Office Humiliation (The Existential Kind), Vanishing Cowboys, and a Holographic Hellscape That Just Ruined Casual Friday.
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Author Note: Joe's having a rough day at the office. Not only has his favorite cowboy gone missing, but reality itself seems to have taken a rather unpleasant detour. Get ready for bureaucratic wings, apocalyptic holograms, and the chilling realization that "unprecedented" is never a good sign.
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Joe hummed a low, tuneless melody under his breath, a quiet rhythm born not out of creativity, but necessity—a subconscious tether to something ordinary in a moment that felt anything but. The silence in his office pressed in on him, heavy and watchful. The hum helped him ignore it, just a little.
He sat still, elbows resting on the dark, polished wood of his desk, his eyes locked on the gentle glow of his computer screen. Lines of code or documents he had reviewed countless times flickered faintly, offering no new information, yet he stared anyway. Not out of focus—but out of fear. The kind that didn't scream or startle, but gnawed steadily from within. A quiet, aching dread.
Joe brought his coffee mug to his lips, fingers curling around the warm ceramic like it was an anchor. The coffee was strong, dark, and bitter—the way he usually liked it. But today, it tasted off. Not because the brew had changed, but because he had. He took a measured sip, letting the liquid scald his tongue slightly, hoping it would shock him into feeling grounded again. It didn't.
Setting the mug down with a dull clink, he turned his head towards the window. Outside, the city pulsed with life—cars honking in the distance, glass towers catching the dull light of the late afternoon. A familiar view. But today, it didn't comfort him. His eyes drifted, unfocused, and his reflection stared back faintly in the glass. The man in the window looked like him but older—worn down by knowledge he hadn't wanted, by truths he couldn't shake.
His right hand reached out, slowly and without command, pressing down on the edge of the desk. His fingers trembled, just enough for him to notice. Just enough to remind him that the unease he felt wasn't imagined. It was real. Physical. Present.
Something was wrong.
The magical energy he'd been monitoring—a specific presence, subtle but distinct—had begun to spike in ways that didn't make sense. It wasn't just stronger; it was… angry. Chaotic. Alive in a way that felt unnatural. His pulse quickened.
Joe's lips thinned into a hard line as he inhaled through his nose, trying to reason with the logic that had once made him feel invincible. But magic rarely obeyed logic, not when it evolved beyond expectation.
Bonny's signature—his unique magical frequency—had vanished.
It had always been there, faint but traceable, like a familiar heartbeat in a crowded room. Joe had relied on it, not only for tracking Bonny but as a reassurance that he was still out there, still surviving, still a part of the plan.
But now it was gone. Not weakened—erased.
Joe swallowed hard, the knot in his chest twisting tighter. Two possibilities warred for dominance in his mind, each as terrifying as the other.
Either Bonny was dead, his essence dispersed back into the ether where no magic could find him. Or… worse—he was trapped inside a Mundus Fictus.
A fabricated reality. A pocket dimension designed to contain and isolate. Inescapable to anyone without direct knowledge of its architecture. If that was the case, Bonny was alive, but unreachable. Lost. And time inside such constructs did not move like time outside. He could be gone for minutes here, but live years in there—or vice versa.
Joe leaned back slowly in his chair, eyes fixed again on the screen, though he no longer saw it. His fingers dug into the arms of the chair, the hum in his throat dying out. The silence returned, this time with finality. The threat he had long prepared for wasn't coming.
It had already arrived.
"It's Bonny," Joe murmured, the name slipping from his lips like a fragile prayer—spoken not for truth, but for comfort. It was barely more than a breath, yet it carried the full weight of his dread. He wasn't trying to convince anyone else; there was no one else in the room. He was trying to convince himself.
The silence that followed stretched too long, and he hated the way his voice sounded in the still air—thin, uncertain. Hollow. He blinked slowly and tried to conjure the image of Bonny: his oldest comrade, the most battle-worn witch hunter he'd ever known. A man who'd fought monsters in both form and shadow. A man who had once walked through a collapsing hexed battlefield with a shattered arm and still carried three wounded allies on his back.
