The Layoff

Henry knocked on Morgana’s office door with less than thirty minutes remaining in the day, and she responded with a flat, "Come in.” Henry slid under the door with ease. Of all the doors in the office that he personally worked to secure, hers was the easiest to pass. He felt such a lapse in security should be remedied, but his security reports had mostly gone ignored in the last few weeks. Occasionally he might receive an email or mindmail that thanked him for the detailed report, but he had no new work orders. “And do close the… oh right,” Morgana said with a smile that didn’t move her unsettling eyes. He didn’t enjoy her gaze, so he looked off to the side to see Morgana’s quill scribble with every step he took.

“Why’s the quill awake?” Henry asked as his favorite chair erupted from the floor and plopped in front of Morgana’s desk.

“I always use it for meetings, and why do you always bring your own seat to every meeting? Just sit there,” Morgana said, pointing to the discolored, plastic chair with uneven legs. She didn’t always use the quill for meetings. The only other times he had seen it awake was during a few promotions. When Sebastian became the Grand Cleric of the Green Vortex of Neverending Terror it scribbled every single utterance in the building. The same insincere smile and empty gaze flashed across her face, but this time a bluish hue darkened the whites of her eyes.

“Actually, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Look, as you know, we sealed the dark lord in a mirrored dimension that only exists inside the dreams of dying Clydesdales. Your work securing the office was invaluable to the champion and his band of cursed wizards, and the firm has richly rewarded your efforts.”

“Yes, it was significant. Thank you. I have to imagine we will want to start securing some of our satellite offices, especially the ones that were temporarily erased from reality during the purge of storms,” Henry said, excited about the prospect of expanding his magical dominion.

“Well, the senior partners of  Anansi, Merlin, and Stevens believe that with the methods we used to bind the dark lord he should not cause any more problems for at least thirty to forty years, longer than either of us will live.”

“What? I’m only thirty-seven, and you’re as close to immortal as an uncursed human can get. The breaking of the time-turned curse turned all of your potential decades into millennia,” Henry said with a quizzical look and a furrow of his brow.

Morgana pinched the bridge of her nose and shook her head, “Good God Henry! You’re not supposed to know that. You’re supposed to audit file security, not read the files.”

“How can I possibly know they’re secure unless I audit the contents as well as the filing system? While interdimensional filing has come a long way in the last few years, especially since the breaking of the digi-magical bulwark, which of course lead to the Quickbookification of spell and curse financials… where was I going with this? Oh right, nothing beats being hands on with security,” Henry said, but he didn’t think he left the impression he expected.

“Sure, yeah totally. Look Henry. It’s not easy to say this, but today is your last day. With the dark lord imprisoned, we no longer have a need for your services. We’ve ported your personal belongings to a holding facility, and you need only reach into an empty box without looking in order to retrieve them at your convenience. The spell will stay active for the next seventy-two hours,” Morgana said, and Henry somewhat appreciated that she didn’t attempt to smile. Her empty gaze finally felt appropriate to the situation.

“You’re gutting my entire department? Henry asked, and he sat back in his black, leather chair. He spent a few hours severing the chair’s connection to the corporeal plane within their reality so that he could take it everywhere he went within the office. It would take him quite a while to pull it back into reality so that he could take it home. 

“No, we’re keeping a bit of a skeleton crew around, but everything you have built no longer needs your skills to be maintained. We need you to sever your soul’s magical connection to this building and transfer it to Balthazar,” Morgana said, and she tapped her black, almond-shaped nails against the bottom of her keyboard.

“Umm, okay… I will need a few days to unravel myself safely and do a knowledge transfer with Balthazar. Do I get a severance package?” Henry asked.

