Peanut Gallery is a never-ending story written live on stream, with contributions taken from the audience. New watchers become characters, and commentary can be integrated wholly or in part in numerous wild ways. If you would like to participate, join us over on my Twitch channel and click follow to stay up to date.
Peanut Gallery
by
Blaine Arcade
with contributions from
the Twitch.tv marginalia
The Chatterbox
The Chatterbox
We join in media resting on a couch too tight-lipped to be comfortable, forcing him to put his long legs, awkward given that he wasn’t tall in the slightest, on the coffee table next to the spread magazines. He was definitely a person, but less of a man than his appearance and mannerisms might suggest, more of a guy, a fellow, a ranchless dude, a quenched chap, an every-man with emphasis on the ‘every’.
He was Biy Beforay, and he was getting less comfortable in his vest, rolled-up sleeves, and leather belt by the moment, attacking his collar with a hooked finger, despite having never even donned the suit jacket. Whenever that hand left the collar to recover, it returned to the small object in his lap, bearing two mother of pearl push buttons with white gold rims. Nervously, his thumb danced around the larger and higher button.
Logic dictated that the item, the device, the misused tool, that had been in Beforay’s possession longer than the world existed as it currently did, had its appearance based on the surrounding building, as both shared Art Deco sensibilities, bold corners and curves with satin finishes.
The building, which was enough buildings stacked atop each other to be called a tower, which could only contain Beforay on its twenty-seventh floor for so long, was but one of many in a sprawling city constantly under the gray watering can of a bored chain smoking god who thought a touch more of his bare bones garden than of himself.
The tower’s interior was livelier, an ant farm of professionals and their secretaries, the clicking of at least three sets of high heels a constant across the tiled floor. White walls were interrupted by shirtless nickel statues at every corner, reaching for the heavens almost angrily, as if aware of the lowly bean counting and penny pinching surrounding them and finding it unfitting of themselves and the rest of the decor. In the absence of eyes, that frustration was expressed with a fused hairline and brow ridge like the face of a judging eagle.
And the machine, the doodad, the babbling bauble, much more valuable than those nonetheless accurate monikers would suggest, looked a little like all that in miniature. A black obelisk, open in the middle to reveal a caged cylinder of paper that tick-rotated endlessly, as if tracking stock prices, its base was very like a paperweight that could exist in any of the surrounding, closing in, offices, and in its flat peak were set, on two tiers, the alluring push buttons.
But not so. The world was this way, this gloomy outside, unwisely optimistic and ambitious inside, at the same time, in the same fashion, and for the same reason as the item we must now name, in order to cease these endless descriptions, as the chatterbox. The ambition of the chatterbox’s inside was still on display, on the ticking paper cylinder, as various lines of typewriter text scrolling across it for Biy to read, to scoff at, to get stung by.
He felt he had to wait until they really took it over the top, then he could push their buttons. Hopefully they had some money to put where their many mouths were. He was finally getting a sense that money was pretty important in this kind of place. Not his favorite kind. His favorite kind was a lot less ‘measuring tape on silk lining’ and a lot more ‘skin on skin’ or ‘face on aquarium glass’.
What were they saying now? Biy glanced down, but in the process grazed the small button.
Small Button Press: palaver89 – “I usually think it’s premature to offer any physical description of a main character this early“
I usually think it’s premature to offer any physical description of a main character this early
Was that a dig at his legs? Biy wasn’t sure, not sure enough to say he was sure, but sure enough to take them off the table and hide them beneath it. He checked the clock on the wall, its hands over-crafted, good enough to be arms on the statues. The meeting was in a few minutes, and he didn’t have anything to offer. The chatterbox did, he decided, and so went for it, yet again, never failing to bite down on its bait with harried relish.
“You seem to know how this should go, so you can come out here, get your foot on the gas, and make it go for me,” he growled at the chatterbox, more specifically at the big pearl button, before he bashed it with his thumb as if passing a sentence with a gavel.
