the security scanner, the guard jokes that if I have yet another item, that'll be five dollars, a joke that I can only acknowledge by commencing to laugh after a second, but not respond with any kind of joke in return. The seventh floor, the interview floor, is as old and worn as any government facility.

My interviewer is a resolute woman in her thirties. She begins asking me interview questions without any opening statement. They are indistinguishable from the request to spell my new wife's last name. They do know about the order of protection that was filed against me some six years ago, which I had never mentioned in any of my filings, but they don't seem to know the resolution of it, DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE, which seems genuinely new information to her as I pull out the document to prove it. Is that an original, can I keep the original, I will make a copy of it. She hands me back the copy, not the original.

This, I guess, would also be the time when it turns out they know my browsing history and consider me not of good moral character because of it. But either they don't know my browsing history, or it's just a normal browsing history like everybody else's. I pass, I am accepted. My oath ceremony will likely be end of August.

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kunstmull · 1 year ago

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Captain Save-A-Hisashi rides again!

I don't know if the comment got eaten by the spam filter; or if it was another case of "did not understand my sense of humour"; or if the blogger has fallen into a black hole on the way to Andromeda, but I did actually save the text, and wanted to post it somewhere, in case anyone ever has any response.

{Comment followed a thread where a random googler had asked for explanation of the Greek letters in Buck-Tick's Nostalgia - Vita Mechanicalis. CP responded to the effect of, don't read too much into it, Imai is not very well educated and the whole thing was just a reference to some Steampunk phone game.}

((Further edited to add: yes, it's entirely possible that this is just a reference to a game, and Delta-Iota-Lambda-Xi refers to nothing more complicated than:

There is indeed both a Delta and a Xi in these characters))

The comment I left in response:

It’s true that Imai is an art school dropout, and his monotropic brain simply cannot hang on to information he doesn’t have an interest in, such as penmanship or random prefectures of Japan. It’s such a SHAME that there is literally no place on Earth or Andromeda where one can come across Greek symbols other than high school maths class!

Chapter 1: amidst the profusion of Imai interviews I’ve absorbed recently, I came across one where our boy mentioned reading James Gleick, so it’s clear he actually does read popular science. (Sorry I can’t footnote it for you, my monotropic brain has never got the hang of footnotes.) Something clicked, as to why the ill-fated tour for Cosmos was named CHAOS: it’s a pun, a synthesis of the “Anarchy” meaning (another long-term preoccupation of Imai, hence the most obvious) and the “complex, self-organising systems” meaning – manifesting in the post-Gleick mid-90s as a pop-science fascination with Fractals. On the chance Imai was fibbing about reading a big book about maths, the ideas popularised by Gleick were widely discussed and heavily used in the fields of Videogame design and Animation – fields Imai has well-known and documented Special Interests in. Knowledge absorbed from pop culture is still knowledge.

Chapter 2: Imai got online in the mid-90s, as documented in his seminal “log off and touch grass” song. What was he arguing about on Usenet? Same things as the rest of us early internet geeks: “Dinosaurs, CT scanners, love, that girl's tooth prints, Klein bottles etc.” Your translation of “いわゆる全てに共通する図形“ is lost, but Google misTranslate is giving me "So-called common-to-all shapes" something that looks suspiciously like set theory or platonic solids? The ~Science Side of Tumblr~. Imai was soaking in it!

Conclusion: living on the net, reading popular science books, imbibing sci-fi, it is not inconceivable that Imai either *does* know the common maths/physics meanings of the Greek symbols he chose; or he lifted them directly from someone who does. (Edited to add: this is the thing; even if he did just lift it from a game; games designers are notorious for adding esoteric references as Easter Eggs. Coming from a game does not mean that it is not meaningful.)

So let’s look at these symbols and see how they link to other common geography of Hisashiland

Δ Delta – this is the easiest one. Delta is the rate of change, usually over time. Everything changes. The only constant over time is change. (The second law of thermodynamics, entropy fans.) ((Edited to add: if I look through my Tumblr archives, I probably can find a long post I made about the relationship between the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Einstuerzende Neubauten's Sehnsucht.))

Ι Iota – the smallest possible amount. How often has Imai referenced scientific words for the concept of the most tiny? Atom Futurist No. 9 (Democritus theorised the Atom – indivisible – as the smallest, infinite, indestructible building block of nature before the Victorians smashed this to pieces with the discovery of the Electron.) Quantum I & II – quantum theory smashed the idea of the smallest building block of nature the way Rutherford smashed the indivisible atom. Iota is another science term for the same thing: the tiny indivisible.

Λ Lambda – the Cosmological Constant. Since the Big Bang, the Universe has been constantly expanding (see section Delta – change!) Lambda is a little mathematical fiddle that Einstein added to the Theory of Relativity to account for the fact that the expansion of the universe is always accelerating. Why? Dark Matter? Dark Energy? This is hotly debated in physics, but in Hisashiland the metaphor of Dark Matter or Dark Energy is repeatedly employed as a necessary corrective for the Blue Sky of conformity.

Ξ Xi – this one was the hardest to crack. At first I thought he’d mis-transliterated the Greek Chi which is the standard mathematical X of the unknown. Xi is the Riemann Function. What’s he about? He’s usually associated with non-Euclidean geometries, surfaces that are impossible outside of multidimensional spaces – moebius strips, Calabi-Yau manifolds (the working model for superstrings, another way of trying to understand where all the extra dark energy/matter is hiding in 10-dimensional space, see Lambda for what Dark Energy means in Hisashiland), and… Klein Bottles, which Imai was getting in flame wars over on the early internet. To understand the true scientific nature of reality, one has to think outside the mosquito net – outside the constraints of the human limitations of three-dimensional perception. In Riemannian maths, dark energy can fold up to hide inside extra dimensions within infinitesimally tiny spaces.

Now these letters may have been chosen stochastically, but all four of them refer to concepts that recur again and again in the hermeneutics of Hisashiland. And one of Gleick’s most profound insights is that randomness isn’t actually that random. Even chaos follows its own cosmological order. Imai may be dirty and strange, but he’s nowhere near as cute-and-dumb as he looks!

#imai mon amour #Nostalgia -Vita Mechanicalis-#things that were in my brain and they are better out of my brain #long post is long

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olivia-anderson-fanfic · 3 years ago

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Canary, Part 5

First

Tim tipped his head to the side as he considered the woman in front of him.

She had a slightly nervous smile as she pulled one of her earbuds out of her ears. “Hi.”

Her eyes flicked past him and, after quickly glancing back to make sure no one was about to attack him, he realized she was feeling cornered.

… probably because she was currently being cornered.

He hesitantly took a few steps to the side until he could lean against the wall. “I’m not here to hurt you or anything, I just want to talk,” he promised.

Her hand slipped out of her pocket. He was willing to bet that she had some kind of weapon in there.

Which was good, honestly. Gotham was a dangerous place for newcomers like her.

“... so, what’re you here for?” She asked when he didn’t say anything for a while.

He bit his lip as he considered her.

Marinette Dupain-Cheng, 27.

The first time they’d spotted her following them around, they’d assumed she was just another alias of Canary… but the fourteen aliases they had found for Canary so far had always had one thing in common: despite how far back it may have gone or how many connections she may have had, there was never anyone alive to corroborate her story.

She would have definitely done that this time since there was a 100% chance that the bats would notice her. Canary would have made sure that, no matter what, they couldn’t pop on over to anyone’s house and ask about her.

But Marinette had two parents. They were back in Paris, of course, but they still existed. Babs had spotted them walking to the grocery store just yesterday. They had a consistent call history with them dating back years.

He had entertained the idea that they could be paid actors… but Canary worked alone. She had informants and sponsors, sure, but partners? No. It had been nine years, if she was going to start working with people she probably would have done that already.

Marinette checked out.

… or, at least, she checked out in all ways but two.

“How did you get here?” Asked Tim.

Marinette frowned a little. “... plane?”

He shook his head. “We have footage of you at Roissy Airport, but you never arrived in Gotham.”

Her skin paled. “Must be a glitch.”

Okay. That’s definitely not suspicious at all, no way.

He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t think so, no.”

“Maybe you missed me.”

“With our facial recognition scanners? And three people checking it over?”

Her hand was back in her pocket and her eyes were flicking to the exit nervously.

“I’m not going to deport you or anything,” he added quickly. “Lots of people here aren’t documented and that’s totally fine, the immigration system is totally messed up… I’ll shut up about that now, that’s not helping... I just… want to know. Curious.”

“Paranoid,” she corrected with a hesitant grin.

“... cautious,” he said after a few seconds.

“Sure, if that’s what you want to call it.”

“It’s much nicer than paranoid, that’s for sure,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

She rolled her eyes and he smiled as some of the tension in her shoulders disappeared.

“The horse miraculous,” she said after a few seconds. “That’s how I got here.”

He sighed internally. Metas in Gotham. Not good. There was a reason that rule was in place. If metas -- even good ones -- started coming then there was nothing stopping the huge, otherworldly threats from following them over. They’d stick with their overdramatic fucks that need therapy, thanks, their gadgets didn’t exactly hold up against literal gods.

And then Marinette giggled. “You don’t need to look so scared. The weird old guy who holds onto all the miraculous… he doesn’t really use them, he just keeps them locked in a weird box thing. I just…” She shrugged. “I had something on him and he was more than happy to get rid of me.”

… well, that’s a little concerning, thought Tim.

Not exactly unexpected, though. She’d very publicly gotten a restraining order by Chat Noir around ten years prior and, while none of the other miraculous holders had come out against her, many of the ones that had revealed themselves as holders had already denounced her. Tim wouldn’t have been surprised if she had stalked more of them -- hell, she was stalking him and his family, clearly she hadn’t limited herself to Chat Noir.

But this raised his second question: “Why now?”

She cringed. “Well, I’d thought about moving a long time ago. No place in France was going to hire me with the whole ‘stalking one of their beloved superheroes’ thing… but I decided to stay for a while. I didn’t want it to seem like I was running away, y’know?”

He nodded his understanding slowly. That made sense. It wasn’t a decision based on logic, but not all decisions are.

She smiled awkwardly, rubbing the back of her neck. “Also, I kind of missed having superheroes, to be honest.”

Tim raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t going to correct her use of the word ‘superheroes’ instead of ‘vigilantes’, English was at least her second language and that would be rude, so he went down a different route: “I thought they still had their miraculous. It’d be stupid if they didn’t. Mayura is still out there and all.”

“As far as I know, everyone but Ladybug and Chat Noir gave up their miraculous. Everyone knows Mayura is just Adrien Agreste even if we can’t prove it. Nothing else makes sense,” she said with a shrug.

He bit his lip. “I thought that the secretary disappeared that day, though. Wasn’t it her?”

“Nathalie Sancoeur? I heard she moved to America,” Marinette said with a shrug. “But America hasn’t had any attacks, so no one in Paris thinks it was her. Adrien is probably just waiting until the miraculous holders drop their guards.”

He nodded slowly. He didn’t realize he was going to be gossiping and discussing conspiracy theories with a person who stalked heroes but, he had to admit, it was kind of fun. Reminded him of the good old days when he was just a kid who followed the bats around for fun.

… but that wasn’t how things were anymore. He had responsibilities now. Which he was currently not doing. Oops.

“I should get back to work.”

“I should get back to watching you work,” she half-joked.

He hesitated. “Is there any way I can convince you not to do that? Gotham isn’t Paris, it’s dangerous here.”

She grinned. “I stalked a guy who had a literal god at his beck and call. I can handle a few odd goons,” she said.

He bit his lip but nodded. “Call for help if you ever need it.”

“Fine. Fine.”

He got the distinct feeling that she wasn’t going to but he was going to give her the benefit of the doubt just for now.

He pulled his grapple gun from his belt and hooked it around the rooftop.

“See you later.”

“Well, you will see me later, I’ll --,” she began, only to cut herself off with a gasp: “NO!”

He quickly checked over his shoulder but he didn’t see anything. He turned back to her, questioning look on his face, only to see her devastated expression.

“Cedric died,” she said sadly, pointing at the ear with the earbud still in it.

…?

Marinette sat in a coffee shop, sipping at a drink as she worked on her computer.

Tim Drake had five coffee shops that he enjoyed. The tiny tweet she’d sent out a little over a week ago ensured that he wasn’t going to be allowed coffee at his place of work. So, he was likely to go and get coffee somewhere else. She was currently sitting at the one closest to WE.

… it was very expensive. She needed to drink her coffee slower.

She squinted at her resume with a frown.

She was pretty sure it was good enough to get in, but…

Marinette sighed lightly and let her head hit the table. Fuck. She hated this stupid job so much.

She heard the chair across from her scrape against the wooden floors and slowly lifted her head. She squinted at the guy in front of her for a minute.

“Hello,” she said carefully.

The brown-haired man smiled at her.

She glanced him up and down. He was clean in a slimy kind of way. He was too nice. His hair was coiffed perfectly, his suit neatly pressed, his face clean-shaven. People who had the guts to dress like that in Gotham were always the worst of the worst.

