He was interrupted from his pondering by a sudden buzzing in his pocket coupled with a loud, relentless beeping. Dean pulled the beeper out and pushed one of the small buttons below the screen.
“Code five,” he read out loud, squinting at the screen. The green of the screen made it difficult to read the message on it, but he tried his best. When he looked back to Cassiopeia, she raised an eyebrow.
“A what?” she asked with an impatience Dean thought was a little over the top, but then again, this was Cassio. “There’s no such thing.”
“That’s what it says,” he said with a shrug. He held it out for her to see.Cassiopeia snatched it from his hand and held it, so the screen was better facing the light.
“That’s an ‘s’,” she corrected him. “It’s a Code S.”
She tossed the beeper back to him. Dean fumbled to catch it, but managed to grab it before it hit the floor. Once he straightened up, he looked at the beeper’s screen again before offering it back to her.
“Okay, so it’s a Code S. Does that mean you have to go?”
Cassiopeia shook her head, refusing the beeper with a hand up. “No, it means you have to go. That’s a manager’s job, and you’re a manager now.”
Dean blinked; for the first time, at a loss for words. A Code S was a big deal, and Cassio had never allowed him to come along on one before. She probably kept him from tagging along out of some form of protocol, but Dean liked to think that somewhere behind that by-the-book, unfeeling façade, she just didn’t want to upset him.
After all, he was a Code S once, too.
“So, I'm just going to go and handle that by myself?” he asked.
Cassiopeia sighed, appearing to grow tired of the conversation. “You know what you have to do. You’ve been through it before. Just follow the protocol in your manager’s manual, and you’ll be fine.”
“But Cassio, you never actually showed me—”
“The manual will tell you what to do,” she repeated, voice clipped again. “You know I can’t hold your hand forever.”
She brought her gaze down to another one of the cabinets, opening and rifling through it. As Dean watched, he noticed that she kept starting over and didn’t appear to actually be looking for anything.
“Whatcha looking for in there?” he asked. “An excuse not to look at me?”
That got her to look up, and Dean thought he saw the corners of her lips twitch upwards ever so slightly.
“I don’t like to do things like this — it might show an unprofessional amount of favoritism - however, I am quite proud of how you’ve progressed. And what’s more… I believe you can do this in a satisfactory manner.”
“Aww, Cassio,” he said with an exaggerated hand over his heart. “I’m blushing. That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“I wouldn’t get used to it,” she replied, straightening up and turning back to face him. Then when the beeper interrupted their tender moment again with another fit of buzzing, she added, “Now go; you know how serious a Code S is.”
“But I don't know who it is or how to find them,” Dean said, to which Cassiopeia held out her hand for the beeper again.
“That second message should be their file's location; you'll get one more showing their location geographically, but if you're receiving it, then you'd be the closest manager in your department to them.”
Dean raised an eyebrow, unsure why he was getting the message when she was also a manager in his department.
Cassiopeia appeared to guess his question, for when the beeper seized again, she handed it back to him and quickly made for the filing cabinets again, this time with purpose.
YOU ARE READING
Newly Minted Manager
ParanormalIn the lowest level of Purgatory, Dean - Soul Shepherd extraordinaire - is finally getting promoted to manager by his boss Cassiopeia. But his first task as a manager might hit a little too close to home when he must tend to a soul who ended his own...