"He can do this," Joe said again, louder this time. But even as the words formed, they felt like a lie. The certainty that used to come so easily when speaking of Bonny now wavered beneath the weight of this magical silence. His chest tightened. He hated the fear inching in—quiet and uninvited—gnawing at the edges of his logic, his faith.
Bonny had always been the one who made the impossible look ordinary. He had a talent for navigating chaos with a calm that bordered on supernatural, always two steps ahead of any spell, any ambush. Joe remembered the way Bonny would stand still during the eye of the storm, as if the world paused just for him. That memory, once a comfort, now felt distant—blurred, like something from another life.
Just as Joe began to wrangle his spiraling thoughts into something resembling control, the soft click of the office door latch echoed through the room. It wasn't loud, but in that moment of mental turbulence, it sounded like thunder. He flinched slightly. His gaze lifted as the door opened and Zara stepped inside.
At first glance, Zara was a study in composed elegance. Every detail of her appearance spoke of precision and discipline. Her short black hair was parted with mathematical accuracy, each strand behaving exactly as intended, the glossy sheen catching the overhead light. Her face, framed in sharp lines, wore a neutral expression—not cold, but unreadable.
She wore a crisp white blouse, its collar stiff and neat, pressing against her neck with the kind of formality that never felt overdone on her. A black scarf was tied tight like a tie, symmetrical and flawless. It hinted at subtle authority, not ostentatious, but deeply intentional. Over that, she wore a fitted black blazer that hugged her slender frame and suggested both style and structure. Her black skirt tapered smoothly over her hips, ending just above the knee, offering the slightest glimpse of her legs, sheathed in sheer black nylons. Every part of her attire had been chosen, not just worn.
Polished black loafers completed the look—practical, quiet, and gleaming enough to reflect the dim lights overhead. She walked with the soundless grace of someone who had mastered their space, her presence both grounding and jarringly out of place in the magical storm Joe found himself caught in.
Zara didn't seem to belong to the world of witches and shadowed secrets—not truly. She seems to belonged to routine, to files stacked in order, to meetings scheduled down to the minute. She was order incarnate. But in that moment, as she stood in the threshold of his office, she might as well have walked into another reality—his reality.
And Joe, for the first time in a long while, wasn't sure he could keep that world from breaking through.
⁕
She would have easily blended into the mundane backdrop of any typical corporate space—the tidy desk, the soft hum of electronics, the endless shuffle of papers and distant voices. Her sharply tailored attire and composed expression suggested a woman rooted firmly in the logic and routine of daily office life. To the casual observer, she was simply another professional in a world built on schedules and spreadsheets.
But that illusion unraveled the moment you looked a little closer.
From her back extended a pair of wings—stunning, otherworldly, and wholly impossible by any standard of human anatomy. They didn't just exist; they shimmered, as though sculpted from moonlight itself and edged with strands no thicker than breath. The wings caught the faint overhead light and refracted it in soft, shifting hues—silver, lavender, faint gold—each flicker like a memory half-remembered. The patterns on them were so delicate, so impossibly intricate, that they resembled stained glass spun by dreams. And they moved—not stiffly or robotically, but with a gentle, constant vibration, emitting a sound so faint it might have been imagined: a soft, high-pitched hum like a lullaby whispered by the wind.
Zara hovered momentarily in the open doorway, suspended just above the floor. There was no strain in her expression, no tension in her limbs. Her flight wasn't boastful—it was effortless, like she was doing something as natural as taking a breath. The office air stirred slightly around her, catching the loose edges of papers on Joe's desk, fluttering them like restless birds. And then, with a subtle tilt of her shoulders, she descended.
Her landing was quiet. Graceful. Her feet touched the ground with the weightlessness of a feather settling after a long fall. She adjusted her stance without a sound, smoothing the front of her blazer, her expression never shifting from its calm neutrality.
Joe watched the entire display with an exhausted kind of fondness, the corners of his mouth twitching into the ghost of a smile. He leaned back in his chair, one brow arched in a way that suggested this was far from the first time she'd made such an entrance.
"Zara," he said, his voice low and dry with a note of weary amusement. "What did I tell you about flying inside the office?"
It wasn't a reprimand—not really. More like a rhetorical nudge, a well-worn line exchanged out of habit than expectation. He knew her too well to believe it would stop her. She knew him too well to pretend she hadn't heard it before. But the routine of it—the familiarity—grounded them both in the moment.