“Hi!” he said cheerfully.

She sighed. “You weren’t even going to ask if you could sit here?”

“You’ve been alone for a while. Figured it was safe to assume you didn’t have anyone.”

Cool. Cool cool cool. Her hand slipped to the dagger hidden in her hoodie pocket. She may not know what kind of bad he was, but he was definitely bad news.

“No, actually, I was just waiting for my friend to get off work so they could join me.”

“Oh! I’ll keep you company until they show up!”

Damn. She hated when people called her bluff.

She forced her most pleasant smile to her face. “No thanks. I have work to do, actually.”

“Applying for jobs, right?”

She paled.

“Sorry, but I was curious so I just peeked over your shoulder a little bit. I actually had a couple of openings at my job, and you seem like a good candidate, if you’d like --.”

“No!” She said quickly.

His smile didn’t waver, but his eyes narrowed just a little. “I was just offering you a job.”

“I don’t want to get a job this way. I prefer the formal interview process and everything,” she lied.

“Oh, well, my company is having interviews tomorrow and there should be an open spot around --.”

A hand came to rest on the man’s shoulder.

“Hey, bud, she said no.”

~~~

TheBetterCanary: @/BrucieWayne give me a hundred million dollars and ill stop doing crime

BrucieWayne: Done.

TheBetterCanary: i take it back five hundred million

BrucieWayne: Sure.

TheBetterCanary: a billion

BrucieWayne: Alright.

TheBetterCanary: what the fuck

~~~~~

Perma taglist: @nathleigh @peachmuses

Canary taglist: @jayjayspixiepop @unoriginalmess @miraculousfanfic127 @probably-a-hologram

#my little cousin stole my phone #:( havent seen it in days #its lost to the void #helpppppp #canary #maribat #timinette #timari #shutterbug #timmari #marinette dupain cheng #ladybug #tim drake #red robin

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scpeen-l0l · 4 years ago

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Hi! I was wondering if your could do a scp-035 x scientist!reader fix where the they’re in the middle an interview, and a containment breach suddenly happens

ahhh, i’m not entirely sure if this is what you had in mind. but anyways, thank you so much for requesting!! you’re the first on this blog and while writing this i got another! man i’m so happy ahah

(i forgot to tag this when it was first posted lol)

---

1.5k words

‘easy prey’

You’ve always had mixed feelings on 035. Since the very first day you were assigned to them, you felt their infamous ‘lure’ that they were known to have. Despite that, you liked to think of yourself as resilient, so you were able to just bury yourself in work and deny any sort of weird attraction you had to the mask. Of course, 035 had picked up on the behavior that they had seen countless times in the past, much to your dismay.

Your supervisor told you that you would be interviewing 035 with the routine set of questions in a few days’ time. When you queried as politely as possible to why you were assigned to interview them this time over the usual interviewer, your supervisor handed you a page of the transcript of their most recent interview, with a section highlighted in yellow.

//PAGE 2//

08/08/██

SCP#: SCP-035

Class: Keter

Interviewer: Warren, [REDACTED] (Sr. Researcher)

SCP-035: Mhm… Hey, what are the odds of that new researcher coming into my cell anytime soon?

[Dr. Warren pauses for a moment, before looking at their host’s hands.]

Warren: Which one? Dr. L/n or Dr. Ahmad?

SCP-035: The younger one. Yes, I’d like to have a chat.

Warren: Why?

[SCP-035 throws its head back before resting its chin on its intertwined hands.]

SCP-035: Since when have you started recruiting people that young? I simply want to ask them about it.

Warren: Stop it, 035. Be more specific.

[SCP-035 lets out an exaggerated sigh]

SCP-035: Why can’t a mask just have a regular talk with a researcher? All I want is a friendly chat! Besides, you’d get some free time whilst we’re busy…

Warren: If we do allow you to converse, you will only be allowed 30 minutes maximum with routine questions.

[SCP-035 laughs]

SCP-035: That’d be grand. Well, what’s on your mind today?

Your heart was beating out of your chest, fear coursing through your body. Your supervisor coughed to get your attention, to which you could only nod your head slowly to, it wasn’t like you really had a choice. Still, what did it want from you?

You didn’t get much sleep that night, to say the least.

When the fabled day finally arrived, you were an absolute wreck. All of your confidence flew out the window and left you with sweaty palms and a looming feeling of dread. The walk to the mask’s cell was long and unnerving, the adrenaline was putting you on edge. You weren’t usually like this, but your fears got the best of you. What if they convinced you to wear them? What then? Regardless, you’d be dead either way. You cursed yourself for being a nervous wreck at the worst time, so you headed to the closest empty room you could find.

You found yourself in a break room after a few minutes of searching, the missioning around the facility already clearing out your mind. You rubbed your temples, psyching yourself up. If you did eventually become a host for the mask, you sure as hell weren’t going to make it easy. With a small pep in your step, you finally approached the area containing 035.

Warren was talking with your supervisor, just about to leave when he saw you walk in. A forced smile made its way to his face as he approached you.

“Pleasure formally meeting you, L/n.”

“Same here. Do you have a spare copy- “

Warren handed you a file, “here, make sure to stay on topic as much as possible. Oh, and the second you feel like putting him on or anything of the sort, press the panic button next to the microphone on the table.”

Him?

You nodded, reassured that you had a sure-fire way to get out. “Thanks. Do I… go in now?”

Warren turned to your supervisor, Dr. Patel, whom only nodded in response. Dry, as always. You sucked in a deep breath before checking your phone for the time, 9am on the dot. A good time to die, you thought, before a guard ushered you into 035’s cell. A male D-Class with 035 on his face looked to you and tilted his head.

You knew you didn’t look the most assertive, or dominant but you were resilient. That’s all you had going into that interview, you told yourself.

Sitting down and laying out the documents inside the file on the table, you looked back at the group of staff behind you. McAllistor, the technician, gave you a comforting smile; Warren was already out the door; Dr. Ahmad looked away awkwardly; Dr. Patel was typing away on his computer and you could see the side of a guard’s visor at the corner of the observation window. Huh, a little understaffed today. Were they the last people you’d ever see? Perhaps. Alas, you had a job to do, and you were going to do it damn well, if it was the last thing you ever did.

//RECORDING STARTED//

L/n: Hello, 035. Ready to start?

SCP-035: Of course.

Ooh, that voice- Did it always sound so… Smooth?

L/n: Well, let’s get through these questions quickly.

SCP-035: Aw, I was hoping to get to know you a little better first.

L/n: Maybe another time. How would you describe your emotions today?

Deflect, deflect.

SCP-035: Admittedly, a little upset that you’re being so stiff with me. I rarely speak to anyone else other than [REDACTED], who’s gone off who-knows-where. Ooh, probably with his assistant- You wanna hear about that?

L/n: Uh, so you feel upset that you can’t speak with me-

Shit. That threw you off.

SCP-035: Indeed, would you help me with that? Pretty please? You look like you need a break, you know. Look at those bags under your eyes!

No, you weren’t going to let him get under your skin that easily.

L/n: Apologies, 035, if my appearance is sub-par— However, I am incredibly committed to my job and I-

SCP-035: Blah, blah. Cut the canned crap. You can speak to me about it, you know, I’m a great listener.

L/n: I will be the one listening today, 035. Now-

SCP-035: You say-

L/n: 035! Stop speaking over me, unless you want this interview to be terminated?

Assertive, dominant.

SCP-035: Ah, of course not. I was out of line, I am sincerely sorry, dear.

L/n: It’s- It’s fine, where were we? Oh, here, I- Um…

Nevermind. How did he manage to make you feel bad? Stupid mask, getting in your head…

L/n: Uh, how would you describe your intentions as of late?

SCP-035: Nothing dangerous, I simply long for the stage, you know? I just miss the atmosphere! The joy! Oh, what I would do to even just watch another showing…

L/n: Thank you for not evading that question, 035. But, ah, I’m sure if you behave you’d get to-

//CONNECTION LOST//

The breach alarms went off, making you jump out of your seat. Looking back to the observation window, you saw all the scientists being escorted out of the room by the guards. You rushed to the door…

Locked.

Slowly turning back to 035, you gave him the dirtiest glare that you could muster.

“Unlock it. Now.”

“You know, I liked the more quiet, sweet, meek version of you-“

You mockingly mimicked his tone, “you know, I don’t give a shit. I’m not putting you on. You’ve already got a host, just leave me alone!”

“Oh, but you’re so intelligent, so innocent… Face it, you’re dead either way. There’s no way you’re making it out alive, I’ll be merciful and make it painless. Wear me, and I’ll ensure that your body gets some good mileage.”

A small part of you was tempted to take his offer, but the rest of you was only willing to admit he was right. What chance did you have without an armed guard? You slouched, fear settling in.

“Come on…”

You felt a weight on your right shoulder. You could see his hand in the corner of your vision, but, it was cold. Long dead. You didn’t want that for yourself.

Aggressively sliding your keycard in the scanner, you bolted out the cell and grabbed the handgun on the desk.

You let out a humourless laugh, “yeah, no. I think I’m fine.”

035 walked out his cell, scoffing as he looked at the gun in your hands, “what’s that gonna do? Is that peashooter gonna scare 106 away, huh? How many bullets are in that thing, if any?”

Biting your lip, you whined, “ahah, um, yeah… Look,” you debated internally whether you should try bargaining with this thing, “I’m not going to put you on, however, I’m willing to… cooperate in order for us to reach our separate goals. I have a level 3 keycard, which I can hand to you once I find the safety shelter. Try anything funny and I’m snapping the keycard in half.”

035 laughed, “ok, maybe I was wrong about tough and cold L/n. Sure, we can work together, but good luck trying to resist me. I can tell you’re already a bit enchanted already!”

You snorted, “yeah, yeah. Suuuuure… Alright, you promise to keep me safe whilst I navigate through the site?”

“I assure you.”

A part of you felt fuzzy. Damn, he was right about you already being charmed by him. Maybe… No, you weren’t going to give in. You’re using him as much as he’s using you. Right?

“Guess I was wrong about you being an easy host.” He mumbled.

“You what?”

#scp 035 #035 #scp 035 x reader #scp #scp x reader oneshot #scp x reader #anon

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avaritia-apotheosis · 3 years ago

Text

Phantom Children Ch.4

In Which: exposition for exposition's sake exists, and Vlad looks way more suspcious than he ought

| AO3 | Prologue | 3 | [4] | 5

VLADIMIR MASTERS. Human male in his mid-forties, and most notably the founder and CEO of VladCo, a billion-dollar industry that mostly specializes in manufacturing weapons and technology. Graduated summa cum laude from the University of Wisconsin despite having to drop out due to a lab accident in his second year, landing him in the hospital. Despite being based primarily in Wisconsin, he made an unexpected move to Amity Park Illinois shortly after reuniting with his college friends Drs. Madeline and Jack Fenton.

Not even a year later, Masters ran for mayor of Amity Park and won the election by a landslide. Suspicious, considering Masters being an unknown and the former mayor Montez being quite popular. It’s during Masters’ tenure in office that reports of ghost attacks to the Justice League steadily died down.

“Why?” Damian asked.

Barbara shrugged, pulling up a few files on the screen. “I originally had a theory that related to VladCo’s buyout of Axion Labs—a technological research and manufacturing company that’s mostly local to Amity—being a factor. Within the last couple of years, they had been experimenting with highly volatile chemicals with hallucinogenic properties. Amity had always been known for being extremely superstitious with its ghosts, and if Axion Labs had somehow accidentally released that chemical into the city, well…” She leaned back into her chair, hand twisting in the air. “You could bet how that ended up. The hysteria around ghosts only grew worse in the last two years, with suspected sightings from once every few weeks to multiple in a single day. Early attempts to capture sightings were unsuccessful, and soon enough Amity Park was just written off.”

Much like the mass hysteria surrounding the urban legend of the kuchisake-onna in Japan in the late 1970s, Bruce thought. He pulled up some news footage from Amity Park dated a few years back of citizens being interviewed about their ghostly encounters. Beside these videos were a few photos taken by a shaky camera, showing bright blurs of light streaking across the sky or vaguely humanoid shapes rising from the ground.

“So VladCo., bought out Axion Labs, improved its security, and slowly helped detoxify the town?” Damian shifted his weight onto his other leg and crossed his arms.

“That’s what I thought, but—”

“But the ghosts ended up being real.” Bruce pulled up a video of a field reporter-slash-weatherman taking cover as a figure dropped from the sky, breaking through the walls of a building. The figure—features distorted by an eerie glow—shot out of the rubble just in time before a green blast hit it.

Oracle enlarged other news footage with a few taps on her keyboard. Beings zooming through the air. Massive plants erupting from the ground. Technology coming to life. Each video more worrying than the last, and most showing some footage of a figure bathed in a white glow. “I’d be hard pressed to call any of these faked.”

