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It was official. She had finally hit rock bottom.
Marcille stared at the red numbers showing her bank balance, and let that horrible fact sink in. How she got into this position was no mystery. She was up to her eyeballs in student debt, and after over ten years of studying, she had walked away with a PhD in an academic field so esoteric and obscure there was practically no prospects for employability in it.
She had tried. So hard. Every option exhausted. Every plan and scheme coming to nothing. Her bank account dwindling with every rejected job application until it was at its current depleted state. Now here she was. Rock fucking bottom with no light in sight. Even the naked sushi gig she had been offered wouldn’t be enough to save her. At best it would buy time. Let her keep her head above water for a couple more weeks.
But a couple more weeks was still better than her current situation.
She glanced at the business card on her desk. Took a deep breath to steady her nerves. Then called the number.
—
Marcille was surprised. She had been expecting this skeevy dive, but the sushi place was actually quite high class. That was probably why they could afford to pay some random woman five grand for one night of work.
They were also very professional and efficient. A quick explanation as to what she was supposed to do, then she was hurried into the shower to wash herself all over with antimicrobial soap. Once that was done she was told to lay down on a rolling table while a harried looking chef carefully plated elegant lines of sushi onto her naked body. Then, with one last reminder not to move, she was wheeled out into the dining room to face the music.
—
She had expected the whole experience to be humiliating and degrading. And it was. But what she hadn’t anticipated, and which was even worse, was that it was boring. All she was doing was lying there. While the humiliation faded as the faces looming over her blurred into indifference, the boredom got stronger with every minute.
Then a new face bent over her. Recognition twigged in her brain.
Suddenly she was looking back on the boredom with rose tinted nostalgia.
Dusty blonde hair, golden eyes, glasses resting on the bridge of her nose instead of on top of her head like they usually were.
It was Falin.
Falin, the cute undergrad she had met while she was doing her PhD. Falin, who she had been roommates with for years. Falin who had no idea of just what kind of financial hot water Marcille had been in, despite regular contact in the years since they graduated. Falin who was standing over her with an empty plate in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other.
“Marcille?”
Normal people, when encountering someone they knew in such an unexpected and embarrassing situation, would pretend not to recognize them and allow everyone to pretend nothing happened.
But this was Falin. Falin, who had a praying mantis as a pet. Falin who owned a cotton onesie decorated with an anatomically accurate depiction of the human circulatory system. Falin who collected ticks like most people collected butterflies. Falin, who had a mounted rabbit skeleton named Casserole, that she kept on her desk right next to her childhood cat plushie.
Falin, who had a fifty page neurological report that certified she was neurodivergent as fuck.
She might just pretend that she didn’t recognize Marcille and let everyone pretend this didn’t happen.
And pigs might sprout wings and start flapping.
”Hi Falin,” Marcille squeaked. She could already feel her face going red with embarrassment.
Falin’s face lit up. “It is you! I never expected to run into you here!”
No shit.
“Oh this is just a temporary gig,” Marcille admitted, burning with the shame of it all. “I just needed a little extra money for a few things.”
“But didn’t you have that job interview with Cascadia Omnicorp?”
Marcille winced. “That… fell through.”
“Oh dear! Hopefully your next one goes better.”
Yeah. Because this gig was already massively exceeding her worst expectations for humiliation and degradation.
“What about you?” Marcille asked through a strained smile. Looking for something, anything, to change the topic. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh Shuro invited us here,” Falin explained, casually reaching down and plucking a salmon nigiri from ontop of Marcille’s breasts. “It was really strange though, he looked really shocked when we arrived, then he started insisting we must have the wrong restaurant, even though we definitely had the right place, and then he disappeared off somewhere and I haven’t seen him since.”
Shuro had probably just seen the part that said sushi, rejoiced at having found something he recognized, and promptly invited Falin without checking what kind of sushi place it was. He was probably hiding in a bathroom or something, trying to figure out the best way to commit seppuku, so that he could erase the burning shame of his mistake.
“He probably got a phone call or something,” Marcille said instead. “He probably gets them at strange times because of the time difference between here and the Eastern Islands.”
