#nonexistent people

[stomach17-ai-imagery]

Americans watching a baseball game

Modified A.I. image generated by Stable Diffusion XL. 2024

[thetoadwholivedalone]

The Staff

Choose a WalCorp employee:

-Derek from accounting, who does his damndest to turn every conversation into a discussion of the dream he had when he was 13 where he found an angel in his dad's gardening shed (in the form of an eyeless, terribly, excruciatingly old masculine being moaning to itself as its graying wings molted) and whether or not it really was a dream

-Tiffany the 17 year old reception intern, who took the job because her parents made her and would rather be off playing Griffons (alone, because the friends she started playing it with in elementary school all got drawn away by sports and makeup and boys and college applications) in the hills and fields outside of town. Her character is Nightfyre, a griffon with raven parts instead of eagle parts and snow leopard parts instead of lion parts, who is a vampire, but a good one

-Hank from sales, the "funny guy", who is actually a convict from the post-apocalyptic future who was offered a pardon by the fragmented remains of the US government if he goes back in time, infiltrates WalCorp and prevent it from releasing a plague. Except that Hank Pulaski, bachelor and Poughkeepsie's foremost Bon Jovi fan, feels more real than Twitch Milligan, wasteland scavenger and smuggler, ever did; a garbled message from his own time implied that time might be a closed, immutable loop and that Hank Pulaski always existed (and never succeeded) in the early 21st century; and also he's fallen in love (or possibly just sexual obsession) with Theodore Wallace, the company's octogenarian founder and owner.

-Claudia from HR, who's constantly trying to invite co-workers over to drink Fresca and marathon Witchblade, and on winter vacations goes to an abandoned lighthouse in New England to sing an a capella version of the sax solo from Careless Whisper out to the vast grey sea, often impassively observed by a group of seals