Chapter 5: Chapter 5: Focus Session Presented by Virgil Praxis

There is a realm that exists outside of time.

Not quite a void, and yet not quite a room.

It wore the skin of an office, the kind you might remember from a job you never had, in a decade that never quite existed.

There were cubicles, row upon row, arranged with the mathematical cruelty of someone who believed geometry could replace human warmth. The carpet was too clean, too uniform,so immaculate it seemed almost smug about its sterility. The walls were painted in that neutral beige perfected to offend no one and comfort nothing, as if politeness itself had congealed into plaster.

The lights hummed overhead with a faint stutter, flickering as though they were trying to wink but had never been properly taught how, caught forever between flirtation and seizure. Shadows didn’t fall the way they should; they clung too long to corners, stretched too far beneath desk chairs, like they were reluctant to be noticed.

Somewhere in the distance, a phone rang with no intention of ever being answered. The call light blinked and blinked, patient as death. The coffee machine hissed and sputtered, brewing something blacker than bitterness,espresso distilled into the purest form of existential dread, steaming gently in paper cups that dissolved just a little too quickly against your skin.

It was not a place people went. It was a place people found themselves in, as if the act of walking down the wrong hallway, or blinking too slowly at the wrong moment, was enough to shift you sideways into this purgatorial break room of eternity.

It is a drab, mildly offputting office, one you would ignore in every instance but , this

Because if you ever bothered to , stop and give it a glance, a single iota of a moment, to comprehend what it truly was, you’d notice several things in the following order At first glance, it could almost pass for an ordinary workspace.

There were desks. There were chairs. There were those little plastic trays meant for papers, though no paper had ever been seen here, nor would it ever be. A casual observer,if such a thing could exist in a place where time had folded itself into polite irrelevance,might nod and think, Yes, an office. I’ve worked in one of these. I know this shape. Or maybe i’ve seen one on a tv show

But that would only be the surface.

Look longer, and you would notice that everything seemed more suggested than built. The cubicle partitions had the weight of scenery flats, flimsy outlines painted to trick the eye into believing depth. The monitors on the desks glowed faintly, but no image ever resolved on their screens,just the faint hum of pixel static, as if the idea of “computer” was sufficient without needing to bother with function. Even the chairs carried no history of use; their cushions were too unbroken, too perfectly uniform, as though they had been designed by someone who had seen the concept of sitting described in a manual but never practiced it themselves.

The whole place was a pale idea of an office, the ghost of one, hollowed out to the bare minimum of recognizability. It was as though the architects of this space,if there had been architects,believed that mimicking the mannerisms of an office would be enough. A desk here, a bulletin board there, fluorescent lights humming overhead: a sketch, not a reality.

And if you asked why, if you pressed for the purpose of it all, you would find there was no answer. No memos to shuffle, no deadlines to dread, no work to be done. The design carried no thought for function,only appearance. A workspace without work. A theater with no script.

A stage set, waiting for an audience that would never arrive.

A place raised not from knowledge but from recollection, as though someone had once heard of offices in the same way one hears of extinct animals, and had then attempted a reconstruction from the bones. It was not built to function,only to gesture. Desks without purpose. Chairs without weight. Lights without warmth. A mimicry of labor with no labor to be done, an imitation of human order without the humans.

And if, against your better instincts, you let your thoughts wander further, the horror bloomed: for what, then, comes to work in such a place? What clocks in, and clocks out, in a world that never had a clock?

Whatever they are, they cannot be people. They can only be sketches of people. Constructs shaped from the shallowest impressions,an arm bent where an arm should bend, a smile drawn where a smile should go, a head tilted at a mathematically convenient angle, but empty, so empty behind the eyes. They look as though someone described a human to a sculptor who had never seen one, and the sculptor had nodded politely and tried their best.

And perhaps they move. Perhaps, at the very edges of vision, there is the swish of a tie straightened, the sigh of a chair adjusted, the murmur of a voice rehearsing syllables it does not understand. But when you turn your head, there is nothing. The desk is bare. The chair is still.

If you stared long enough, you might begin to wonder which came first: the false office, or the false employees. Whether this space birthed them to populate its hollowness, or whether they dreamed the office into being so they would have somewhere to pace, somewhere to sit, somewhere to mimic the gestures of a life they were never given.

And if you wondered that much, if you looked that hard, you would pray they did not look back.

This was the Feedback Division, Sector V,a wholly unholy branch of Quality Assurance, dedicated to the careful observation and light meddling of developing worlds.

And here, before a semicircle of desks arranged like a jury with quarterly deadlines, stood Virgil Praxus.

She looked, at first glance, like a very tired woman in a suit that had once meant something. She had thick-rimmed glasses (worn without lenses), a clipboard etched with runes, and the distinct aura of someone who had once argued a philosophy professor into tears.

In truth, she was an entity older than existence, a being of ink and inference born in a city that only existed on maps used to lie to gods.

Today, she wore stress like a perfume and hope like a disguise.

"Right then," Virgil said, in a clipped, cultured tone that suggested she’d once hosted a murder mystery on a train and still suspected everyone.

"Thank you all for attending the preliminary emotional assessment for Development Project 742-D, working title, The One Where the Boy Gets Arrested on Purpose, and the Girl Makes the Rain Angry."

A ripple of polite enthusiasm murmured through the room. One reviewer gave a thumbs-up with two elbows. Another clapped with entirely the wrong number of fingers.

Virgil straightened a stack of imaginary papers and pressed on.

