If you’d told me six months ago that I’d be sprinting through a public park at 3:17 a.m., wielding a warhammer like a mismanaged forklift, chasing a creature made of half-burned index cards and emotional trauma, I would have laughed.

  Not a normal laugh…

  A concerned laugh. The kind where you start Googling “early signs of stress-induced hallucinations” and then panic when the first five results apply.

  But here I was.

  The park was slick with dew, the air damp and metallic like the world hadn’t fully rebooted from yesterday yet. Sodium streetlights flickered overhead, casting everything in a jaundiced glow that made the shredded-paper monstrosity ahead of us look like it had been photocopied too many times, a remnant of the Curator’s forces freed from the pocket dimension I’d destabilized.

  It moved in stuttering bursts — fox-shaped one second, feral cat the next, then something that resembled an angry accordion with teeth. Charred slips of paper fluttered from its flanks, each one muttering fragments of arguments, breakups, and rejected college essays.

  “I swear this one’s divorce paperwork!” Lily shouted as she vaulted a picnic table with the kind of athleticism that made physics file a complaint. Her hair streamed behind her like she’d stepped out of a shampoo commercial filmed during a natural disaster. “You shouldn’t have pulled your punch on the first swing!”

  “It was attacking joggers!” I shouted back. “And it hissed at me in Wingdings!”

  “It was expressing itself!”

  “It stapled a guy’s emotional baggage to his aura!”

  “Still rude to interrupt!”

  Euryale glided past both of us, because of course she did. Her movement wasn’t a run so much as an elegant refusal to acknowledge gravity. The faint glow around her hands pulsed like distant lightning under skin.

  “Focus,” she said calmly, as if we weren’t chasing weaponized stationery at Mach Two. “It’s losing cohesion. If we don’t contain it in the next thirty seconds, it will fully disperse.”

  “Which is good, right?” I panted. “Disperse means ‘gone.’ Gone is good. Gone is restful. Gone is how I’d like to feel at 3:17 a.m.”

  Elly zipped overhead in a streak of pixelated blue light, her wings scattering glitchy sparks like corrupted fireflies.

  “Gone means shredded consciousness spread across an eight-mile radius,” she said brightly. “Which means everyone unlucky enough to inhale it gets a case of emotional déjà vu for a week.”

  “That sounds… manageable?”

  “They’ll start crying about breakups they never had.”

  “…Oh.”

  “And forming attachments to strangers based on phantom memories.”

  “…Oh no.”

  “And possibly developing strong opinions about book club betrayals that never occurred.”

  “That one’s just Tuesday,” Lily muttered.

  The creature screeched ahead of us — a sound like someone crumpling aluminum foil while whispering tax code citations. Its edges flickered. Words peeled off it mid-stride.

  Unsent. Unfinished. Unforgiven.

  Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!

  “Okay,” I wheezed. “That’s new. It’s shedding vocabulary.”

  “It’s destabilizing!” Elly called. “If it unravels completely, it becomes particulate regret!”

  “I hate that phrase!”

  “It hates you too!” Elly hissed.

  The thing bolted across the footbridge. Sparks rained from its claws as they scraped metal. The wooden planks blackened under its passing, smoking like they’d been lightly torched by existential dread.

  We were losing ground.

  “Ardent!” Elly called. “Distract it!”

  “On it!” Lily skidded to a halt near the pond, cupped her hands around her mouth, and bellowed, “HEY PAPERFACE! I DATED YOUR MOM! AND SHE WAS TOO NEEDY!”

  The creature froze mid-leap. It turned its faceless origami snout toward her.

  “…Insufficient citation…” it rasped.

  Then it tripped. Full-body. Right on its weird folded-paper face.

  Lily beamed. “Still got it.”

  “That didn’t even make sense,” I gasped.

  “It doesn’t have to when you’re a succubus.”

  Eury’s hand snapped toward me. “Dan. Now.”

  Right. My turn.

  I vaulted the railing, boots skidding on damp wood, lungs on fire. The Debt Collector hummed in my grip — that low, dangerous vibration that meant it was ready to enforce metaphysical policy.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Overdue!”