“I suppose…” Falin replied, reaching down and snapping up another salmon nigiri off Marcille’s breasts. “I hope it doesn’t take too long. He’s really missing out. I heard good things about this place before he invited me to come here, and so far it’s really living up to them. Laios was really excited when he heard I was going… Oh this is perfect! My brother Laios is here right now. It’s the perfect chance to introduce you.”
WHAT!!?
“Falin! This really isn’t the best time!”
But it was too late. Falin wasn’t paying attention anymore. Instead she had turned away and was waving to someone across the restaurant, and saying the worst thing she could possibly have said. “Hey Laios! Over here!”
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
She didn’t actually scream. She still needed that five grand from this gig. Instead, what came out was merely this compressed squeak. Very similar to the sound a mouse being crushed in a hay bailer might make. Which was fitting, because that seemed to be what the universe was doing to her right now.
Out of the corner of her eyes she could see a man, with the same dusty blonde hair as Falin, making his way over to them.
She was trapped. No way to run, no way to hide, no way to join Shurou in the bathroom and commit shame erasing suicide. All she could do was lay there like the decorative platter she was being paid to be.
“What is it Falin?”
Falin beamed, like this was some happy coincidence, and she was not metaphorically putting her shovel into the ground and showing Marcille that she had not hit rock bottom yet, and that she could still sink lower.
“Laios, this is Marcille,” she said, making a sweeping gesture down to Marcille in all her naked, sushi covered glory. “She was my roommate in University. The one I told you about.”
Laios had the same golden eyes as Falin, Marcille noticed as Laios looked down at her.
“Hi,” Her voice came out like a squeak. Like another mouse being crushed by industrial machinery.
“Pleased to meet you!” Laios just smiled warmly back. “Falin told me a lot about you. I wasn’t expecting to run into you here.”
“No surprise. This is just a temporary gig.”
“Falin said you studied… human biochemistry with a focus on longevity and long-term health?” He asked, reaching down and taking a crab-roe maki off her belly.
“Yeah.”
“What exactly is that?”
It was insane. They were standing here, trying to make small-talk, like they had just bumped into each other at a cafe somewhere and were catching up. Instead of her lying naked on a table and both of them eating sushi off her breasts. But talking about her research meant they weren’t asking why she was in this situation in the first place, and right now she’d take any distraction she could get.
“It’s basically looking at the chemical processes of the body and how they interact with the cellular structure, and trying to determine the correlation between chronological age and cellular degeneration.”
“Basically trying to figure out why our cells stop regenerating as effectively as we get older,” Falin summarised. “By the way, try out the breaded shrimp rolls with tuna. They’re absolutely delicious.”
Laios gold eyes scanned Marcille’s body head to foot. “Where?”
“Right there, on her inner thigh.”
“Ah!” Laios plucked the indicated piece of sushi off her skin and popped it into his mouth. “Oh that is good. Nice salty tang. Anyway, that sounds really fascinating. Do you ever do any cross comparisons with other long lived species? Like turtles or sharks?”
“Well… you see turtles and sharks have…”
And so it went on. Marcille talking about her research like everything was perfectly normal, and Laios and Falin eating sushi off her naked body. The only relief came when Shuro showed up after about an hour.
He hadn’t disembowelled himself in the bathroom apparently.
Instead he said he was feeling ill and should probably be heading home. To be fair, he did look kind of sick. At which point Laios and Falin had bid her goodbye, leaving her to spend the last five minutes of her shift lying on the table, trying to not to die of embarrassment before she got her cheque.
After all, she had just earned every single cent of that five grand.
—
If there was one thing Marcille was absolutely certain of, it was that she was never doing a naked sushi gig again. Never. The way her luck had been going lately, she’d run into Falin again, and this time she’d try and introduce her to her parents.
No.
She was not going to give the universe the chance. And step one was getting a job that did not in any way involve her getting naked. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.
Thankfully, Fate, Destiny, or the Winged Lion had thrown her a bone. Golden Castle Ltd. was an old company that had fallen into obscurity and looming financial ruin. Only for a new owner to suddenly take the helm and raise the entire company out of the depths of bankruptcy back into the golden light of profitability.
And more importantly, they were hiring. Marcille didn’t exactly have the corporate experience the company was looking for in a research director, but she had everything else. So she had put her resume in, and to her relief, had gotten a call back almost immediately asking if she was willing to come in and do an interview with the owner.
