: Prompting Needed_

HR Nightmare

From Daily Quordle 333 (12/23/2022) GRAPH, PUPAL, UNDUE, FUGUE

"Let's be fair to me. I, at least, held my tongue for five whole minutes after Frank started talking. It wasn't hard. I just want to let you all know before we go further into this meeting that I firmly believe that I have nothing to apologize for. At all. Yes, I see hands raised, but I'm not here to take questions. Not about me. I'm the Os Auditorus. You all (as far as I understand the by-laws, anyway) work for me. Capisci?"

Beth shifted in her seat uncomfortably and refused to make eye contact with me.

"Beth?" I slapped my hand down on the podium and several of the small creatures up front jumped a bit. I get it. We were all a bit jumpy that morning. Or afternoon. Christ, I miss clocks.

Beth nodded her head quickly, filling the silence in the meeting room with a whoosh of shaggy hair.

"Good. Oh, and Beth?" This time she did look up at me and I tried not to recoil at the flecks of viscera that dangled from her muzzle. "I never got a straight answer from what I recall at the last huddle. Am I the main boss? The, uh, head honcho?" I spread my hands wide to the side and indicated the entirety of the physical facility. The Meta-physical one was hard to point at with a three-dimensional body.

Beth glanced down at her bundle of technicolored Trapper Keepers and shook them until a slip of paper poked out the top of one. On the back of the sheet was a greyscale bar graph of some sort. She scanned the document, then shrugged. "You are the Os Auditorus," she said in the oft-repeated blanket answer I always received.

"Fair enough," I muttered, then pointed to Frank. "Frank, man, look, I'm sorry to have cut you off but we're talking about the pupal sacs. The pupal sacs. Not the already formed rib monsters-"

"They're costaevi, sir."

I stopped with my mouth open, and my eyes glued to his. It was hard to find his eyes, too. The feat was no small task.

"The costaevi, right. See, you do know your bone creatures! Excellent. So, you know that when a baby bone creature plops out of one of the sacs, they aren't to be brought around the other staff. Mainly, the carnivorous staff. Their fugue state hasn't worn off. They can't run or protect themselves and... do you see where I'm getting at, Frank?"

Frank nodded. Well, he more undulated his gelatinous form to show he understood my synopsis of the protocol.

"So please tell me – without blaming Beth this time – why you chose to parade our defenseless blob-children right through the halls of HR." Beth let out a small sob. I did her a favor and kept my eyes locked on the vague orbs that were Frank's.

Frank inflated as he began to speak. I saw something swish within him as he... looked around the room? I don't know. Gelatinous beings were a new addition to the roster, and I was still learning their physical attributes. With a sigh and the slapping of Jell-O folds, he said, "Like I said before, the path to the UV tanks were completely blocked by unscheduled maintenance and I couldn't get by."

"Oh, now he's gonna blame me," a voice piped up from the back. I held up a hand to silence anymore interruptions from the construction crew. As half of them (literally half of their bodies each) existed in two different planes, I couldn't entertain their outburst. Whatever they had to say was bound to come with multidimensional subtext that I couldn't translate at the moment. I rolled my finger in a 'go on' motion to Frank.

"So, I consulted the nearest map, found the shortest path, and I went for it." He paused as he took in more air. "To be quite honest, Os Auditorus, I didn't see HR labeled on the map."

"Oh, that's no exc..." I trailed off. "Wait, Frank... oh crap. That's right." I leaned forward on the podium and laughed a small, sighing chuckle. "You're new! You've only been here, what... nine decades?"

"That's right, sir. Youngest slime on the roster, too."

That explained it. One by one I could see the reason behind this blossoming in the other minds of the gathered staff. If Frank here had only been in the bone harvesting and delivering business for anything less than two hundred years – Earth Standard Time, of course – then he had never been subject to the third-dimensional shifting of the upper offices and therefore would not have known to read the simplified maps through his phasic oculus. Duh.

"Well, hell, Frank. I guess we all owe Beth and you a bit of an apology. This whole shebang was one undue process." Beth's head came up a bit and she wiped off a few dregs of baby bone slugs from her mouth on one arm. Beth pretended not to notice as the gnat patrol that was hovering in the seat next to her swarmed the caked fur. Frank nodded with his full-body jiggle and waved one sloppy tentacle in the air at everyone.

"No harm done," he said. "Sometimes we've got to break a few femurs to get a few teeth, am I right?" The room's volume, which had ben climbing as the staff got ready to leave and return to work, dropped to a void-level.

"Beth," I said through a small smile. "Would you mind having a chat with Frank later about what's cool to joke about in the matters of teeth? The last thing we need is another angry slew of mouth curses from the Fairy Department." As everyone filed out or blinked into subpockets of reality to get back to work, I added, "Oh, and get him fitted with a phasic oculus tuned to..." I waved a hand over my face to indicate my eyes then pointed to Frank's back. "... all that."