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The boardroom door swung open, and Merle entered. He was not who the Reapers were expecting.
“Where's Algernon?” Barry asked, brows furrowed. “What're you doing here?”
“Algernon left the Working Elves’ Union and formed the Alliance of Elven Warehousemen,” Merle said. “They went -” he checked his watch - “twenty minutes ago. Damn splitters. Dispute over the colour that the candy cane pay stubs should be.”
Kravitz put his head in his hands. “How long is it before every single one of our elves is in a different union?”
“You did this,” Barry said, flatly, to Merle. “We’ve spent the last eight months negotiating with a dozen different unions - this is worse than delivering the godsdamned presents ourselves!”
“Hey, leftist infighting, what can you do,” Merle shrugged. “The worst part is, they've got a really good point, the pink is prettier -”
“Gods, this was easier when it was just the three of us,” Lup said. “Especially because two of us were married and the third was our brother in law. And the boss was a goddess who, let's be real, spent half her time day drinking with Istus and Pan.”
Kravitz had opened his notebook and written alliance of elven warehousemen as the latest bubble in a complex spider diagram. “So, you're the new spokesman for the Working Elves’ Union?” He asked.
“Hm? Oh, no,” Merle said, looking up from his phone. “No, that's Algernon again. I literally just got a text that he rejoined -”
“Gods.” Kravitz snapped the notebook shut and visibly considered tossing it across the room before, with great force of will, gently placing it on the table in front of him. “So why are you here, Merle?” He asked, saccharine.
“Oh, well, interesting story,” he said. “I accidentally killed the Spirit of Labour Day.”
“Who?”
“The what?”
“How?”
“How many roads must a man walk down before we can call him a man? How many beans are in the jar at the BOB summer festival guessing game? How does anyone kill anyone? Such are the mysteries of this big beautiful world. Anyhoo, he’s super dead, so.” Merle shrugged, like, what can you do?
“Merle, nobody over a hundred believes in that guy,” Lup said. “He's not like Santa, or the Tooth Fairy, or the Fantasy Easter Bunny - we all know they're real, there's empirical evidence.”
“They've done studies,” Barry concurred.
“But the Spirit of Labour Day is just a myth made up to make kids return the cart at the grocery store,” Lup continued.
“Who did you think had been delivering your Labour Day presents every year?” Merle asked.
“Unionised and adequately compensated postal workers?” She guessed, but Merle shook his head.
“Labour Day is a federal holiday, Lup,” he insisted. “That's not something that applies to just some people and not others.”
“I'm gonna stop you there,” Kravitz said. “I can already tell where this is going, and we're not doing it.”
Merle was a picture of innocence, but, like, one drawn by your three-year-old niece. “Doing what?”
“You killed the Spirit of Labour Day,” Kravitz said. “Next up, some new bullshit will happen - demons, maybe, we've not done demons yet - and then we'll have to deliver the presents, or whatever happens on Labour Day, while you have a party. I can - I'm seeing the trajectory of my Labour Day unfurl in front of me, and I'm not doing it. Especially because we'll end up somehow signed up to this for the rest of our lives, like that Baul Plart podcast every Hatesgiving with those guys.”
“It does feel like we're stretching the suspension of disbelief,” Lup said. “Nothing happens to us all year, until a holiday rolls around? Not even a fun holiday like Saint Patrick’s or Pancake Day. I'd be the Spirit of Valentine's Day in a heartbeat, wouldn't you, babe?” She winked, and Barry blushed.
“Oh, really?” Merle seemed very interested in that nugget of information.
“Merle, if the Spirit of Valentine's Day dies, I'm turning you in to the FBI,” she replied, flatly. “We'll all testify that it was premeditated.” Merle opened his mouth, but Lup cut him off: “yes, even if they ‘just’ go missing without a trace. We've all fallen for that one too many times.”
He scowled and kicked his feet beneath his chair (they didn't quite reach the floor), but finally perked back up. “Well, the union contract -”
“Covers your Santa duties,” Lup said. “This is definitely considered freelancing under clause 5b, section VII - actually, guys, did Merle clear this with you before taking the job? We've got a really good case here that he's violating the moonlighting clause in 5c, section XVI(b).” Merle blinked at her, utterly taken aback. “I'm an expert now!” She snapped. “I've spent the last eight months doing nothing but negotiating with elves! Don't try to fuck me, Merle, I've had dreams about this contract!”
“One was a nightmare,” Barry divulged. “She woke up screaming. She won't describe the other to me but -”
“Okay, don't, he doesn't need to know about our sex life,” Lup said. Kravitz pivoted in his seat to stare at her, and Merle’s shocked gaze spoke for itself, and she turned slightly red and said, “I contain multitudes! When something is such a big part of your life for so long - shut up! Kravitz, you've definitely had wet dreams about paperwork, don't pull this bullshit on me!”
“Well, yeah,” Kravitz said, not looking embarrassed at all. “But I'm me.”
“It's in character for him,” Merle agreed.
“I'm not getting bogged down in who had sex dreams about what,” Lup said. “The point is that we're not getting involved, and for once this stupid contract is on our side. Now seriously get out, or I'm actually going to leap across this table and kill you with my teeth.”
Kravitz, Barry, and Merle all exchanged looks, and decided simultaneously that she meant it. Merle’s chair squeaked back across the floor as he stood up hurriedly. “I'll send Algernon in,” he said, and scuttled out the door.
Lup lay curled up, cuddling one pillow tight to her chest, another pillow - inexplicably - wedged behind her back. This pillow sandwich took up easily four fifths of the bed. Barry lay flat on his back, arms perfectly straight by his sides like a corpse, in the remaining fifth, one shoulder dangling limp off the edge of the mattress. This was how they slept every night, no matter how wide the bed.
Until Lup rolled over, swung her legs out of the bed, and moved to the bedroom door. This was not unusual; she often had protein bar midnight snacks, usually waking up the next morning with crumbs all over her and melted chocolate on her face. This time, however…
Lup’s eyes were still closed.
She made her way carefully down the stairs and across the hall to the front door, which she unlocked and headed out into the street.
Lup woke up with a jolt.
This was her bed, certainly; these were her insanely-oriented pillows and that was her husband already half on the floor, just as every night. So why did she feel like something was wrong?
Then it hit her. She was wearing an apron. That wasn't part of her pyjamas, and for last night's sexy roleplay she'd busted (heh) out the clown costume, not the barista apron! She quickly double-checked - yup, she still had the string of multicoloured handkerchiefs tucked into her cleavage to prove it. She pulled them out - and kept pulling, and kept pulling, and kept pulling - and looked down at herself again.
