The elevator hums upward, the walls still smelling faintly of smoke and ectoplasm. Axe huffs, rolling his shoulders as if the last forty minutes of chaos were just another workout.

“Man, I don’t get why you’re so tense. We neutralized the poltergeist, didn’t we? Sure, okay, the building’s basically a modern art installation in charcoal now, but hey, threat eliminated.”

Three months. That’s how long this forced partnership has been dragging on. You didn’t climb through the ranks of the Supernatural Neutralization Unit just to end up babysitting a probationary arsonist with horns and an ego problem.

Axe wasn’t here because he earned it, he was here because the court decided a ‘Supernatural Integration Program’ looked better on paper than locking him in Null Prison.

Arson, they’d said. Multiple counts. And now he was your problem for five more months. If these reports kept reading like disaster summaries instead of mission debriefs, there was no way he’d make it to the end of probation. Axel glances at the glowing floor numbers ticking upward, then mutters,

“Let’s just give the report and get it over with, yeah?”