Season 1: Survival of the Fittest

  Ch 6: First Monday — The Lion’s Den Proper

  Nysera sat stiffly at the battered desk, the cheap chair groaning under even her careful poise. She folded her hands atop the scratched surface and took her first full survey of the battlefield.

  The office stretched before her in one sprawling, chaotic mess of mismatched desks, colpsing partitions, and teetering piles of paperwork. Workers slouched over keyboards or loitered by the kitchen area, nursing steaming cups of whatever passed for courage in this world. The hum of conversation, punctuated by the occasional mechanical whine of a dying printer, formed a low, incessant background noise — like the ceaseless muttering of courtiers too cowardly to speak aloud.

  She frowned. Open warfare. That was the only way to describe it. There were no walls here, no private chambers, no proper fortifications. It was as if the entire court had been shoved into one overcrowded room and told to jostle for power under fluorescent lights.

  "Why," Nysera murmured under her breath, "would you pce all your retainers in one chaotic room without defences? Are they trying to provoke a civil war?"

  No one answered. No one noticed. Peasants, it seemed, were used to this madness.

  She narrowed her gaze and began mapping the terrain properly. The kitchen area — where ughter clustered and alliances were quietly reaffirmed. The casual seating near the window — where lower-ranked workers huddled together, perhaps for safety, perhaps for strategy. The corner desk cluster — dominated by a sharp-tongued woman with red gsses and a booming ugh, clearly one who commanded attention without ever needing to stand.

  She noted, too, the invisible ones. The quiet interns practically fading into the grey carpet, the newer hires pretending to check emails while flicking nervous gnces at the social hubs they dared not join. Their insignificance was palpable, and Nysera catalogued it without pity. Invisibility was not always a shield. Sometimes, it was a death sentence.

  Her mind clicked into pce, the old instincts humming to life beneath this fragile mortal skin. She understood now. If she was to survive this strange, unfortified court, she would need to learn its secret routes, its hidden currents of power, its unspoken allegiances.

  Quietly, almost absently, she straightened the cheap stack of papers on her desk, as if setting her standard before a battle.

  The ancient work ptop groaned to life under Nysera’s fingers, humming weakly as if protesting its own existence. She frowned at the clumsy interface, the blinking icons, the sluggish response time. If this was to be her new sword, she thought grimly, she would need to temper it well.

  Carefully, she navigated through the folders, opening documents at random, piecing together the strange rituals of this world. Client briefs, densely packed with buzzwords — "brand identity," "customer engagement," "social amplification" — y stacked alongside presentations that reeked of desperation and false cheer.

  One, in Mira’s clumsy formatting, boldly procimed: "Campaign Q3: Bold, Authentic, Disruptive!" in a font so garish Nysera recoiled slightly. She scanned through it, catching the rhythm beneath the chaos: a pitch for a product no one needed, cloaked in promises of belonging, prestige, and excitement.

  Marketing, she realised slowly, was not a trade of goods, but a trade of illusions. It was persuasion, not by bde or treaty, but by suggestion, by shaping the stories mortals told themselves.

  It was sorcery by another name.

  Her pulse quickened with something dangerously close to excitement. She understood this. She had built movements with little more than whispered words and a carefully orchestrated myth. She had swayed nobles and commoners alike without ever needing to draw a sword.

  This world had not outgrown her. It had simply changed its tools.

  Further notes revealed Mira’s own pathetic role: a junior strategist, tasked with assembling drafts no one read, attending brainstorms where her ideas were pilfered by louder voices, and endlessly "circling back" without ever moving forward.

  Nysera clicked through Mira's old emails — brief, apologetic things riddled with unnecessary excmation marks and pleasantries. "Hope this helps!" "Just checking in!" "Let me know if you need anything else!" Bowing and scraping in digital ink. No wonder the girl had been trapped here, invisible and repceable.

  Nysera leaned back slightly, allowing herself a thin smile, and opened the Campaign Q3 file.