Sure enough, she was wearing a Fantasy Starbucks apron. “Great,” she muttered. “Now I'm a fucking were-barista. I thought that asshole behind the counter bit me last week when I went in for my cup -”
“Oh, shit, babe,” Barry said, blearily. “Did I miss this on my fantasy G cal?”
“What? No, Barry, babe, I'm not dressed up for sex right now,” she said. “What would the scenario even be? Pov, barista wakes you up for coffee in bed? Babe, you know how I feel about narrative cohesion in our roleplay. No, I think I got bit.”
“Oh, shit,” Barry said, reaching for the glasses on his bedside table. “Were-baristas? Fuckkk. And I just bought you that silver jewellery, too. Well, there goes our relaxed Sunday while I try to source some baristasbane -” He pulled his handy lunar cycles calendar from the pocket of his pyjamas and pored over it intently for a moment. “Wait, hold on, last night wasn't a full moon.”
Lup paused. “If it's not a perfectly normal case of baristathropy, what is it?”
“Let's head down to the basement and run some tests,” Barry said, throwing off the duvet. “Maybe it's a kind of Doctor Jekyll, Mister Barista deal - hey, what the fuck?” Underneath the blankets, he was wearing a pair of black jeans (instead of his usual sleep jeans) and a t-shirt with the fantasy Gap logo on the breast. “I didn't go to bed in these,” he said, mystified. “I don't even think these are mine. ”
At that exact moment, Lup’s stone rang. She snatched it up off the nightstand and snapped, “what?”
A pleasant, robotic female voice said, “this is the Neverwinter State Penitentiary. You have a collect call from -” The voice cut out and was replaced by a man’s, sounding spectacularly angry.
“Lup, I don't know what you did, but when I get out -”
The robotic voice cut back in again. “To accept this call, press 1 now. To decline, press 2. To speak with a human operator, press 3. To hear your options again, press 4. To confess to a crime of your own, press 5.”
Lup shared a look with Barry. The voice had been Kravitz's.
She pressed 2.
“ - and then you didn’t even come bail me out! I used my one phone call on threatening you!” Kravitz yelled. “Taako had to report me missing before they told him where I was!”
Lup shrugged. “You should’ve called a lawyer. Or, y’know, your husband.”
Kravitz looked truly volcanic for a moment. Taako took over. “It’s not that we don’t think it’s funny,” he started. Kravitz let out an indescribable noise, a sort of angry, spluttering wheeze that suggested it was that he didn’t think it was funny, actually. Taako ignored him. “But why CVS?”
“Taako,” Lup said. “Tee. My beloved brother. It really wasn’t us.”
“You didn’t kidnap Kravitz out of his bed, dress him in a CVS uniform, break into a pharmacy, and leave him there?”
“Lup woke up this morning in a Starbucks apron,” Barry divulged. “And look at these jeans!” They all looked. The jeans looked, to a layman, exactly like Barry’s normal fare. He saw their blank expressions, and said, a little piqued, “they’re totally different. Look, the cut is all wrong, and the seams - even you philistines can tell that the hem is an entirely different - okay, the point is, something’s obviously affecting all of us. I broke into a Gap, Lup broke into a Starbucks, and Kravitz -”
Kravitz waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, please, they administer yearly shots for baristathropy to all the grannies at my local surgery like it’s the flu. Who hasn’t had a case of metamorphism? I got bit in a pet store and for six months I turned into a hamster nightly, full moon or not. I’m still taking the tablets for it.”
Taako looked pained. “I had to shred newspaper for his bedding every night.”
“Point is,” Kravitz said, “our situations are nothing alike.”
“Krav,” Lup said, reasonably. “I get why you don’t believe us. Especially after we put that werehamster in the pet store you visit on your lunch breaks and gave it one of your shirts to get your scent. I understand, I really do.” Kravitz’s mouth dropped open, thunderstruck. He was so staggered that he didn’t even have time to get mad before Lup continued. “But listen. Remember what Merle was saying, about the Spirit of Labour Day? How much of a coincidence is it that he killed some probably bullshit ghost, and then we all get dressed up in workers’ uniforms overnight? What’s more likely: that this is Merle’s fault, or literally any other possible cause in the whole world?”
Kravitz glared, but he was clearly mentally weighing the scales - on one side, chaos theory, the randomness of the universe, the weight of all the coincidence in the cosmos; on the other, Merle fucking Highchurch.
“Alright,” he said, begrudgingly. “Let’s go speak to Merle.”
Merle walked back into the board room, but this time he wasn’t alone. In tow was a centaur, his human half wearing a suit jacket. Only the back legs of his horse body were wearing the nearly matching pants. He looked greasy; even his horse hair was weirdly glossy. The Reapers blinked at him. “Who’s this?” Barry asked, baffled.
“My lawyer,” Merle said. “The best money can buy. He’s gonna tear this contract to shreds.”
Kravitz cocked his head. “He looks kinda familiar…”
“Yeah, wait, you’re that guy from the billboards, right?” Lup asked him.
“I actually just recently got an ad campaign on the local news, too,” the guy said. “2 am, that’s practically prime time for old guys who want a divorce. No offence, mister Highchurch.” Merle waved a hand affably.
“‘Want a divorce? Hire a horse,’” Taako quoted. He'd been hanging around since Kravitz had chewed them out, very vocally making it clear that he was not there to help, he just wanted to be present in case Kravitz broke into another CVS. Not to stop him, but to take pictures. “I love those billboards. I didn't think he did contracts, though. Why didn't you go for that lawyer with the ads like, ‘praying for your boss’s death? Hire an aboleth.’” Taako paused. “Rhyme scheme's a little strained on that one.”
“The billboards are good, though,” Lup said, and everyone nodded, thinking about the big one over the freeway with the tentacles.
“I keep telling him to hire Counselor Sh’kbuth,” the centaur said, but Merle shook his head.
“He got me a great deal on the divorce. I trust him implicitly,” he said. “Twelve and a half percent of the assets, and I don't even have to see the kids except one weekend a month? Score!”
“We actually didn't really want to talk about the contract, though,” Barry said, trying to get everyone back on track.
“You didn't? Okay, get outta here,” Merle said to his lawyer, propelling him out the door as he turned back to them. “He's paid by the minute, I'm not keeping him around if you guys aren't even gonna try and trap me in one of the bourgeois diktats you call employment contracts.”
“You really gotta stop spending all your time around the elves,” Lup muttered.