In a world unraveling at its magical seams, some rules, no matter how small, still had the power to anchor reality.
"My apologies, sir," Zara said quietly, her voice unusually soft, yet laced with an edge of urgency that didn't quite match her usual composed tone. Her shoes made no sound as she stepped onto the thick carpet, the static hum of the office the only noise filling the silence between them. She moved closer, her posture stiff—controlled, but barely.
Joe noticed the change immediately. Gone was the teasing sparkle that usually lit up her dark eyes, the playful quirk of her lips that often accompanied her casual defiance of office decorum. Instead, there was a tightness to her expression, an almost haunted look creeping across her face that unsettled him more than the silence itself.
"You have to see this," she said, and extended a sleek, metallic tablet toward him. Her hand, though steady at first glance, trembled just enough to betray the undercurrent of alarm running through her. It wasn't the kind of fear you expressed with words—it was the kind that buried itself in small, unconscious movements. The kind that set the body on edge before the mind caught up.
Joe shifted in his leather chair, the creak of it unnaturally loud in the stillness of the room. His eyes flicked from the device to Zara's face, and for a moment, he didn't reach for the tablet. He just looked at her—studied the way she stood, the way her jaw clenched, the slight flutter of her wings now held still behind her. Whatever she'd seen, it had rattled her.
That alone was enough to make his chest tighten.
Then, slowly, he took the tablet from her outstretched hand. The cool touch of the metal registered instantly against the warmth of his skin, but the real jolt came from the heaviness settling in his gut. He braced himself.
Zara stepped to the side and, with a smooth swipe of her finger across the screen, activated the device. A soft, digital chime rang out, and almost immediately, the room changed. The walls of the office remained, but the space between them warped as a large holographic display flickered into being—suspended light and motion forming a massive image in front of their desks.
It filled the room.
Joe's breath caught in his throat.
"What is that?" he asked, though the question emerged more as an exhale than a sentence. His voice cracked slightly at the edges, disbelief weighing it down. His eyes widened, locked on the shifting scene before them, and his shoulders drew inward, bracing instinctively for something his mind hadn't yet processed.
Before them hung a vision of chaos—a swirling vortex of reality, twisted and broken. Shapes moved within it, but they were too distorted, their outlines melting into the vibrant whirl of colors and fractured light. The center of the vortex pulsed rhythmically, as if it had a heartbeat of its own—one that didn't belong to this world. The energy that radiated from it felt wrong. It wasn't just foreign; it was other. Alien in the purest sense of the word.
He couldn't look away. And he couldn't shake the cold hand of dread slowly tightening around his spine.
"The largest Mundus Fictus ever recorded in modern times," Zara replied, her voice steady, but there was a trace of awe threading through it—a quiet, reverent fear that betrayed her internal struggle to remain composed. She was trained for moments like this, yet even now, with her back straight and her expression schooled, Joe could feel the undercurrent of dread humming beneath her words.
Though her tone remained clipped and professional, a practiced mask for chaotic moments, Joe wasn't fooled. Years of working together had attuned him to the subtleties in her voice—the slight hitch in her breath, the way her fingers unconsciously curled against the edge of the tablet. There was urgency here. Not just the alarm of something dangerous, but the silent agreement between them that they were standing at the edge of something unprecedented.
"Isn't this…?" Joe's voice faltered as he leaned forward, his eyes scanning the warped terrain displayed across the holographic interface. His breath caught in his throat. Shapes emerged—buildings and bridges he recognized—but they were broken, bent into grotesque, almost surreal silhouettes. The familiar had become monstrous. His mind wrestled to make sense of the impossible geometry, his chest tightening as pieces clicked together.
"Yes, sir," Zara said softly, confirming what he didn't want to believe. Her eyes met his, and in that gaze was something raw—shared horror, unspoken questions, and the quiet dread of knowing what this truly meant. "I'm afraid so. The energy signature is unmistakable. It's centered in Riverdale."
The name fell like a stone into the room, crashing through whatever fragile calm Joe had managed to hold onto.
Riverdale.