Big Button Press (Demonstration): palaver89 – “Par Example”
What should have been another line on the cylinder was now another person around the coffee table, waiting for their meeting, with their feet up near the magazines, though they came down almost as quickly as they appeared.
“Pourquoi?” he said, instead of typing, which confounded him further. His name was Par Example, which he learned about himself just as he also learned he was bilingual, but only French when enraged, he had a mustache, tiny spectacles pinching his nose, and a suit hugging his body more suited to reading a knee-cracking tome in a luxurious armchair than harassing his collar over a meeting with someone in one of these offices.
“Okay tough guy, are you ready for this?” Biy Beforay addressed him, crossing his arms.
“What is this?” Par demanded to know, standing, but only briefly, as that drew angry stares from statues and passing secretaries with very tight hair buns alike. “I wasn’t here… I was… where was I?”
“You were in the peanut gallery,” Biy informed like a slap to the face, still satisfying every time he said it. “Aboard the peanut galleon, but now you’ve been thrown overboard into the peanut ocean, so start treading shells.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Marginalia,” Biy said, unfolding his arms only to hold out the chatterbox on a flat palm, making it look as much like a lone building standing in a field of razed neighbors as he could. “You were in the marginalia, not the world, heckling me, tossing your salty insults, getting grease all over my reputation and the floor.
Only you didn’t know I had this, the chatterbox. It’s a connection, brings author and audience together into the same room, makes them look over each other’s shoulders in an endless loop as they work and criticize. With this, I can see what you distant readers and viewers think about my world in real time, the text responding to the vandalism, and I can make you prove yourselves with one press of this big button.”
“And the small button?” Mr. Example asked, leaning to make sure that’s what it was, and not just a speck of particularly bright spittle from this excitable fellow’s lip.
“That doesn’t bring in people, it’s just for adjustments,” Biy explained dismissively.
“Ah, so that is the criticism you are willing to take, and the rest is what you have now blamed on me.” Mr. Example leaned back in his seat, reached into his billiard-felt jacket with corner pocket elbow patches, and drew out a wallet. He examined its contents. “It’s as if I have a whole life here. This chatterbox works quickly.”
“You do have a life here, now that I pushed the button. Now it’s your story. I’m just here, in the margins, so don’t mind me. Oh I’ll chime in if I think I’m needed, but you don’t want me to keep pressing this, I promise you. That life you’ve now got can go haywire like that.” He snapped his fingers.
The chatterbox’s scattered text proliferated in response, but he ignored it. One criticism at a time; he wasn’t done milking all the comeuppance out of this Example victim.
“I am… finding things out,” Par said, facial expression as close as a typical human could come to rolling their eyes back in their head and scanning the archives within like library shelves. “It does seem to be my world, though I don’t know if this is my meeting. It seems like yours, and you’re just trying to get out of it. More pressing, I assume, but please no more pressing on those buttons for the time being… is this ‘haywire’ business. That I don’t know. Please,” he pointed at the clock, “before we’re expected.”
“Oh you’ll hate this,” Biy said, giddy enough to sully the cushions with his tip-tapping shoes, but not brave enough under all the stern eyes of the twenty-seventh floor. “It’s called cage slant. I want you to picture yourself inside a large metal cage. The walls are bars. Outside? It doesn’t matter, because you can’t leave, now that the big button’s been pressed. You couldn’t quit squawking from the outside, so now you’re a caged canary.
This cage is shoddily put together. None of the screws are all the way in; they wobble. That means the cage’s shape isn’t as fixed as you’d hope, though you’re no less trapped. If you move to one corner, the weight distribution will be off, and the whole shape will slant in that direction.
That’s what your presence does to the very world. Now that you’re here, you’re influencing it. It has become a little more like you. A little more focused on you. But if you screw this up after jawing about how badly I was doing, I’m going to press again, and again, and again, and fill your cage up with others who will apply their own slant.