“Anyhoo, how can I help?” Merle asked. “Is it the end of the world again?” He looked around and nodded in a satisfied way. “Makes sense I was your first call. I'll suit up. And try to remember how to summon Della Reese with her sword instead of that cocktail shaker she's been using -”
“Um, no,” Barry said. “Suit up? You have an end of the world outfit?”
“Well, yeah, I gotta look good in the press. It's just my best Hawaiian shirt, yknow, the pink one with the blue flowers?”
“And pants?” Taako interjected. “Merle, and pants!?”
“We actually wanted to ask you about the Spirit of Labour Day,” Lup asked. “When you say you killed him -”
Merle immediately looked cagey. “Lift your shirts up. I wanna see you're not wired.”
“I'm not doing that,” Lup said, instantly.
Merle squinted at her suspiciously, but finally nodded. “Okay, fine, continue.” Barry and Kravitz slowly and embarrassedly lowered their shirts. Taako continued texting on his stone.
“You killed the Spirit -”
“Allegedly,” Merle enunciated clearly in the direction of Lup’s stomach.
“Allegedly killed the Spirit of Labour Day,” Lup said, with a heavy sigh, pushing Merle’s face away from her chest. “Was there, like, a note…?”
“Maybe it said something along the lines of ‘sorry, sucker, you're the Spirit now, et cetera’?” Kravitz asked, hopefully.
“‘Sorry, sucker, your friends are the Spirit now?’” Barry posited.
“That's a good - that's a great point, babe,” Lup said. “It stands to reason that not all Santa Clause situations work the same way. Like, sure, whoever kills Santa inherits the title, yes, and that's a curse in its own right, but maybe whoever kills the Spirit of Labour Day curses their friends. Maybe it's a curse, like, socially, like nobody likes you any more because you got them arrested for breaking into a CVS by killing a ghost.”
Barry and Kravitz nodded, presumably envisioning that meme with the dominoes that get way bigger, the bottom one labelled “vehicular spiritslaughter,” the top one labelled “your friend gets arrested for pharmacy related crimes and now no one likes you.”
“You got arrested in a CVS?” Merle asked. Kravitz nodded. Merle raised his hip flask in a toast. “Been there, brother.” He drank deeply, but when he finally came up for air he said, “I didn’t find a note, but I wasn't exactly looking. I was too busy cleaning my fingerprints off his stuff and mopping up the blood. And it's definitely not a social curse, because Jerry and Kevin at my weekly poker games are fine.”
“Jerry and Kevin? Not -”
“Yeah, the elves,” Merle confirmed. “We got to know each other while picketing the toy factory. There's only so much standing around a barrel and warming your hands a guy can do, y’know? Especially in August, it's just too hot, but you gotta keep up appearances.”
“Hold on,” Barry said. “You're telling me that Jerry and Kevin would've been affected by the curse before us - what, because you're closer to them than us? We spent a century together!”
“They've been teaching me about Fantasy Marxism!” Merle said. “We don't bet cash, we play in a collectivised and worker-operated anarcho-syndicalist barter economy, which is good, because Jerry made me invest the kids’ college funds in crypto so my pockets have been a little light lately. I haven't checked in a while, is hawkcoin still hot? Anyway, point is, you guys probably just got it along the existing inheritance pathway that we established when you agreed to take over Santahood,” Merle said, casually. He paused. “I should check my credit score, maybe you got all my credit card debt too.”
The Reapers blinked. Inheritance pathways? Slowly, they turned as one to Taako. He shrugged. “Makes sense. I teach inheritancepathwayology to first graders, and once you agree to that kind of thing there's a big magical link between you. It's never happened before that some psycho has managed to kill two Greater Holiday Anthropomorphs, but it's plausible that the second would follow the same path as the first.”
“What about Lesser Holiday Anthropomorphs?” Merle asked, shooting for casual but landing on “hunter hearing about a rare new type of game.”
“Oh, sure, that happens all the time. The International Men’s Day Fairy gets himself killed pretty much weekly, it's practically a leading cause of death.”
“Tragic. Truly the stuff of greyscale candlenights charity ads. Without the Fairy, who's gonna bring all the good little boys a tasting sampler of craft beer and a pack of plain socks,” Lup said. “Can we get back to our plight, please?”
“It sounds like we need to reverse the inheritance pathway,” Kravitz said. “It's bad enough being fucking Santa, I'm not ready to give up a second day of my year being an animorph!”
“An anthropomorph, babe,” Taako said. “And I don't even know if it can be done. I'll get some of the fuckin’ nerds at the school to do some research -”
“We all know about the secret library behind the big mirror in your office,” Lup said. “You're only lying to yourself.”
“The nerds will do research,” Taako insisted. “I'll be kickin’ it in my cool office. Did I tell you I got a pinball machine installed?”
“And where does the secret door behind that one lead? Probably the arcane sciences lab, huh -”
Taako froze. “No - wha - nuh uh,” he stuttered, eventually.
Kravitz could see the way the wind was blowing, and he interrupted before the argument could get any worse. “So what are we meant to do in the meantime? Just break into CVS every night? Should we be chaining ourselves up in the basement like werewolves?”
Taako considered. “You’ve got to fulfil the responsibilities of the Anthropomorph. If you try to repress it, it'll come through subconsciously. I don't think you can avoid it. The magic of Labour Day would probably break the chains.”
Merle chortled. “Isn't breaking the chains what Labour Day is all about?”
“Tonight's Labour Day Eve,” Barry pointed out. “Are you - sorry, I mean, are the nerds - going to be able to cure us by tomorrow morning?”
Taako just shrugged. “You're not gonna like it, but… maybe you have to do the job. Just until I can find a way to revert it to Merle! It'll be a week, tops. You've gotta do it this once and then by next year it'll be Merle's problem.”
The three Reapers looked at each other with assorted fatigued expressions, before Kravitz said, “it’s actually a condition of my parole that I never go in a CVS again, so I think we have no choice.”
Lup sighed. “Well, if the only other option is to be charged with impersonation of a pharmacist…”
“Does anyone know what the Spirit actually does ?” Barry asked. “Do we have to travel the world and bring class solidarity to all the good little boys and girls, or something?”
