A Typical Day at the II Offices...

RT3: Right. So, Sly is gone, and we’re all celebrating the absence of definite authority mourning his absence. In this time of euphoria grief, a few of us aristocrats here at II thought we might enlighten a few of you proletarians as to what exactly goes on here at the II Offices.

Kitty: [runs past throwing Sly’s collection of Ming vases into walls]

RT3: Yes, like that. Which reminds me… do you remember the day that Sly got those vases?

Kitty: No. Wait…no. I do remember the day he gave me one with a pair of gophers in it.

RT3: I remember it like it was only a few weeks ago…

[5/29/09]

Kitty emerged from the bank’s vault.

“I’m thirsty,” she said.

She backhanded an accountant and took his coffee, draining the cup of its contents before sprinting full tilt towards the office of ImpishIdea.

—

I awoke hanging upside-down from my pull-up bar. Backflipping to the floor, I quickly donned my signature three-piece suit in a gray plaid befitting an English nobleman such as my cover myself. I waltzed downtown, spinning my cane merrily and uttering a warm “hallo!” to the young spring maids who pranced by in their summer dresses, singing gaily of roses and butterflies.

After getting my usual double-caramel nonfat soy macchiatto with two shots of espresso from the local coffee shop, I walked outside to find that my limousine had just arrived.

“Helmut!” I said as my chauffeur opened the door and I stepped inside, “the office.”

—

The office appeared like a giant cinderblock over the horizon. Kitty was too short to pay it any mind, at least until she ran headlong into its door. She kicked it in and shouted “HELLO I RETURN.”

No one was there, as she was always the earliest arrival. She immediately took a wrench from the inside of her jacket and used it to bludgeon a hole in the ceiling. She hoisted herself inside and set off to search for any repairs that needed doing.

—

My limousine pulled up to the outside of the abhorrently boring exterior of the ImpishIdea Offices at what my Rolex dictated to be ten hours, thirty-two minutes and twenty-four seconds, Central time. I find Rolexes to be rather tacky, but it was a gift from Sly and I felt it polite to wear it to the workplace.

“Thank you, Helmut, that’ll be all for now,” I said to my loyal chauffeur, and stepped out into the sunlight. As I walked into the office, fashionably late as per usual, to find Sly making some kind of announcement to the gang. Indifferently, I flipped off my Ray-Bans and began to listen in on the announcement, attempting to feign interest.

—

“These are exceptionally rare Ming Dynasty vases,” said Sly to his charges, displaying the fragile things to his staff. The five gathered around him oohed and aahed appropriately. “I’m holding onto them until the recession stops recessioning, so please be careful around them, okay?”

“I’m certain there won’t be any silly antics on your watch, Sly,” said Jeni, adjusting her ponytail.

They dispersed to the elevators.

Kitty dropped down from the ceiling, snatched three of the seven vases, managing to break the a fourth into a thousand lovely delicate pieces, and scurried back into her hideout.

—

I whistled to the tune of the elevator music as we ascended to the thirteenth floor or the “Writer’s Dungeon” as it is lovingly nicknamed. “You all look lovely today,” I said to the rest of the staff. They glared at me with wrinkled, faded eyes of those who did not awake at nine in the morning in a bed of plush and satin. Poor things.

As we emerged from the elevator, Sly grabbed ahold of my sleeve. “My office. Now.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, “just lay off the jacket, will you? It’s silk weave and I bought it in France.”

We walked down the seemingly endless corridor, the granite goth arches along the way and around the office doors adding a bit of a veterate touch to the granite floors, granite walls, and torches lighting the way in a dim, bleak sort of way. Still, I love the way the torchlight shines on my hair. I whipped out my pocket mirror and smiled into it. “Gorgeous,” I said.

Sly grimaced as we reached his office and opened his large oaken door. “In,” he said.

—

Kitty shuffled along in the hollow between the thirteenth and fourteenth floors, occasionally peeking through ceiling tiles into the offices of her “comrades” as she called them. This one contained Nate Winchester; he sat perched on a large pile of books eating breakfast, which consisted of ramen noodles and a packet of pineapple fruit snacks. Kitty waved, he looked up and waved back. She continued onward in search of leaky pipes or dead lightbulbs.

The office next to his contained Virgil, but it was so dark she couldn’t see anything — she could hear a slow, steady scritch scritch of a quill pen on paper. She replaced the ceiling tile and went another ten feet forward, removing yet another tile and dropping down into her own “office”, really a custodial closet.

—

Sly’s office consists of two parts: a small area with a large wooden desk, a large swiveley leather chair, and a large fireplace, and then a larger sideroom which nobody has entered and later been seen alive. Few know of its existence — I only found it after stealing the II Office blueprints while Sly was out getting lunch.

“Sit!” he barked, falling tiredly into his large swiveley leather chair. I plopped down happily into the guest seat, of slightly less large, less leather, and less swiveley constitution.

“I am sick and tired of you coming in late!” Sly screamed in his soothingly monotonous way. “You are dragging this operation down with your sloppy, ridiculous antics!”

I grinned. “Sly, Sly, Sly,” I said, kicking off my patent leather wingtips and resting my argyle-socked feet upon his desk. “How long have I known you?”

“Well,” he said, thinking, “I guess about fou—”

“It’s gotta be at least fifteen, twenty years by now,” I said, ticking off the numbers on my hands. I was counting by fives. “We’re not as young as we used to be. Well, you’re not as young as you used to be, anyway. You need to relax a little. Here, I’ve just the thing.”

I pulled a few cigars from my inside pocket. “Come on, Sly, let’s light up a few Cubans like the good old days.”