It begged the question as to how Amity Park survived this long unscathed. Since, if he remembered correctly, even the Dark Leaguers tended to avoid Amity Park like the plague. “They have their own heroes, then?”

“Think along the lines of vigilantes with unofficial support.” A few more files popped up on screen. One showcased a female in a full-length black and red body suit on top of a hover board. The other was a male; young, perhaps a teenager, with white hair and a black and white suit. Hazmat? “The Red Huntress and the Phantom of Amity Park.”

“Partners?”

“More like enemies working on the same turf. Sources place Phantom as appearing first, though it seems Red Huntress has more government support in the end despite there being no official statement. They seem to be the most effective ghost hunters in town, though far from the only ones. The Fentons of Fenton Works are also acting as ghost hunters, though their track record of success leans more towards their anti-ghost tech than any hunting. The town’s even attracted visitors from the Ghost Investigation Ward; a side branch of Cadmus though a now defunct organization.”

“This doesn’t make sense,” Damian said. “If anything, this should be more than enough reason for a League intervention. Why the Justice League didn’t come sooner is the real question here.”

Bruce’s lips thinned. “That’s because we were warned off it.”

“What?”

While there was no rule against heroes entering another hero’s city, there were certain unspoken rules that demanded that JL members avoid claimed cities or stay just outside of city lines until given permission to enter. Some were especially strict about it such as Batman’s ‘no metas or outsiders’ rule. Others were more lenient, simply requesting a warning before entering.

Amity Park, despite having no listed heroes in the database, was marked with heavy ‘Do Not Interact’ warnings for humans and metas alike.

“Justice League Dark said that under no circumstances should the League interfere in Amity. The situation was never explicitly laid out for us except to say that everything was being handled.”

“Oh yeah,” Oracle chimed. “Constantine even had it bolded, underlined, italicized, and in all caps. The occult community was very clear about everyone staying away—and apparently this decision had support from Amity Park too.” She pulled up another document. “That’s probably what led to the decline in their ghost reports, actually. Amity’s claims were considered bogus and brushed aside. No one outside their town—not even their sister town of Elmerton—believed them, so they simply stopped asking for help.”

Strangely, it reminded Bruce of Gotham. Both cities existed in its own isolated sphere, unwilling to let any outsiders interfere in its business.

“It’s safe to assume, then, that whatever Ra’s al Ghul wants with Amity, it has to do with these ghosts. Do we have anyway to contact the town’s vigilantes?”

Oracle shook her head. “Ghost attacks within the past few months have slowly died down along with sightings of Phantom and Red Huntress. Your best bet is asking Masters directly.”

Damian glowered. “Masters blatantly sent out an invitation for Batman to my father. How do we know that Masters hasn’t somehow found our secret identities?”

“Unlikely,” Bruce said. “Vlad Masters, despite his wealth, has done well to keep a low profile. He’s met Bruce Wayne a total of three times within the last decade and Batman not at all.” That, and with the kind of spyware Batman has, he’d be able to tell when, where, and who was trying to dig deep into Batman’s past. Masters hadn’t even registered as a ping.

“Besides, there’s always a few rumors of Wayne Enterprise’s involvement with Batman. All this tech has to come from somewhere, no?”

“How long is Masters staying in Gotham?”

“Umm…” Oracle leaned forward in her chain and flipped through a half-dozen windows. “Going by his reservations at the Gotham Royal Hotel, he’s leaving tomorrow.”

Bruce pivoted on his heel, heading deeper into the Cave. “We better make this count, then.”

------

According to Oracle’s intel, Vlad Masters was staying at one of the executive suites in the Gotham Royal Hotel. A titanic structure with forty-eight floors, two towers, and the gothic aesthetic that never seemed to leave Gotham’s architecture.

Scaling the building as well as entering the suite proved no challenge for Batman and Robin. But upon entrance, it was abundantly clear that the room was vacant.

“Are you sure you guys are in the right room?” Bruce could hear the clicking of Oracle’s keys through their comms. “Masters had reserved the suite on the west tower.”

“Yes we’re in the correct room, Gordon,” Robin hissed.

“Codenames only, Robin.”

Robin clicked his tongue, sweeping the common room for any hidden bugs or cameras as Batman scouted out the rest of the room. The bed was made to hotel standard and the bathroom towels all completely replaced. There were no clothes in the hotel closet or dresser.

The only thing left that indicated occupancy of the room was an unmarked manila envelope unsubtly tucked within a pillowcase.

Robin tensed at the sight of it. “A detonator of some sort?”

Batman rotated the package, holding it up to his scanner. “Doesn’t seem to be. Regardless, it might be better to take it back to the Batcave and locate Masters ag—” The envelope started ringing. A standard ringtone found in most phones. Quickly, but carefully, Batman opened the manila envelope and dumped its contents onto the bed. A ringing burner phone and a flash drive came tumbling out.

Batman threw the flash drive at Robin before answering the phone, holding it up against his ear but saying nothing.

Silence. Then, Masters’ voice filtered in through the phone with a strange echo-like quality. “Good evening, Batman! I’m so glad my invitation managed to get passed along.”

Batman growled into the speaker, “What do you want, Masters?” He signaled Robin to do another sweep of the room for any signs of Masters they might have missed.

“I sincerely apologize for not being there to meet you myself; incredibly rude of me, I know. But it cannot be helped, the shadows are growing ever bolder.”

“So, you are aware then, of the League of Assassins’ presence in Amity Park?”

“A league of assassins? What a terrifying notion that is.” Batman frowned. It was unlikely that they had misread his words at the gala, so why was he acting unaware now? Could he be watched? “Why such a group would appear in my little town, I wouldn’t even dare to guess.”

Robin came back into the room and signaled back ‘negative.’

“Why did you call for us, Mayor Masters?”

“Do you know what is so very tragic, Batman?”

“This is strange,” Oracle said. “I can’t pick up his signal. He’s not appearing on any of my cameras, either.”

“When someone so young dies much to soon.” A pause. “Could you even imagine such a thing? A parent burying their own child.”

Batman could. He had no need to even imagine it because he lived it.

“Some very close friends of mine have been weighed down by the shadows of death and I require help in providing them the closure they need.”

“Are the Fentons the targets, then?”

Masters paused. Then let out a breathy laugh over the phone. “Oh, if only it were that simple.”

“So a different target.”

“Everything you need to know is in the flash drive I’ve enclosed in that envelope Whether you take up the case is entirely up to you—though I do hope you take it. Regardless, if he is not returned soon then I assure you that a disaster unlike any you have seen before will arrive.”

Batman narrowed his eyes. “Is that a threat, Masters?”

“No,” He laughed. “That was no threat. That was promise.”

The phone line disconnected just as Oracle exclaimed that she finally found Masters boarding his flight back to Amity Pak.

#danny phantom #batman #danny phantom x batman crossover #dp fic #phantom children.txt

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sirthisisa-wendys · 3 years ago

Text

The Enforcers: Part 4 (Geto Suguru x Fem!Reader)

synopsis: You're propelled to the heights of fame with your constant success with Suguru, but what goes up... must come down.

wc: 1.3k

tw: none (next part will be different)

masterlist

Success.

Your name and the word "success" are intertwined by the third month of your Kitsune career. With the help of Suguru, you're practically unstoppable, sniffing out criminals all over the city and bringing them out to face justice. Even the Leviathans come to admire Geto, who stands tall as redeemed and a big brother to many of the new recruits.

But even as you reach the height of your fame, there's a nagging feeling that sits in the back of your mind.

Same misery, but with a paycheck.

It's like a chant that haunts you in the middle of the night, and you lay awake most nights, thinking of escaping. But then the sun comes up, you rise from your bed, and you pretend that everything is okay for another eighteen hours.

Suguru notices your despondency and even mentions it over dinner, but you snap at him, telling him you were "fine", and leave him alone with the others. As you stalk off, you grumble to yourself and rub your temples, wondering when the feelings would subside. When you reach your barrack, you slide into your chair and begin your research for your current mission when you frown at your computer screen.

You always closed out the network of files when you left the room.

So why was the finder open?

And why was there a file sitting on your computer labeled "For Y/n"?

You click on the file hesitantly, knowing any wrong move could open a virus on your desktop, but your scanner doesn't pick up anything odd, and the file opens, revealing four documents, two videos, and two audio files.

All of them are labeled with your first and last name except for the audio files, which are labeled "One" and "Two".

You hesitate again. What is this pandora's box, you wonder internally. Should you even... your mouse drags to the first audio file and you click on it. Your sound is too low to hear the first part, so you rewind it and play it again. You hear the following words first:

"Hello, y/n," a robotic voice says, its tone flat and unmoved, and goosebumps break out across your skin. "You have shown great promise in your field as a Kitsune, and we know you feel empowered by your success. But there are some things you should know about the men and women you work for." You pause the audio file, heart thumping wildly in your chest as you consider the idea that this is either a test of loyalty or a cruel prank. Either way, you'd had enough.

You stand from your computer and walk around your room, covering your prickly flesh with clammy hands. Someone broke into your room to put files on your computer, addressed them to you, and made it seem like you were being watched by some outside source. But who would want to scare you? Who would--

"Y/n?" Suguru opens your door and gives you a look of deep concern, but you try your best to mask your look of fear. "Are you feeling okay?"

"I'm okay; I haven't been sleeping well," you admit, and Suguru nods, rubbing his neck nervously.

"I have something that could help you if you want. Just a sleep aid. We're given it when we start training to calm us before--"

"Sure." Geto disappears, then reappears with two pink pills.

"Take these right before bed. You'll be off to sleep in no time."

"Thanks," you reply, setting them on your bedside table and stretching. Suguru stands in your bedroom, looking at you for a second more. "I should get off to--"

"Right," he mutters, then leaves you in the room by yourself again.

_____________________________________________________________

But you don't take the pills.

Instead, you stay awake, looking at the computer screen from your bed, wondering just who would be daring enough to come into your space uninvited and place those... things on your desktop.

Curiosity eats at you for three more hours until finally, at sunup, you crack.

Keys rattle furiously under your fingertips as you type in your password and click on the first audio file yet again.

"Hello, y/n. You have shown great promise in your field as a Kitsune, and we know you feel empowered by your success. But there are some things you should know about the men and women you work for. If you wish to proceed in this endeavor, click on the first video. We know you have no reason to trust us, but we hope you will see this as a show of good faith and use the information for good. Reveal, don't conceal."

You drift over to the first video file, and a black screen comes up, the title words popping up moments later:

L/N, W. May 23. Project Kudzu Debrief.

Your father appears on the screen right after, his eyes looking dead into the camera. He's in his standard, antiquated Kitsune attire, with more hair and brighter eyes than you've ever seen. He's much younger; that you recognize instantly.

"Okay, Mr. L/n, go ahead and state your rank and case for the CSB."

"Mr. W. L/N, Kitsune, Project Kudzu."

"Thanks," a man offscreen mutters, then the sounds of flipping paper can be heard. "Now tell us about your project and what the results of it were."

"Um..." Your father shifts in his chair then rolls his neck around. "Project Kudzu is... or was, my bad." Laughs. "Project Kudzu was a ten-year effort concerning the relocation of lower-class citizens into rougher areas to produce Leviathan recruits. I spearheaded the effort with my research, and my partner, Leviathan C--" The name is bleeped out. "helped with the evictions and relocations."

"Okay," Rustling papers again. "And what were the results of this?"

"Exponential growth of the Leviathan enlistment, sir." Your father adjusts his glasses, nodding stiffly.

"Were those the desired results?"

"Yes, sir."

The screen goes black, and you stare at your open-mouthed reflection, shock flooding your veins. "Please watch the next video" pops up on your screen, and you click on it instantly, instinctively knowing who's next.

L/N, F. May 31. Project Redroot Debrief.

Your mother appears on screen, her cheeks plumper and figure fuller than it currently is. She's youthful, with long hair pinned into a bun and also in an antiquated Kitsune uniform.

"Name, rank, project," a female voice mumbles off-screen.

"Ms. F. L/N, Kitsune, Project Redroot."

"What were the aims of your project?"

"To relocate potential candidates for Kitsune potions into areas where large populations of Kitsune already reside."

"And your goal?"

"To increase Kitsune families and potential enlistment."

"How successful were you?" Your mother smirks at the camera, propping her chin upon her palm.

"How successful do you think I was?"

When the screen goes black, the taste of bile rushes into your mouth, and you rush to your bathroom, shoving a mouthful of toothpaste and your toothbrush onto your teeth. Something you can control, something you can control. But even your toothbrushing - which is normally a soothing habit - can't wipe away the look on your mother's face at her triumph. Project Kudzu... Project Redroot...

How could your parents be a part of something so sinister? Making the poor poorer and the elite... more elite?

These videos have to be fake, you tell yourself, circling back to the computer. But when you look up the metadata- which is neatly scrubbed of any trace of third parties - you see that they are in fact originals of the interview.