Morgan placed her chin in her hand and said, “Oh yes, of course. It’s a rather generous one given the expertise required to build what you did. Also, your years of service to the enlightened one are commendable. That being said, we need you to sever your connection today. Right now in fact.” She sat back up and beckoned someone into the room. The office didn’t have windows, so he assumed correctly that it was Balthazar. While Balthazar had many competencies, Henry steamed at the fact that he would choose to do something so amateur as seeing through walls when giving oneself an omniscience of the contents of a room served a security professional far better. Balthazar, with black smoke flowing from his blood red suit, sat down in the plastic chair next to Henry and offered him a sympathetic smile. Henry never liked Balthazar much, but the layoff wasn’t his fault, so he felt no ill will. The plastic chair began to warp and melt under Balthazar’s demonic presence. 

Henry snapped his mind out of passing judgment and said, “I can’t sever it today. I need to unwind the bindings from my phylactery, and that can take several hours.” 

Morgana dropped her face into her hands and spoke with a muffle tone through her fingers, “You seriously tethered your personal phylactery to this building? The enlightened one is going to lose all of his minds.” 

“The building needed to be connected to a soul in order to foresee threats and actively warn me of them. Did the executive team not read the compendium that I created illustrating exactly how this would all work?” Henry asked with a raised eyebrow. 

“They were all slaughtered during the dark lord’s season of cleansing at the second quarter’s earnings call last year. Not that they would necessarily remember, anyway,” Morgana said, leaving her face in her hands. She popped up with her synthetic smile, this time with her bright green fangs showing and continued, “I can authorize a fifty percent increase in your severance, along with an empty phylactery that we cleansed during the dark lord’s banishment. They are of quite high quality, so it will be an upgrade, right?”

“It takes a long time to inhabit one, let alone reinhabit a new one, especially without having access to the old one,” Henry said.

Morgana started, “Well it seems like-”

“And I won’t have my magical network anymore. I won’t have anything. The only magical item I have at home is the scantron of a student who got a perfect SAT score. I can’t rebuild a nexus from that. You need to give me more time. Please,” Henry interrupted, and he leaned forward with his hands clasped.

“Once we begin the layoff process, your access to the office’s dominion becomes a liability rather than a boon, especially with how much you enmeshed your own resources into it.” Morgana said. She looked at Balthazar and gave him a quick nod.

“I already told you that it had to be done, there was no way to-” 

As Balthazar’s incorporeal fingers phased through Henry’s neck, a chill convulsed through his spine and his vision flashed white like a pile of malfunctioning strobe lights in a room of mirrors. The purple, translucent tendrils of the nexus he built slithered out of his mouth and shot from his eyes, wriggling their way under Balthazar’s skin. Henry’s eyes rolled into the back of his head, and he slumped over in his leather chair that began to sink into the floor. Before he passed out he could hear, “He’s not gonna fucking die in my office right?”

Henry awoke to the smell of cigarettes and car exhaust. His blinding headache didn’t prevent him from noticing that he woke up his leather on the top floor of the company’s parking garage. Someone had brought his Tacoma around and left it idling in front of him. 

“Hey you’re awake! You were out for almost an hour, but not a whole hour, so Faeloria owes me ten bucks. I appreciate you being quick,” Jaylen, the security guard, said with far too much pep. 

“What the hell?” Henry asked.

“Sorry man. They asked me to give you your last check,” Steven said, and he opened Henry’s jacket to place the white envelope in the inside pocket. “Also, that includes the fifty percent bump due to the magical stuff you did or whatever.” It was then that Henry looked down to see an ornate urn sitting in his lap, and he realized that he had woken up in his leather chair. He figured his chair must have phased back into existence when Balthazar took possession of the dominion. 

Henry stood up on shaky legs, opened the passenger side door, and buckled the new phylactery into the passenger seat. He turned around and waved his hand at his chair, but nothing happened. He tilted his head back and let out an exasperated sigh. He didn’t know how long all of it would take. It would take longer than it did before without the firm’s resources. He stumbled over to the chair and attempted to lift it from the side, but it weighed significantly more than he could lift at that moment. “Oh damn. You haven’t needed to use your physical strength in quite a bit, huh? I got you,” Jaylen said. 

“Thanks, man.”

“It’s nothing.”