They'd all retreated to their office in the Astral Plane overlooking the Sea to consider. Only Kravitz ever did any work there, and his desk was a labyrinthine complex of in-trays and out-trays that paperwork moved between of its own accord, aided by the occasional quantum z-tray that had been conjured into existence by the presence of so much magical paperwork in one place. Someone would place a file in Kravitz’s in-tray, and without anyone's knowledge or consent the file would vanish from the in-tray and appear in an out-tray, already signed with Kravitz’s own signature. The z-tray was an intermediary, always appearing full, and the paper in there was occasionally shuffled and rifled through by an unseen hand, but any attempt to remove anything from the z-tray simply resulted in a blank piece of A4 paper, warm like it had just come out of the printer. This was not an intentional act of magic by Kravitz, and he found it deeply irritating that an interdimensional entity apparently had nothing better to do than forge his signature.
Lup and Barry, in lieu of doing any paperwork themselves, would occasionally file something in a quantum Z-tray and watch it briefly exist in five dimensions before transforming into paperwork from next week, last week, or, rarely but worryingly, from the torture dimension, which generally consisted of “owwww, ahhhh, ouch!!!” and variations thereupon, all written in very neat cursive on their office letterhead in what looked like blood.
They normally stopped fucking with the z-tray for a little while after that happened.
“When we first became Santa,” Kravitz said, trying to cast his mind back to the far off yesteryear of, like, five years ago, “didn't Merle get a magic hat off the corpse of the last Santa? And it let us summon the reindeer, right?”
Lup was leaned so far back in her chair as to be nearly supine, and she tossed a scrunched up ball of paper perfectly across the room and into one of Kravitz’s z-trays. It briefly emitted an acrid yellow smoke and then turned into a rubber duck, which shot out of the tray with a noise like a firework and disappeared through the ceiling. Barry barely looked up, just raised an eyebrow and jotted that down in his “weird new z-tray shit” journal.
Kravitz scowled. He hated when his idiot coworkers messed with possibly dangerous forces of nature beyond their comprehension, but most of all he hated when they messed with his files. The file demon was definitely gonna hide his case reports for the next week now; the quantum rubber ducky was always a sign of its bad temper.
“Yeah, but what magical object does the Spirit of Labour Day have,” Lup asked, already scrunching up another piece of Kravitz’s expensive letterhead paper. “He's C-list at best. Even Cupid has his stupid bow.”
“The Easter Bunny has that wand that summons chocolate,” Barry agreed.
“The Spirit of Martin Luther King Day has a gun,” Kravitz supplied. The other two gave him a look. “What? I met him at a party one time.”
“When did you go to a party,” Lup deadpanned, but Barry spoke over her.
“Maybe it's considered exploitative for us to use the reindeer,” he said. “Has anyone read a reindeer contract? Have any of you signed a reindeer pay stub in the last five years?”
“There must be some way of getting around,” Lup said. “What did the old Spirit of Labour Day do? We know he wasn't Santa, because if he had been we'd have avoided a whole bunch of bullshit the last five Candlenightses.”
“Maybe we're meant to get a taxi,” Kravitz said. “And tip 20%.”
“A taxi journey to all the little boys and girls of the world?” Lup said, disbelievingly. “It’s exorbitant enough just going to the airport, how much do you think a circumnavigation of the globe costs? And I bet he'd leave the meter running while we're going down the chimney.”
“We don't even know we have to see all the kids of the world,” Barry said, optimism in his voice. “Maybe we get to work from home! It’s all the rage nowadays. And it'd fit the Labour Day theme - what's more empowering than shitting on company time while muted in a teams call?”
Kravitz gave him a look that suggested he was rethinking all those times Barry had turned his camera off.
“We're never that lucky,” Lup said.
Kravitz heaved a sigh. “The reindeer knew what to do the first time we were Santa…” He tailed off, so depressed by the implications of his own suggestion that he was unable to verbalise the rest of the thought.
All three of them contemplated the alternative options for a moment, up to and including just killing themselves right there.
“Let's go and see the reindeer then,” Lup said, and the other two slumped in their chairs.
In a ritual that was, after five years, all too familiar, Barry wafted a carrot around, and with a faint jingling of bells and snorting of horses with spears strapped to their heads, the sleigh arrived over the horizon.
Once it had skidded to a halt, the reindeer all turned to look at the three of them. The leader, Rudolph, raised an eyebrow like, you idiots can't even get the time of year right, huh?
“Uh, hi guys,” Barry said. “Good to see you all.”
The reindeer’s other eyebrow raised too. Is it? It clearly telegraphed. Somehow, he managed to communicate with that single eyebrow that he'd been in a hot tub with an attractive gentleman reindeer with a couple of bottles of wine in the cooler before he'd got this out of hours call.
“Well, uh, we'll cut to the chase,” he said. “We're the Spirit of Labour Day now too. And we were hoping you guys would give us a hand delivering some, uh, unionisation to the little boys and girls of the world? It's kind of a present, when you think about it.”
The reindeer turned to look at each other. A silent conversation seemed to pass between them. Prancer was obviously opposed, and by his body language seemed to be in favour of goring all three of them and taking their chances with a new Santa, but all nine reindeer always gave that vibe. Blitzen seemed in favour of helping them out, but maybe he was just being tempted by the carrot still in Barry's hand.
Finally, Rudolph, who seemed to have taken the role of spokesdeer, turned to them and raised an eyebrow again. We'd better get overtime carrots for this, he seemed to say.
And the sleigh disappeared in a puff of pink smoke and glitter, and, before the Reapers’ disbelieving eyes, the reindeer emerged from the smoke one by one. Each on their hind legs, they struck magical girl transformation poses, pirouetting and voguing while a dancing and glittering light twirled around them
They each brayed an incomprehensible catchphrase in reindeer language in their horrible deep voices, and disappeared back into the mist again.
When the smoke cleared, the reindeer had returned to standing on all fours, but that was where the normalcy ended. Each was wearing a high-vis jacket, bulky eye protection goggles, over-ear headphones over a hard hat, and they had rubber corks attached to each of the spikes of their horns. Rudolph's nose had become a flashing orange light like the kind found on a road maintenance vehicle.
“What the fuck just happened,” Barry said. “Did I really just watch that?”
“Is this something you'd been rehearsing?” Lup demanded of the silent reindeer. “You didn't improvise that, no way.”
They blinked at her. We're just dumb animals, they seemed to imply. Even the omnipresent malicious vibe they broadcast was muted, replaced by an aura of frankly unbelievable innocence.
The sleigh had headlamps and wing mirrors for the first time, and a wheelchair accessible lift had replaced the step up to the interior. The trio stood in it as it very slowly ascended the three inch gap between the sleigh and the ground. The reindeer didn’t move, for a long minute, before the Reapers noticed the new blinking yellow “fasten seatbelt” icon on the sleigh’s dashboard.