The word echoed in his thoughts, conjuring memories both recent and distant—of streets lined with stonework, of crowded market stalls, of laughter echoing through the alleys. A place once alive, grounded in reality, now twisted into a nightmare—an illusion so vast and complex it had rewritten the very physics of the space it consumed.
His stomach churned, a fresh wave of nausea and fear rising as the implications took root. This wasn't just an anomaly. It was a message. A warning. A trap.
"And any news from Bonny?" he asked, his voice rough and uneven, strained with emotion. It took effort to speak the name. Something about saying it aloud made the situation feel heavier, more real. Bonny—the man he'd known for decades, the man who had stared down death more times than anyone should—was somewhere in that illusion. Or worse.
Zara's silence was deafening.
She didn't need to speak. Her eyes told him everything. No contact. No sign. Not even a flicker on their magical tracking systems. And that absence, that void where Bonny's unmistakable magical presence had always glowed like a lighthouse through fog—it terrified him more than anything.
Joe swallowed hard, trying to ignore the cold sweat beading on the back of his neck. The image on the screen, with all its impossible swirls and jagged distortions, seemed to pulse in rhythm with his heartbeat. Fast. Erratic.
Bonny was in there. And if they didn't act soon—if they didn't understand what they were dealing with—then he might not be coming back.
"No, sir," Zara finally spoke, her voice barely above a whisper, tinged with a quiet sorrow that was impossible to hide. There was no calculation in her tone now—only the weary honesty of someone who knew the limits of even the most advanced magic and technology.
"With a Mundus Fictus of this magnitude," she continued slowly, carefully choosing each word as though afraid of what they meant, "its tendrils of warped reality stretch far deeper than we've ever documented. It's not just an illusion or a barrier anymore—it's a complete severance. The laws of our world don't apply within its bounds. Any form of magical trace, signal, or conventional communication… it's all absorbed, reshaped, or completely lost. There's no reaching in from the outside."
She paused, her hand unconsciously tightening around the tablet as if holding on to the last thread of hope.
"We won't be able to pierce its veil until someone inside finds a way to fracture it—until someone can weaken its core from within. And even that… might not be enough." Her eyes met Joe's, the moment stretching between them like a quiet funeral bell tolling. Her words hung in the air, heavy and final, the weight of them sinking into the silence that followed.
It wasn't just a logistical nightmare. It was isolation—true and merciless. Bonny, a man forged in fire and battle, could very well be stranded in a shifting prison of magical design, his reality rewritten, his very essence tested in ways Joe couldn't begin to imagine. And the worst part was the helplessness, the cold fact that no spell, no amount of strategy or power, could bridge that divide—not from here.
"From the sheer scale of these fluctuations… the raw magical energy radiating from it… and its unprecedented size," Joe murmured aloud, the words escaping him slowly, each one measured and heavy with realization. His brows knit together in concentration as his eyes stayed locked on the mesmerizing chaos swirling within the holographic display. The twisting storm of unnatural color and motion seemed to breathe, alive and growing. "The instigator must be channeling a truly tremendous amount of magic… It's unsustainable."
He leaned back in his chair, exhaling through his nose, his fingers tightening around the armrests. "No matter who they are," he continued, his voice thick with the weight of responsibility, "no matter how powerful or reckless, they're eventually going to deplete their reserves. You can't cheat the limits forever."
It was a rational analysis, and yet the comfort it offered was thin—hollow, even. Logic held little power against the image of a warped world consuming itself from within. Joe knew the laws of magic as well as anyone, but what stared back at him wasn't just a magical anomaly. It was an omen. A warning. And maybe even a declaration of war.
Turning toward Zara, his eyes now shadowed with unease, he asked, "Have you contacted the coven?" The words carried a desperate edge, a search for support beyond their walls. The witches—ancient, secretive, and powerful—had been allies in times of magical crisis before. Perhaps they held some knowledge, some artifact, some buried wisdom that could give them a path forward.
"Yes, sir," Zara answered without hesitation, her posture straightening slightly, her expression sharpening. There was something steely in her gaze now, a grim resolve. "They've denied any contact, any association whatsoever with the individual responsible for this… abomination." Her voice dipped on that final word, as if even speaking it tasted wrong. "But they didn't stop there. Given the scope of the threat, they've already issued a Class-One extermination order. Immediate effect."
