sadoeuphemist:

writing-prompt-s:

You are a low-level office worker with a lot of rather dull assignments and no real knowledge of what your company actually does. One day you are shredding paperwork when you realize the truth… your boss is the city’s biggest supervillain. 

“Okay, I definitely should have realized this earlier,” I babbled, shivering from the chill, “but it was a low-level job, I’ve only been working there two months, and the moment I figured it out, I swear to god, I got in contact with you …” Crayforce was seemingly paying no attention to me, the light glinting off the back of his shell-like body armor as he entered all the data I’d so painstakingly collected into his Cray Computer. The gloomy rock walls of the Crevasse loomed high around us, the crimefighting equipment and the trophy cases and the submersible dock all gleaming in the semi-dark.

I’d been blindfolded when he brought me here, so all I could tell was that it was somewhere near the sea, probably an inlet on the side of some cliff face, hidden to the outside world. When I’d first figured out who I was really working for, at first I’d been wracked with guilt, unable to process what I’d been a party to. Even when I decided to blow his cover, I’d been too scared to go to the police – after all, how many times have they been able to stop a supervillain like Low Tide? It was only luck that my cousin had once been roommates with Persephone Parr, and so I’d told her and she’d managed to contact Persephone and one thing had led to another, and Crayforce himself had contacted me to arrange the rendezvous.

“It was so obvious once I put it together.” I kept talking through his silence, unable to stop myself. “The company’s focused on buying up water rights in communities at risk for drought, and buying up water extraction equipment. That’s Low TIde’s whole schtick! He’s planning to steal the water from us ‘undeserving surface-dwellers’ and ransom it back to us drop by drop! He’s done this a hundred times before! And this clinches it, our company name, it’s Orbal Industries, right?” I was pretty proud of myself of figuring this one out. “That’s an anagram of Balor, the Irish god of drought and blight!

“There’s some other stuff I found, when I dug deeper,” I said, trying to peer over Crayforce’s shoulder. His massive shoulder pads did not give me much room to see. “It’s less obvious, but I think it still fits his motivations. Like, he’s not a mammal, right? He’s some sort of weird fish-creature. And so I figure that’s part of his prejudice against us, that we’re mammals, and that we nurse our young. So he’s trying to undermine that, use that as our weakness. And so he had these huge propaganda efforts to get new mothers to use his sub-par baby formula instead of breastfeeding their children. Formula …” I paused for impact, “…that you have to mix with water! And it was contaminated water that was responsible for god knows how many infant deaths! Even I couldn’t get the full data on that. So I figure it’s ironic, to his demented mind, that it was our unnecessary dependence on water that -”

“Stop,” Crayforce said, his voice a gravelly rasp. He turned around and flung my USB back at me, and I only just managed to catch it. “You’re wasting my time,” he said. His eyes were empty slits of light behind his helm. “There’s nothing here. Low Tide’s not involved with any of this.” He grabbed my shoulder, muscling me back to the submersible, blindfold dangling from his other hand. “Put this back on. I’m taking you back.” 

“W-what?” I said, stumbling along, trying to resist. His Cray Claw was like a vise. “But-but my dossier …”

“You’re a fantasist, seeing connections where none exist. Bullshit anagrams,” he grumbled. He gestured to the Cray Computer’s screen. “I’ve gone over your so-called connections, traced your company all the way up to its head. There’s nothing there. No supervillains involved anywhere. They’re clean.”

“B-but – but -” I stammered, staring at the complex tree of flowcharts and connections, searching for some sign that I wasn’t going mad. “He’s stealing water! He killed babies! And I know I was working for him, I know I helped him out, but I came to you the moment I figured it out! I didn’t – You have to see it! I’m trying to save the world here! How much more can I make up for it?”

“There’s nothing there,” he grunted, forcing the blindfold over my eyes, and then there was the hiss of gas and I was sinking into a deep and enveloping dark.
I could hear his voice, from far away, as I drifted off into unconsciousness. “You work for a Nestlé

subsidiary. Nothing more to it than that.”