After they’d buckled up and the reindeer had taken to the sky, Kravitz leaned in close. “If they'd been rehearsing that, does it imply they knew Merle was going to kill the Spirit?”
“Oh my god, they set this up,” Lup whispered. “I don't know how but they manipulated Merle into killing - okay, it probably didn't take that much manipulating, but still!”
The ride continued in the horrible silence that can only ensue after a group of people realise their taxi driver is a murderer, except this group had nine taxi drivers, all of whom had a pair of six-foot pikes built in as factory standard and a type of road sign specifically warning you not to hit them with your car because they’d be fine and your car wouldn’t.
“To be honest,” Barry said, “if they wanted to kill us I think they’d just do it. I don’t think they’d have bothered with the whole magical girl transformation dance routine. I think we have to live with the knowledge that they somehow hypnotised Merle into killing a spirit.”
“Maybe that’s why,” Lup said. “It’d be just like them to do that just because they know nobody would believe us -!”
While the Reapers discussed, the sleigh began to descend. At first, they thought they were still in the cloud layer, but it soon became obvious that no, the ground beneath them was simply a featureless, white landscape - the north pole.
“Shit,” Barry said. “I think they just took us home.”
“So they’re not gonna help us?” Kravitz asked. “Was the whole dressing up thing just some kind of sick joke?”
But just as the Reapers had convinced themselves the whole thing was a fucked up bit the reindeer had pulled on them, and that they were gonna get tossed out of the sleigh to freeze to death in the Arctic wastes, they saw it on the horizon - an enormous smokestack. As they got closer, they could see it was attached to a vast, sprawling factory complex, and at the gated entrance, a town. Barely more than a cluster of red and white striped houses, tinsel strung from every house’s rafters, the town was centred around a Candlenights tree in the town square. And, blocking the entrance to the factory, a vast mob - dozens of elves, each only three feet tall, wearing pointy hats and boots that curled up into a whimsical spiral at the toe, all rosy cheeks and big blue eyes. They were all huddled around trash can fires, warming their hands on the flames or holding signs that said “say NO to strikebreaking Santa!” or “elves have rights too!” As the sleigh landed nearby, all the elves pointed and grumbled to each other, turning their protest and the signs on the Reapers.
“I'm an elf,” Lup grumbled as the sleigh landed. “Just because I'm taller than three feet -”
“Oh ho,” one of the nearest elves said. He came to Lup’s thigh. “Heightism, now, too - and who's surprised?”
“Wait, wait, that's not - I didn't mean -”
A familiar voice came from the crowd. “Heightism! Can you believe it! What wouldn't they do, am I right fellas?”
Lup’s attempts to walk back her bigotry faltered as she stared into the crowd with a face like thunder. She pushed her way forward, and the elves parted before her, revealing Merle, dressed in a scruffy and patched black duster and fingerless gloves. He was warming his hands on a trash can fire.
Lup hoisted him out of the throng by the scruff of his neck and pulled him back to the clearing around the sleigh. “What,” she hissed, furiously, “are you doing here?”
Merle at least had the grace to look shamed. “I wanted to show my support,” he said. “It's not personal.”
Barry cut in. “Why does your sign say -”
“I don't have to work on Candlenights whatever happens,” Merle said. “I wanted to protest about a cause that really matters.” His sign said “END THE PINK TAX NOW!”
“Do you think we've got the power to do that?” Kravitz asked, mystified.
“If Santa can't, who can?” Merle asked, with all the wisdom of a sage old monk. He moved on quickly before anyone could notice that was fucking nonsense. “Anyways, what are you guys doing here?”
“Good question,” Barry answered, with a backwards glare at the reindeer. The elves had wasted no time in getting union contracts in front of them, and the reindeer were holding the pens in their mouths to sign. “Oh, for fuck's sake.”
“It's to do with Labour Day,” Kravitz said. “We think.”
“Oh, sure, I forgot about that,” Merle said cheerily.
“Merle, remember the Union’s position - no negotiation with management until our three demands are met!” A voice came from below, and all three Reapers peered downwards to see who had spoken. It was an elf, tall (for an elf) at about 4 feet tall, with grey hair and a twirling moustache.
“I’d never scab!” Merle insisted to the elf.
The elf turned on the Reapers. “Well, here they are at last. Management. Thought you'd come and see conditions on the ground, eh? Probably want a photo op, to promise free pizza once a month?”
“We've literally met all your demands except that you have to work on Candlenights,” Lup said. “Which is, let's be clear, the one day a year we need you to work.”
“One day!” The elf gasped. “You think we work one day a year, just because that's the hours Santa keeps? Ohhh, must be nice! You think the north pole just looks this good naturally, huh? No! We elves work unsociable hours, 18 hour shifts, hand-carving snowflakes to make sure all this -” he gestured around - “stays pristine!”
“Um, you don't have to do that,” Barry said. “If you be Santa -”
“No, to be clear, we like doing that,” the elf said. “And what about when the photographers come for candlenights cards and postage stamps? If we don't keep this place looking nice, they'll have to print more rude novelty cards with puns about ‘coming once a year’ and so on, and nobody wants that.”
“I always thought those were artist's impressions,” Kravitz said.
“Hah!” The elf spat, contemptuously. “Artist’s impressions. Show ‘em, boys!”
A pack of elves wearing hard hats sprinted out across the landscape, each carrying a different object - one with a picturesque cardboard pine tree, a series of them with a row of fencing, and one at each corner of a miniature rustic cottage, red and green tinsel dripping from every possible awning. They plopped the items down and one elf with a fire extinguisher sprayed some foam over the tree and the roof of the cottage. Looking at it, the Reapers had to admit it did look like a candlenights scene, even with half a dozen elves scowling (and making a variety of rude gestures) back at them from within it.
“Do we want the polar bear, Baron?” One elf wearing a foreman’s high vis asked. “He's on a smoke break, but we can get him in -”
“No, they get the picture,” the elderly elf said. He turned back to the Reapers. “You think all this can be done in one day a year?”
“Your name is Baron?” Kravitz asked. “You're the union Baron?”
“Yes?” The elf asked, clearly not at all understanding why that might be comedic.
“Don't you also make presents?” Barry asked. “I kinda figured that was your main deal, not, y'know, landscape gardening…”
He tailed off under Baron’s withering gaze. “That's a stereotype,” Baron ground out.