Your corner won’t be the heaviest, which has its ups and downs, but the more you bug me, the more I press, the fuller the cage gets, and the world changes all the more. Who knows where we’ll be sitting, and who with, a hundred and fifty-six presses from now. If you want things to go smoothly, make it happen, or I’ll agitate the stew. You get me?”
“Enough for this meeting,” he said, ruffling his gray mustache with an exasperated exhale. “My name is Par Example, by the way. I am, and feel I have always been, a novelist.”
“You and everybody else in the peanut gallery,” Biy dismissed. “And I know your name. Even outside existence every quote comes with a name, its issuer, and its detractor. You’re all the same. I’m the one who’s different, because I’ve got the chatterbox. Go ahead and prove me wrong. Make this satisfying for everyone involved.”
That was when one of the women from the secretary highway broke off and came to their waiting area. She looked at them both, momentarily confused, but eventually her impatient eyes settled on the novelist called Par Example. Biy was just present, a voter that could only cast a ‘present’ vote, a person just trying to sidle on by and get to the water cooler. As long as he could be that, he didn’t need to press either of the buttons again.
“Mr. Example?” she asked, or perhaps she ordered him to take up the name if it wasn’t already his.
“Yes miss,” he said, standing and brushing off dust he hadn’t had time to accumulate.
“Alright, Mr.-” Biy stood as well, but as he tried to pocket the chatterbox he accidentally pressed the small button again.
Small Button Press: palaver89 – “Oiseaux”
“Mr. Oiseaux will see you now.” She turned and clicked away, forcing them both to scramble around the coffee table and follow a little too fast to catch their breath, past the statues, which now seemed to judge Mr. Example more harshly than Biy. Secretary noise faded, as they were now in a dimmer passage where only the one leading them was permitted.
Par noticed the unusual shape of her collar, like spread dove wings, doing little to give her more of a peaceful aura. A similar shape was riveted in gold onto the double doors they approached, the name ‘Oiseaux’ stenciled across it in massive letters like Roman pillars. She stopped and turned with the precision of a cuckoo clock dancer on the hour. Par and Biy faltered, shoes squeaking.
“None of you have any fruit, nuts, or seeds on your person, do you?” she asked. Biy didn’t bother to answer, just turn out his pockets, always as empty as possible, the chatterbox never leaving his hand by choice. Par had to check his as well, as he wasn’t entirely caught up on his own situation yet. There was just the wallet, a matchbook, and a cork stained pink.
“No.”
“Excellent. Do not panic if you feel anything land on your shoulder, as they don’t bite, and if they do bite you’ll be compensated.” Apparently nothing else needed explaining, as she pushed the heavy door open with one insistent arm and ushered them inside, not entering herself.
It was an office, sure, but Par thought perhaps that accidental button press he’d spied had something to do with its unorthodox multitude of birds. There was endless chatter, squeaks, rasps, clicks, squawks, chirps, but all whispered, as if one was the rare Twenty-Seventh Floor Librarian Bird, which only sang in oppressive hushes.
Only one or two flew at a time, the rest perched on a variety of stands and wall-mounted roosts, none of them fully enclosed in a cage: purple headed doves, blue and white parakeets, gray parrots, and tiny yellow titterers. In the middle of them all, sat behind a staggeringly wide desk was a portly man with round glasses and all the tower floors above them carried on his slumped shoulders.
“Ah good, you’re on time,” Mr. Oiseaux said, not standing, not even correcting his posture; perhaps the weight of whatever-it-was was too great.
“We are,” Mr. Example said, confusing the man at the desk until he allowed his peripheral vision more power, causing him to recognize the presence of Mr. Beforay, though it was quickly disregarded. “Correct me if I’m wrong, I do feel very wrong today, could be coming down with something, but… I don’t know why I’ve been summoned, yes?”
“No, I wanted you here before I told you, that’s why I paid you the advance.” Par checked his internal library, found a cashed check. Then he sounded out his own identity as it occurred to him, applying it to his current situation like a prepaid shipping label.
