"Please," Malharaxxus the Malevolent says, smiling around a bottomless, broken jaw-hole filled with twitching mandibles. "Don't think of me as your supervisor. Think of me as your new friend."
"Okay!" Golnaarth says with fake, uneasy brightness, twirling her hair round a finger. Not many people transferred out of Torture into Temptations of Lust, and Malharaxxus wasn't...the kind of coworker that Golnaarth was used to, that's all. And came preceded by a reputation, the kind of hushed whispers that herald a truly monstrous middle manager.
"So, your figures for this year," Malharaxxus says.
"Oh, they're — they're better than last year!" Golnaarth says hopefully.
"There's something odd about them," Malharaxxus says. "They are up. If you weren't so brainless, I'd think you were cheating. But here we are."
"It's—" Golnaarth bites her lip. Getting caught at cheating is very bad, when you're below management level, and she isn't even cheating, so getting caught for it would be horrible. "It is weird," she says miserably. "It's the internet? I think? I think I miss when it was just weeks on end of frat bros who'd sell their souls for anal," she adds dismally, and those are strong words round this department.
"Your last assessment, before your previous supervisor was flung into the Furnace Eternal and Loathing, Living Destruction Itself, says you've been finding your candidates on...Reddit."
"It was..." Golnaarth hesitates, then in a tiny voice, "it was Bernadette that suggested it?"
Malharaxxus scowls. "I don't recall any Bernadette on the department roster."
"No! No, she — sometimes I have lunch out by the pond. Throw rocks at the ducks. Only one day one of the damned souls got loose and sneaked up close enough to jizz on my foot, and I'd never talked to Bernie but she saw I was a bit upset and she put her cigarette out in its eye—"
"She doesn't work here."
"She works over in New Ideas," Golnaarth says, looking nervously down at her hands, clasped in her lap. "ASMR, I think her department's called?"
Malharaxxus makes a noise of vilest, ear-rending contempt.
"So I tried what she said, and tempted all these Americans who are weird and fetishy-racist about Japanese cartoons? And they kept going on about wanting 'isekai' and I didn't know what that was so I asked Vozdrammar the Pitiless Razored Gullet and she said it's about being hit by a truck and that's weird and I don't understand but they agree I can have their souls if I isekai them and then I—"
"You hit them with a truck," Malharaxxus says, with an expression of hideous, beaming joy speading over her like an oil spill.
"It nearly makes me miss the feet perverts," Golnaarth says, smoking tears glistening at the corners of her eyes.
"Succubi," Malharaxxus says, eyes closed, as if savouring something particularly delicious. "Succubi are so incredibly fucking stupid, Golnaarth. If this was back in Torture I'd have to do three weeks of investigation and end up uncovering five different unrelated crime rings. I'm going to love it here."
Golnaarth laughs nervously. "Welcome to the department?" she says uncertainly.
"I'm going to recommend you for a promotion," Malharaxxus says. "Your numbers are so good with these isekai fellows. You can specialise in it forever, lead your own team, won't that be nice?"
"Thanks!" Golnaarth says miserably.
