Sporemageddon

Several weeks ago.

He didn’t want to be here, and the person sitting across from him didn’t want him here either. They both knew it, and they also both knew that this was out of both of their control.

It was actually a good thing that they were both aware of where they stood, it meant that even if they didn’t speak things aloud, there was a mutual understanding. They could work with this, be civilized and even helpful to one another so that they could both go on to do their own thing.

“So, what have you learned so far, Detective Mallory?” Chief of Police Alfred Longview asked.

Longview was a rather portly man, though he carried himself like someone who’d once been in much better shape. He was probably tall when he wasn’t slumped into a well-worn office chair, and his broad shoulders had probably made him an impressive man before a decade behind a desk had trimmed off the muscles and padded on the fat. He was nobility, though not important nobility.

That was a good thing. Important nobility didn’t make it to the seat this man was in. That was too much power. But non-nobility didn’t make it there either, because they didn’t have the right contacts and hadn’t shaken the right hands.

“Slow, as expected,” Mallory admitted. He shifted in his own seat a little. Behind him, past a glass door, was the main office of the city Nineteen police headquarters. Some three dozen desks with detectives and functionaries hard at work. It created a certain kind of noise, one that he found rather pleasant. The clacking of typewriters, men talking, the occasional laugh.

“Slow, huh?” Longview asked. He worked his jaw. “Well, what do you have so far? Maybe we can help you along.”

And get him out of their hair, went unsaid.