The analog clock hanging on her wall finally clicked over; short hand on six and long hand on twelve. Six AM.
Six AM and Blonde Blazer was already sitting behind her desk, the polished mahogany surface a harsh little beacon in the pre-dawn quiet of Torrance SDN. On cue, the central air kicked on as it did every morning; a rattling industrial hum announcing itself through the overhead vents.
The superheroine’s hands were folded neatly atop her desk, blue fabric of her gloves pressed tight into one another as she kept the smile fresh on her face through the smell of early-morning coffee finishing and the sound of approaching footsteps. The door didn't open so much as get shoved out of the way, Chase Felix already halfway through it with a mug in one hand and that yellow sweater looking somehow more rumpled at six in the morning than it ever did at three in the afternoon. "You're here early." She lifted her head, smile still in place. "Coffee's fresh, if-"
"I don't want your damn coffee. I’ve got my own." The dispatcher lowered into the chair across from her, mug in hand steaming with brown. "What I want is to know what the hell is this optimization framework I’ve been hearing about.”
She blinked his way, eyes widening for a moment. “How did you h-”“I keep my ears open and I’m low to the ground when people run their mouths.” Heavy-lidded eyes dropped to the manila folder sitting square in the center of her desk — the thing twelve pages and color coded with tabs on the inside. “That for me?”“It’s… it’s for the team.” Blonde Blazer slid it across anyway, biting down a sigh as Chase reached for it; hand already over the neatly stamped title. Phoenix Performance Optimization Framework: Q3.
Corporate loved a euphemism. She'd learned that early.“Mm.” Across the desk, Chase Felix didn't blink as he opened the folder and began taking in its contents. The more he read, the more he looked like somebody’s disappointed grandfather flipping through the morning news and finding nothing worth a smile.She knew what was in it because she’d read the thing over and over for a week now, hoping it would say something else if she reread it enough times. But no, it was all just performance thresholds and individual metrics tracked against average output and so much worse to justify the leaderboard — it wasn’t referred to that in the actual document of course, Corporate always used the Recognition Tier System — as the method for the cuts that were coming.
“I want you to know…” The words left her immediately as soon as Chase hit page three, those old-man eyes staring her way immediately. “That none of this is punitive.”She wanted to believe that, and Blazer found she was doing a very good job of convincing herself about it so far. “It really isn’t. If anything, it’s motivating.”“...Motivating.” The speedster once known across all of the West Coast as Track Star simply stared back at her, breathing in a papery rasp that made him sound the part of the disappointed grandfather he looked. Officially, Corporate had the man coded as a ‘Senior Consultant’ for all Chase Felix wanted to pretend he was another dispatcher but — unofficially — it meant he wandered the hallways of the facility drinking black coffee, and largely telling any hero younger than four decades that they were fucking retards.“Motivating.” She repeated the word with the same smooth practiced emphasis that came from time spent in front of the mirror for this exact moment she knew was coming. “Positive reinforcement for the ones performing well, that they passed the bar, providing distinct benchmarks for th—”"For the ones who ain't." Chase held his coffee in one hand without looking at it, eyes locked on her in a way that made her superhuman stomach drop half an inch before he even opened his mouth again. “Is this a joke?”“No, it’s…”“A fucking Performance Improvement Plan I would get, but this…” The dispatcher grunted loud as his scowl deepened. “This is a performance cut plan.”“It’s about streamlining the roster.” Blonde Blazer leaned forward in her chair as she cushioned her words, smile struggling harder to find a place on her face. “About setting achievable standards for the probationary tiers. Just… just clarifying expectations, honestly. We’re giving them a target to aim for, Chase.”“You’re setting up a firing line and aiming at them.”“It’s a metric.”“It’s re-tar-ded.” “Here we go with that word again.” Blazer raised a blue-gloved hand over her face, barely resisting the urge to drag it down. “You know you can’t say that.”“Don’t you start on me with that, blondie. You’re the one putting a bunch of desperate people in competition with each other."
"That's not—" Blazer almost licked her lips."Mandy." Just her name.Her name and nothing else, spoken quietly, somehow did ten times more work than if he'd shouted it as the young woman sat there like she wasn’t his boss. “Mandy, you know what desperate idiots — especially idiots on this level — do when you put 'em in competition? They do idiot shit. Competitively." A dry huff left Chase’s lips, not even close to a laugh. "You're not motivating nobody here, kid."
"The budget is real, Chase."
“...to who?” One white eyebrow rose over those glasses. “‘Cause I got the feeling if I do some digging in Accounting, they’ll tell me different.”“...okay, our budget is being pressed on by the board.”“There we go.” Chase clicked his tongue, the old-looking man nodding his head. “Some honesty here, finally.”