“I would imagine you’d like to hire me as a ghostwriter,” he said slowly, “as I have done that sort of thing a few times before, though I’m not sure where you got my name. I have a few decent sellers under it, and I don’t really want it getting out that I sometimes work on commission.” He glanced over, saw one of the birds pass a rolled bill, definitely not a single dollar, to its neighbor, which was then tucked under a wing. Had one of them wagered he would say that?
“I don’t want to hire you,” Mr. Oiseaux said, “they do.” He gestured around at his many pets even as he made it sound like he was the domesticated one speaking on command.
“The birds?” The man nodded emphatically with both his chins. “And what do they want exactly?”
Finally Mr. Oiseaux stood, less of an effort and more of a burden, pacing back and forth near the back of the office where the wall was glass, overlooking a rainy street with jealous pigeons streaking by. He locked his hands behind his back, stared out at the city: the only true cage.
“Mr. Example, you were chosen because these birds, a collective despite the many species, they call themselves the Twenty-Seventh Floor, for that is exactly how high they prefer to fly, see you as a grounded man despite your active imagination.
You’ve demonstrated the ability to take very silly ideas as seriously as possible, as evidenced by your previous novel, The Irrational Counter, where you posited a man who had innately learned most of mathematics only through intuiting the nature of irrational numbers. I’ve heard some mathematicians gave you a call, asked a few questions about your theories.”
“Only to find I had no theories,” Par countered. “I just tried to follow the idea logically. I do sometimes stumble into a pit that momentarily mimics expertise.”
“You try to be humble, but you’re only impressing the Twenty-Seventh Floor all the more,” Mr. Oiseaux said with a thrown dart of a laugh. “Your mimicked expertise is very real to them, for that is precisely what a bird does when it copies human speech. Most people don’t know it, but there are some thoughts behind the words, almost as good as a man’s thoughts, but no less power-hungry and ambitious.
On their own they can do nothing, but banded together, exchanging these thoughts, arranging them in a network as they have, they form an incredible mind. That is what you see before you.”
“I’d consider asking for proof,” Par said, “But I don’t really care if you have any, assuming you intend to pay what I would require to work for the birds.” He stole another glance at Beforay, who looked very comfortable in the silence and shadows, leaning on the nearest wall. His closed eyes expressed immense relief, now that the spotlight was elsewhere. That, and only that, was why Par Example now existed, but he was smart enough to know, with his doppelganger deviousness, that troubling himself over it now wouldn’t benefit him in the slightest.
“Payment will not be an issue,” Oiseaux assured him, smiling, but not with his own amusement, clearly on the behalf of the lipless beaks all around them. “As this whole building, above and below, the entirety of Measured Wing Incorporated, is owned and operated by the Twenty-Seventh Floor.”
“If you want me to write a book it will cost you at least fifty grand,” Par said, trying to outdo the man in outlandishness. This sort of rapid adjustment was how he wrote, one explosive plot development or twist at a time.
“They do want you to write a book,” the burdened man confirmed, “but not a typical sort-” he was interrupted, by a snort from Biy Beforay, disturbed from his rest by Par’s ability to take everything in stride. His critics should have it a little harder than that when a whole world gets thrown at them.
“You have something to say now?” Par snapped. He didn’t care if he ever heard from the man again. He was the one that had left grease all over the reigns.
“The birds should just be aware that critics, which you are Par, don’t make the best writers. Maybe they want someone else is all.” He never learned, even when he was getting exactly what he wanted. Biy’s snotty outburst ruffled every last feather of the Twenty-Seventh Floor, and their slow mouthpiece wasn’t going to express their ire quickly enough, so they took it into their own talons.
Three of the smaller birds launched straight for him. The man flailed before it was even necessary, giving them a window between his wheeling arms to peck at his earlobes until he learned to listen instead of talk when he wasn’t the one summoned. He only defended himself successfully once, but it was with the hand holding the chatterbox, and what should have drawn a drop of blood, instead struck the littler pearl button.
