Chapter Text
Mary's been scrolling through the company chatroom for the past several hours now. The sky's long since gone dark, and the computer screen lights the room in a dull gray. A lot of it's just work stuff, but his coworkers frequently get off topic.
> look what we just ported doom to!
Mary smiles at the attached photo of Misty, Chip, and Brian all sitting around Cathal, who currently has the game controller in hand. Scrolling further down, he finds Brian ranting and raving, clearly having done poorly in the game. He was banned from game night after that, if Mary recalls correctly. The textwall of righteous gamer rage is interrupted by a photo of Flint’s sorry attempt at baking, taken by Graham. He and Holly get into a vicious argument about the charred cookies, while Belle congratulates Flint on the attempt. Yes, she knows how to use a computer. But Prester doesn’t.
Mary knows it’s late, and she knows it’s a work night. But she stays where he is, glued to the flickering screen. (She makes a mental note to purchase a replacement for the monitor.) He does this a lot these days, even though it’s undoubtedly affecting his work performance. Despite reading every message, Mary doesn’t respond to a single one. This is because everything here is from over a year ago.
These are some of the last remnants of her former colleagues. This is the closest Mary has come to believing in ghosts.
Fifteen Suits, gone without a trace. There were only weeks at most between each disappearance. Mary wonders when she’ll be next. As of recent months, COGS had scheduled him for various upgrades, but Mary isn’t sure how much that’ll help, seeing as how nobody knows what happened to the others in the first place. Maybe it’s just to make him feel safe. Safe enough to keep working, anyway.
Mary chuckles as he reads Holly’s pleas for someone to tell her how to disable caps lock. He admits to herself that she almost misses her. Eventually, Brian, having (partially) recovered from his gaming losses, explains it to her, in a manner that is strangely verbose and redundant for an instruction on how to press a single key. Flint finally speaks, requesting some notes on a meeting they’d missed. Graham tries to ask Tawney about a project within their region, and Chip has to remind him that she’s completely unreachable after eight PM.
Mary himself rarely spoke in this chat unless it was important; she prefers to just communicate in person. He eventually finds a message from himself though, a message asking if anyone had seen Misty. And that’s when she decides to shut off the computer. For a few moments, or maybe a few hours, she stares at his reflection in the dark screen, sad glowing eyes looking into themselves. Finally, Mary drags himself out of the computer chair and off to bed.
She awakes the next morning feeling absolutely awful. Mary just barely stops herself from smashing his alarm to get it to stop blaring. Rolling right off the bed, he lands on the wooden floor with a loud thud. For a while, she just lays there like a dead fish washed ashore. It’s part of her morning routine at this point; Mary isn’t sure if it makes him feel better or worse, but either way, it’s a catharsis better gotten over with at home than at work.
Eventually, Mary pulls himself off the ground and unplugs the cord connecting himself to the outlet in the wall. Making her way to her desk, he checks his email for anything important. Even at the lowest brightness setting, the computer’s light overwhelms her tired eyes. There’s a few last minute assignments for today, but nothing major.
While COGS has hired a few new people since the disappearances, a large amount of the work Mary’s colleagues used to do now falls on him. It’s a lot, but what isn’t , these days? At least the stress helps him feel more awake. And the lack of free time isn’t as constricting as it used to be, now that Mary’s learned to be more choosy with the personal projects he takes up. Learned to abandon the futile ones, like searching for his missing colleagues.
Recently, the biggest “project” she’s been working on, outside of his job, at least, is an investigation into some recent changes within the local marine ecosystem. Several species’ numbers have decreased drastically, and Mary spends most of his evenings after work trying to find the cause. So far, she hasn’t found anything concrete, but he has a couple suspicions.
Noticing the time, Mary shuts off his computer and gets himself ready to leave for work. After feeding the fish in the tank in her bedroom, he puts on his helmet and walks out to do the same for the fish in the rest of the house. Dropping a few cubes of frozen brine shrimp into the water, Mary watches with a smile as the little fishies gobble them up. This is probably the best part of his morning. He makes a note to herself to get up earlier tomorrow, so she can change the water.
He brews some cogfee and pours it into a travel mug, then she leaves the house, making sure to lock the door behind her. While Mary loves living by the ocean, and wouldn’t ever dream of moving, it does make for a very long trip to the office in the mornings. She’s been meaning to ask about getting her schedule rearranged, so that he can start the day in the (significantly closer) streets instead, but he just hasn’t had the time.
Activating her propeller and taking off, Mary takes a moment to admire how the morning sun glints off of the water. There’s a part of him that wants to skip work and go for a swim instead. He wonders if the company can even afford to fire him. She decides it’s best not to find out, so he tears her eyes away from the stunning view and continues on her way to the office. There’s something almost mind-numbing about the long ride.
Mary’s feet finally touch the ground as he lands just outside the building. He picks up a discarded can off the ground before opening the door and walking in, barely holding back a sigh. Other Cogs are chatting with their coworkers, but Mary wastes no time in getting straight to business. After all, it’s not like she has anyone here to talk to. Listening to them, it only makes him feel jealous, and lonely, like a tetra without a school.
