[ PRP ] What is your [Mark, Rep ]

[Zoobey]

"-Specialization again?" Mark repeated to Rep. It was one of those days, lazy paper shuffling days, where they were supposed to collectively read over mission reports, initial them where necessary and forward any significant ones to archive.

The Death Assistant paused, debating between whether his current report went into the 'Useless Trash' or the 'Exceptionally Useless Trash' bin. "I was thinking of changing mine to certified doctor."

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

Rep shrugged his shoulders as he tipped more reports into exceptionally useless. He was pretty ruthless when it came to filing the things, they tended to pile up really quickly. Of course, being a hoarder of fairly significant proportions, that didn't mean he'd ever actually throw any of them away or condone that ever happening.

"I dunno." he said. "Used to be extreme terrain or some s**t." he shrugged his shoulders. "Is assistant to the assistant a specialisation?"

"Certified doctor sounds like a good way to get H to notice you." he said. "Probably not a very good ******** idea."

Zoobey

 

[Zoobey]

"H didn't freaking copyright doctorates, I could be a doctor you know. I could be a double doctor. Double D's. Or well, like, single D's." The Exceptionally Useless bin was getting really full, so Mark quickly took the time to dump them into the shredder.

"Bro, if being an assistant is not a specialization, then I don't think a double A is too, if you know what I mean. Let me think, doctorates of cool stuff, no wait doctorates in the Force, no that's too broad, maybe a doctor of communication- no wait - what does that even mean." He began to drift off again, and there was just a period of awkward shuffling, mostly because the Death lead had started to turn his gaze towards their direction again, which meant they probably had to look like they were working harder and being effective with their time or something.

"What kind of extreme terrain?", whispered Mark loudly when he thought Caelius wasn't paying attention, "Is that like, snowboarding and mountain biking and stuff?"

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

Busy work as far as Rep and Mark were concerned more often than not ended up with both of them getting into s**t with Cael about not working hard enough when the Death Lead decided on his usual whims he was sick of their chatter. This didn't bother Rep too much, Cael's tolerance for their work was usually about as long as Rep's attention span for paperwork.

"Actually it kind of is." he said. "It was like arctic s**t mostly, working on bases and stuff up there. I think they maybe wanted rid of me and that was an excuse. I was ******** good at it though, I like snow and s**t. Did a bit of snowboarding, though I'm admittedly a bit s**t at that." he shrugged, going quiet himself for a second.

"I don't think I'd need a specialisation in communication, I'm already king of twitter."

 

[Zoobey]

Mark opened his mouth, and there was a good period of time where it was obvious he was thinking about correcting something, but only out of pure patience and willpower did he stop. "Uhh, sure, yeah." His agreement didn't sound convincing, but he was probably still just sore over the whole unfollow Twitter thing.

More silence passed, more paper shuffling and then the steady noise of the shredder churning away. Some second between that the Death lead had disappeared, but he did that a lot, it was best not to form eye contact anyway.

"Oh hey," whispered Mark, remembering suddenly to keep quiet, "Are your Arctic bases related to the arctic titan thing?"

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

"The one that made lunch out of H that time?" He asked, taking Marks lead for volume - which was a big deal given Rep wasn't an indoor voice kind of guy. "I guess I had that s**t in mind when I did it, those titan things are ******** scary and we weren't prepared at all last time."

He was genuinely distracted by the shredder, finding any semblance of destroying perfectly good s**t disturbing. He hadn't shredded any of his stuff at all in the time they'd been there.

"Is it back again?" He asked. "Cause that would be er.. a thing." A thing he did not want to get caught up in given how ******** huge it was.

 

[Zoobey]

"A titan," Mark corrected, "that's a titan. There's like, a few of them, most of them are neutralized but sometimes they break free destroy s**t and stuff. They're pretty much almost indestructible, but really annoying." He shook the shredder a few times to get it working again.

"Anyway, there's a 1/12 chance it could be the same one, or it could be one that I dunno, got upset over the polar ice caps melting or something. Long story short, some stuff went down, some bases got destroyed, some hundreds people died, and they went to cover it up as some Canadian gas leak explosion or something." A rare, slow smile had crept up his face. "Did it really almost eat Doctor Hannibal Lecter? That's what he gets for rejecting my rare gifts and abilities."

Of course, these rare gifts and abilities had done more harm than help in any and every single scenario.

There was a suspiciously long period of time where Mark had abandoned any illusion of work for one of his many cellphones. "Oh cool, your last base is still mostly undamaged. You should go check it out sometime." The Death Assistant made clear to say you and not we.

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

Directly after getting a talk about how indestructible titans were was not the time Rep was inclined to go back to the arctic. "There's one base I'm er. I'm not allowed back to." And he didn't want to go back to it either given that he'd gone red eyes there years back and partially eaten and mangled some of his companions. It still haunted him.

"If it's not that one maybe I'll check it out...sometime." It was obvious by sometime he gently meant /not now/

"And aye it tried to eat him." He said as if reminding Mark of this would keep him out of imminent danger. "You were in life?" He asked before adding "lol" out loud.  

[Zoobey]

While Mark easily had access to most archived information and oftentimes gossip, most of the time he just didn't care. He mistook Rep's hesitation for laziness, more annoyed at the latter comment. "Dude I don't even want to talk about it."