  Immediately, her eyes narrowed.

  The product was an abomination: a "smart" rubbish bin designed to detect waste levels, automatically seal bags, and even alert homeowners when it needed emptying. In theory. In reality, the notes were littered with panicked reports of glitches — bins sealing themselves prematurely, refusing to open, or worse, spewing their contents across kitchens in dramatic acts of rebellion.

  The current draft of the campaign was a tragic thing. Polite, desperate, dishonest. "Make life smarter! Love your SmartBin!" one slide bleated. Another promised "Revolutionary waste solutions!" without so much as a hint of irony.

  Nysera stared at it with growing disgust.

  Was this how mortals fought their battles now? With limp ptitudes and obvious lies?

  She tapped her fingers lightly against the battered desk, thinking. Deception had its pce, but transparent falsehoods only bred contempt. In war, if your shield had a crack, you did not pretend it was whole. You turned it into a weapon, baited your enemy into striking at your strongest point.

  Why should this be different?

  A slow, dangerous smile curved her mouth. She opened a new slide and began typing, the ancient keys ccking sharply under her touch.

  At the top, in bold bck letters, she wrote:

  "Our bins are smarter than your ex."

  Below it, she added mock-serious bullet points:

  Won't ghost you after three months.Will alert you when things start to stink.Seals the deal better than your st retionship.Won't run out on bin day.She leaned back, surveying her work with quiet satisfaction. Brutal honesty. Sharp humour. A decration of competence, not perfection.

  She skimmed through the existing slides, deleting the worst offenders, stripping away anything that reeked of desperation. She kept the nguage sharp, the promises minimal but brutal: the SmartBin might be fwed, but it was yours — loyal, tireless, and only occasionally temperamental. Mortals, she had already observed, did not trust perfection. They preferred the clever, the brazen, the ones who knew how to turn a wound into a weapon.

  When she finished, she saved the file under a new name — SmartBin Q3 Pitch FINAL FINAL (Nysera Version).pptx — and fired it off to her line manager, as Mira would have, with a brief, icily polite email:

  "Attached. Please let me know if you require further adjustments."

  No excmation marks. No desperate emojis. No cringing apology.

  She sat back, sipping from the lukewarm coffee she'd stolen from the break room, and waited for the ripples to begin.

  It didn’t take long. Barely twenty minutes after she had sent the file, a shadow loomed over her desk. Nysera gnced up calmly to find a man hovering there, the faint sheen of panic already beginning to gloss his forehead. He was a middle manager by scent and posture alone: trying desperately to project authority, already fgging under the weight of it. His nyard read Ben, Brand Strategy Lead, the title trying and failing to confer dignity onto his ill-fitting bzer and scuffed shoes.

  "Mira," he said, voice pitched too high for real control. "Hey. Just, um, wanted to chat about the SmartBin deck you sent through?" Nysera rose smoothly to her feet. If battle was to be joined, she would not meet it sitting down.

  Ben shifted from foot to foot, ptop tucked awkwardly under his arm. "So... it’s, uh. Different."

  Nysera inclined her head. "It is accurate," she said, in the tone one might use to announce that the sun would rise in the east.

  Ben opened his ptop with fumbling fingers, spinning it around so she could see the glowing slide.

  Our bins are smarter than your ex.

  Even now, seeing it again, Nysera felt a fierce satisfaction. The words were a bde.

  Ben gave a nervous ugh, gncing around as if afraid someone might overhear the treasonous daring unfolding in his possession. "It’s just," he said, scratching the back of his head, "I mean... it's funny? And like, honest? Which is sort of—maybe?—what the brand needs? But also, like... brutal."

  Nysera waited.

  Ben wrung his hands once more, then sighed, surrendering to a force rger than himself. "Honestly, it’s the best thing I’ve seen all quarter. I mean, marketing’s basically a meme economy now, right?" She said nothing, letting the silence stretch just long enough for discomfort to do her work for her.

