#mork Borg character | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

othernaut · 6 days ago

Text

Character Creation Challenge 2025, Day 4: Corp Borg

Image Archive B6-96 doesn't exist. It isn't located on the second floor of the Southern Watchtower, between Compliance Archive II-01 and the Domain of Ceaseless Summer. No pneumatics travel there; emails never arrive. There certainly isn't a trolley full of proprietary images that have been allowed to rot in stock for six months, lacking anywhere to rest.

Jazz isn't worried. Her department, slashed to a single head, can function just fine, just like this. The lack of managerial direction after the culling doesn't concern her one bit. She hasn't been forgotten. This'll work out just fine.

(They keep finding them in drywalled offices, the bodies. Support for software that's been sunsetted for decades. Withered, single-man departments without responsibilities, without oversight, without food, without air. They drag the groaning things out into the offices by their fingernails. Security still has to walk them out, regardless of whether or not they can stand.)

Just sit back and collect a paycheck. Live the dream. But she can't even effectively freelance - can't create, can't do anything for herself - due to the clause in her contract that owns any work done on company time. And now that everyone else is gone, now that she IS the department, overtime is effectively infinite. Live the dream - unless you can't go home. Until they notice you. Until they remember you can still perform.

Trolley full of proprietary images to B6-96, which doesn't exist. The pencils have been rattling all morning in a soft and subtle earthquake that won't stop. All she has is her own initiative. And she has to make this look good.

Sneakers crunching across the old brown basement carpet as she wheels the trolley through the corridors. Techs are in today, hefting desks and drafting tables out of old offices, wheeling in server racks and PC banks pre-loaded with the latest generative image software. You can still see the long scratches on the walls where the old heads - the layout artists, the physical media guys, the ones who worked in ink and paper - were pulled screaming from their ratholes. A wisp of magenta lurches from the trolley, flickers the fluorescents neon pink for a moment; a pattern of primary color shapes, rods, and squiggles asserts itself momentarily over the carpet. There's a reason you don't let the images pile up for too long.

A heavy jolt hits the building. The lights flicker in their housing, gypsum dust rattles from the walls. Something crashes in an adjacent room; someone curses, automatic and rapid-fire, and it lasts until the lights go out for good.

A low moaning from somewhere far, far below. Motes of light, ketchup red, rise from the carpet around her sensible shoes.

She runs, barreling the trolley ahead of her like a battering ram.

Crowd around the elevators, clustered muffled bodies staring at the blinking emergency lights. Someone cracks a joke about early lunch; sensible chuckles. One of those bodies sinks wordlessly into the unlit floor, black into black, and no one even notices they're missing. Jazz thunders on, riding the inertia of her now-unstoppable snap decision. The task she had appointed herself has become her sole focus, beyond the safety training videos drilled into her year after year. Freight elevator. Her department relegated to the basement for so long that she knows the way by heart. Red light pulsing above the doorway, emergency power - still power. She skids the trolley to a slow, rumbling stop and taps the elevator open.

Inside, another person. Old winter wear, pink windbreaker, battered ski boots - possibly rentals. Wraparound mirrorshades lift to reveal terrified eyes, red-rimmed doe-leather brown. Sheer terror when Jazz eases the trolley into the elevator. He speaks something like modern Swedish, though fucked up and archaic in a way she can't really place. Seems grateful when she hits the button for the lobby. Keeps repeating that he needs to get out, get away, she thinks - she can relate. Snow melts on his shoulders as the freight elevator rumbles upwards. She can't show him the way out, not now, but she does the best she can to guide him to the front doors from the lobby. Eyes watering in a childlike confusion and gratitude, like a baby that's never been struck.

Doors ding open. Security is there, four of them, and they rush in plain and quick and efficient. Taze the stranger in a single motion and lope him out of the box, twitching and groaning. Jazz holds the elevator open with her foot, waiting for them to vacate. A wisp of an old jingle rises out of the compressed art blocks on the trolley, a memory of when there was more soda than just the one, more options than just this.

Nearly crunches over the guy's dropped wraparound shades on her way out. Something weird in the neon blue reflection: not the ceiling, a cloudy sky. Edge of a mountain. Snow coming down. She pauses, just a little, and picks them up. The perspective shifts to a ski lift rising up the edge of an otherwise familiar mountain. A quaint little lodge, winter-frosted, sits right in the heart of what would be Nekker Bell HQ main lobby. Like here, only quieter.

There are figures in the reflection, distorted and small. A snowsuited man fixes skis onto a tiny, overdressed, potatolike toddler. A smiling woman slides by, ear to an old beige-brick cellphone with a thick, wobbly antenna. Some animal leaps around in the snow, golden-furred in little booties and a knitted sweater, like a hellhound with dark, teary eyes and no miasma of hellish stench.

Snowy, achingly prosaic. Mundane.

