Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
DAX
“Dax! Dax, come here!”
Dax had been reading a journal article about some fascinating new research into aquatic exercise and magic healing on his phone while on the way to his office when he heard someone calling his name.
He looked up with a frown, scanning the room until he noticed the receptionist, Zeraphine, waving at him frantically.
He turned, heading her direction, and leaned in close when she did.
“That new guy is still here!” she hissed. “I’m pretty sure it’s been three days! I don’t even think he’s showered yet!”
He pulled a face. That wouldn’t be pleasant if it were true. But he had to ask, “Which new guy? There are like three.”
She pointed a finger toward an area of the research floor cordoned off with some temporary walls. Dax sighed. He knew that researcher. The poor man was going to work himself to death if he wasn’t careful.
“I’ll talk to him. Thank you, Zeraphine. How’s your sister’s baby?”
She brightened, immediately grabbing her phone to show the picture of the egg that was nestled in its nest, surrounded by pillows. “I think it’ll hatch soon. It’s been wiggling more. She promised to call me when it happened.”
Zeraphine’s sister, Saryna, was a researcher in their division and was currently on maternity leave. She and Dax were cordial but not friendly enough to share numbers, so he got all his updates from Zeraphine, who was a proud aunty already and excited to share pictures whenever she had the chance.
“Let me know when it happens. We can send something from the office.”
She beamed and returned her attention to her work as he headed toward the temporary office Louis had claimed as his space.
He was still new, having only been hired a month prior during the mass hire after the coup upstairs, and while nice enough, he was sort of an easily distracted fellow when he was working on a project and sometimes forgot the basics like eating and sleeping.
With a polite knock on the wall to signal his arrival, Dax pushed it aside to reveal the researcher doing his best not to nod off on his work.
He had a screwdriver in his hand, but his head kept drooping, and Dax was pretty sure he would fall asleep face-first on top of his device if Dax didn’t step in.
Using both tentacles and hands, he pulled the human away, shushing him when Louis startled and blinked up at him sleepily. “Dax? What’s happening?”
“You need a nap, Louis. You’re going to break the device if you don’t get some rest, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?”
Louis looked at the device, then back at Dax, still confused. The poor man was exhausted.
“Louis Dubois, you'd better have a good excuse for changing your mind about the tenancy!” Taron demanded, stepping around the wall with a scowl on his face. He came up short when he noticed Dax holding a bleary-eyed Louis, who still hadn’t woken up enough to stand on his own feet yet.
Dax could just see Taron jumping to the wrong idea and changed the subject to distract the shapeshifter. “What tenancy?”
Taron blinked, confused for a moment, before remembering his purpose. He pointed an accusing finger at Louis. “He signed up for the Residential Pilot Program and then didn’t show up on move-in day! We can’t get a decent idea of how the program works if people don’t show up, Louis!”
Louis’s brows furrowed tightly. “That’s not until next week.”
Taron squawked in protest, but Dax knew Louis well enough by now to recognize the look on his face. “Louis, what day is it?”
Louis looked back up at him, then down at the grip of Dax’s tentacles around his waist. “Dax? What are you doing here? We don’t have a project together, do we?”
He sighed. The poor man was delirious. Deciding it was best to move things along so Louis could get some rest, he turned to Taron.
“He probably forgot. I don’t think it was malicious.
Can you get a fae escort to bring him home?
He’s exhausted, and according to reception, he’s been here for three days straight. ”
Which meant he was here on Friday, likely worked through his move-in day to his new home, and was still here Monday morning.
Dax seriously hoped someone got through to him soon.
He didn’t think humans could get sleeprot, but they were significantly more prone to illness than supes were, and lack of sleep wouldn’t help in that regard.
A diet of only break room snacks wouldn’t help much either.
Taron finally seemed to realize what was happening.
He frowned, studying Louis closely, then pulled out his phone, putting it to his ear.
“Kian, my dear friend. I could use a favor.” He paused, then snorted.
“Not that kind of favor. I’m not in need of a temp right now.
I need a portal. One of the researchers in your mate’s division is overworked and too tired to remember what day it is.
He needs a portal home.” He listened for a moment longer before saying his goodbye and tucking the phone away again.
“He’ll be down in a minute. What was he doing when you found him? ”
“Falling asleep on his project,” Dax explained with mild amusement. Now that he knew Louis would be taken care of, he could see the humor in the situation. He’d never seen someone falling asleep sitting up before.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” Louis protested, though the words were slurred from exhaustion. Dax chose to ignore him, snatching the screwdriver away and putting it on the table next to Louis’s work.