“Well, listen,” Lup interjected before Barry could say anything to make the situation worse. “We’re open to negotiation. We’ll pay more, literally anything - whatever. Come meet us tomorrow and we’ll talk. But today we’ve got some Labour Day Spirit shit going on, so we can’t really discuss it right now.”
Baron suddenly looked suspicious. “What about the Spirit of Labour Day?”
“Um, we're him,” Kravitz said, and filled Baron in vis a vis Merle savaging yet another holiday anthropomorph.
“Merle, taking you into the union is the biggest regret of my life, and I've been to prison four separate times,” Baron said. (“Ouch,” Merle said, not sounding like he was hugely surprised or offended by this.) “Tax evasion, all four times,” Baron elaborated to the Reapers as an aside. He paused for a moment. “The murder charges were dropped. Anyway, the problem is, I met the Spirit of Labour Day. He told me that this is where it happens.”
Baron brought them into the empty factory, past the burning drums and the lines of elves chanting slogans, and up some stairs into an office that declared him to be the Union Rep.
He sat them down and pointedly didn’t offer them a beverage. “You’ve heard of the Witching Hour,” he said. “Well, Labour Day is the Bourgeois Hour, when the veil between our world and the Plane of the Free Market is thin. The ancient magicks of Supply and Demand are strong and the Invisible Hand is manifest. Every year, a battle must occur between the forces of capitalism and kleptocracy versus the Spirit and the forces of workplace democracy.”
“So we have to fight a battle?” Lup perked up. “That’s way better than travelling the world. We can fight battles. I love to fight battles.”
“We’re literally god’s strongest soldiers,” Kravitz agreed.
“Well, okay, hold on,” Barry said. “What if it’s, like, an army?”
“Oh, yeah, an army could be tough,” Lup said.
“There are only three of us,” Kravitz agreed. “Maybe we can’t fight a battle.”
Baron looked truly sick of the conversation by this point. “The battle against the Spirit of Capitalism takes a different form every year. But it’s always symbolic.”
“Ohhh,” Lup said. “We can do a symbolic battle.”
Displaying a keen sense for the Reapers’ whole deal, and before either of the other two could chime in with their comedy triple act bullshit, Baron interrupted. “It’s a real battle!”
“Oh,” Lup said, subdued.
“But it’s linked to the events of the real world,” he said. “Years when the spirit wins, there are big advances in workers’ rights. Fantasy FDR was one of the most successful spirits.” He pointed to a framed photo on the wall of the great president, looking statesmanlike at Yalta - shirtless, insanely jacked, and popping a sick ollie in his wheelchair while Churchill and Stalin watched on, each double-fisting cocktails. Baron sighed wistfully. “Until he died of real polio.”
“Oh,” Barry said. “It wasn’t some kind of spiritual disease that got him?”
“No,” Baron replied. “Straight up regular human polio.”
“Was Reagan the Spirit of Capitalism of his age? He was kind of the anti-FDR,” Lup said.
“No,” Baron said again. “He was just a cunt.”
“Okay, so we fight a battle,” Barry said. “How hard can it be?”
Both the other Reapers froze in a matching wince then slowly rounded on Barry. He looked sheepish.
“Well, now that you've said that - ” Lup started.
“Yep,” Kravitz agreed. “You've jinxed it. It's not even worth having the fight now. We'll get our asses kicked. We might as well just go home and say our goodbyes to OSHA or whatever preemptively.”
“Hold on,” Baron interjected. “You can't just not fight. All the good little boy and girl workers of the world are depending on you!”
“Boy are they gonna be disappointed,” Kravitz said. “You don't understand. Barry always says that and then we always lose.”
“Yeah, we always win the actually hard fights, but the ones that seem like they should be easy are the ones Barry always jinxes,” Lup said. “And then when we lose it's embarrassing. One time we got our asses kicked in front of a bunch of schoolkids and they laughed at us.”
Barry shrugged. “It just slips out. I can't help myself.”
Baron spluttered. “But - but -”
“It's not that we don't feel for you,” Lup said. “But right now we're looking at getting our asses handed to us and then having the Fantasy FTC dismantled. All I'm suggesting is we skip the part where we get beat up and go straight to the part where Citizens United is put into the fantasy constitution, since it's gonna happen either way.”
“This could be a historic loss for the unions!” Baron insisted. “They're going to pass laws that it's legal to steal your Tupperware lunch from the fridge!”
“This just isn't what we signed up for when Merle killed that spirit,” Kravitz said. “And the problem is that if we do it this time, he won't stop, he'll just keep… killing… spirits… hmm.”
“Hmm,” Lup agreed.
“Hmm?” Barry queried, obviously lost.
The salon wasn't big enough for seven people plus the saloneers, so the Reapers had to awkwardly squeeze into a corner while Merle had his cuticles trimmed. He hadn't even lifted up the cucumber slices on his eyes when they’d approached.
“I'm not doing it,” he said.
“Yeah, stick it to the man!” Jerry jeered.
“You tell ‘em, Merle!” Kevin crowed.
The two elves were reclined beside him with their feet in a pool getting nibbled on by those fish that eat dead skin. Jerry was having his nails painted, Kevin getting acrylics.
On the far side of them, Lucretia said, without even opening her eyes, “workers of Faerun, unite.” She was getting her calluses buffed, and an inexplicably shirtless high elf half her age was massaging her shoulders. Lup shot her a look, but Lucretia’s ignorance was bliss.
“Merle, you're the best there is at killing random spirits,” Kravitz tried. “And innocent bystanders.”
Merle lifted one cucumber slice. “There are innocent bystanders?”
“Plenty,” Barry said quickly. “And some of them are orphans.”
Merle narrowed his eyes. “Keep talking.”
“Statistically,” Lucretia interjected, “there are very few orphans at the north pole. The Bureau of Benevolence Arctic Outreach Office has been doing some good work up there assigning orphaned elves a new loving, happy, and healthy home. And also rehabilitating injured penguins. Sometimes in the same home.”
Merle grunted and wordlessly dropped the cucumber slice back over his eye.
“Lucretia, you should be on our side,” Barry said. “You sicced Merle on a whole planet when he was a reclaimer, we just need him to kill one guy!”
“Just remember, Merle, a union is only as strong as its weakest link,” Lucretia said. “Stay strong.”
“I don't think I like you hanging out with these guys, Luce,” Lup said. “They're a bad influence on you.”
“We're the bad influence?” Jerry said, and he and Kevin cackled. “She taught us about leftist theory from a hundred different planes! You wouldn't believe the infighting we can get up to now we know about the anarcho-crypto-libertarian syndicalist thought from the animal plane!” Lucretia just winked.