Finally, you take a look at the documents, the insignia and red letters "CONFIDENTIAL TS_CO" watermarked on the endless pages. TS_CO= Top Secret Clearance Only. This is above your paygrade, and exponentially so. But as you skim the redacted information, you see names, dates, your parent's names, their information, metrics, graphs, everything that you need to know that Project Redwood and Kudzu aren't fake.

They're real.

And they both happened right before you were born.

_____________________________________________________________

TAGLIST: @missbonekitty @wack0-genius @thankuary @jsqeeut @r-i-m-f-009 @sunfloweroranges @leanne-tamashi @girlruby23 @rein-icu @brownskinnedgirll @chanelmalandro @savantsoulfinder @jibe-gajima @chilledlucifer @amnxsia @kontentious @fuyuko26 @everybodylovescayrayray @flare-on

#geto suguru #jujutsu kaisen getou #getou x reader #geto x reader #getou suguru #jjk geto #jujutsu kaisen

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stormkrigeren · 3 years ago

Text

Whumptober Day 1!

Link to the Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34210837/chapters/85120435

Title: Bound - Lois

Prompt: No. 1 ‘All Trussed Up And Still Nowhere To Go’ - “You have to let go”, barbed wire, bound

Word Count: 2475

Lois preferred rope over handcuffs, and duct tape over rope. Duct tape was best because it was surprisingly easy to break, but she was rarely lucky enough to be tied up with it. Lois could tell that today wasn’t her lucky day the moment the goon wrapped a length of plastic boating rope around her wrists and yanked it tight.

She loved her job. The title of ‘investigative reporter’ practically gave her a free pass to be as nosy as she liked (and Lois was admittedly quite nosy) while also revealing the truth on a variety of issues, affairs, and dealings. No one would blink twice if she walked into a warzone or gang territory or some crooked mogul’s office with a pen handy and far too many questions in her head, and no one was surprised when her life was threatened only for her to diffuse the situation a few minutes later. That was just how Lois worked, and she loved it.

The one and only issue with her job was the fact that if her life wasn’t being threatened, her freedom probably was. Sometimes it would just be a threat to get her so discredited that no one would ever publish her works again, removing her freedom of speech, but Lois was good at her job and no one ever found anything to discredit her on. So more often than not whatever fraudulent idiot she had revealed that day would instead tie her up and leave her in a warehouse somewhere until either the police or her boss showed up with a ransom because investigative reporters, especially ones named Lois Lane, were surprisingly valuable (the highest number she’d ever heard was close to a million, which of course didn’t pan out, but it was interesting to think about).

Today had started out pretty normally - Lois had woken up, gotten ready for the day, and taken the subway to work like she usually did. Upon arriving at the Daily Planet’s Head Offices in the Upper East Side of the city, she had clocked in and gotten to her desk with the intention of kicking off the work day with a little bit of research and note-taking in preparation for her interview with some S.T.A.R Labs higher-ups that afternoon. The company had received a contract from the Department of Defense to investigate and research the Kryptonian scout ship that had crashed in downtown Metropolis and was now in government custody. Any Kryptonian 'artifacts’ found in or around the ship were catalogued by S.T.A.R Labs before being transferred to various labs and other research companies around the nation for studying, the biggest transfers usually being made to the S.T.A.R facilities in Central City and Metropolis, and third-party contractors such as Kord Industries, LexCorp, and WayneTech. The distribution of findings for individual research was all well and good, but a whistleblower had recently come to Lois with some disturbing finds: some of the artifacts, especially alien weapons, were disappearing from large shipments without a trace.

When the time of the interview drew near, Lois checked in with Perry before catching a taxi to the S.T.A.R Labs headquarters downtown. Her appointment was with a few scientists from the company’s board of directors that worked with the Kryptonian scout ship the most, and luckily for them, all three of them had enough tact to not back out of the meeting when they realized that the reporter the Daily Planet had sent over was in fact a lady on the high road to a Pulitzer Prize. A board room was procured for their usage, and Lois, being well-familiar with the drill, started her recording app, pulled out her notes, and started doing what comprised the bulk of her job as an investigative journalist: asking questions.

How was work on the Kryptonian scout ship progressing? Had any significant discoveries or breakthroughs been made so far? What sort of artifacts were they dealing with, and how did they decide which ones to distribute for outside research? Were the scout ship’s contents primarily weapons, or other items? What was the company’s response to rumors about misplaced shipments?

The scientists happily answered her questions, occasionally going off on a tangent about some discovery or the supposed usage of some unknown object but otherwise provided Lois with some pretty good fuel for her next article up until she came to the final question. All three of the researchers shifted uncomfortably in their seats and exchanged the briefest of nervous glances before Dr. Rhems, the head consultant for their Kryptonian armaments division, launched into a spiel about how their cataloguing system was infallible and they had not seen any evidence that items were missing, the rumors had to be false or else they would have known. To solidify his claim, he even offered to show her their records and prove that whatever data people were basing their opinions off of had to be wrong. Lois immediately took him up on the offer.

Taking his fellow scientists’ leave, Dr. Rhems led her through the building before finally stopping outside a door that supposedly led to where the Labs kept their records pertaining to the Kryptonian artifact research program.

“You have to understand, Miss Lane, that S.T.A.R Labs is not the only facility performing research on Kryptonian weaponry,” he explained as he fished a key card out of his pocket, nearly dropped it, and finally managed to tap it against the scanner beside the door, “It’s quite possible that one of the other contractors involved in the program may simply not be cataloguing their artifacts correctly-”

“They are,” Lois snapped back as she followed him through the doorway, “The issue is within your own company. The records available to the public show that half of the missing items disappear while still in your system. I know this seems a little far-fetched, Dr. Rhems, but it's looking like there are some shady dealings going on within your facility to steal Kryptonian weapons, and possibly other items, without your knowledge.”

“That’s impossible! This is one of the most secure facilities in the state, and every one of our employees has undergone rigorous background examinations. Surely this must be some sort of journalistic ploy to discredit S.T.A.R Labs, Miss Lane-”

“With all due respect, Dr. Rhems, please stop trying to dissuade me before I’ve seen your evidence against the so-called ‘rumors’. I’ll make my decision on what to tell the public once you can prove to me that the accusations aren’t true.”

Dr. Rhems paused at that, stopped in front of a laboratory workstation and glanced quickly between Lois and the racks of Kryptonian armaments on the far side of the room - apparently this lab was where they were stored for cataloging and documentation.

“Well,” the doctor said finally, “if you’re so sure you cannot be persuaded...”

The scientist tapped a button on the workstation’s keyboard and Lois distinctly heard the door behind her lock shut with a hydraulic hiss and low shunking sound. Before she even had time to turn around, Dr. Rhems was pulling what looked too much like a genuine Kryptonian sidearm for comfort out of his labcoat and levelling it at her head. There was no doubt in her mind that it was real, and Lois should know - she had used one.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Miss Lane,” Dr. Rhems confessed, “But I am going to have to ask you to comply while Caleb ties you up - don’t want you getting away before we’ve come to an agreement, you see.”

At his behest, mostly because she was unable to do otherwise with a Kryptonian sidearm pointed at her, Lois took a seat in the chair the scientist pointed to and waited in silence to see what he would do next. Dr. Rhems typed another command into the workstation console and the door unlocked to slide open just enough for a nervous-looking intern to slip inside before the door locked shut again. The young man had apparently been given orders to follow them and wait outside the lab until his boss let him in, and after a brief, curious glance in the reporter’s direction, he immediately got to the task assigned by fetching a length of plastic rope - the kind typically used for camping due to its lightweight nature - from a desk drawer and using it to tie Lois’ hands behind her back. Under Dr. Rhems supervision, he tied the knots as tight as he could before proceeding to tie her ankles to the chair legs, and though Lois hated to admit it, she was thoroughly stuck where she was.

“You can’t keep me here for long,” Lois reminded Dr. Rhems, holding back a wince when the uncomfortable cordage bit into her ankles and resisting the urge to give Caleb a solid kick to the nose went he bent down to adjust the rope, “My editor will wonder where I am if I don’t check in soon, not to mention the fact that I’m legally under the protection of both the US government and the Kryptonian remnant. I just have to scream ‘Superman’ and someone will be here within ten seconds.”

If she stated that last sentence a little louder than necessary, Dr. Rhems didn’t notice and simply cocked the blaster (improperly, Lois noted) as Caleb finished tying her up, “You won’t scream. You wouldn’t dare.”

“Maybe I will,” Lois answered, resisting the urge to smirk. Dr. Rhems apparently had enough confidence to do so himself, and shook his head self-assuredly.

“As you said earlier, Miss Lane, you should wait to hear my side of the story before forming an opinion,” he stated calmly, “Let’s start with a simple fact: alien artifacts created in and designed to be used in an environment different from Earth are a little difficult, and expensive, to maintain. Sure, the technology works here, but until we can fully understand it, we have to ensure that it does not deteriorate or lose function when not used properly. I would read you a few excerpts from my paper on the apparent bio-technological advancements in Kryptonian technology that make their mechanism borderline-organic, so simultaneously holding some level of innate intelligence or purpose but also being susceptible to deterioration if not maintained, but we don’t have time for that now.

“Without going into too much detail, S.T.A.R Labs is not getting the funding it needs from the Department of Defense. No significant advances or research is able to be done without money, Miss Lane, and we don’t have a lot of it,” Dr. Rhems continued, “The solution? Getting rid of artifacts we do not have the facilities to maintain while also making a little bit of cash - in short we’ve been selling Kryptonian technology to foreign buyers.”

“You mean stealing and profiting off of property of the US government, not to mention that the UN is currently trying to rule both artifacts and the scout ship itself as property of the Kryptonian remnant,” Lois corrected him. Damn, she was pretty sure she was losing feeling in her hands considering how tightly the intern had bound her, but if she could just slip one hand out of the rope…

“Everyone knows the UN won’t succeed in the ruling - that technology is far too valuable to belong to a couple of do-gooder extraterrestrials,” Dr. Rhems answered, “And before you ask what I’m going to do with you or why I’ve decided to tell you all this, the answers are simple: I’m going to ransom you and get a bit of extra ‘funding’ out of it, and once your ransom has been paid and you are released, you are going to write me an article about the corruption going on in our own Department of Defense that has led to the gross underfunding of essential research facilities such as S.T.A.R Labs.”

“And just who do you think is going to pay my ransom?” Lois asked. Her plan was to keep him talking, keep his focus off her and the fact that after rubbing the skin raw and nearly spraining her wrist, she had just about managed to get her right hand out of Caleb’s tightly-but-poorly-tied attempt at binding her up. Poor kid - he hadn’t done too bad of a job considering that typing would be a pain-in-the-ass tomorrow, but it wasn’t enough to keep Lois off her game. Dr. Rhems was still going off about who he was going to call for the money for her release when she got both hands free, and right on time the thick laboratory door crumpled beneath a hand strong enough to bend steel as Superman himself stepped into the room. Lois wasted no time when the two S.T.A.R Lab scientists were distracted by his arrival, and she lunged at Dr. Rhems to knock the blaster out of his distracted grip, cock it for firing (properly, she noted), and point it at the bastard’s head.

“Well, Dr. Rhems,” she couldn’t help but announce with a smirk, “It looks like I was right about those missing shipments.”

V*V*V*V*V*V*V

It was Perry who picked her up from the S.T.A.R Labs facility after Lois was done giving her account to the police - part of her wished it had been Superman who flew her back to the Daily Planet offices, but he was still busy talking with an officer about the two scientists who had been holding Miss Lane hostage - and after a short drive back to the familiar newspaper building, it was Clark who first noticed the blisters covering her wrists and insisted on getting the first aid kit to treat them. Still, Lois ended up looking after the injuries herself, mostly because Clark, despite his kindness, strength, and adorable handsomeness, was a bit on the squeamish side and still had work to do. It wasn’t the worst she had ever dealt with - her wrists only required some antibacterial cream and bandages, whereas her left ankle had nearly been sprained when she lunged at Dr. Rhems with her feet still tied to the chair and required a bit more care in the form of an ice pack. Despite her injuries, Lois was having a pretty damn fine day - her typing skills weren’t as affected as she had imagined, her phone had still been recording throughout the whole hostage situation, and she had enough evidence pieced together to make the leading story of the evening edition. A sprained ankle and wrists that were raw as fuck after trying to wriggle her way out of plastic boating rope of all things were a small price to pay for the front page.

#whumptober2021 #no.1 #bound #DCEU #Lois Lane #fic #Red Capes #whumptober

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xhxhxhx · 4 years ago

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China is suppressing the of Chinese Muslims through a campaign of surveillance, police raids, mass detention, and forced sterilization.

I haven't read much about China's campaign against the Uyghurs, but this Associated Press article is worth reading:

The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children.

[...]

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.

The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

[...]

[China began] an unprecedented crackdown starting in 2017, throwing hundreds of thousands of people into prisons and camps for alleged “signs of religious extremism” such as traveling abroad, praying or using foreign social media. Authorities launched what several notices called “dragnet-style” investigations to root out parents with too many children, even those who gave birth decades ago.