She was not going to let this one slip through her fingers. She was not going back to being a decorative sushi platter. Her financial situation may still have been precarious, but the way she saw it, the new outfit, expensive haircut and update to her cosmetics case was a calculated investment. Not spending anything would just mean she stayed in the hole and found out how deep rock bottom really was.
So when the day of the interview rolled around, she got out of the taxi sure she could blow this interview out of the water. She looked the part. A confident, professional woman who could tackle any problem and face any challenge.
The only problem was that she hadn’t been able to find anything really credible about the new owner of the company. The company website just had the profile for the old owner, and a banner saying they were currently updating their site. He didn’t appear to have any presence on social media, and most of the internet forums discussing Golden Castle’s unexpected turnaround couldn’t even agree how to spell his name.
Still she was completely confident she could impress Louis Thordon, and convince him she was the woman he wanted to hire.
The receptionist at the front desk confirmed her appointment, and a security guard was assigned to escort her to the owner’s office for her interview.
It was only on the way up in the elevator, that the security guard looked around furtively, then turned to her and said. “So, what do you actually know about the new owner?”
“Not much…” Marcille admitted hesitantly. “Just that he’s really turned the company around since the old owner died.”
“Murdered.”
“What?”
“The old owner was murdered,” the security guard clarified. “With an axe. Thought everyone had heard that one already.”
What the fuck!?
“Look,” the security guard did another furtive look around. “You shouldn’t be going in there unaware, but the new owner, he’s managed to save our jobs here but he’s… something else.”
”Something else?” Marcille said, her eyebrows raising.
“He’s a real weirdo okay?” the guard finally admitted. “He’s not… that bad… It’s just… Let’s just say I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a lifeboat with him.”
What the hell did that mean!? Was this guy just really annoying or would he eat them all at the first opportunity!?
She never got the answer to that, as the elevator doors opened and she was escorted to an office at the end of the hall, let inside, and told the owner would be with her shortly.
Marcille took a seat in front of the desk, took a deep breath to steady her nerves, then let her eyes start exploring the office. Time to figure out just what kind of psycho she was dealing with here.
It certainly wasn’t like the other corporate offices she had seen before. Instead of a Karvard MBA, the framed degree on the wall was from an obscure university she’d never heard of before and was in biology and ecosystems. Right next to it was an incredibly detailed framed print of some kind of chimaera with three heads, followed by a poster detailing D&D dragon anatomy.
The bookshelf had a stand on top, holding replica swords she vaguely recognized from movies and anime posters. The shelves themselves had a whole row of fantasy and sci-fi novels, along what appeared to be about a dozen volumes from a manga series. There were several D&D sourcebooks, a collection of hardcover zoology books, a whole range of cookbooks…
…Followed immediately after by several anthropological texts on cannibalism in human societies.
Wonderful.
The desk itself had the usual clutter of paperwork. Along with one of those Newton’s cradles that seemed to populate desks all over the corporate world. Which stood in direct contrast to the mounted rabbit skeleton that shared the desk with it. It was almost exactly like the one Falin had on her desk when they were roommates actually. Same base, slightly different pose. Only this one was apparently named “Stew.”
Cool dread washed over her and sunk icy claws into her heart.
She suddenly knew exactly what kind of psycho she was dealing with.
And of course, it was that exact moment that the door to the office opened and her worst fears were realised.
“Marcille! Good to see you again. I saw the name but I wasn’t sure it was actually you!”
Falin’s brother, Laios Toudan walked through the door with a wide smile on his face. Like this is nothing more than a happy coincidence, and Marcille had not just been screwed over by a bunch of illiterate yeditors who didn’t know how to spell.
She’s doomed. Completely fucking doomed. It’s all been wasted. All of it. All the time spent refreshing her resume and going over her cover letter with a fine toothed comb. All the hours spent practicing for this interview. All the money on her updated wardrobe and professional new look. Wasted! This man would never believe she could be a sharp, professional executive for his rising company. The last time he had seen her she had been lying on a table wearing nothing but sushi!
Her chances had been scuttled before she even got here. There was no way she getting this job!
—
She got the job.
—