Small Button Press: graph0601 – “bugs”
Suddenly much more defensive of his precious toy than his own flesh, Biy retreated toward the doors. The committee of the Twenty-Seventh Floor may have pursued, but it was feeding time. Mr. Oiseaux hurried back to his desk, sat down, and opened a drawer. Out came a raincoat, much cheaper than what an executive would be expected to wear, but he didn’t wear it, instead pulling it over his head like a tarp.
Mechanisms clunked inside the ceiling. Vents initially meant for cold corporate air popped open on half their hinges, then, after a terrible skittering sound, like a washing machine tumbling a load of cactus needles, a veritable flood of live insects poured into the office.
The flow continued for more than a minute, with Mr. Example standing his ground even as weevils found the inside of his socks and ants the sheltering awning of his toenails. Yet he held perfectly still. In trying to minimize Biy’s presence he grew all the more curious and devoted to the scenario. He wanted that money, and he wanted a very large bird to hand it over.
All the while the Twenty-Seventh Floor gluttonously acted as their own custodial staff, swooping to and fro, scooping the mess off the floor and swallowing it down. The bugs were released by the ton, so they couldn’t possibly finish them all. The point was the excess, the luxury, Par guessed. These birds claimed the whole sky when they flew it.
More subtle vents opened, allowing the vermin to escape into the floor, but only into pipes that would cycle them back to the ceiling before the next feeding. Every day was a gauntlet until they were finally snapped up. Par was reminded of all the workers he’d seen out in the waiting area. They moved in much the same fashion, hurrying their lives away, their tasks nothing but a mask blinding them to the life being siphoned by higher powers, though not powers that high. Given what Oiseaux had said about the seriousness of silly ideas, the novelist took a stab at a hidden reality.
“They aren’t the only ones, are they?”
“How do you mean?” Oiseaux said with a smirk, indicating he was on the right track.
“I’m no businessman, but what are the odds, out of the countless thousands that exist, I’ve been summoned to the only one secretly run by something other than a human. The Twenty-Seventh Floor must have competition in what I now expect to be an exceptionally free market.”
“It’s as if you’re already writing the foreword,” he confirmed, shaking off his raincoat and folding it back into its drawer. “That idea has a lot to do with you being here. I’ve already seen you keep a stiff upper lip after one revelation, but you can’t keep it stiffer than a macaw’s nutcracker beak. It’s alright to be shocked, you don’t have to steel yourself against this one, lord knows I didn’t when I first heard…
that every corporation above a certain size is run by something inhuman. MWI was founded by this coalition of birds, but on the remnants of another company it gobbled up, which was itself created by the ancestors of the imprisoned bugs they now cycle through these vents between lunch breaks. Nature never gets less cruel, even when hidden behind our white collars and our tax deduction forms.”
“Are you telling me all the nature we’ve displayed over the ages has simply gone into hiding, but remained master of the land?” Par asked. He was getting painfully close to losing his composure; it felt as if his lenses were about to crack in protest of his mind failing to do so.
“Another fun idea, but not exactly.” Oiseaux’s stare drifted off for a moment, as if he thought it would be a better world than the one he worked in. “It can’t be human, for the human heart breaks when it has to make indifferent profiteering decisions for too long and at too large a scale.
But it doesn’t have to be an animal or a flock of them. It can be an inanimate object that makes decisions by random chance, like a sacred roulette wheel, or really anything dropped like dice that could land on certain faces.
Calculating machines as well, a few as big as this building, can be the cynical minds needed to balance these baffling budgets. Many of them hide their identities or have their identities hidden as trade secrets, the Twenty-Seventh Floor among them.
You were right about the competition of nature still existing behind this facade, to an extent. That’s where you come in. There’s a new financial quarter starting soon, which is sort of like the hunting season, and those I represent wish to make an aggressive yet sly maneuver: a book. You are to be the author of the most insidious and layered propaganda the world has ever seen, and they won’t even know that’s what they’re seeing.