“The runway is not exactly infinite here. I promised results by the end of Quarter 2 and I can accept that…” Blonde Blazer tilted her head as she tried to work her words over, eyes closing for a moment as anything better failed her “...that maybe, it was a little optimistic of me to make that claim.”“Oh, ya think?”I should have, yes. “Either way,” the heroine bit down a sigh, “Roth wants results by the start of Q4, and if we don’t show upward mobility in the Z-Team’s closure rates, the board might start to view Torrance as a liability.”“So, we lose our funding because they don’t know what the job looks like.”“...essentially. Look, Chase I don’t get to just—" Breathe. Slow down. "I don't have the luxury of hoping this fixes itself anymore and Robert might be doing a great job but a great first day is still only that.""The board wants numbers." Chase's mustache twitched, expression going as bitter as his coffee before the consultant swallowed both down as the mug lowered from his lips. "Numbers don't bleed on the carpet, sweetheart. People do."
I know that. But who’s gonna clean up the blood, Chase? Obviously she knew that, considering she'd been the one mopping up after Flambae's little parking-meter incident, she'd been the one in a meeting with LAPD after Prism set that drunk’s hair on fire for slapping her ass. Who did they think had to deal with that gym’s angry phone calls over suspicions Visi had been lurking in their sauna?And that didn’t even get into the sexual assault allegation from Punch Up was already on her desk last week from a criminal lawyer, too. Sure, any competent judge would throw the thing out but she didn't need —
Her forehead found her palm before she caught herself doing it, elbow braced on the desk. "The team's out of control."
“Tell me something I don’t know.”“I’m telling you that I might not agree with this, but I’m not going to deny that they need a little push to force them to figure out if they want to do this, Chase.” She breathed out slow, eyes on the man across from her. “They need something that puts pressure on th-”“Mandy, pressure only works…” The dispatcher cut in, watching her over the rim of his mug “...If the container ain't already cracked and these are some crackheads we’re dealing with.”
That white head of hair dipped forward. “Literally, with Sonar’s bat-ass.”Mandy swallowed the dry copper taste at the back of her throat, silence stretching out under the hum of the AC unit before she finally found an answer. “...I know.”"Do you, though?"
"I know, Chase."
He let that sit with a hum of his own, the thirty-nine year old man finding the patience of his ninety-year-old face as he shifted his weight. “The new kid…”Blue eyes blinked up at the man. “What about him?”“Sky…” Chase shifted his weight, yellow sweater bunching at the collar as he raised his mug again. “He know he's exempt from this?""I'm going to tell him." She reached for the folder again. "Today.”Chase's mug stopped halfway to his mouth. “...when?”
"Well, I was planning to announce it in front of the team, so there's no confusion abo—"
"That." The mug came down hard enough that coffee sloshed onto the manila, a ring of brown blooming over the edge and onto the wood. "Is the dumbest shit I have heard today. And you are lucky — lucky — it is six fucking A.M."
Blazer sat up straighter, a sigh almost leaving her. "I want them to know I'm—”“These assholes don’t care what you want.“—Not cutting the new guy his second day on the job, Chase!” Mandy barelled through the interjection, as if speaking faster and louder would make her point. “It shows f-”“I swear to god, if you say something dumb like fairness!”“What else would you call it then?” She grit her teeth with nothing else to say, the old-looking man opposite her simply staring at her like it was somehow her first day. “I’m trying to play with an open hand here!”
"And that open hand still looks rigged.” Chase leaned forward in his chair, those heavy-lidded eyes on her the entire time “That's it. That's the whole message they walking away with.”
Mandy’s mouth opened only for nothing to come out.
“You put a new face in a room full of felons, and then you tell those felons he’s got a free pass and their heads are on the block.” The dispatcher tutted his tongue, head shaking from side to side. "You’re too smart for this." “I think they’ll take it like adults.” The lie tasted bitter as soon as she said it.“You’re too smart…” Chase's voice hadn't gotten any louder. If anything it had gone softer, and that was worse. "Too damn smart to be this surprised when people act like people, Mandy."
Mandy pulled a breath in through her nose, eyes closed before she finally spoke up again. “I don’t exactly have better options. Just one story I'm allowed to tell corporate about why any of this is fixable, and it's this one."
"You got other options."
"Then tell me what they are." Her hands gripped the edge of the desk. "Genuinely. I would love to hear it."
“For one…” Chase looked at her for a long moment, the man simply sighing instead of saying something as harsh or cutting as usual. "Stop pretending that room is a team."
He stood before she could respond to it, mug in hand and coffee ring drying into her paperwork as the door clicked shut soft behind him.
Chase’s exit left the office quiet.
Stop pretending… Blonde Blazer sat alone as the clock ticked over to 6:05, the first two words repeating in her head.