Joe's shoulders sank slightly at the response. Swift. Cold. Ruthless. The coven didn't deal in hesitation, and the fact they had responded so aggressively meant one thing—they were scared. That alone said more than their words ever could.
"Give it five more minutes," he said suddenly, the words almost a plea masked in command. His voice was low but firm, unshakable on the surface, but threaded with something raw underneath.
He wasn't ready to let go. Not yet. Not while there was still the faintest chance that Bonny, against all odds, might break through—might reach out and remind them that he was still alive.
"But sir, any longer and the normals—" Zara started, her voice tight with worry, eyes flicking toward the hologram that still displayed the roiling chaos beyond their walls. There was a sharp tension in her words, an urgent reminder that the human population—blissfully unaware of the magical storm descending upon them—might already be caught in the creeping edge of disaster.
Her concern wasn't misplaced. The ripple effect of a Mundus Fictus that size wouldn't be limited to magical constructs or practitioners alone. Reality itself bent and twisted inside those zones, pulling at the seams of physics, perception, and even memory. It wouldn't take long before the normals—people with no magic and no understanding—began to suffer. Some might hallucinate. Others might vanish without a trace, swallowed whole by illusions they couldn't even name.
"I said five more minutes!" Joe snapped, the words bursting from his throat like a dam breaking. His voice, usually composed and clipped, cracked with a fierce intensity that silenced the room. Beneath his command, there was something unmistakable—desperation. A raw and trembling hope that refused to die, no matter how illogical it seemed.
He wasn't ready to give up. Not yet. Not without a sign. Not while Bonny—his oldest friend, his field partner, the one person he could always count on—was still out there.
And then, as if the universe itself had heard the unspoken plea, something stirred.
The antique radio on Joe's desk—an old thing with chipped dials and worn brass edges, usually kept more for nostalgia than function—sputtered and crackled to life. Static hissed through the room like the whisper of a breath in the dark. Then came the faintest voice—buried in distortion, nearly lost to the noise.
"Joe? Joe?" The voice was rough, strained, like someone speaking through clenched teeth and a wall of fire. But despite the interference, Joe knew it. Every syllable hit him like a punch to the chest.
"Bonny?" he said, almost disbelieving, his hand flying toward the radio like it might disappear if he didn't grab it fast enough. He leaned forward, heart hammering in his chest, a surge of adrenaline and relief so intense it left his hands trembling.
"Man, you won't believe what happened," Bonny's voice rasped through the static, each word struggling to make it across the interference. There was a familiar cadence to his tone, dry and laced with that trademark sarcasm, like he was trying to make light of the hell he'd just crawled out of.
Joe could almost see him—bruised, dirty, maybe a little bloodied—but still upright. Still fighting. The image sent a rush of heat to his eyes and he had to blink hard to steady himself.
"Where are you?" Joe asked, his voice dropping low, thick with emotion. His other hand hovered over the holographic control panel, already primed to call for extraction. "Just give me a location, Bonny. I'm bringing you home. Portal back to HQ, full pull-out. Say the word."
There was a pause on the other end, and then Bonny's tone shifted. Gone was the attempt at levity. What came next chilled the room to the bone.
"You better be fast, Joe," he said, his voice low and ragged. There was no bravado in it now—just honest, exhausted urgency. "She's very, very angry now."
The words dropped like stones into the silence that followed. No names were spoken. No descriptions needed. Just she. And in that single pronoun, layered with fear and reverence, Joe understood the gravity of what his friend was facing.
The static rose again, swallowing Bonny's voice as the connection wavered, but the warning lingered in the air. Joe could feel it—like a shadow stretching over the room. Whatever was inside that Mundus Fictus, whatever she was doing, Bonny had just bought them a sliver of time to act.
And that time was running out fast.
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Notes: The Riverdale Metropolitan Department of Extranormal Affairs would like to remind all personnel that humming is permitted for stress relief, but prolonged staring at inactive computer screens is considered unproductive. Furthermore, the unauthorized generation of holographic vortexes of doom will result in immediate disciplinary action. Please see HR policy 4.7b for further details on interdimensional emergencies.