What you will write for MWI is ostensibly a volume of pro-union literature, with an unassuming cover on the cheapest paper we can manage without it falling apart in the hands. We believe that our greatest rivals, which we will distribute this volume to, will interpret it as first level propaganda, nothing more than us trying to rile up their workers, cause strikes, and thus cause them losses and delays.
In actuality, in the vein of basing math off irrational numbers, you will hide subliminal narrative messages that encourage them not just to join unions, but to investigate the very structure of the buildings in which they work.”
Mr. Oiseaux stood again, went to the wall, and knocked on it in a few places. Par expected to hear at least one hollow, given that the bugs had to be transported through something, but all sounded solid. Then the heavyset man went to the window just as all the birds leapt off the perch nearest him. With surprising strength he turned it over and bashed the window with its base. The glass hardly shuddered, and there wasn’t a single crack. As he set it down he went back to explaining.
“This tower is a feat of engineering, with every facility the birds need for their affairs and their comfort expertly hidden away and disguised. Such a thing is not cheap, and they happen to know that several of their biggest competitors in the area have pinched those particular pennies and not secured themselves completely against investigation.”
“I do feel like I’m landing on your page, and it isn’t the dedication,” Mr. Example said, starting to pace back and forth, now looking every bird in the eye rather than the man. “You want this hypothetical book to trick your competitors’ staff into distrusting them, and to the specific degree that they investigate every forbidden door and tucked-away hatch in their workplace.
Eventually they would discover that the company they work for is run by a periodically dropped umbrella, or a testy fan boat motor, or a field prone to meteorite strikes, or a bunny rabbit. Some such critter or thing. They could then threaten to go to the press, blackmail them out of their profits, or try and dismantle the entire economic system that delivers cruelty to the lowest levels because it is capable of no better.”
“Thus causing overall instability in our competitors,” Oiseaux said with a nod. “And for such a precise task we are prepared to pay you 300,000 dollars for a completed manuscript and your secrecy sworn with a signature.”
“I assume every penny over the 50,000 I asked for is for me to set aside the moral imperative to tell the world that this may very well be why the poor have suffered so, in this time where industrialization has been fully carpeted over, the graves hidden.” Oiseaux looked to one of the birds, the biggest and grayest. It gave no visible signal, but he seemed to learn something anyway.
“No, it’s simply adequate compensation for the skill required. We’ll ask for your secrecy, but if you go blabbing our various safety measures will protect us. Trust me,” Oiseaux took a step closer, darkened his expression with the rain cloud always near his head, and repeated, “trust me, there would be no point and you’d only harm yourself. What do you say? Are you up to the challenge?”
Before he could answer, Biy Beforay, suffering a green lightning bolt of envy, bitterly tapped the smaller button, almost absent-mindedly, half-wondering if a tap that light could even trigger anything.
Small Button Press: palaver89 – ” Lego” and “villainization”
“Before we discuss further,” Par said, raising a finger, which a small yellow bird then landed on, forcing him to bend it to accommodate the creature better, “I’d like to know who our competition is. Who are we aiming at? And what inhuman things run those structures. I need a better understanding of the playing field.”
“What an efficient way to agree to our terms,” Mr. Oiseaux complimented, returning to his swiveling office chair, his most welcome home in all the world. “There are two entities on which we expect you to concentrate your efforts. Both of them have their headquarters less than five miles from here. They are Gollyblock, the scoundrels-“
“Wait, Par interrupted, “you mean the toy company? The one that makes those interlocking bricks for building castles and vehicles and such?”
“Oh yes, if you want to talk about the evils inherent to this system, they are the ones that have embraced it the most. Few things in this world are fouler than the upper disguised practices of Gollyblock Inc.”