"So. General impressions. Was the emotional trajectory comprehensible? Did the tonal shift from Pratchettian whimsy to creeping horror feel integrated?"

A hand,or possibly a talon,raised.

“Lovely work,” said a creature shaped exactly like a middle manager.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Strong sense of voice. The chaos lad, Kaz, is delightfully unhinged. Great branding opportunity.”

“Agreed,” said a reviewer whose smile was several inches to the left of her face.

“The girl, Leonor, too. Sparkling dialogue. Love the fish. Excellent fish.”

“Yes, yes,” said a velvet voice near the back, belonging to someone in a trench coat with teeth where buttons ought to be.

“But what about that boy? Pip. That’s a little cheap, innit?”

Virgil’s pen paused mid-hover.

The figure leaned forward.

“All that trauma and bedtime horror. It’s obvious he’s gonna die. Feels manipulative. Like you’re begging for tears.”

“Do shut up, Gorrence,” muttered a woman with hair made of receipts.

“What?” Gorrence spread their hands.

“It’s not real.”

They all paused at that. Not with shame. Just acknowledgement. Like someone had pointed out the teacups were decorative.

Virgil, to her credit, smiled the way people do right before a power outage.

“I appreciate the honesty,” she said.

“I do.”

She clicked her pen once.

Twice.

Three times.

“But I would gently posit that being predictable is not the same as being dishonest.

You see, tragedy doesn’t have to surprise you. In fact, it shouldn’t.

It walks toward you, slow and steady, while you scream at the page to do something else.”

Another click.

“And as for Pip...”

Her smile vanished.

“If you knew him.

If you’d heard him.

If you’d sat in that room and felt the weight of his breath hitching like it was trying to apologize for being real,

you wouldn’t ask if he dies. You’d ask if he lives.”

Silence.

The uncomfortable kind.

The kind that doesn’t end when someone clears their throat.

One of the eldritch reviewers coughed up a small agreement.

Another nodded solemnly, eating a stress ball.

“But yes,” Virgil continued, voice lighter again, falsely cheery, like someone who’d just taped over a crack in the hull.

“Some good notes. Worldbuilding still a bit obscure.

We’re folding too much cleverness into metaphor soup; audiences don’t always have the spoons.”

Laughter. The polite kind.

“And we do need to make sure the side characters aren’t just scaffolding for the leads.

Yes, we heard that too.”

She walked in a slow circle.

“Any final feedback before this gets released to the Mainline Imaginative Stream?”

There were a few scattered mutters: tighter hook, stronger lay-of-the-land, less cryptic magic systems, and more consistency in tone.

But no outrage. No fire.

Just... consumer interest.

Virgil nodded.

“Understood.”

She turned, clipboard held to her chest like a shield.

Her smile was perfect.

But her shadow curled around her heels like it was trying to hold her back.

Because if this story failed, if her story failed, she would vanish.

Not dramatically. Not tragically.

She’d just unhappen.

One foot through the door.

One final breath.

"Let’s hope they like it," she muttered.

Behind her, one reviewer whispered to another:

“She’ll be back. They always come back for edits.”

And the door to the world opened.

Back into the story.

Back into the fire.

Back into the page.

Almost.

Because just before she stepped through, Virgil paused.

She didn’t turn around. She didn’t speak.

But she felt it.

A stare.

Not a glare. Not rebellion. Not malice.

Just that ancient, awful thing: recognition.

Gorrence.

Still seated. Still smiling with his borrowed mouth.

But watching her,truly watching her,as if some gear behind his eyes had finally clicked into place.

As if to say:

I know you.

I know what you did.

You’re no different from us.

Even if you pretend to be.

Virgil didn’t flinch.

She didn’t look away.

She only raised her clipboard,just slightly, just once,

and clicked her pen.

Dismissal. Or defiance. Or maybe the only language they had left between them.

Then she stepped through the door.

And the moment passed.

But the stare did not.

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM

FROM: Virgil Praxus, Lead Narrative Architect, Sector V

TO: Mary (Quality Circulation Liaison, Reviewer Allocation Unit)

**RE: Reviewer Pool Rebalancing – Project 742-D

Timestamp: 06:43:19 - Local Constructed Time**

----------------------------------------

Mary,

I hope this finds you well,or at least intact. Quick note regarding the current reviewer pool assigned to Project 742-D (working title: The One Where the Boy Gets Arrested on Purpose, and the Girl Makes the Rain Angry).

After the last Focus Session, I’m growing mildly concerned (read: acutely alarmed) at the tonal drift emerging from some of the feedback. There's a scent of insubordination brewing,not the fun kind that leads to innovation, but the sour, mealy sort that curdles collaboration.

Gorrence in particular is starting to show signs of... awareness.

The kind that peers back.

I don’t like it.

Please consider reshuffling the reviewer batch for the next cycle. I’d prefer to fold in a few stabilizing voices,Type-Theta Reflective or perhaps a dormant Muse with ethics dampeners still intact. Someone with empathy protocols above baseline but without the compulsion to weaponize them.

If you could quietly phase out any units flagged “Disruptive-Inquisitive” or worse, “Meta-Agitated,” that would be ideal. I understand some of them have tenure, but frankly, so did the Leviathan we fired last quarter.

Keep it subtle. No alarms. No memos that sigh when opened. You know how the walls gossip.

I trust your discretion.

Cordially but with fraying patience,

,Virgil

P.S. If the coffee machine continues to bleed again, please send Maintenance another offering. Preferably, something without The word everything in it. Last time, someone used a bagel, and the screams haven’t stopped.