“Leave no blind spots,” said two county and township directives in 2018 and 2019 uncovered by [Adrian] Zenz, who is also an independent contractor with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a bipartisan nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. “Contain illegal births and lower fertility levels,” said a third.

Officials and armed police began pounding on doors, looking for kids and pregnant women. Minority residents were ordered to attend weekly flag-raising ceremonies, where officials threatened detention if they didn’t register all their children, according to interviews backed by attendance slips and booklets. Notices found by the AP show that local governments set up or expanded systems to reward those who report illegal births.

In some areas, women were ordered to take gynecology exams after the ceremonies, they said. In others, officials outfitted special rooms with ultrasound scanners for pregnancy tests.

“Test all who need to be tested,” ordered a township directive from 2018. “Detect and deal with those who violate policies early.”

[...]

Leaked data obtained and corroborated by the AP showed that of 484 camp detainees listed in Karakax county in Xinjiang, 149 were there for having too many children - the most common reason for holding them. Time in a camp — what the government calls “education and training” — for parents with too many children is written policy in at least three counties, notices found by Zenz confirmed.

In 2017, the Xinjiang government also tripled the already hefty fines for violating family planning laws for even the poorest residents — to at least three times the annual disposable income of the county. While fines also apply to Han Chinese, only minorities are sent to the detention camps if they cannot pay, according to interviews and data. Government reports show the counties collect millions of dollars from the fines each year.

[...]

Once in the detention camps, women are subjected to forced IUDs and what appear to be pregnancy prevention shots, according to former detainees. They are also made to attend lectures on how many children they should have.

Seven former detainees told the AP that they were force-fed birth control pills or injected with fluids, often with no explanation. Many felt dizzy, tired or ill, and women stopped getting their periods. After being released and leaving China, some went to get medical check-ups and found they were sterile.

It’s unclear what former detainees were injected with, but Xinjiang hospital slides obtained by the AP show that pregnancy prevention injections, sometimes with the hormonal medication Depo-Provera, are a common family planning measure. Side effects can include headaches and dizziness.

Dina Nurdybay, a Kazakh woman, was detained in a camp which separated married and unmarried women. The married women were given pregnancy tests, Nurdybay recalled, and forced to have IUDs installed if they had children. She was spared because she was unmarried and childless.

[...]

Another former detainee, Tursunay Ziyawudun, said she was injected until she stopped having her period, and kicked repeatedly in the lower stomach during interrogations. She now can’t have children and often doubles over in pain, bleeding from her womb, she said.

Ziyawudun and the 40 other women in her “class” were forced to attend family planning lectures most Wednesdays, where films were screened about impoverished women struggling to feed many children. Married women were rewarded for good behavior with conjugal visits from their husbands, along with showers, towels, and two hours in a bedroom. But there was a catch – they had to take birth control pills beforehand.

[...]

A former teacher drafted to work as an instructor at a detention camp described her experience with IUDs to the AP.

She said it started with flag-raising assemblies at her compound in the beginning of 2017, where officials made Uighur residents recite “anti-terror” lessons. They chanted, “If we have too many children, we’re religious extremists....That means we have to go to the training centers.”

Police rounded up over 180 parents with too many children until “not a single one was left,” she said. At night, she said, she lay in bed, stiff with terror, as officers with guns and tasers hauled her neighbors away. ...

[...]

Chinese health statistics also show a sterilization boom in Xinjiang.

Budget documents obtained by Zenz show that starting in 2016, the Xinjiang government began pumping tens of millions of dollars into a birth control surgery program and cash incentives for women to get sterilized. While sterilization rates plunged in the rest of the country, they surged seven-fold in Xinjiang from 2016 to 2018, to more than 60,000 procedures. The Uighur-majority city of Hotan budgeted for 14,872 sterilizations in 2019 — over 34% of all married women of childbearing age, Zenz found.

Even within Xinjiang, policies vary widely, being harsher in the heavily Uighur south than the Han-majority north. In Shihezi, a Han-dominated city where Uighurs make up less than 2% of the population, the government subsidizes baby formula and hospital birth services to encourage more children, state media reported.

One woman was forced to have an abortion after the police found WhatsApp on her phone:

In December 2017, on a visit from Kazakhstan back to China, Gulzia Mogdin was taken to a hospital after police found WhatsApp on her phone. A urine sample revealed she was two months pregnant with her third child. Officials told Mogdin she needed to get an abortion and threatened to detain her brother if she didn’t.

During the procedure, medics inserted an electric vacuum into her womb and sucked her fetus out of her body. She was taken home and told to rest, as they planned to take her to a camp.

Months later, Mogdin made it back to Kazakhstan, where her husband lives.

“That baby was going to be the only baby we had together,” said Mogdin, who had recently remarried. “I cannot sleep. It’s terribly unfair.”

Yesterday, China sanctioned three American lawmakers and a diplomat in retaliation for American sanctions against Chinese officials involved in human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

"Xinjiang affairs are purely China's internal affairs. The US has no right and no cause to interfere in them," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said yesterday.

"I also have some Uighur friend s who I know are very happy in Xinjiang, breathing freely and enjoying their life, [living] in a completely different way than African Americans like George Floyd."

Hua said she hoped Americans would focus on their own racial minorities.

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drummergirl231-2 · 5 years ago

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So the plan is to disclose my Autism to my employer today.

I. Am. Terrified. And I don’t speak well when I’m terrified.

(Note: This post has basically become my journal for all this work craziness, and for the few of you following the ordeal, please skip to the bottom for the most recent update.)

Disclosing my Misophonia when I was first hired didn’t go well. I’d specifically applied to work on the stock team. I’d worked on a stock team before. I loved it. I was good at it. I could handle the work environment.

Fast forward to orientation at this new job. I find out during my orientation, after they’d interviewed and hired me, that I would be working at the registers for the first three months of my employment and then be moved to work on the sales floor, even though I specifically applied for the stock team.

I knew this would be awful with my Misophonia (never mind my Autism) so I went to talk to my boss at the end of the shift and disclosed my Misophonia and asked if I could work on the stock team.

She said, “Honey, if you have a disability, you need to disclose that in your job application or in the interview!” Well, no I don’t. Not by law. I’d been denied housing over Misophonia and Autism before. I wasn’t about to disclose it to a potential employer when it never really hindered me at my last stock team job.

She said, “There’s a spot on job applications where it asks you if you have a disability and you say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ You can’t lie on an application.” But that’s also wrong. The question is always, “Can you do the job for which you are applying with or without reasonable accommodation?” And of course, my answer was “Yes,” because I was applying for the stock team. And then sometimes there are some questions for statistics’ sake on a job application where it says “Do you have a disability?” and the answers are “Yes,” “No,” or “Choose not to answer.” I choose not to answer.

So I was not at all dishonest in my job application, but she was dishonest with me by hiring me for a job that is the exact opposite of what I applied for without even telling me in the interview what job I was really being interviewed for.

Then she said, “You have to tell people you have this, because I wouldn’t have hired you if I didn’t think you could do the job.” And this wasn’t a, “I believe you can do it and the proof is that I hired you!” This was a, “If you’d told me, I wouldn’t have made the mistake of offering you employment.” This was discrimination. And she said, “Do you think you can do this job?”

I tried to ask about the stock team again, and she said, “Well there are noises in the stock room, too... fans and other machines and people moving boxes...” She hadn’t heard of Misophonia five minutes before and now she was telling me what I could and couldn’t handle. But she gave me two options: try to work at the registers, or tell her, “Sorry, I guess I can’t work here after all.”

I did better than I expected at the registers, but the weird thing about Misophonia is that it sometimes eases up in new places temporarily. It still really messes with me, though. And working the registers is still terrifying because of my Autism, as is working the sales floor. I am not suited for this. If I belong anywhere in a retail store, it’s the stock room, working early in the morning when the store is closed.

I’m hypervigilant at work, terrified of customers (I had more verbally abusive customers over back-to-school season this year than I had over the whole year I worked there), I’m exhausted, I can barely maintain my weight (we’re talking 89 lbs on a 5′3″ frame on a good day... that’s 40 kg and 160 cm), and it’s only going to get worse with the holidays coming up.

I’d worked three Christmases in retail before working for this company, and I still loved Christmas, but after last year working for this company I started to hate Christmas, and I vowed to get out before this holiday season. It’s too late. I tried to get my old job back but that store has a new manager and she didn’t pick me, even though my previous boss there would offer me my job back whenever I was home from school without me even having to ask for it again. They liked me that much.

So my only options are 1. to suffer through this Christmas like last year, 2. quit without any other job lined up and no guarantee of employment when the holidays are over, or 3. try to disclose my Autism which has a huge flipping stigma attached to it and ask to be moved to the position in the store I applied for in the first place.

If she says “No,” I may have to quit anyway because I just can’t do this again. The other store never treated me like this (and they allowed me to practice my religious beliefs, too, which this store does not, violating Title VII). I feel so trapped and so lied to, tricked into doing a job that I just can’t handle, and I just know she’s going to turn it around on me and paint me as the dishonest one for not telling her about my Autism earlier.

Anyway, if you read all this... I am impressed. If you didn’t, I totally understand. If you’re the praying sort, please pray for me.

Update: Boss wasn’t there. She won’t be back ‘til Wednesday, so I’ll talk to her then. I did disclose my Autism to my favorite supervisor though, and she was cool. And she promised she wouldn’t tell anyone.

Another Update (10/22/19): Today a supervisor called me in to the office and had me shut the door. She had another person who does HR stuff there as a witness. She said the supervisor I’d talked to yesterday told them I wanted to be moved off the sales floor to accommodate a medical issue, and asked me if that was correct. I said. “Close to correct... but she said she wouldn’t tell anyone, so that’s cool...”

She told me that supervisor was required to tell management about this sort of thing, because if I have a disability that needs accommodating, I need to disclose that to management. I said, “I was going to disclose it to her” (my boss) “tomorrow when she’s back.” She said my boss is going on vacation though, so she’s acting as management.

So, with all my nervous ticks kicking in (excessive swallowing and inability to inhale so I constantly feel like I’m talking with the last bit of breath in my lungs) I told them everything. I told them I have Autism and applied to work on the stock team because I know I can do that well, how it would benefit the store to have me doing what I’m best at, how I was hired for a position I didn’t apply for and not told until orientation, how my boss said when I told her I have Misophonia “You have to disclose these things in your job application because I wouldn’t have hired you if I thought you couldn’t do this job,” how that made me afraid to talk about my Autism, and how by law I don’t have to say anything. I said I was only saying anything now because I’ve been dealing with burnout, and for the longest time I didn’t want to admit it because it’s retail and duh, we’re all stressed, but I never felt this kind of burnout working on the stock team of my other job. They only had me do sales floor stuff once a week, and that alone was exhausting for me. So I have grown in that area, but it’s still to much.

She said they definitely do want all their associates to be doing their best, so she was going to send in some accommodation work to people above her and they’d probably ask me for paperwork from my medical provider. I said, “I don’t have a medical provider. I don’t have insurance or a doctor... but I do have a letter from a counselor that says I’ve been diagnosed with Autism.”

She said, “I don’t know exactly what they’ll ask of you, but you’ll need to provide them with whatever paperwork they ask for and I’m gonna be honest, we’re heading into the fourth quarter here so I’m not sure what we’ll be able to do or how soon so for the time being you’ll have to keep working the sales floor.”

I don’t see why they can’t make the lateral move sooner. We’re hiring for the holidays. I’m sure they have a position open. Why not have me finish this week and next week, which I’m already scheduled for, and then put me in the stock room ‘just because’ while all this paperwork is being done to say I need to work back there because of my Autism? If this is going to take until January because they’re so busy with the holidays coming, I’ll have to leave my job.

Another Update (11/15/19): The good news is, they told me shortly after the above conversation that they heard back from the people above them and they said “We’re going to try to accommodate you the best we can.” The bad news is everything else. In this meeting, the same supervisor I’d talked to in the previous one, told me “We don’t have an actual stock team position. And [our manager] made that perfectly clear to you when she hired you and you disclosed your Misophonia, remember?” Why yes, she did, HOWEVER: that didn’t explain why they advertised an available stock team position which is what prompted me to apply in the first place, and it also doesn’t explain why there are certain people I never see working on the floor, but only ever in the stock room backstocking in the afternoons or evenings or receiving truck early in the morning (I only saw certain people the few times they had me do early morning sign changes last year).