“Well,” he said, his anger fading, “I suppose…”

I delivered a swift punch to his temple, knocking him unconscious, and threw my chair through his window, shattering the stain glass with a thunderous crash. Oh well, it was probably booby-trapped anyway. Were I a less mature and developed human being, I would have paused to chuckle at the word “booby,” but instead I leapt out the window, parachuting my way safely to the ground and walking nonchalantly into the lobby as if naught had happened — only to find the vases gone!

—

Kitty muttered something in some foreign tongue while examining the vases. They were pretty, sure, but kind of old and spiderwebby. She set them down and sighed, noticing that there was a note taped to the inside of her closet’s door. She tore it off and read it, the paper inches from her nose.

“Kitty, please consider drawing a picture to boost morale,” she read aloud.

I don’t have any pencils, thought she.

She took the vases to Sly’s office at sort of a half-run, barely making an effort to hide them from the cubeslaves. She knocked on the wooden door.

“Slyyyyy,” she said.

No answer.

“SLY,” she said louder, setting down the vases and knocking on the door. “I need to borrow some pencils…”

Kitty opened the door just a crack.

“Hey, I need to borEEEEK~”

—

I ran down the writer’s corridor to attempt to glean some information as to the whereabouts of the vases. I’d always wanted to be a noir detective, here was my chance! I popped my head into Nate Winchester’s office. He sat upon a pile of books with his back facing me. A large metal device slowly lowered a fedora onto his head as he swiveled around to face me. “Why hello there, Reginald. How —”

“Let’s cut the small talk, eh, slick?” I said, putting a candy cigarette in my mouth. “What do you know about some vases?”

Nate looked about nervously. No doubt my interrogative technique was making him sweat a little. “Well I know they date back to the Ming Dynasty—”

“What did I say about small talk, huh, slim?” I said, picking up one of his books and carelessly dog-earing one of the pages. “I want answers and I want them now.”

“Well, er…” he reached inside his trenchcoat for something.

“Hey, watch it, skip, don’t you go pulling out a pea-shooter on me!” I said, backing away. “I’ll go quiet-like.”

Nate’s look of confusion intensified. “But I was just getting some gum… You want a piece?”

As I shut his door and walked away, I patted my pocket and muttered, “I already got one, slick.”

—

Kitty scurried back through the torchlit corridor, dropping a vase on the way and crashing rather violently into me.

“Oh, hello,” she said, slightly covered in lovely delicate pieces of a vase which had flown in its lovely delicate way from her grasp upon impact and shattered atop her cranium. Suddenly her expression went from polite surprise to gently girlish terror. “Sly looks kind of dead.”

“Yeah, he does that a lot,” I said. “Oh, you mean particularly so. Yeah that was me. We had a bit of a creative misunderstanding.”

I then noticed the vase pieces, and pieced together the location of the missing vases. It was Kitty. She was a classy dame, but the kind that liked shiny things like a professional football player loves getting drunk and crashing his high-performance Italian sportscar. She had the kind of legs I’d like to clamber up like an island boy looking for coconuts, though, so I figured I’d let this one slide.

“I see you have the vases. Or the parts thereof,” I said. That’s the way, Timbleywick III. Play it cool.

“Yes. I took them. They looked nice, and my closet has not a lot of nice things…you can look in it if you want. I dusted it.”

She was just about as dusty-looking as the closet, giving the impression of something left stationary in a forgotten corner of a house for a long time. She looked around at the floor where the pieces of vase lay.

I like an honest dame. Keeps me from having to guess and whatnot. I hate guessing. You know what else I hate? Non sequiturs. Supposing the the necessity for cliche noir Americanisms was over, I flicked back a lock of my strawberry blond hair and assisted the young lady in rising.

“As Sly valued those vases rather highly,” I said, “perhaps we had best make like a binarily politically diverse group of people and split.”

“I didn’t mean to. Should we tell Sly?”

“…Discretion is sometimes the better part of valor,” I said, wincing at my cliche use of proverb.

“Oh, okay. You said split. Like banana split…I could really go for a banana split.”

“Indeed,” I said, leading Kitty (who appeared to still be somewhat dazed from the collision) to the elevator. “I shall have Helmut take us to a suitable vendor of frozen confection.”

Venturing a suggestive witticism, I quipped, “I like my women like I like my coffee: in a bowl and covered in chocolate!”

“I like fish,” she said.

“Indeed,” I said, leading her into my limousine. Suddenly, soothingly monotonous screams of anger — or was it horror? — echoed down from the thirteenth floor. “I believe Our Benevolent Leader may have discovered our antics… Helmut, the ice-cream shoppe, please. And, as the Americans say, ‘Step on it!’”

—

Suddenly she realized what she was doing and where she was. And there was Reginald. What the crumpet was he doing in a limo? Forget that, what the crumpet was she doing in a limo? She punched him in the head with her foot and escaped through the open window, brushing pieces of vase from her overalls.

—

I sighed. Always with the classy dames, as soon as they regain full consciousness they punch you in the head and jump out of your limo. “Helmut,” I said with a resigned sigh, “home, please.”

—

RT3: And that is an entirely accurate account of the events of Friday, May 29th, 2009. Incidentally, that was the anniversary of JFK’s birthday.

Kitty: Happy birthday Mr. Preside—hey, that’s not what happened that day. You broke one of the vases, then another, then another, and then Sly got mad at you, then I kicked him in the head—

RT3: Sh! Look, a birdie!

Kitty: WHERE

RT3: That way.

Kitty: [runs off]

RT3: Anyway, as I was saying, that was an entirely accurate account of the events as they happened on that day. In the end, Kitty had to pay Sly like 50 Rupees in damages, which was dumb because those vases were begging to be broken. But that’s how it is here at the offices of ImpishIdea — it might be hard, but it’s fair. Speaking of which, I need to finish composing my email to Sly wherein I ask for a payraise.

Ciao!

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