I don’t think I’ve ever told you about my first day at Thotplaces Inc, but I guess that’s as good a place as any to start.

After a lengthy interview process that involved seven managers and twelve applications, I received the call on a Friday that I had been hired and was to report to work in the mailroom first thing Monday morning. As luck would have it, Monday morning was a depressing gray drizzle – the kind that seems to soak into your bones and fog your head. I didn’t care much then – I was excited. But given some distance and knowing what I know now, this was ominous foreshadowing for things to come.

So there I stood at the bus stop, watching drops gather and fall off the end of my nose and avoiding sprays of puddle water flying off passing cars. I stood there for an hour like that, until a sweet old lady reminded me that the buses didn’t run anymore. I looked up at the sign and noted with some amusement the words “No Standing”. Of course, this is a company town and the public transportation had been shut down in the budget rollbacks of ’08.

I walked the remaining nineteen blocks to the Corporate Headquarters Tower and slipped my way across the lobby floor to the reception desk. The disinterested hag of a girl behind the counter wrinkled her nose at my rain-soaked appearance when I told her my name and she pointed at the elevators without saying a word. I walked past a sign on the wall that said the mailroom was in sub-basement M (short for Mail, I guess) and took the elevator down.

Upon exiting the elevator, my first thought was that the mailroom had been relocated. There were lines of desks running down each side of the corridor as far as the eye could see, every one covered in stacks of envelopes nearly to the ceiling. The lights were mostly off, save for the handful that flickered annoyingly here and there. I wandered the stacks for several minutes, looking for signs that someone had been there in the past decade. I didn’t find any. Finally, there was a ding from the elevator and a man with a handlebar mustache and small round spectacles stepped into the room.

“I’m Garvin D. Busslepot, Mail Manager. You must be Jeremy.” He said, extending his hand. His voice was like an announcer from a 1940s radio broadcast.

“Yes, I am. Sorry I’m late.”

He didn’t reply. He just walked over to a small rusty basket on wheels and pointed to a stack of envelopes on the desk nearest us.

“Load those up and start delivering.”

I looked at the first piece, while he stood nearby watching me like a creep, and noticed the date stamp was 1976. I showed it to him.

“We haven’t had a Mailboy in a while.” He said, almost as though he were apologizing to me.

I shrugged, loaded the cart and began to deliver the envelopes.

A lot has changed since then. There’s now four other people in the mailroom with me. But, delivering 2.3 million envelopes around the Thotplaces Complex was probably the best way to really get a feel for what this place is like.

So stick with us and we’ll try to give you some sense of what it’s like around here, too.

He woke up in his bed with a massive headache. He rolled over to look at the clock and saw that it was about seven o’clock. By the amount of light that was coming in through the window, he guestimated that it was seven PM versus seven AM. He had apparently slept the entire day away. Not bad for his first day off in two weeks, and it was only . . . Tuesday right? He rolled over in the other direction on his bed and looked at the calendar from the local bank that he had hanging on the wall. It was Wednesday? He frowned slightly. What happened to Tuesday?
He pursed his lips and tried to recall what happened. The bar. That’s right, the bar on South Street, he thought to himself. After having worked about eleven days straight, working on clearing up several homicide cases, and a couple of other detectives wanted him to join them downtown to celebrate a break from fighting crime and putting away the criminal element that existed in Philadelphia. He remembered heading down the stairs from a landing on South Street, he remembered inflatable crocodiles while we he in there. Aside from that, there was something about someone from some sort of business. There was a lot of bourbon (businessmen seemed to draw their power to make high powered decisions from bourbon, based on the amount that they would drink) and then . . . cheesesteaks . . . . he thought. And now, he was home.
He slid his legs off the bed so that way his feet were touching the floor. His eyes strained to focus as his head continued to throb incessantly. He slowly stood up and felt the weight of a hangover and general world weariness sink to his feet like a rock. He slowly made his way to the bedroom, stepping over random articles of clothing as he did so. He went and looked in the mirror, peering as if trying to identify the face that was looking back at him.
The red hair on the top of his head would have streaks of grey in it if time had the ability to touch his face. The azure eyes that peered at him looked like the surface of a bottomless pool of water that had existed for many years and held hundreds of unknown secrets. His abnormally smooth skin held very few scratches or pock marks, which was surprising considering how many different adventures had brought his entire body into contact with danger.
He sighed as he did every morning when he did this little ritual. Who was he supposed to be again? Steven? No, that was back in the 1880′s. Richard? That was when he lived in England in the early 1900′s. Shamus? Yes, that’s who he was. Shamus Riordan, homicide detective for the city of Philadelphia, fifteenth precinct. What his real name was he had long since forgotten. He only truly remembered and responded to the title he had known for centuries- the Hunter.
Shamus looked one more time into the mirror, shrugged, and walked towards the kitchen to begin his day, or night as the case was. As he fumbled to make some coffee his mind wandered back to how he had gotten to this point. He was the Hunter — a loyal servant to the Conclave and fulfilling what he had been told centuries ago was his last task before he could return to his home in the mountains.