Sporemageddon

A few days ago.

He was sitting on a rickety chair in the dusty end of the City Nineteen Record’s Department. It was a long, low building a block over from the police headquarters and two doors down from the courthouse. This was where paperwork inevitably found itself and where it usually remained. The site had two Librarians and a Bureaucrat. People whose entire skillset revolved around sorting and finding paperwork.

None of them were happy that he was here, but that was normal. They were the sorts of people that were rarely happen to see others slipping into their domain, and he supposed that he understood.

Still, he’d been here for two days now, and so they’d grown used to his presence in the corner. They’d even relaxed the rules about having tea within the reading room, though bringing food in was right out. That’s how ants happened, apparently.

In any case, he found himself staring at a stack of reports, some of them two or three years old.

They were more or less sorted by date, with the oldest to his left and the newest to the right. He had detached pages from each other and constructed overlapping piles that he imagined would make no sense to anyone but himself.

Fortunately, the people working here also insisted on putting any reports he pulled back into their place. He was definitely not allowed to sort through the stacks himself, less his lacking skills disrupt their organizational systems.

Most of the time, this place was only visited by lower-ranked officers bringing in reports or court clerks coming to grab copies of something or another for an active case. He was an intruder here.

He wasn’t the only intruder in the city.