Another rumble. The freight elevator shifts a few centimeters; something whines in the overhead mechanism. Jazz wheels the trolley through the doors, out into the overlapping shadows and light of the lobby floor. Tucks the shades into her T-shirt, glass in, cold against her feverish skin. A trio of first responders lean against the curve of the front desk, trading indistinguishable gossip, plain and casual, with two of the five receptionists even as the floor shifts and shudders.

Still got shit to do.

*****

Savings: 111¤ Role: Designer Works for: Nekker Bell Traits: Knowledge 20 (3), Flexibility 13 (1), Integrity 13 (1), Hard Skills 7 (-1), Soft Skills 15 (2) Hit Points: 4 Undos: 1

Assets: Just a shirt and jeans (no damage reduction, -2DR for Flexibility tests), Pen (d3 weapon, at max damage it embeds, Flexibility or Hard Skills DR12 to pull it out and do 1 bleed for 1d4 rounds), Backpack (7 items), Bag of coffee additives, 26-day-old sandwich (it's fine) Incantations: Intern Descend (Summon d4 faithful interns, no armor, d2 scratch, worthless) Artifact: Sketchbook (sketch a location to teleport there, roll a d6; 1-2 the sketch is bad and it doesn't work, 3-4 the sketch is okay and it teleports somewhere else, 5-6 the sketch is workable and it functions as intended)

Complicated past: Family curse (soul's mortgaged from birth) Yearnings: Purity (longs to do ART, ACTUAL FUCKING ART) Reason to work in corporation: A grave mistake (artist wants paycheck, the beartrap closes) Reaction to stress: None (just another day in paradise)

Name: Jazz (like the old dixie cup pattern)

*****

I do like a bit of corporate horror. Severance got hold of me hard for a bit; I've always liked the bits of the SCP Foundation that focused on the odd interactions of the anomalous with a normal office building. Corp Borg files that mundane inhumanity into the framework of Mork Borg, and at first it looked like an awkward fit, making nostalgic and, at times, hilarious Mork Borg's ever-present feeling of grinding, inescapable doom. But as someone who's put time in the customer service mines, "grinding, inescapable doom" is a sensation that well fits the vibe in every modern office. And hey, we like lateral moves, here at the reeling edge of culture.

Corp Borg looks and rolls pretty much precisely like Mork Borg; the colorways are identical, the flashy zine-style aesthetics, the assumption that you know what the hell the book is on about when it says "d6 laptop, 50% chance to inflict code-madness for d3 rounds". Fresh new vinyl flesh poured onto the skeleton of Mork Borg; if you know Mork Borg, you know how this thing works. Which sounds on first blush like a faint condemnation, but Mork Borg is a masterpiece of design, and saying that a thing looks and feels just like it is plaintext praise.

That said, the vibes are... kind of off. Corp Borg can slide too hard into the "horror" side of "corporate horror", treating the fluorescent lights and open-plan offices as set dressing for the capitalist demons that carry the weight of the thing's professed awfulness. Part of what appeals to me about corporate horror is that the corporate part is in every way exactly as horrific as the horror part, only in an insidious, achingly slow way - the horror not of a monster peeling off your skin but of willingly lining up, day after day, to have it abraded down to the muscle layer by the gentle scrub of the office-standard belt sander.

(The reason I got out of the customer service mines was that I had one real, good conversation with a co-worker where she revealed a lot about herself and her personality. We had a lot of similar tastes and opinions; she said I reminded her a lot of herself when she started. She had been ground down to a cynical nub, immediately expecting everyone she met to be stupid, irrational and stubborn. She accepted that her day was going to be misery and the paycheck was just enough of a balm to keep her in it. There was no life in those eyes. Two weeks submitted days later.)

That said, there's enough stuff in Corp Borg that you can assemble the pieces into whatever flavor of corporate sundae you're after - if you think coffee Madonnas and stapler fights are too ridiculous, you can play around with endless overtime, with the slow grinding shift of the mutation tables, with the end of the world delivered by email daemon hot and fresh every morning (and please do not reply).

One thing I will unconditionally laud is the starter adventure in the back of the book (which is excellent, and banks on impostor syndrome as its main mechanism of fear, which I adore) and, crucially, beautifully, the solo play rules. I am pleased beyond expression that not only are solo play rules included right in the book, but that it's comprehensive, well thought out, and comes with delightful flowcharts, exceptions and thematic justification. This is a thing I want to praise loudly until it blossoms into a trend, and it's the thing that elevates Corp Borg from a "huh, neat" to something I'm probably going to reference over and over again on bored work nights.

Next up: A careworn dream of the future.

#character creation challenge #new year new character #corp borg #mork borg #tabletop rpg #corporate horror #i am never going back from wfh you can't make me #i will actually fight you

2 notes · View notes