Screen Saver: Ash & Blue

By Stormy Sto Helit

Welcome, Old Friends and New Recruits

If you know why you're here and what's going on, head on in. Grab a bean bag from Jonesy, a cookie from Stef and a glare from Taylor.

If you're new - either you were gifted this ebook, or someone threw it at you with the vague-but-insistent command to "just read it!", then here's a bit of an introduction.

This is a short story in the world of Ash & Blue, a nerdy urban fantasy series, mostly focussed on a group that could be best described as the Men in Black, but for magical stuff.

Some of these shorts work okay as standalone contemporary fantasy stories - but most rely on at least some context from the main series. Luckily, you can start reading the series for free at AshandBlue.com - and we hope you enjoy your stay.

Well, most of us do, Taylor's just going to glare at you regardless.

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Screen Saver

After a boring day preparing a new network, Screen returns to her workplace, and walks into a hostage situation.

Hiding in the storage area, she contacts the Agency, and Jones rushes to organise a rescue before all of her coworkers are killed or taken into Faerie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ash & Blue
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215383117

Book preview

Welcome, Old Friends and New Recruits

If you know why you’re here and what’s going on, head on in. Grab a bean bag from Jonesy, a cookie from Stef and a glare from Taylor.

If you’re new - either you were gifted this ebook, or someone threw it at you with the vague-but-insistent command to just read it!, then here’s a bit of an introduction.

This is a short story in the world of Ash & Blue, a nerdy urban fantasy series, mostly focussed on a group that could be best described as the Men in Black, but for magical stuff.

Some of these shorts work okay as standalone contemporary fantasy stories - but most rely on at least some context from the main series. Luckily, you can start reading the series for free at AshandBlue.com - and we hope you enjoy your stay.

Well, most of us do, Taylor’s just going to glare at you regardless.

Screen Saver

By Stormy Sto Helit

AshandBlue.com

Copyright, 2019

Series Content Warnings

Five Years Before Dorian Knocks

Chapter 1

The new office was shiny. So shiny. Oh so shiny.

It was such a shame that it would be three months before they could actually move into it.

Screen flipped to a fresh page of her notebook, wrote down the port numbers, then checked the numbers against the assumed map of the new office layout.

It would have been much, much preferred if the map had been finished, but actually signing off on complete work was something that the managers seemed to be almost allergic to.

Consequently, the first week in the new office was going to entail a lot of rework, which somehow, they would find a way to blame on her.

She was magic, but she wasn’t fucking psychic.

So far, this was the messiest office moving project she’d ever been a part of - and that included the freelance job where part of the floor had collapsed - at least that team had neatly labelled boxes that had fallen into the office space below.

Right now, they would be lucky if someone didn’t accidentally pack the office cat into a box without air holes.

On the other hand, it gave her an excuse to be out of the office for hours at a time. The two temps that comprised the rest of her IT team were more than capable of handling the level-one-help-desk stuff that comprised ninety-five per cent of the problems that her team handled on a daily basis.

All of the software was cobbled together, cheap packages that had been hammered into being fit-for-purpose. Spreadsheets ran what should have been databases, if not full-fledged data management applications.

Half of the office used free email accounts because the company email was notorious for eating important communications.

And almost all of her attempts to get the management to do something about it had fallen on deaf ears - fully-written proposals had gotten lip service, but no follow-up. So, after a couple of years, she had stopped trying.

As awful as the patchwork systems were, the actual day-to-day work of the IT department was reasonably easy. Mostly, they were there as a sort of nanny - someone to come by, make cooing noises at the hapless employee, and use big words to describe restarting a computer, checking for memory leak issues, or resetting a password.

So the office move project, and designing all of the architecture that they would need for the expansion and the new teams was a bright spot in what had been a dull year, where six out of every eight hours had been spent on reddit, The Mount, and various depositories of smutty, smutty fanfic.

Various family members had suggested that she move on, that there were better things out there. She argued back that they paid above the