“I didn't want to go here, Lucy,” Lup said. “But you leave me no option.” Merle lifted the cucumber slice back up curiously as Lup pulled a scroll from her bag. “This,” she said, “is testimonials from current and former BOB employees about your variety of OSHA violations and union busting practices.”
Lucretia spluttered.
“Firstly, one Magnus Burnsides told us that you didn't erect any safety railings around the edge of the moon, which apparently led to a number of dogs, quote, “running right off the dang thing,” end quote. Did you have any measures in place to prevent any employees from falling?”
“Listen,” Lucretia tried, but Lup wasn't to be stalled.
“This one is from Avi Adventurezone, who says he regularly got drunk while operating heavy machinery without a license, and that your organisation was aware of this? This is from Leon, who says you compensated employees in gachapon tokens they had to use in your establishment in place of real money,” Lup dropped a sheaf of paper into Lucretia’s lap. “This is from one Robbie Pringles, who says you falsely imprisoned him for trying to start a union -”
“He was trying to start a union?” Lucretia asked, baffled. “That's not even remotely why I put him in prison -”
“And could you please provide your copy of the work permit for one Angus McDonald, who was, according to my records, ten years old at the start of employment?”
Lucretia held up her hands as if to ward off attack. “It - we weren't in any country’s territory! The laws don't apply, it was international waters, I -”
Lup eyed her for a moment, and then turned back to Merle. “So, you're gonna come help fight the Spirit, right?”
Merle looked to Lucretia. Lucretia gave an abortive shake of her head, then half-shrugged, and finally nodded, defeated.
“If I say no, are you gonna pull a bunch of scrolls out of there that say I'm a bad person, too?” Merle said. Lup just raised a menacing eyebrow. “Fine! Fine,” he said, hurriedly.
The stage was set. The Reapers and all the elves had retreated into the whimsical pink-and-white candy-cane-striped lead-lined bunkers overlooking the beautiful rolling hills, peering through the narrow slits that were ankle height to the outside world. Distantly, down in the snow-covered valley, Merle was barely visible. Through the night vision binoculars Lup had borrowed from the elves’ shockingly well stocked armoury, she could make him out more clearly. He was cracking his knuckles, rolling his shoulders, and looking around, presumably for orphans he could claim as collateral damage.
Behind them, the clock chimed midnight. All the elves cocked their weapons and stopped their conversations.
“The bourgeois hour,” Baron said, forebodingly, flanked by Jerry and Kevin. Jerry had a shotgun on his back, an assault rifle in his hands, and a pistol on each hip, as well as one in a thigh holster and one in a chest holster. Kevin had a huge grenade launcher. All the other elves were similarly equipped, but only Merle's friends had such a gleeful air. The Reapers were trying to ignore them, but their red and green camo with bells dripping off every seam was making it hard.
As if on cue, an enormous headlight shone out of the fog. It swept from left to right, scanning the scene, pausing for a moment on the elves’ whimsical and festive fortifications, and then finally zoned in on Merle. He suddenly seemed very tiny in the enormous searchlight, backlit from above.
And, striding out of the swirling snow, a gargantuan figure; vaguely humanoid, but there was no head upon that boxy torso. It took one final step forward, and stopped. “Spirit of Labour Day detected!” It announced, cheerily, in an awful, high pitched voice, that was instantly and horribly familiar to all three Reapers.
Barry, Lup, and Kravitz looked at each other.
“No,” Lup said. “It can't be him. Please don't be him.”
Back out on the field, Merle, still frozen like a rabbit in the headlights, was suddenly bathed in a blood-red light as the searchlight flickered crimson.
“Instant kill mode engaged!” Upsy, your lifting friend, said, in the same cheery voice as before, lifting one vast foot to try to stomp down on Merle.
Merle finally moved, diving out of the way at the last moment as that foot crushed a beautiful and eccentric section of elvish town, alpine cabins festooned with tinsel splintering like so much firewood.
“We have to do something,” Lup said. “Merle doesn't stand a chance - he's used to killing helpless and innocent bringers of joy, not someone who can fight back!”
Baron shook his head solemnly. “I'm sorry, my companions, but no. We all have our own destinies, and his culminates here. If we intervene, we'd be invalidating the rules of the 1v1 spirit fight.”
But it was evident Merle was going to lose, and damn the elves to an age of union-busting and strikebreaking. As they watched, aghast, Upsy’s enormous clown shoe caught Merle in a kick, and the dwarf was sent flying, crashing into the side of an improbably twee snow-covered church.
Baron’s phone pinged, and he checked the alert. “Oh my god,” he said. “It's starting - they're making it legal to take Zoom calls in the office without headphones on.”
A laser cannon popped out of Upsy’s forearm and fired, hitting Merle square in the chest. He collapsed backwards, smoke emanating from his jacket, and Baron’s phone pinged again. “They just signed a Fantasy Executive Order that it's illegal for receptionists to have those little bowls of free candy on their desk!”
Blow after blow struck their slut dad, and with each one, Baron read out loud another news alert. “Constitutional amendment proposed to make child labour mandatory - you legally have to turn your camera on in meetings - they've made it legal for your boss to have his messy affair in the office and not just on the jumbotron at a coldplay concert!”
The situation was dire. Lup, Barry, and Kravitz looked at each other - something had to be done before the Spirit killed Merle. For all they knew, if it did, they'd inherit the job again.
Lup knew what she had to do. This was, after all, a symbolic fight - every blow Merle took was a blow to the very core of worker's rights. Every time Upsy manipulated Merle’s limp arm into slapping himself across the face with a “why are you hitting yourself?” was a strike at the foundations of the welfare state. She couldn't intervene directly, but she could bolster those foundations.
“Bring me the contract,” Lup said, her voice weak.
“Lup, no,” Barry said. “We can find another way - don't do this!”
Baron produced the union contract from one sleeve, and placed it in front of Lup. He looked at her with a respect that hadn't been in his eyes before as she made the ultimate sacrifice.
She picked up the pen, blowing out a long sigh as she considered all the Candlenightses she was signing away. She took one last look at the fight happening below, but Merle was just a sad, crumpled figure, collapsed in a pose instantly recognisable as that family guy death meme. Upsy was hyping up an imaginary crowd for a final, fatal elbow drop onto his prone body.
She scrawled her name on the contract, and the bunker was filled with light.
Through the narrow slits that served as windows in the bunker, golden light, bright as your asshole friend’s headtorch on a night hike that he won't stop shining into your eyes. Even through their eyelids, it was so bright that they had to shield their eyes with their hands.