“Run by…”
“The blocks themselves, in a sense,” Oiseaux said. “You see what they do is scatter a bucket of them across a floor. Then one of the highest level human employees walks across that floor with their bare feet, all the way across. Their howls of pain are recorded, then interpreted by a team of linguists who transform into a set of orders. Then those orders are applied to their board meetings and financial statements; thus the wheel keeps turning.”
“And that has resulted in them being the greatest villain in the city?”
“Quite.” The birds squawked in consensus. “It is self-sustaining, even if nobody understands how. They don’t have to make the corners on those blocks that sharp, but they do, almost as if they’re trying to create more howls when it comes time to throw them across the floor once more. Everything is evolution, the market, competition; it can’t be stopped. We can’t escape.”
“The second entity we can’t escape?” Par reminded before Oiseaux could descend into a malaise he clearly suffered every moment he did not have human company in his office.
“That would be Mrs. Forthright and her shell game. They give the orders over at Solid Foundry Gravel and Sands. Most buildings in the city are partly rooted in their products, ours included, a fact that has always unsettled the Twenty-Seventh Floor.”
“You said there were no humans in charge; who is this Forthright woman?”
“She is an ex-flimflammer from the streets, these streets to be mildly specific. Her shell game got noticed and tossed in an elevator, all the way up to Solid Foundry’s equivalent of our twenty-seventh floor. All she does is put a little seashell under her three wooden cups and play it just as she would wagering over five dollars in the alley.
Obviously something about her is key, otherwise she would be replaced, kept from the exorbitant salary she now earns. I doubt she knows what it is anymore than the other board members. If someone finds the shell they choose whatever option is the most positive, forward-thinking, or investment-heavy. Should they fail the board then chooses to be stingy, technical, and skeptical in the extreme. They have been served as well as Gollyblock by their pained shouts and Measured Wing by its fanciful flights of consensus.”
There then came a knock on the door, which Par had to remind himself was likely not a woodpecker, but the human secretary again. It was an alert that Mr. Oiseaux’s next appointment was approaching, which in itself meant they had scheduled precious little time for Mr. Example to cope with these mammoth shifts in perspective. If he had rejected their proposal he might be under the floor, helplessly carried along a sluice with all the vermin.
In truth he wasn’t sure exactly how right or wrong this task would be. Beforay’s intervention gave him a life, a personality proper, but he still had to settle into his place in it. If the birds were evil, perhaps he was meant to be evil, and could be happy no other way. As it stood he was being offered a tremendous sum to do what he did best in an intriguing challenge that could, he hoped, at worst result in a hostile takeover.
In the privacy of his mind he vowed to challenge himself all the more, to add a third layer to the propaganda in his manuscript, one that encouraged his readers to only do what they knew to be morally correct, truths earned through the ‘settling in’ he hadn’t yet had opportunity for.
“We’ll be in touch Mr. Example,” Oiseaux said, helping himself to a pinch of mixed birdseed piled in what Par previously assumed was an ashtray. “It’s always a pleasure to get someone new to work closely with. I’m the only old one at MWI.” The birds watched Par closely as he turned and headed for the door, irritated when Biy Beforay settled in next to him and kept pace.
“You’re no longer needed here,” Par assured him as they took their leave, their lungs expanding in the much more open air outside the office. There wasn’t a hint of feather dander or newspaper lining anywhere in its scent.
“Are you kidding me?” Biy said with a snort of laughter. “I’m the glue that keeps all this together. Nobody is supposed to see the glue, but come on, it’s there. Everything you did in there, great work by the way, was because of me, so it was my great work. Congratulations to the both of us.”
“Can I expect you looking over my shoulder every time I tap the typewriter?”
“Only if you ask nicely. Here, I’ll show you. You’re heading home, right? Uht- don’t tell me where, doesn’t matter. You see, hitting the little button makes all this boring travel stuff go by a lot faster. Watch.”
“I’d prefer if you didn-“
Small Button Press: palaver89 – “Bad Taste”
Blaine Arcade 