  The creature twisted toward me, papers flaring like wings made of rejection letters and old love notes.

  For half a second I saw it clearly. Not an animal. Not a thing.

  It was a mass of unfinished emotional residue — arguments that never resolved, apologies never delivered, grief that never found a container. It wasn’t evil.

  It was backlog. And backlog gets ugly.

  I swung. The hammer connected with a sound like a filing cabinet exploding inside a cathedral.

  WHUMPF.

  Air displaced. Burning paper smell flooded my sinuses. Glittering scraps erupted outward in a shimmering shockwave of demonic confetti.

  I flew backward and hit the grass hard enough to rethink my life choices.

  Silence fell.

  The sprinkler system kicked on.

  Finally, after a solid ten seconds of lying there soaked and staring at the stars, I croaked: “…Did we get it?”

  Elly floated into view above me, upside down, haloed in fae-light. “Define ‘get.’”

  Eury offered a hand and pulled me up with deceptive strength. “It is no longer sentient.”

  “That feels like a win.”

  “It is,” she said. “Mostly.”

  Lily brushed a scrap of paper off my shoulder. It fluttered to the ground and whispered, “Reeeeturn to sender…” before dissolving into gray dust.

  “Mostly?” I repeated.

  Eury nodded toward the bridge.

  Fine particulate ash drifted through the air like pollen.

  “Micro-residuals,” she said. “We’ll need a sweep.”

  “Oh good,” I muttered. “Nothing says ‘professional organization’ like vacuuming trauma at four in the morning.”

  Elly landed lightly on my chest again. “We could brand it!”

  “Brand what?”

  “Emotional remediation!”

  Lily gasped. “Ooooh. Trauma detox.”

  Eury pinched the bridge of her nose. “We are not monetizing grief.”

  Lily shrugged. “Depends how good the Yelp reviews are.”

  Right on cue, my phone buzzed.

  Unknown Number: Thank you so much!! The crying has stopped!!! 5 stars!!!

  I stared at it. “…We have a Yelp.”

  Elly grinned. “You made it official when you filed the LLC paperwork.”

  “That was a joke!” But it wasn’t.

  “You paid the filing fee.”

  “That was also a joke!” They knew me well.

  Eury folded her arms. “Dan.”

  “Yes?”

  “You are now the founder of a supernatural response organization.”

  “…I preferred ‘concerned citizen.’”

  “Too late for that.”

  The sprinklers intensified, pelting us, but I seemed the only one to suffer for it. We stood there, soaked and exhausted and glittered with emotional ash.

  “Let’s go home,” Lily said finally.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “We’ll… figure out what to do with this tomorrow.”

  “Put it on the list,” Elly chirped.

  “What list?”

  She pointed behind me.

  I turned.

  Burned into the grass where my hammer had struck, carved clean and precise into the earth as if the ground itself had stamped it:

  P R O B L E M S

  Not chaotic. Not jagged. Intentional.

  Eury’s expression sharpened. “That wasn’t from the creature,” she said quietly.

  The air shifted. The dew on the grass felt colder.

  Lily stepped closer to me without thinking.

  Elly hovered a little higher.

  I stared at the word. Not written. Declared.

  I sighed. “…So that’s how we’re doing this, huh?”

  A faint ripple passed through the air, subtle enough that if I hadn’t spent the last several months becoming intimately familiar with reality misbehaving, I might have missed it.

  Something had noticed. Not the paper beast. Something bigger.

  Elly grinned, bright and dangerous. “Welcome to the upgrade, boss.”

  And that, for the record, is the story of how we handled our first official case after the Curator’s collapse.

  We didn’t salvage anything. We didn’t contain anything. We definitely didn’t solve anything.

  But the joggers went home intact. No one developed an irrational attachment to strangers. And our Yelp rating remains tragically, inexplicably perfect.

  So honestly? I was counting it as a win.

  Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned lately, it’s this: The monsters aren’t getting bigger. The job is.

  And apparently? So am I.

  This is the first chapter of book 3:

  ERROR 426: Upgrade Required