Finally it dimmed enough that they could stare through narrowed eyes down at the valley, where a short figure was rising into the air, arms splayed, face skyward, as if he was receiving a boon from the gods. That blinding light was emanating from him. As they watched, Merle’s wounds closed. His black eye healed, the cuts and scrapes closed and vanished, his multiple broken limbs cracked back into place.
And the light finally faded and Merle dropped to the floor once more.
Upsy’s doors slid open, revealing Lucas Miller, furiously pulling on levers and stamping on pedals to control his giant mecha. His eyes were twin red dots - a telltale sign of spirit possession, that the Spirit of Capitalism was living within him.
As they watched, the elevator mech did a complex series of punches, kicks, chops, and finally struck a dramatic pose.
Merle merely rolled his shoulders and cracked his knuckles. “It's Merlein’ time,” he said.
“- and then I Merled all over that guy!” Merle said, raising his glass.
“Merle, this is a disciplinary hearing,” Baron said. “Please put your shirt back on.”
“Oh,” Merle said, subdued.
“When you kicked the shit out of that mech and shouted ‘take that you dweeb,’ it was notably absent of any revolutionary sentiment,” Baron continued. “Why didn't you shout ‘all value is produced by the worker, and as such the worker should enjoy the fruits of their labour’?”
“It’s just not as catchy,” Merle tried.
“Merle, you know the rules about writing your own slogans,” Baron reprimanded him. “Or are you trying to start another war with the Elfish Propagandists’ Labour Association?”
“And you didn't even try to liberate that poor enslaved mech from its bondage,” Kevin said. “Were you even carrying the mandatory literature?”
“I'm sure I've got it somewhere…” Merle said, patting his pockets but turning up nothing but receipts for margarita mix and compost.
“I’m disappointed, Merle,” Jerry said. “I really thought you were committed to this union - and to the revolution.”
“You’re out of the union,” Baron said. “I'm sorry, Merle, but we can't continue to overlook your bourgeois ways.”
“Are we still on for weekly poker?” Merle said, weakly, but Jerry sneered.
“With a class traitor like you?” He said. “I'm surprised you don't want to play Monopoly.”
“Sure,” Merle said, brightening up. “Thursday at my place?”
Jerry and Kevin looked at each other. “Yeah, alright, see you then,” Kevin said. “But we're having the car and the dog. You can have the shoe, since you're a bootlicker now and all.”
While things were working out generally fine as always for Merle, the Reapers were drowning their sorrows in the corner of Merle’s bar. They'd all retreated there after the fight to celebrate the signing of the new We Promise To Be Cool bill, making it illegal for your boss, quote, “to be a dick just in general.” But while all of them were happy about the new law, it was tough to feel like this was a complete win.
“We're back to where we were last year,” Lup said. “And it's already September - there's only four months until our next load of improbable bullshit!”
“Maybe it'll be chill this year,” Barry suggested, not really believing it himself. “We're overdue for a year where nothing happens. We'll probably go down the chimney, no zombies, no alternate universes, nothing.”
“I don't believe that for a second,” Kravitz grumbled.
An elf materialised at Barry’s elbow and passed him a note. Barry took it unthinkingly. “Has anyone considered this is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said, putting the envelope on the table in front of him without really looking at it. “Our negative attitudes are probably feeding into our perceptions. Maybe if we looked on this as an opportunity -”
He stopped here under the power of Lup and Kravitz’s disgusted gazes.
“Yeah, I didn't think so either,” he said, miserably.
Another elf appeared, this time next to Kravitz, and passed him another letter. He absently placed it on the table on top of Barry's.
“Maybe we should be adjusting our perceptions,” he said. “And by that I mean getting really hammered before we go out. That'd adjust my perception alright. Mostly it'd make it blurry.”
Another elf appeared, this time next to Lup. But when he tried to pass her a letter, he suddenly found himself getting loomed at. Lup had stood up very sharply, her chair rattling backwards, and she was suddenly very close to him and glaring down at him very angrily indeed. “What do you think you're doing? What is this? Not enough that you got your contract, now you're going to pass notes about it?”
She ripped the letter open and quickly skimmed it. “It's all procedural bullshit,” she said. “Minutes of meeting - record of attendance - statement of work. Why are you giving me this?”
“Um,” the elf said. Theoretically, Lup was also an elf, but there must have been divergent evolution somewhere along the line. His evolutionary precursors had been domesticated by a fat man who needed a source of cheap labour in a remote location. They'd been more concerned with developing the kind of fat reserves you needed to survive in an arctic wasteland and the kind of calloused scalps you needed to prevent stripey pointed hats from chafing too badly. Her distant ancestors had, evidently, become avenging warrior angels with fire in their eyes. Dimly, the elf remembered they were from another universe; presumably the one where elves hunted Tyrannosaurs for dinner. He opted for the truth. “Merle used to be the Union Secretary,” he said. “And the People’s Treasurer. And the Democratic Commissar. He actually did most of the work for the union -”
“What,” Lup growled, “does that have to do with me?”
“Baron said that the inheritance pathway means that's your job now,” the elf squeaked, and ran away.
Lup looked for a moment like she might give chase, but then she just sat down heavily. “Merle did most of the work in a group project? When has that ever happened? Even when we were fighting for our lives on the ‘Blaster he slept in until 10am.”
“Merle just got fired from the only job he's ever done any work for,” Barry said, “and somehow, it's still our problem.”
“There's no way the contract can make this our job,” Kravitz said. “We've all read it a hundred times, we'd know if it said that.” He paused for a moment. “Right?”
Lup drew a copy of the contract from her bag and began to read. After a moment, Barry leaned in and examined it too. A beat later, Kravitz was also peering at it.
Lup finished reading, blinked, and started again.
Their reading got increasingly frantic.
They all leaned back, exchanged a glance, and sighed.
“I do have one thought…” Kravitz said, slowly.
Lup stood atop her desk in their Astral office, one arm above her head, squinting at her goal. “For the championship…” she said, “Lup Taaco takes the final shot of the game -”
And she launched the balled-up important piece of union paperwork from across the room, straight into Kravitz's quantum z-tray. Barry and Kravitz cheered. Before their eyes, the paperwork folded into an intricate origami model of Lup and Barry’s house before spontaneously catching on fire, but none of the Reapers paid too much attention to the z-demon’s threats.
Lup grabbed up another piece of paper from beside her. “This one looks important,” she said, and scrunched it up. “Yeet!”