  Ben snapped his ptop closed with an air of finality. "Right. I’m gonna, uh, show it to Jess — our Senior Manager. I think she’ll love it. If not..." He ughed again, high and thin. "We can always just bme, like, Mercury retrograde or whatever."

  Nysera offered a very small, very cold smile.

  Ben hesitated, unsure whether he had been dismissed, then nodded frantically and scurried away.

  Across the office, a few heads turned to watch him go, curious at the sight of the normally unfppable Brand Strategy Lead fleeing the junior strategist’s desk looking like he had glimpsed the edge of a revetion — or an execution.

  Nysera sat back down, resettling herself with regal calm. She opened the next task in Mira’s to-do list — an inane document titled Upcoming Awareness Days to Leverage for Brand Activations — and regarded it with all the disdain of a queen forced to muck out stables.

  The afternoon dripped by, thick with the stale scent of reheated food and too much desperation. Nysera worked in silence, completing the minor tasks assigned to her with ruthless, mechanical efficiency. She spoke only when necessary, never volunteered small talk, never ughed too loudly. She had learned long ago that mystery was not created by saying more, but by saying less.

  By mid-afternoon, she noticed it: the gnces. The murmurs. The way a few of the younger women at neighbouring desks leaned closer together whenever she passed, half-whispering, half-smirking.

  At first, she assumed suspicion. Then, she caught a few phrases drifting across the stale air: "New Mira’s a bit savage, isn’t she?" and "Honestly kind of obsessed with this era she's in." Another, whispered behind a too-rge coffee cup: "She’s giving boss energy."

  Nysera allowed herself no outward reaction, but internally, she noted it with the precision of a scribe recording the first signs of a winning campaign. She had not intended to build a reputation so quickly, but if this court was so easily swayed by bearing and silence, she would not insult it by refusing the advantage.

  She filed the test document away and, remembering that blending required performance, rose from her seat and wandered toward the coffee station where the lesser alliances seemed to gather. A small group loitered there, one or two nodding awkward greetings as she approached, others pretending deep concentration on their phones.

  One of the women—the same coworker who had shepherded her home—raised her coffee in an informal salute. "Babe, you’re killing it today. Ben looked like he saw God after your deck."

  Nysera inclined her head with a grave courtesy that made the woman snort into her coffee.

  Conversation drifted, casual and shallow: weekend pns, reality TV dramas, compints about the new expense report system. Nysera listened, absorbing the cadence, the currency of casual speech, the strange, modern performance of alliances.

  Then a sharper note entered the chatter.

  "Did you see Tasha’s outfit today?" one of the girls said, jerking her chin towards a tall, sleekly dressed woman crossing the office floor. "Head to toe designer."

  Another woman ughed. "Yeah, well, it’s OnlyFans money, babe. She can afford it."

  Nysera, who had been sipping her coffee with careful mimicry, froze subtly mid-motion. Her ears, trained by years of court intrigue, honed instantly onto the word that mattered.

  Money.

  She tilted her head slightly, masking her sharp focus under a veil of polite disinterest.

  "Seriously," the first girl continued, lowering her voice. "She’s got this alt account. Nothing mad—no full nudes or anything—just, like, posh selfies and bossy captions. Blokes love that. She’s raking it in."

  "Smart, honestly," another chimed in. "Easiest side hustle going if you’ve got the vibe."

  Nysera set her cup down carefully, eyes narrowing slightly.

  Alternate accounts. Command through image. Payment for attention and curated dominance. It was marketing, distilled down to its most brutal and personal form. And more importantly, it was lucrative.

  Her mind ticked rapidly through possibilities, connections sparking like kindling catching fme. If such channels existed, if serfs willingly paid to be spoken down to, commanded, made to kneel metaphorically… then the game just expanded.

  And Nysera had never feared to rule a new faction.