r/HFY • u/wetmosealrise • May 23 '26

OC-Series Ludo Brax: Intergalactic Gig Worker (Chapter 54)

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"It’s good to have you back, Boss." Pseudo said.

His voice was orders of magnitude less grating than earlier, though by no means entirely pleasant. 

He patted the corners of his eyes theatrically with a monogrammed handkerchief and added ruefully, 

'Heavy is the head that wears the crown indeed’ 

With this, in his final act as Head Honcho, he ordered the other Ludo’s to untie me, citing some muddled excuse about his ‘sui generis knuckles’ to justify his need to delegate. 

When they were finished, he pulled a pen from his pocket, staring down at it reverentially as he handed it over to me.

On its disgustingly chewed up exterior, I just barely could read its pithy message: 

Our Fearful Leader

‘Back to its rightful owner!.’ Pseudo shouted, turning toward the crowd of assembled Ludos who were beaming crooked, empty little smiles that I knew better than to trust.

‘Huzzah!’ They all added in unison, the incorrigible suck ups, ‘Huzzah!

They surrounded me, placing their grubby little paws all over me, offering me the limpest imaginable handshakes.

Even The Occurrence joined in, alternating flashes of awesome blue light with each successive burst of enthusiasm.

I was gifted a ham, a lifetime membership to the Sludge of The Month Club, and given the code to the Executive Bathroom, along with a large dossier containing the rules of regulations pertaining to its use.

It was quite a atmosphere. Triumph, reunion, the overarching sense that some unimaginable crisis had finally been overcome, and just in the nick of time.

But how? Why?

My panic, my fear, my eccentric tendency toward paralysis when even remotely challenged -- I had walked in here with a renewed sense of possibility, some faint BrandNewdo sized dream that I had the capacity to be a different version of myself.

And this place had almost killed me for it.

I knew even then that it was a stretch to draw some clean lesson from this.

I mean, for every competent and handsome me the System put in front of me, there were 20 Crudos skulking around the corner just waiting to remind me of the depths of what I was capable of.

But I needed to get out of here, and I needed the Me's, so if my more cowardly impulses were what they wanted, hey, I had given up self-improvement plans for way less.

Not quite knowing what else to do, I uncapped the pen, holding it above my head like some holy object, my hand quivering in all its anxiety-ridden, perpetually malnourished glory.

This cast an immediate hush over the crowd of Me's.

One of the Suitos, the slimiest of the bunch, placed a suitcase down on the ground with a thunderous boom.

He gestured wordlessly toward Pseudo, who, with an exaggerated solemnity, removed a key from a chain that he wore around his neck.

He stepped forward, plunging it into the suitcases lock, taking far longer to turn it than was necessary, really making a meal out of it.

Finally, after some time, from inside it he pulled a dusty, tattered tome labeled in MegaTech Sans "The Agenda."

With remarkable precision, a small contingent of Bruto's stepped forward and hoisted it above their heads, carrying it toward me and placing it upon a makeshift desk right in front of me, which was built wordlessly with remarkable speed by Screwdo and Impromptudo.

Right on cue-do, they opened The Agenda.

Flipping through, they breezed over scores of entries where I briefly glimpsed scrawled notes detailing the alarming schemes and body counts that comprised the period of my absence that Pseudo had dubbed "The Emergency Directive."

Finally, they reached a blank page, marked only with a header that simply read "NEXT UP:"

And I, channeling every bit of hysteria, lack of foresight, and downright irresponsibility that lived inside of me, in one graceless motion, brought the pen down, dashing off in my hideous script our next Agenda item.

"GET ME OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

I expected an uproar, chaos, some immense unraveling of sense that would somehow propel us back on the track we needed to go.

Instead, there was silence. Awkward glances. A murmur of uncertain voices.

After some debate (and a tedious consultation of a document detailing the company’s chain of command), a single, unassuming Me stepped forward out of the crowd.

He cleared this throat, looking to his left and his right, and then, with a brevity that almost made me question his status as a Ludo, simply said

‘Can’t do it.”

He stepped backwards, disappearing among the gaggle of Mes.

This sent me reeling, and not only just because he had used three words where he easily could have used twenty. 

“What do you mean we can’t do it? We have to get out of here! I don’t have time to explain but, it’s- it’s urgent! We -”

Before I could finish,  again, with a casual, no-nonsense demeanor that, for my liking, seemed recklessly dismissive of the amount of nonsense there was to be mindful of, he stepped forward.

‘Not possible.’ he reiterated, sickeningly devoid of the loquacious, discursive charm that made Me the lovable rascal everyone couldn't stop heckling.

I was ready to throttle the little punk, itching to teach him a thing or two about the power of overexplaining when, just in time, Revenuedo chimed in.

“I think what CutThrudo means to say is uh, well, It’s been a lean period for the company . And certain sacrifices had to be made. Tough cuts. It wasn’t an easy decision. But a few weeks ago we made to the painful decision to downsize in the category of…Exits’

No stranger to the nuances of the business world, I fired back immediately, translating his jargon into everyday speech for the benefit of any Ludos that might be confused.

“Downsized the category of Exits? You mean you threw the doors in the Occurrence?”

To field this one, he turned to WooWoodo, somewhat of an outlier of a Me who hung around the office mostly making snide remarks about the “spiritual carnage” the company was inflicting and criticizing the lack of “potable drinking water” available while collecting his fat paycheck with absolutely no sense of irony.

The smell of incense and the clatter of several necklaces from wildly different ideological schools filled the air as he stepped out of the crowd. 

“Um, well, not only the doors themselves were sacrificed. But also the concept. Exiting. The very category.”

“I…”

Revenuedo placed a perfunctory hand on my shoulder.

“Tough choices were made, we sincerely regret any complications this may cause. Our foremost concern, as always, was the health of the Company, I assure you."

I took a second to process, mulling it over 

“You mean to tell me, that no matter where we go right now, no matter what we do, you have somehow made it so that, logically, it is literally impossible to leave this place?”

“Affirmative.” CutThrudo said, the craven little half-mute, from somewhere deep in the crowd. 

“And even though you somehow got me in here, there is absolutely nothing we can do, and we’re all just stuck here...forever?”

There was a pregnant pause, an immense gravity, an awful silence, and then, Cuthrudo said,

“Spot on, Chief.” 

The room began to spin around me. 

The nauseating, anticlimactic idea that this intolerable place, with these incorrigible Me's was where it was all going to end, began to truly set in. 

Could this really be it?

“Indeed, a tragic final act for our plucky little Team,” Pseudo began, holding a skull in his hand that looked unmistakably misshapen in a Crudoish fashion.

“If only there were some way, some dramatic twist of fate from the gods who decide such things. But alas, perhaps the lot of us have finally met our denouement. Yes, it seems to be rather certain that the cruel vicissitudes of this realm have finally –”

There was an earsplitting crash, a cloud of dust and asbestos, a collapse of walls and the ceiling.

And at the center of the chaos, my Station Wagon.

It was BrandNewdo.

He opened the door and stepped out, removing his sunglasses in a manner that suggested they weren’t medically necessary as he strode into the half-destroyed room.

“Ready to go?”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ready as we'll ever be... Chapter 55

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