It took some doing, once Louis was alert enough to realize people were trying to get him to go home and sleep, he protested vehemently, but with Dax, Taron, and Kian manhandling him, they managed to get him through the portal and into a room with sun-blocking curtains and a soft bed.
Dax barely put him onto the surface before Louis was snoring.
After he was asleep, Kian was kind enough to offer a portal back, and Dax could finally get to his own projects.
He made a mental note to check in with Tanya, though.
She was the division’s staff healer and might be able to help regarding Louis.
At least hearing it from a health professional might get him to listen. The man seriously needed a keeper.
He was setting up for another test cycle of a device when the terminal he was working at suddenly started acting strange.
Pages kept popping up that he hadn’t clicked on, then closing again, the whole thing was moving glacially slowly, and he kept getting an error that disappeared too fast for him to read.
Since he knew better than to try to fix it himself, he called up to IT instead, tucking the phone between his shoulder and his ear as he wrote out the notes he’d planned on typing into the research data so he wouldn’t forget them.
“IT, this is Francine.”
“Hey, Francine, this is Dax from Medical Innovations Research. I’m having issues with a terminal I was working on, and I’m not sure what to do about it.”
“Did you submit a ticket?”
He winced. He forgot to do that. “Okay, so no I didn’t, but in my defense, the terminal doesn’t work well enough for me to get onto the system to submit one anyway.”
“You can submit a ticket from any computer,” she replied, thankfully sounding amused and not annoyed by his blunder. “That’s fine. I can help with that part. What seems to be the issue?”
He described what the terminal was doing and what he had been doing at the time when it’d started going hinky.
Francine hummed, and he could hear the clack of her keyboard in the background before she spoke.
“That could be a cyber security issue. I’m going to CC their team when I send this ticket in, just in case.
Between you and me, the head of their department is terrifying, and I don’t want to end up having to take one of those several hours long courses she demands from anyone who fails one of her little tests. ”
That sounded awful, and he was suddenly a little concerned about sending the ticket in. He glanced at the screen again just in time for the entire system to lock down. His shoulders slumped. There was no way he could fix this on his own.
“Alright. About how long will it be?”
“Well, we’re a little busy up here right now, but the cyber security team is usually pretty quick to respond to tickets we escalate to them. Give it twenty minutes?”
“Sure.”
She hung up, and he went looking for a laptop to work on since he’d accidentally left his at home. By the time he’d found one he could borrow and made it back to his workstation, an unfamiliar face was there, already poking around the glitching terminal.
“Uh, hey there,” he greeted.
The man, human by the looks of him, glanced up from where he’d been squatting by the terminal tower. He was a pretty man with thick black hair, honey colored skin, and serious dark brown eyes. When he stood, he gestured to the terminal, skipping introductions in favor of focusing on his work.
“We got a ticket saying there was an issue with this station. Is it yours?”
Dax noticed a hint of an accent he couldn’t place, but pushed the thought aside to answer the question. He didn’t want to get sidetracked right now. “Yeah. I was working on inputting some data in preparation for another test cycle when it started acting strange.”
“Does anyone else have access to it?”
He shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t think so. We’re assigned workstations when we start on experiments. This spot is mine for at least the next month.”
They’d attempted permanent workstations at one point, but the size of the workstation needed depended entirely on the research you were working on.
This was one of the smaller stations because most of his actual experimentation was in the water at one of Spellbound’s marine field testing facilities, but he’d move stations if he was invited to work on something bigger in the main office.
No one wanted to mess up someone else’s experiments so they usually steered clear of workstations they weren’t assigned to just to prevent any accidents.
“Okay, I’m going to run through some tests, see if I can figure out what’s going on. If there’s a security risk, we may need to pull the terminal and give you a temporary one until we can get it fixed.”
Dax felt the blood drain from his face. “But… you’ll do everything you can not to, right? I was starting on a new cycle, sure, but I’m still collecting data from another cycle. Will I lose all that data?”
From the way the man’s face twisted, he was trying not to be the bearer of bad news. “I’ll do what I can to prevent any loss of data. Did you back it up? Is it possible to transfer where the information is going for now while I work on it?”
“Without access to the station, I’m not sure,” he replied, trying not to pout.
He wasn’t great with tech. He’d probably survive with interrupted data, but he’d rather not.
He needed all of it to get a full picture of what to look for in the second cycle.
And they were all more careful about backing things up online after the coup.
He’d submitted a request to get an external drive from IT, but they were busy and hadn’t gotten back to him yet.
The man’s brow furrowed, and he glanced between the terminal and Dax again. “Let me just take a look. If I need to, I’ll escalate this to my bosses, see if one of them can at least get you your data before we have to take any drastic measures.”