Chapter Text
Attempt 333
Day 154
“You can't keep pretending like this is normal, Michael! Everything is wrong here! Things fall from the sky and the ground opens up at random, nobody likes each other, I can't sit outside for twenty minutes without it starting to rain on me! And my soulmate is the world's most forked up dog!” Eleanor glared at the golden retriever sitting at her feet, its mouth open in a vacuous doggy grin. “It watches porn on my TV when I'm sleeping!” The dog put one paw over its nose, looking embarrassed.
“And you know what, Michael?” Eleanor stood up from her chair, bracing her fists on the desk as she leaned her diminutive body into his space. “I've figured out your game, and there's nothing you can do about it! Or at least, nothing that you haven't already done, right? Because I'm already in the Bad Place!”
“Oh, for fork's sake.” Michael leaned back in his chair and tipped his face to the ceiling, not even bothering to look as he snapped his fingers. There was a clatter as Eleanor tumbled over unconscious, plus an alarmed little yelp as the dog scrambled out of the way. “Porn, Glen, really?”
The dog writhed on the floor and then split open to reveal Glen, his human suit a very unbecoming pasty nude all over. He sprawled over the carpeting like a landed fish, limbs splayed in all directions. “I was homesick!” he whined. “You try living with a human full time for five months, eating disgusting food and drinking nothing but water.” Glen shuddered. “And anyway, she was already getting suspicious about the weather and all the restaurants serving nothing but food on sticks. Why do all the restaurants always have the same menus?” he asked suddenly. “Isn't that weird?”
“Shut up, Glen,” Michael begged wearily, massaging his temples. “Five months of work, down the toilet without even a nice sewage leak to show for it. Get some clothes on and go make sure the other humans get back into holding so we can reset. And you're going to be the one explaining to everyone why you forked up at the hotwash tonight, so try and come up with something better than kibble and homesickness.” Glen whined but slouched his way out the door, leaving Michael alone in his office with the unconscious dirtbag who kept ruining his plans.
Michael stared at Eleanor's slack face, untroubled and nearly innocent as she slept in the static unconsciousness that was the state of all human souls who weren't being rewarded or tortured. She should've been so easy. He'd had her all figured out after five minutes with her file, but he'd still spent dozens of hours poring over her life, then hundreds more after things had started going wrong in attempt after attempt. Eleanor Shellstrop was rotten, a selfish monster, a jerk who'd never put any good into the living world except by accident. Torturing her for a thousand years should've been a piece of cake, but here they were, nearly seventy-five years in, and she'd figured him out every single time. So far his longest attempt had gone barely six months, and that was partly because he'd introduced Eleanor a month later than everyone else in an attempt to put her even more on the back foot. It had worked, just not well enough. Nothing was good enough. What in the here was he supposed to do now?
A quiet boop announced the arrival of another complication. Michael was nearly as tired of dealing with Janet as he was the humans. At least the humans had the grace to pass out and let him wipe their memories in peace, rather than going out kicking and screaming every single time. In this attempt, Janet had swapped out her usual purple dress for a particularly virulent shade of green that, in retrospect, couldn't have helped in Eleanor's calculations of what place she'd landed herself in.
“Michael,” Janet began, then checked herself as she noticed Eleanor. “Eleanor appears to have entered stasis. Would you like to revive her now?”
“No, no,” Michael assured her hastily. “In fact, why don't you take a little break in your void and I'll meet you on the beach in two hours, all right?”
“Okey-dokey!” Janet agreed with her bizarrely cheerful smile. Michael would never get used to that. Bad Janets were so much easier to understand, even if they were much harder to work with. “But before I go, there's an unscheduled train arriving at the station. Bye!”
“What?” Michael jerked upright in his chair, waving a hand to open a viewscreen. Sure enough, the familiar black train was pulling into the station, right at the worst possible time. If Shawn saw the neigborhood between reboots and started asking questions... For a wild moment, he thought about just waking the humans up and telling Eleanor to keep her mouth shut, but that had about as much chance of working as telling Glen to not be such a dipshit. It didn't sound as though Eleanor had told the others this time before coming to confront him, so maybe he could just wake up the three and pretend that Eleanor was in a special torture session. Except Shawn would be doubly interested in seeing anything like that. He was so, so screwed.
The doors to the train car slid open inexorably and a Bad Janet stepped out, chewing gum and barely looking up from her phone. The person who stepped out behind her was not Shawn, though, but rather a much smaller, teenage figure with dark hair and an expression of bright interest. “Dave?” Michael asked aloud, even as relief made his human suit weak at the knees. It still wasn't good; having a senior architect evaluate a neighborhood that wasn't even a hundred years old meant that things weren't going well, but at least Dave was a colleague and could be reasoned with. He probably hadn't even brought hot ladles along with him.