He suddenly stood up, rather aggressively. "You know what? I'm tired and sick of this. I demand we have equal rights and stuff. The right for I dunno, more free time and higher salaries. We should go on strike."

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

Rep gave Mark a very concerned look, more concerned than when he was suggesting he go and poke a titan. “Strike?” he said, a bit of the colour going out of his face. “Like, not working and demanding that we get better pay and sh- like that? Uh, you remember who our boss is right?” Imagining Cael’s reaction to being told that his possibly most useless underlings were going on strike opened up a huge array of imaginary possibilities, none of them any /good/.

“I mean.” He said, looking a little bit thoughtful. “We could do it you know. I mean, the security on the island’s systems is non-existent. I bet you could do a thing like in Jurassic Park, where that guy had the ah-ah-ah no way thing on all of ngen’s systems. Maybe we’d get a raise, cause yeah, we are really underpaid, our stuff doesn’t even rise with inflation or anything.”

And his eyes began to light up with greed. “I mean, even Cael can’t work without his phone.”  

[Zoobey]

"Bro, Wonder Park? That was me." It really wasn't something Mark should be boasting about, but he had already opened his laptop and was hard at work.

"Okay I'm in the database." This was possibly the most obvious statement he could have stated considering that Mark created the database. "Oh my god I have the best idea, I'm going to change all the ls in the database to capital I's so nobody can ever search up anyone who has l in their name." There was some frantic typing. "Okay what else should I do, our future pay depends on it."

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

Rep didn’t bring up how many people had supposedly died at Wonder Park, he wasn’t exactly a saint himself when it came to body counts. “I mean the actual Jurassic Park.” He said. “What even happened at Wonder park though? I saw we got a few guys from there.”



Mark’s tame messing with the system though got him a look as if he’d slid down a few grades on the cool scale. “If you are going to do something man, you need to do something big. Lock people out or something, cause some serious problems for other divisions or our division, got to make them give us a raise.” Rep didn’t really think all that clearly when it came to potential consequences for getting in the way of other divisions. This was in spite of the fact H had made it pretty clear on several occasions that there were penalties for getting in his way. “Go big or go home.”  

[Zoobey]

"Uh yeah," Mark was busy making sure his change in code didn't ruin anything else in the database to fully register Rep's question, "I happened at Wonder Park."

After running three more bug checks to make sure everything else was fine, he paused and looked up at Rep. "Wait why am I locking out people who aren't going to give us a raise? I mean with that logic I should just lock out like, the entire accounting department. Oh wait - I know! Every time anyone tries to browse something on the intrawebs using your phone it will force you to install a mobile version! That's got to be severely annoying enough to pay raise us right?

Baneful

 

[Baneful]

The comments Mark had made about Wonder Park simply made Rep think that it hadn’t been a big event after all and that mostly the headsets had stopped working and maybe some explosions happened. This was about the sum total of what he considered the other man to be capable of doing. Competence was right out of the question.

Rep looked wholly unimpressed with Mark’s attempts to have an impact on the political landscape of the island. It was especially annoying to Rep who had come from a cracking and hacking background where the highest aspiration was to hold the establishment hostage for their own ends. This seemed like an ideal chance to do so and the other man was just stubbornly focused on nothing more than minor annoyances.

“What’s the point in that? You’ll just annoy people, it won’t change anything, it won’t make any difference to anyone. You are thinking like some mobile app maker rather than an activist. Micro transactions and making people frustrated don’t f—in change the world, or our wages. You’d be holding them to ransom by locking them out”

He thumped the table in a way that made it wobble precariously, obviously rather passionate about the topic.

“If I had access, I’d do it right.” He said, obviously having forgotten his initial fear about /who their boss was/  

[Zoobey]

Mark moved his stuff further away from Rep, "Well, you do have access though, just like general user stuff, some viewing abilities, you can edit your username and password too I guess that's something - wait! - what if I changed everyone's e-mail to a different e-mail so if they forgot their password they just could never get to their account again."

He looked up and gave Rep and Caelius a thumbs up.

There was this weird long, awkward pause where something went through Mark's brain that was something like perhaps he had done something wrong but couldn't quite actually remember what it was that was worthy of being directly the recipient of the Stare of Shame and Judgement. Some cogs slowly clicked into order. "Oh that's right! Rep and I are going on strike so we can get better pay."

As Mark said the word "strike", another Death Hunter was making their way into the office, dropping off two more boxes of old mission reports. She stopped halfway in the door, and gently, very gently put the boxes down as quietly as possible before exiting backwards out of the door, like one would when escaping a dangerous wild animal.

"I'm not involved," drawled a fourth voice. Oz, in the corner furthest away from Mark and Rep, dutifully forgotten (the way he liked it).

"Strike," Mark repeated to Caelius, wondering if that fell under 'modern terminology', "Rep and I are going on strike. S-T-R-I-"

- When Rep woke up it would be because his cellphone was buzzing furiously. It was nice overhead, really nice, the kind of roofless nice that was suspiciously not like their office at all. The birds were singing (cawing), there was a thick lush canopy of green all around them nearly blotting out the sky, and a light drizzle was coating the extremely exotic rainforest foliage. Rep had clearly been out for a while, clothes entirely damp, and he had lost Mark somewhere in the process, and apparently an entire office of paperwork.

Rep's phone stopped, and then began to buzz again. It was nice to see they had reception this time at least.

Baneful