He stared at the screen, eyes blinking exactly every five seconds. A fresh bead of sweat broke out on his shiny red pate as he ground his teeth together in aggravation.
The Accountant clicked a button and the image shifted from the firm foyer to the offices of the Accounting and Acquisitions Department. One of his hairy underlings was holding the receiver of his desk phone up to his ear, lips flapping and ears wiggling as he communicated with something on the other end of the line, clearly agitated. On the screen, the chimp stood up on his chair and screeched at the monitor. In his elegant black designer suit, he beat his fists on his antique desk and bared his teeth in a clear sign of displeasure. The angry ape in the monkey suit then slammed a hairy fist down onto his keyboard and the monitor screen went all staticky.
The Accountant shook his head in disgust. “It’s impossible to get good help these days.”
***
It was easy to get turned around in Downtown. Everything was built to look the same. That was part of the aesthetic, or lack thereof. Gillian and Arlo followed along behind Roger, who they incorrectly assumed was leading them to the Accounting Department building. In fact, Roger had never actually seen the outside of the head office, and wouldn’t have been able to pick it out of a line-up of all the multistoried buildings in Downtown. Back when he was in Acquisitions, he worked remotely. And in his role as Executive Assistant Supervisor in Charge Pro Tem for Data Entry, he only communicated with the other departments via teleconferences and email. But, in an effort to seem useful, he wandered aimlessly through the maze of dark alleys that ran between the high-rise buildings along Main Street, on the off-chance that he’d accidently stumble upon it. If he passed every building in the block, he was bound to come across it eventually.
Up ahead, the late afternoon sun glinted off the smoked glass windows of an imposing structure that took up one whole city block. Roger decided to check it out. His charges trotted obediently (sort of but not really) along behind him.
***
The Accountant’s computer screen shifted to a custom wallpaper background of a purple cyborg cowboy and a scantily clad woman with vibrant butterfly wings sat astride a shaggy green beast riding off into the triple sunset.
Once upon a time, the Accountant known as Phil considered himself an author. He wrote in the rather obscure genre of futuristic sci-fi/fantasy alien-abduction cross species reverse harem existentialist romance. The genre was so obscure in fact, that Phil’s debut novel was the only one in its category on Amazon. That made it an instant bestseller (even though it only sold five copies). He tried to reach that state of inspiration again many times, but try as he might he’d never been able to pop out another complete work. His current piece about two star-crossed lovers locked in an endless loop of unrequited love and unending torment was sitting in a desktop folder, unfinished and raw.
It wasn’t always easy to find romantic inspiration when one was stuck behind a desk 23 out of 24 hours every day. Phil’s job required that he account for every second of every hour of every day for every drone currently employed by the firm. That might sound like an impossible task for any one man to do. And you’d be right. Luckily for the firm, Phil wasn’t a man. Not really, anyway. He was a… well it’s kind of hard to explain in layman’s terms… think of something along the lines of a limitless hyperintelligent being that can shift across dimensions at will and you might get some idea. Put that diffuse cosmic entity into a 5’ 3” skinsuit and clad it in a double-knit polyester three-piece suit and you might begin to comprehend why he was so surly all of the time.
He hated his job. He hated being stuck in the skin suit. He hated having to oversee all of his charges from JJ at the coffee shop, to the chronically absent billing crew grrr, and the apes in that cosmic joke of an Acquisitions Department.
The fact that JJ and the apes (wow that sounded like the world’s worst pop band) usually managed to stay on schedule and not interfere with his “side project” was the only reason he ever had a free moment to himself when he could write his magnum opus.
When Phil wrote, he would close his eyes and disconnect from everything but the roiling inner turmoil of his thoughts and dreams. Unfortunately, his carefully thought-out characters tended to have a life of their own, so to speak, and would often escape his rigorous outline to run rampant around the subplots they created, unlikely dialogue flying willy nilly.
His current WIP, or work in progress, centered around the erotic adventures of a multi-tentacled galactic knight and a Venutian fox princess. The two main characters were supposed to be falling madly in love with each other and cavorting in all sorts of semi-disheveled situations but the damn characters just refused to go along with the program. What he really needed was inspiration- that elusive element that every great writer needs to create a literary work of art. Unfortunately, his day job had a nasty habit of interfering with his creative process.
He sighed and changed the video feed. The Three Musketeers, as Phil privately referred to Arlo, Gillian and Roger, marched angrily through Downtown to the Hades Corp building. Phil felt a faint satisfaction from the idea that they were about to make someone else’s life hell for a few minutes. God only knows they’d been doing it to him. Why not let the apes get an earful, for once? Sure, he had to corral the loose herd, but would it really matter, in the grand scheme of