But anyway, the supervisor kept insisting there is no stock team position and “since you’ve been here more than a year you should already know that,” but she was going to try to accommodate me as well as she could (funny they never asked for documentation of my Autism). She asked if I was willing to come in early in the morning a few times a week (3am) to receive truck, and I said yes, and she said they could train me to start doing omni, which is preparing customers’ orders and packing them and running around the store looking for things people have ordered. I’d be behind the scenes more, but still might get stopped by customers. At least I’d have a scanner on me, whereas a lot of our floor associates don’t get scanners because they’re all in use when they show up. Now I should note that after my first conversation with the supervisor I keep talking about, she paged me to call her, and I did, and she said, “Hey so would working at the registers be a better fit for you?” and I was like, “No... that’d... kinda be the opposite of what I need.” She said, “Okay. Just wanna make sure I ask for the right thing when I talk to the people above us about what accommodations you’re asking for.” Like was I not clear in our meetings that I need to be BEHIND the scenes? After that, I had to finish out my two weeks I was already scheduled for working the floor. They started having me do a little omni training in the middle of my floor shifts over the next couple weeks, but things were crazy because they kept asking me to back up registers while I was doing omni. Oh, and I still had my departments to worry about.

Then, on Monday 11/11/19, another supervisor, a guy, told me I’d be doing omni for my five hour shift that day. Yay! But then after one successful hour of omni, he put me on the registers for the rest of the day, and denied me a break multiple times when I asked because there was a line and apparently no one else to back up (and that’s weird, because normally floor associates back up the registers, not omni associates). I was 3.5 hours into my shift before I was allowed a break, and by then my stomach hurt pretty badly. And then I tried truck early in the morning, and while I felt like an absolute zombie afterwards, I really enjoyed it, because there were no bloodthirsty customers, you know? And the person in charge that day told me what a great job I did. The next truck went pretty well, too. But then today I had a 7.5 hour shift from 11:30am to 7pm, and yet another supervisor told me, “Hey so today you’re my go-to back up person for registers. When you’re not backing up, run 500s from customer service.” (500s are go-backs). I probably spent half of my shift if not more at those registers, including covering someone’s lunch which should have been 30 minutes long but wound up being an hour long with no explanation. Then, after my first break, when the supervisor I’d had the meetings with took over as the main supervisor for the day, she had me switch gears to running more 500s. I had a new scanner which I’m not familiar with so when I scanned the items, which didn’t seem to belong anywhere, I couldn’t see if they were clearance or not. They didn’t have clearance tickets, either. Many of them were still coming up in the scanner as costing quite a bit of money, and some were sweaters, so I tried to find places for them with signs that matched their price point or even with things that looked exactly like them. After making me back up at registers again, the supervisor called me over and she was standing with another associate and she said to me, “Hey, are you scanning 500s when you put them back?” I said, “Uh-huh. Why?” She looked me right in the eye and said, “Are you sure?” I said, “Yeah. Why?” She said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “How do you find where things go?” And I said, “I look for the same item, and if I don’t find any, I scan the item, look at the price, and try to find the right sign. And if I don’t find the right sign, I try to see if it’s clearance but I don’t know how to tell on the new scanners, so worst comes to worst, I put the item in the back of a fixture with something similar under a sign that has the same price point so customers don’t get ticked off at us.” She said, “Well everything you were putting back is clearance.” I could tell some of it was because of how cheap it was so I put some things in clearance, but for the other things I couldn’t tell. She told me to scan the item so I did, then she showed me where it says it’s clearance. On the old scanner, you swipe right twice and it’ll have a big colorful bubble where it tells you its status: blue for sale, purple for clearance, hot pink for a sale not advertised, you get the idea. But on this scanner, where it says if it’s clearance, it’s buried in a long list of teeny tiny unremarkable black letters with a white background, completely indistinguishable from anything else around it if you look too quickly, and it’s not two swipes to the right. It’s on the first page if you scroll down a bunch. Of course I didn’t see it when I’m used to things being big and colorful and two swipes to the right! But then my supervisor said, “Don’t lie to me.” I was shocked. “What?” She said, “I’m not having this conversation out here on the floor,” and she started to walk away from me and I was like, “I didn’t lie to you! I couldn’t see where it said if it was clearance or not because I’m not used to this scanner.” And she said, “I’m not gonna have this conversation with you out here. Just make sure when you scan something you put it back where it goes. I know some stuff looks similar, but this was all in the wrong spot. So go work on the fitting rooms.”

I cannot believe after a year of working there and showing nothing but honest character she would accuse me of lying to her face. I only made a mistake. It was rude and unprofessional of her to accuse me of something so base and then to try and shut me up by saying, “I’m not going to talk about this on the floor.” Well if she didn’t wanna talk about it on the floor, she shouldn’t have called me a liar on the floor. And in front of another associate, too! Also, I hate the new scanners.

Interesting that after our first meeting, she asked me if I would be better off at registers, and when I told her that was the worst place for me, they literally started putting me on registers almost non-stop. It’s like they’re trying to force me out. I wonder if that’s the reason they didn’t ask for my paperwork on my diagnosis... so if I get to the point where I quit (and I am close), and if I take them to court (which I’d love to do if I can), they can say, “Whaaaat? We didn’t force her out... Autism? She doesn’t even have any disability on record with us...”

Update (11/17/19): Hoooooo boy.

Okay. So since there are so many different supervisors and stuff I’m gonna start assigning fake names to everyone so it’s easier to tell them apart: manager: Staci supervisor I talk about most who’s giving me a hard time: Loretta supervisor who didn’t let me take a break: Kyle supervisor who wanted me to be the go-to backup cashier on Friday: Hugo supervisor who I initially disclosed to that told the other managers: Becky supervisor who runs truck unloading: Shawna This morning I had a truck unloading shift from 3-7am after only two hours of sleep (thank you cat), and there were tons of new people who don’t know the store or the brands or layout or who even know to sort petite and plus sizes from misses sizes, so Shawna was like constantly screaming at everyone like “HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU PEOPLE?! AM I YOUR BABYSITTER? WHAT ARE YOU DOING STANDING AROUND TALKING?!” Other associate: “I’m teaching the new people, Shawna!” It was annoying. Oh, and I had cramps and was dizzy. Extra fun.

Then at the end of my shift, I clocked out and went to find Loretta to talk to her 1. about how much they were making me do register backup, and 2. to ask for an apology for calling me a liar. So I found her out on the floor (we were still closed at this point) and asked her “Can I talk to you about some things?” And she was like, “Sure, what’s going on?” and I’d hoped to talk in the office but I was like, “Okay... well, you know how after our first conversation about accommodations you asked me over the phone if I’d do better on registers I said ‘No?’” She said, “Mm-hm.” I said, “Well... after working out the two weeks I was already scheduled for, of the shifts I’ve had while the store was open, I’ve been doing mostly register backup. And Monday I had a 12-5 shift which was supposed to be omni but after an hour I got put on registers and wasn’t allowed to take a break for...” and she was like, “Wasn’t allowed to, or you forgot to ask for it?” and I said, “Oh I asked, like two or three times.” And she said, “Who was the supervisor that day?” But like Kyle was nearby and so I just mouthed his name (his real name) and she was like, “What? D’you wanna talk in the office?” and I said, “Yeah, sure.” So she snags Hugo, who’s like, 2nd in command, to come with us and at my mother’s suggestion I pulled out my phone and said, “Can I record this conversation?” And Loretta said, “No, you cannot.” And I said, “Why not?” and she said, “Because you’re in the workplace.” I said, “...Yeah...?” She said, “It’s illegal.” I said, “Really?” she said, “Yes,” so I said “Okay...” and didn’t record. I looked it up when I got home. It’s totally legal. It’s just that in California both parties have to consent to the recording, which I figured, hence why I asked.

So I told her and Hugo what happened on Monday with working the registers for 4 hours and not being allowed a break and how much my stomach hurt by the time I was finally allowed to go on break, and I mentioned how normally it’s floor associates who get asked to back up and not omni and Loretta was like, “No Kristen, everyone backs up. You’ve been here a year. You should know that.” Okay but when things are busy though, normally floor associates are the first ones they call up. I was the first one. Hugo explained that that day there were fewer online orders coming in than they anticipated, so they had to reshuffle us a bit. Well and good. I wish they’d made someone else do registers, though.

Then I talked to them about how Hugo and then Loretta had me back up at registers a lot on Friday. So Hugo was like, “So you did tell Loretta though you’d be willing to back up occasionally, right?” and I said, “Yeah I mean if things are totally nuts I don’t wanna leave you guys high and dry but being the go-to backup person is like... too much.”

So Hugo tried to get me to get it “set in stone,” how much I should back up, and I explained how that’s a little tricky with the anxiety I have because of my Autism, but we agreed 20 minutes for every hour and a half, or basically just having me cover people’s 15 minute breaks plus the time it takes them to walk to and from the break room. He was trying to work with me, which was great, but I felt like he was trying to see how much he could get me to work at the registers instead of how little. At the same time, we did basically set a cap on how much I could handle, so that’s something.

Then he asked, “Do you have any other concerns?” and I said, “Yeah, I wanted to talk to Loretta about a conversation we had on Friday...” and Loretta was like, “I don’t remember talking to you on Friday.” Convenient. But she would. I kinda hinted I wanted to talk to her privately and Hugo offered to leave but Loretta was like, “It’s okay. He’s management, too. Anything you can say to me you can say in front of him.” Well alright then, if she insisted...

So I reminded her that she started having me run 500s, and how after making me back up at registers she called me over and asked me if I was scanning things before putting them back like three times in a row and then she went, “Yeah and I remember asking you to be honest with me, because...” and I said, with Hugo as my witness, “No. Your exact words were, ‘Don’t lie to me.’ I have worked here for over a year and I have never once lied to you or anyone else here. I don’t know if maybe you’ve been lied to a lot by other associates, but I don’t do that. I’m unfamiliar with the new scanners and that’s why I didn’t see where it said it was clearance, because on the old ones it’s two swipes to the right and then it shows up in a big color-coded bubble what the item’s status is, and it’s not buried in a long list of tiny black letters on a white background on the bottom of the first page like on the new ones. It wasn’t right to accuse me of something so base as to lie to you in front of another associate, and then to walk away and say, ‘I’m not having this conversation with you out here on the floor.’ If you didn’t want to have this conversation out on the floor, you should not have accused me of lying to you out on the floor. I went into the fitting room after that and couldn’t stop crying.”

As I expected, she blame shifted back to me saying from her perspective, since it said on the scanner it was clearance, of course she thought I wasn’t being honest with her. And she said if I’m going to make mistakes, then as a supervisor, she is going to coach me. Ummm yeah, coaching doesn’t involve attacks on someone’s character. And defending herself by saying well if I hadn’t blah blah blah, that’s a tactic I used to use with my parents when I was twelve! I wanted to tell her what my parents used to tell me: This isn’t about me, this is about you.

But I said, “And after you showed me on the new scanner where it said it was clearance, I corrected my behavior. I made sure to be careful and check every item. So that’s done. That’s taken care of. But you still shouldn’t have accused me of lying to you.”

And then she was like, “I’m sorry you feel like I was accusing you of lying, but you have to understand that if you’re doing your job incorrectly, it’s my job to...” and more rot about her “coaching.” Okay so first she says to me that from her perspective of course she thought I was lying, and then she says, “I’m sorry you feel like I was calling you a liar, but...?” Like, no. She can’t have it both ways like that. And that was no apology. “I’m sorry you feel,” is how narcissists try to manipulate and pacify their victims, and it does not work on me.

Nevertheless she refused to apologize to me AND was then like, “But why couldn’t you see it says it’s clearance?” I said, “Because I’m used to the old scanners,” and she said, “Didn’t you look at all? What’s the difference?” So I had to explain to her, AGAIN, how I’m used to the color-coded bubbles and how it was in a different spot and I couldn’t see the “Status: Clearance,” when it was buried in a list. “Everything was the same font. Nothing was bolded, italicized, underlined, or distinguishable from anything around it in any way, and it was on a different page than I expected, so of course I didn’t see it.” I need colors. I need different things to look different. That’s how my brain works.

By the end of the conversation, Loretta was still refusing to apologize to me (and she’s developed a twitch by her mouth) and Hugo was saying how he’s sorry that happened to me and he certainly doesn’t want me to be crying in the fitting rooms. “We want everyone to be happy when they’re here.” He’s sweet but he wants the impossible. This company consistently gives stores a limited budget for scheduling so we are always understaffed. We’re the biggest store of our chain of stores in the area and we still only have two cashiers working at a time (one at the men’s side registers and one at misses’) and 1 associate for every 2-4 departments. Even at Christmastime, they increase the number of cashiers, but not floor associates. It’s insane.

So anyway I’ve decided to quit, but now the question is when. Because since Hugo has put in the effort to work with me and set a cap on my register time, it seems like it’d be in bad taste for me to leave now. And while working out a two weeks notice is common courtesy, I looked it up and it’s advised if I’m being abused or if I feel unsafe or if the job is detrimental to my physical or mental health (and by golly it’s taking its toll), then I can quit without notice, so long as I’m aware it may leave a bad taste in their mouths.