“Are you gonna eat that?”
“Huh?” Mary turns around to see a Cog with a garbage bin for a head, pointing at the can in her hand.
“If you’re not, can I ‘ave it?” He speaks with a British accent.
“...Shore.”
Well, she supposes it does make sense, that a trashcan Cog would want to eat that. Mary hands it to him, and he gobbles it up in a single bite, muttering a muffled, “Thanks mate.”
After that, the cog continues on his way, and Mary does the same, reaching her office and closing the door behind her. Sitting down at the desk, he immediately gets started on filing that report about the latest Toon activity. After that, she gets to compiling various sets of research data. The work is dull, but it’s easy enough. He’d really rather be working in the field though.
Although he gets sidetracked a couple times, Mary eventually finishes all the paperwork, and she leaves the office in just as much of a hurry as she entered it in, only stopping to grab a can of oil from a vending machine. Looking at the label, he notices that it’s a different brand than the one they stocked the machines with last time. He remembers that it's the brand Holly always complained about.
The air outside isn’t fresh, but it’s nicer than being cooped up indoors, hunched over a keyboard and a stack of paper. While COGS has hired several new people to do the officework, Mary’s still been left to patrol the streets all alone. (Well, there was a new street manager for a bit, but they quit last week. Mary wasn’t told why.) She knows that there’s no way one manager can oversee the entirety of Toontown, but he figures the best thing he can do is try.
Sometimes, all the walking around is actually pretty relaxing. Much less relaxing as of lately though, seeing as how–
Thunk.
Ah. Speak of the devil.
Mary crushes the now empty can and shoves it in his pocket, before scraping the splattered cake off the back of his helmet and turning to fight the pack of Toons that’ve approached her. With him being the only manager on the streets these days, she’s been a bigger target for their goofy harassment than ever before. Although Mary’s pretty difficult for the Toons to find, seeing as how she’s no longer stationed in any particular region, there’s so many gangs of them looking for her that he ends up spending most of the day fighting anyway.
Luckily, this particular group was pretty unprepared, and Mary is able to send them back to the playground with relative ease, though not without watching several coworkers be reduced to scrap. He instructs the remaining Cogs to pick up the parts littering the streets, to take anything salvageable into a repair shop. It’s likely that they'll have to be rebuilt from scratch, but at least the birds won’t choke on any screws.
Sometimes, the Toons that chase her down are so frustrated from the long search that they act more like the wild beasts they represent than (somewhat) civilized people. Some of them get so vicious that Mary can’t help but feel like they’re gonna eat him alive, even though she’s more than twice their size. There have been a few who’ve tried biting her recently.
He encounters many more teams of Toons as the day goes on. At least none of them decided to chomp on him, not yet, anyway. The more tired Mary gets, the more grating the critters’ chittering is on her mechanical ears. It’s baffling, how their conversations manage to be both completely ridiculous and completely uninteresting. Mary does catch some news about Toony ships going missing within the past few weeks, though.
After one particularly nasty fight, Mary is forced to fly off to another street in surrender. He barely even has time to inspect the damage before getting jumped by a completely different gang of Toons. She just barely fends this one off; she’s sure he wouldn't have made it if he took one more Drop Gag to the head. He’s happy to see them be sent packing, and even happier to see that her shift is finally over.
Mary likes to end her shifts in the Boatyard; it’s the place most familiar to him, and thus the easiest to patrol when she’s exhausted at the end of the day. He makes her way to the pier, still wanting to survey the ocean before going home. In the quiet of the evening, she notices the awful sound his right knee keeps making as he walks. Maybe she should see about getting some time off tomorrow for repairs. She plunks herself down at the edge of the dock, looking out into the water. The setting sun is starting to shine into her eyes. It feels so warm. It feels so wrong.
Mary digs through her pockets, finding the waterproof case that contains his notebook. He takes it out and flips through its pages, looking for her notes on the recent changes in local marine populations, and adding to them where he can. At first, he suspected the rapid decline was due to the introduction of an invasive species, but, seeing as how he’s never found any concrete evidence of said species, she’s starting to wonder if it’s a pollution issue instead. Maybe something to do with all those Toon shipwrecks? Though, any specimens she has found seemed to be perfectly healthy.
He finds himself slowly letting the book fall into her lap as she starts to nod off. That’s odd, she could’ve sworn he had enough power to at least make it through the day. Maybe it’s just all the sitting down that’s making him feel so tired. Or maybe, it’s some sort of battery issue that she needs to get checked out sometime. Or maybe her math really was just wrong. Mary shuts his eyes, listening to the ocean. The sound of the waves is just so soothing.
Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to stay like this for just a little longer…
…
Tug, tug.
It takes Mary a couple seconds to process what’s going on as something slowly takes the notebook out of her hands. She opens his eyes, blinking a couple times as the thing in front of her comes into focus. A shrimplike being, more mechanical than animal. Large for a shrimp, but small for a Cog. The two stare at each other for a split second before the creature scurries back into the water, taking Mary’s notebook with it. Er… with him ? After all, it… well, it looked a lot like Brian .