But I feel like I should at least see if they stick to their 20 minute backup deal, because if they don’t, and if I can take them to court later for failure to accommodate my “disability,” as well as my religious practices, I’d need a solid case, and a judge will want to see I did everything I could from my side. But man, I hope I can leave before Black Friday. Apparently working omni on Black Friday is a nightmare because orders get cancelled and then angry customers call to yell at omni on the phone and with my Autism I have phone anxiety just talking to nice people, much less customers who want me dead.

Update 12-15-19

So Black Friday wasn’t the nightmare I thought it’d be. And working omni and truck hasn’t been so bad, except for the weird sleep schedule.

But this month, they started cutting my hours instead of giving me more. Last year at this time, I was working 35 hours per week. This year? 12 hours the week of Dec 8th-14th 8 hours for Dec 15th-21st and next week, the week of Christmas: 4 hours.

FOUR FLIPPING HOURS THE WEEK OF CHRISTMAS and it’s RETAIL!

And they don’t even have me doing omni anymore. Just truck. I couldn’t have been that bad at omni! What the actual living heck?!

#personal post #trigger warning #autism #asperger's syndrome #discrimination in the workplace #misophonia

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i-love-regenerations · 5 years ago

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Sign Me Up For That

There are far worse things than failure...

(Something else I wrote a while ago - dark humour warning)

“I’ve got something you’ll really like,” said Claire’s friend Judie when they were talking on the phone one evening.

“Another knock-off kitchen gadget?” Judie often got stuff from sales or offers in magazines.

“Nope, a way you can go and cuddle babies at the hospital,”

“I can’t do that,” said Claire “I’m not good at that sort of thing!”

“You could be. They’re really short of volunteers,”

“If they’re that desperate for staff, they’d best call Ingeus - another place I have no intention of going to anytime soon!”

Claire had applied for a lot of similar work – both voluntary and paid – a while ago. If she was any good, she would be doing it already. And that had been when she was unemployed and available all the time. She’d now found a fairly reasonable job at an estate agents and this position could well be weekday afternoons anyway.

“Seriously, can you at least Google it? Are you still there?” asked Judie.

“Yes. I’ll Google it later, with the malware scanner on!”

“That’s a great start! Come on, it’ll give you loads of self-esteem!”

“Loads of spam, more likely!” said Claire.

“You aren’t worried about spam when you’re downloading dodgy movies!”

“I know, but I get some satisfaction from watching movies!”

“You don’t get any from holding babies then? Okay…”

“No, I don’t!” Claire was getting annoyed. “I don’t do it because I would never get past the interview! How do you know so much about it anyway? Did you see it on an American documentary?”

“Possibly!”

“Yes then! Can’t I just come round to yours and play with the kittens?” asked Claire. Her priorities certainly weren’t the same as a couple of years ago. “It would save me a lot of hassle and I could watch a movie at the same time!”

“Not right now, I’m watching Bear Grylls,” said Judie.

“Oh gawd,”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“One, the man is a plonker. Two, I’m not eating anything you’ve cooked now, I have no idea what might be in it!”

Claire decided it was probably a good idea to rustle up an application before Judie suggested any other documentary-inspired ways to spend the evening, such as digging around in the local park for something to eat!

“I’ve got an interview tonight,” Claire said when she went to see Judie after work the next day.

“It’s at ten o’clock at night though. That doesn’t sound remotely dodgy, does it?”

“Sick babies don’t all do office hours,” said Judie. She kind of had a point but you’d think the recruitment office would still be nine to five.

Perhaps they were in there typing rejection letters, Claire thought sarcastically. She’d done some Google searching last night and noticed that some of the baby holding programmes in America had very long waiting lists. If the same applied here, that could be a lot of letters!

“Well, I’m going to get a big fat no anyway,” said Claire.

“How do you know?” asked Judie.

“None of the places I applied to wanted me three years ago, why should they now?”

“I dunno, more experience?”

“From an estate agents!? If they were sitting around cuddling babies all day in the one you went to, how on Earth did you get a flat?” Claire asked jokingly.

“Listen,” said Judie, with her serious face on, “It’s really good for babies and I know you would love it too. Can't you use your imagination? I read about babies who’ve been born on drugs, they need holding all the time so they can recover,”

“I can imagine, I was watching videos of it online last night, while you were watching Bear Grylls making a condom out of stinging nettles or something! That doesn’t change the fact I’ll be getting a big fat no, does it?” argued Claire.

“You might not. My friend’s brother had an interview at night, it was so they could give him a work trial straight away and he got the job!” said Judie.

“What kind of job?”

“Oh, just supermarket night work,”

“Which doesn’t need a background check or anything,” said Claire “I’ll do my best, but if it’s a Big Fat No you’re paying for us to go somewhere that’ll actually give me some satisfaction. Like a gig! Deal?”

“Deal. Want to watch a film?”

“Not if it’s one of your choices! If the interviewer asks what I’ve done this evening, I can’t tell them I watched the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the Centipede or whatever else!” said Claire.

“That could work, they’d certainly know you’re not squeamish!” said Judie, laughing.

“I’m not telling anyone I watched those!! Can I print my CV?”

“Okay, but I’ve only got pink paper left. It’ll be er, baby friendly!”

“You mean it’ll be naff! The babies are not doing the interview, the recruitment people are!”

Judie hadn’t mentioned that she’d run out of black printer ink too. Claire’s CV came out bright pink with purple text. It was starting to look very much like she might be getting this gig!

Claire had a problem with her interview straight away - she couldn’t find the place! Surely a hospital had to be pretty big and clearly signposted? Yet she’d somehow found herself outside a closed-looking office block in the backside of nowhere!

It was 21.49. She knocked on the office block door to ask for directions, hoping like crazy that she wasn’t more than ten minutes’ walk away from the hospital or Judie would have a right laugh hearing that she’d never even found it, in order to get The No.

A man answered the door. Claire heard bleeping and saw someone go past behind him. They were walking around with a drip stand, so this presumably was the right place! It just looked a bit rough on the outside, likely because of Conservative party budget cuts and it being late at night.

“I’m here for the volunteering interview,” said Claire.

The man checked his watch. “Ah. Wait upstairs,”

“Thank you. Which floor…”

He went back inside and and Claire had to kind of run after him into the lift. His voice had sounded all wrong – should he be around sick people with a sore throat like that? Not to mention his attitude!

On an upstairs floor, a woman came in and asked for Claire’s CV then walked off, leaving her in a waiting room with several inside windows. Some of the rooms were definitely staff offices. Others had the shutters down so behind there could have been anything, although the bleeping seemed to be coming from that direction so she assumed it was a hospital ward.

On and off, Claire could hear drilling and what generally sounded like building renovations. Damn, no wonder they couldn’t get the babies to sleep with that racket! She smelled burning plastic and had a terrifying mental image of the block catching fire. Sensibly, she knew it was probably just the paper laminator or whatever the builders were doing.

Where was the interviewer or anyone else? She doubted they were planning to trial people straight away because if nothing else, the background checks would have taken ages. It was Friday night, even something ridiculously fast-tracked would surely have to be done at nine o' clock on Monday morning?

Maybe they’d done it early this morning, after she applied last night? Maybe they could trial her with supervision? Maybe they were just going to give her The No straight away? Although someone actually getting around to interviewing her would be a good start for any of those.

On the upside, she had at least one requirement sorted thanks to their brilliant scheduling – the ability to sit still for a very long time!

Claire remembered one of the videos she’d seen online of a woman snuggling a baby who woke up and looked around at her. He had really big lovely eyes and it had made Claire feel funny inside. Although that was probably just because she had the sense of a Big Fat No heading in her direction.

She was just going to think about that sort of thing, unlikely though it was for her, and not some of the other things she’d read about online recently – about perverts and financial scammers and high-rise fires. That hot plastic smell was making her feel funny inside and not in a good way, maybe she should go and tell someone?

“Yeah, and that’ll make me look brilliant,” Claire thought sarcastically. It would almost certainly be the office document laminator she was freaking out over. Then when this volunteer position inevitably turned out to be admin, she still wouldn’t be getting it!

Claire wasn’t exactly sure how long she’d been waiting. Fifteen minutes or so? One of her interviews was pretty late before, wasn’t it? Although that one was in the morning at a cash & carry, which was just a bit different from this.

She started walking around the place looking for someone to ask. She’d been waiting longer than fifteen minutes - the clock in the staff office said 22.30. Did the interviewer forget about her? If the hospital was that busy, how come she’d barely seen anyone? She found a pile of documents next to the shredder with something pink in it that looked rather like her CV. This was a big fat no alright!

She picked up the pile to check whether the pink thing was actually her CV. It was, and there was something worse underneath – exam certificates! Why would anyone be shredding those? She had suspected from the beginning that there was an admin assistant here who needed replacing but that was ridiculous.

She was going to find someone to moan to, and to hell with The No. She probably would have gotten it anyway and she was now kind of looking forward to getting out of here. She was just glad she didn’t bring her exam certificates! She spotted something else that made her feel funny inside, and certainly not in a good way.

The clock wasn’t on 22.37, it was 02.37! Where the hell had she been for over four hours? Asleep? She must have been totally forgotten about.

There was a corridor at the back with more small offices, but there was nothing in them. She got the feeling that the place wasn’t even finished. What if the entire thing turned out to be some kind of horrible joke? Judie had seemed very encouraging, hadn’t she? Not to mention the weird suggestions of getting useful experience from an office job and the dodgy CV.

Judie certainly wouldn’t have had a problem with frightening her – lover of disgusting horror movies that she was. But she surely wouldn’t be mean enough to disappoint someone with a fake job interview? And how did she rustle up the keys to an empty block? Claire wouldn’t have easily been able to arrange that late at night just for a joke, and she worked for an estate agents! Judie worked in a shop.

Claire remembered something else about the interview at the cash & carry – their offices had been on intermediate floors at the sides and she could see down into the main warehouse from there. Maybe the same thing could work here? It surely wouldn’t hurt to look, if only to find out where everyone had gone and make sure the place wasn’t on fire. She found the controls to the window shutters, opened them so that she could see down onto the next floor and screamed.

There were people in there with their entire bodies covered in bandages, as if they’d been burned in some sort of terrible accident. Far worse than that, one was laying on an operating table and a worker was covering parts of his body with something that looked horribly like plastic laminator sheets. That must have been what she could smell earlier!

The sound that she’d assumed to be building renovations started up again - they were screw-drilling things into his chest. He twisted around - he was awake for this - and she saw metal bars screwed into his head and just kind of…holes for the eyes and mouth.

She turned round and started running, only to find all of the waiting room doors firmly locked. Even if she could have forced them, she could see that someone who must have impossible strength had moved several heavy filing cabinets in front of the hallway exit doors. She couldn’t get to any outside windows either, so screaming for help or even jumping off the block weren’t going to be an option. The staff had only told people that this floor was the baby nursery because it was a lot easier to make people turn up than if they told them it was the cyber-conversion theatres. Claire realised she was about to lose a hell of a lot more than her self-esteem...

#doctor who #fanfiction #my ideas

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cassafra5 · 6 years ago

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Where Have I Been?

I’ve been a bit nervous to post this.

Two month or so ago, I teased at a possible announcement and something I was very excited to share with you all. I had been given the opportunity to work on a temp-to-perm basis for a comic start-up headed by Marvel alumni. I applied on a whim to be a freelance Storyboard Artist, but I was instead offered the chance of working in a full-time Editorial and Admin position with a few hours dedicated to storyboarding and participating in creative meetings each week. As someone who's always wanted to get into creative work, this was a really huge deal for me and I was excited to learn and be able to have projects to add to my portfolio.

Now, part of the reason I held off was because I wanted to make sure it was solid before I made the announcement. It was a dream come true and it seemed too good to be true ... and it was.

Read below if you'd like to hear about how I unwittingly signed up to take care of a herd of entitled neckbeards and had to work on preventing them from literally walking into glass instead of actually storyboarding as advertised.

TL;DR of my experience:

2018 unfortunately was a pretty rough year. The good news is that I managed to push for a mutual termination of contract and should be a lot more active very soon now that I’m not as emotionally drained by an incredibly toxic environment.

Credit to @kirain for looking through this and helping to edit it when I just rage-typed all of this together lol;

I walked away from my interviews in tears after being told that my work really had potential. I told them I had been a comic fan since I was a kid and this was something I was excited about. I grew up with family trying to dissuade me from doing art and I had friends/partners who really weren't interested in my work. I am by no means a professional, so I threw up whatever I could be proud of and applied to the role on a whim. So as you can imagine, having real professionals say I had potential was something amazing to me.

My first day, they sat me at a desk with a tablet and computer and I was super excited to start learning and was immediately approached with a Sexual Harassment plaque and told to mount it. Weird but alright. It was a start-up and I already assumed we’d all be helping out with small jobs around the office. I helped them fix their scanner and they suggested I move it to my desk. I was a bit confused but did so. I asked if they wanted me to set their computers up for it but they waved their hands at me and said we could do it later.

This would eventually result in me scanning every single document for every person in the office, and also measuring the office for furniture that they would randomly decide not to get. When I had a day off, I came back to piles of documents they refused to scan themselves since "that was my job". I got chastised since they wanted them in a hurry and it should have been done sooner ... i.e., the day I was off.

Alright.

I also ended up doing the following duties:

Calling the IRS every single day because the Controller was too uppity about something that was in the mail and somehow thought they could track it...DURING THE GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN. I was required to do this and told it was part of my job.

Calling Instacart at the behest of their Legal Counsel, a man who bitched on the phone for 2 hours because he didnt want to go downstairs to drop off a faulty computer part, and having to tell them that their avocados were too soft and their almond milk had too many ingredients. I was required to do this and told it was part of my job.

I had to ask for multiple vendors to provide quotes and COI and do site visits to our office for things that they, on a whim, would decide they wouldn’t want....resulting in multiple vendors getting angry at me.

I had to get what “everyone wanted for Christmas” for their luncheon...they expected me to get cakes same day from a fancy bakery, as well as LOBSTER (one of them said this was apparently a Christmas tradition of theirs?) Mind you, they repeatedly spoke about budgeting since they were working on investment money and the owner repeatedly would mention how “every day we weren’t producing was a day we died a little more.” I guess that death would have been from gout.

I had to take on dealing with all building requests. Fine ...until they started to tell me I should be reaching out to building management about the "radiation coming out of the cable box". They said it was shooting at a person given their angle and, because I'm *that person*, I mentioned it'd probably be more of a radius vs a direct shot. They started talking about it causing a mushroom cloud over the office. I laughed. Apparently it wasn’t a joke :/ They also complained about the fan making noises and being able to hear people partying and singing songs ... during the holidays ... when people normally do that sort of thing.

I also had to deal with things such as their electrical work and assistance with general interior work in the office...for some reason

They put me in charge of the Party Committee for a Housewarming Party where I was the only one actually making arrangements. This would be fine but the office was sublet and, due to their clumsiness in handling their electrical work before I got there, part of the office has no electricity and there was also a fallen over power beam in the middle of the office...but I guess that can be an accent piece.

I literally had to rename their files. Rather than renaming documents themselves, they would email me to rename them and reupload them because they couldn’t be bothered to change them themselves.

I made the mistake of telling them I had worked with DocuSign in a previous job. What resulted was them forcing me to teach it to them...but then they would argue with me about why it couldn’t mail merge or allow them to revise their documents. A Docusign rep mentioned they could just do their work outside of Docusign and import it since the whole point is to maintain the integrity of the document but they just kind of blamed me for not knowing enough about something I had only briefly used in another completely different setting.

I was literally approached by the person who should have been leading me in storyboarding and told that I needed to look into “distraction graphics” for the office because he was concerned that the two head people (WHO WORKED AT MARVEL) kept bashing their heads on the glass and he was afraid they’d go through the glass eventually. My literal reaction:

Yeah...he didn’t laugh. It was apparently serious and I had to have some very awkward talks with some window vendors. Do you know it apparently costs more than $3.5k to cover glass that you could probably avoid if you just looked up from your phones when you walked?

Frustrating, but whatever ... it wasn't a big deal and so long as I got to do some creative work, I was willing to tolerate it.

I asked the person in charge of art and asked when we'd be able to work on creative and was told that my role was mainly in admin and to "leave the storyboarding to the storyboarders".

I guess I just imagined every single mention of that during the interview process.

I was taken aback but he assured me it was fine since I could work in production and work on other items, like cutting comics up for Webtoons. This wasn't what I wanted, but fine ... maybe I could get something out of this regardless and learn, even if I was just cutting up and processing other peoples' work. By the way, they ended up not even letting me do that.

And here’s where I get to the owner of this establishment...

I got called in to meet with him and told I would be given a special project. He wanted me to suggest a few themes that would be used for a promo project the company was working on. Okay ... this could be good. I started thinking of all my favorite genres and comics and wrote out a decent list. I asked him if it there was a limit and he said there was no limit, so I made a comprehensive list.

He brought me back in a week later and ripped my report apart.

First, he didn't want Marvel and DC included, but then he got upset when they weren't.

Star Wars and Serenity weren't Scifi, according to him; they were "Space Opera". So that had to be done. They were set in space but apparently that wasn't scientific. Alright.

Spongebob and Ducktales were irrelevant, but apparently The Simpsons was super relevant.

He smiled at me and told me I needed to redo it because I obviously didn't know what I was doing. Okay ... sure. Then he kept changing his mind. We started this before the holidays and I worked on making a very sortable report in case there were anymore last minute changes.

Me and another co-worker who were avid comic book readers spent a lot of time looking at sales numbers and articles to compile what we should focus on; however, for one reason or another, the owner would dismiss everything we brought up since he "hadn't heard of it". Deathstroke apparently never existed. Teen Titans also ... totally not relevant. Although he said he was open to ideas, he'd bash every single suggestion, answer every question by asking us why we'd ask such "stupid questions", and he literally asked us to bring in articles and statistics just so he could completely dismiss them. He was completely un-open to hearing anyone else's opinions and already had a dead-set idea of what his audience wanted ... despite having told us he hated comics and that "normal people [like him] don't read comic books". He knew what these idiots wanted, and it was just a matter of making us redoing the report over and over until we happened on the right combo HE wanted. I.e., pretty much the top comics he last saw at the dawn of the early 2000's.

I literally had taken pics of a few bestseller displays I’d seen in stores (Newsbury Comics, Barnes and Nobles etc) but he literally said that that didn’t mean they would sell. What does Best Selling even mean then?

But it's cool to just completely dismiss your customer base and act like you know better, right?

I ended up having to work until 10:00pm one night in order to make all necessary changes and print covers for him to review. What started as a simple list of themes became a report that had over 600 rows in Excel. Even then, 80-90% of it ended up not being used. I was so exhausted at this point and burnt out. I loved comics ... but having to rip them apart by category, put them back together, eliminate whole categories because he didn't want them, and then having to remake them after he changed his mind was agonizing.

I had another meeting with him and he smiled at me and simply said, "Aww I thought this would be a fun project for you, since you're a fangirl after all"

He was taunting me. This was a game to him. Of course, I should have expected this from someone who literally made a cheat sheet so "idiot comic book fans" would get his jokes. I'm not joking. It actually exists and I'm sure it's something Marvel would rather not even remember.

A couple more weeks passed and, at this point, a majority of the office depended on me to get people's food choices for their snacks, following up with building maintenance, and I barely had any creative projects whatsoever. I did get to create the party invitation the main art guy refused to make but he pushed me to make in Canva, because he thought Canva was the end all and be all to graphic design and that it should be used for all presentations for our LinkedIn. Pretty much everything Canva (something used mostly by Instagram and Twitter users) probably wasn't meant to be used on.

Keep in mind that this person was in charge of creative and was also in charge of gate-keeping me from doing the one thing I was tolerating everything for. I had literally repeatedly asked about the storyboarding during the interview process and even though they had changed the duties, they always confirmed that storyboarding would be a part of it.

Last week, I asked the main art guy again about my job description and about how he had mentioned storyboarding being off the table entirely. He immediately got defensive and reminded me that I was an admin. I mentioned I still had the job descriptions and emails mentioning me having a hand in creative, and he accused me of talking back and said that he could tell from how I looked that I thought he was an idiot.

He also accused me of not being enthusiastic about his projects. I was confused since I was actively asking for projects and had literally been trying to find some way to take on creative assignments. He got even angrier and said I wasn't telling him how much fun I was having and how excited his work was making me.

What?

It suddenly dawned on me that every talk I'd had with this guy about how excited I was to learn from him/to work on the team gave him some sort of weird satisfaction. I mentioned that I didn't think I should have been sending him emails about that, and he asked, "Why not? You shouldn't assume I don't want them. I want you to tell me my stuff is fun and how excited you are about them!" I was ... very uncomfortable. This grown man. This grown ass man wanted me to fawn over his work and send him emails about how excited I was about his work. About HIM. What a narcissist.

He made enough commotion that the owner brought us in. He sat us down and said something about him being a bit familiar with this sort of thing, having gone to marriage counselling himself. I was already uncomfortable and that really didn’t help.

What ended up happening was they berated me in his office and told me I was "too honest", and I was told that I didn't know my place. I was told that at the very top were the two Marvel alumni, then underneath there was everyone else and I was right at the very bottom of everything and I should know my place.

These were the two people who had told me I had potential and who had made me so happy just a couple months prior. I was frozen in place as they grinned at me and told me that obviously there was some misunderstanding on my part. They then told to run along while they thought about what they could throw at me to make me happy. The guy who yelled at me was not chastised or told his behavior was wrong in any way, shape or form. I got dragged into a staff meeting afterwards, where the owner proudly told all of us, "This is the best company you can work for, where you can work with people you like." And in the same breath, he told everyone not to fuck up or otherwise it would be "resume time".

I felt broken the rest of the day, where I heard them blatantly laughing and insulting the creators they were going to work with. One creator was commented on as being able to "...work as a writer but you shouldn't look at her stuff unless you want your eyes to bleed.” They said worse stuff too and laughed like a bunch of entitled douchebags on DeviantArt trying to get kicks off of stuff they thought were cringey. It was insane. These were supposed to be professionals in the field. It made me uncomfortable to think what they said about my own work when they told me I had "potential". Some of these were small time Tumblr creators like me who probably thought this would be their big break too...

I thought about putting in my two days, the amount that was specified in my contract, and worried about what they'd try to do in the time I had left. I was miserable and scared and nervous.

On Friday, the owner approached me and asked me for my portfolio while smiling to himself. I was skeptical and asked why, and he firmly said, "Because I want to see it." I sent it and prepared for the worst.

He brought me in for a two minute "friendly" chat in the conference room, and once we sat down, he mused over his computer and said it was "coming back to him” I did art.

He remembered now. It had been so forgettable, after all. Aww, maybe there was something there.

With a smile, he told me I "shouldn't take it personally", and that only one artist so far had been able to get along with him and work with what they wanted. They'd thrown out 8 artists after they just simply "didn't work". They admitted that they had promised me storyboarding, but no one was working to their intended vision. That they hadn't really figured out a place for me in the company, but maybe going out on a business trip would help him clear his head and he could find something I could do. "I guess we've been letting you down a bit, haven’t we?"

I felt like at this point he wanted me to act desperate and happy for the possibility of a chance and buy into it and take his offering with gratitude...

...but I was done with his shit.

I told him that I had started at his company a few months ago and that if they hadn't figured out where I was supposed to be in all that time, then maybe it wasn't a good fit. He was quiet and didn't seem prepared for it. "Well ... what do you think we should do about it then?"

"If it's alright with you, I would like to terminate this contract immediately." I said it through gritted teeth. I'm not a confrontational person, but after everything that had happened, I was worried I'd lose it. I could feel myself shaking, but I just couldn't deal with it anymore. "I didn't appreciate being told I was at the bottom of the food chain and I really didn't appreciate you allowing me to be treated this way. Frankly, after that, it's taken every bit of motivation out of me and I'd like to end this. Now." I was trying to be professional and control myself, but I was quietly seething with every word. I told him I had saved all my job descriptions and had the contract if he wanted to review it, and I knew that what they had been telling me was bullshit.

He was really quiet and his eyes were wide open. I really think he expected me to be grateful and happy and willing to do more and more for the company just for that little chance. He mumbled something about not prolonging my suffering and told me to just assist in transitioning over my duties and typing things up.

Once I did, I asked if I was free to go and he said I was and I left. It was so much of a relief not to have to come back to that office.

So this is what happened with something I thought would have been a great in to an industry I was excited about. I got used up (and not even for the skills I actually have under my belt) and kept around as an emotional punching bag, and for the dumbest things imaginable and essentially just assisted them with setting up their office after they'd sublet it.

On the plus side, I feel like it was a big deal that I could actually stand up for myself, even if it happened to be to someone like that. Even though I'm not a professional and even though some people would consider me insignificant, I feel like there's never a reason to make any person feel insignificant and like they're the lowest of the low. I hated how they spoke about other creators and I hated how they spoke to me, and there isn't any reason anyone should have to deal with people who are just bent on being condescending.

Ironically, around this time, Steven Universe released an amazing episode and the ending theme kind of hit home with me. I loved its message and I think that ep. kind of helped me in a way.

2019's off to an interesting start, I guess ... but I guess I can be proud that I'm stronger despite it. I am passionate about my art and do want to be able to work professionally but there’s no reason to ever tolerate disrespect and dishonesty in a company.

In the words of Raul Julia/Gomez Addams:

Hopefully, one day, I’ll get my break but this definitely wasn’t it.

If any of you guys are in NYC and happen to come across a mildly shady startup toted to be headed by Marvel alumni, maybe just be a bit careful. I normally don’t post about stuff like this and honestly tend to get quiet when things happen because I have trouble opening up about personal issues but maybe it can help someone or at the very least be an interesting read.

#personal #job stories #comics

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