#KathaWritingGroup Prompt 1 - The Case For Scales
I dragged my feet into the waiting room of my office, slowly sipping from the cup of coffee in my left hand, and took a slow look around. Except for my receptionist, no one was there. I wasn’t so much surprised as I was annoyed. “They just went in and waited again?”
Gina didn’t even bother to look up from her computer to answer. “Mhmm. Straight beeline.”
“I told them they could call the office for updates—”
“They said they’re the one’s with updates. Definitive proof that they orchestrated the entire firing.”
I looked at her suspiciously. There was actually more to this case than a couple of disgruntled former employees trying to screw their boss?
Nah. I had already known this case was going to be harder to prove than was reasonable. That didn’t mean I didn’t want to try, just that I knew what I knew - humans had a way of creating excuses for the worst parts of themselves. And when we were done with excuses, we’d make laws.
I just shook my head, and continued dragging myself to the wooden double doors of my office and gently pushed one of them open. Standing above the two armchairs in front of my desk were two large reptilian forms, standing on all fours. One was a large, dark red form of scales, its large head almost touching the high office ceiling. Much shorter, but still almost a foot above me, was the other one, with scales almost milk white, and dark red eyes, like the larger. When they saw me walk into the room, they both bowed their heads almost shamefully and turned back into their humanoid forms - one a young brown-skinned man who couldn’t pass for older than mid twenties, and a darker woman only a bit older.
I walked around them to get to my desk as they morphed back into human form. “You came into my office early so you could put your scales back on?”
The man took a small, shameful step forward. “Sorry, Mr. Holder, we just—”
“Bart,” the woman at his side cut him off. “We don’t get to be our truest selves anywhere other than the comfort of our own homes, and some people don’t even get that. Most nights, I don’t get a good sleep because we have to keep concentration on the illusion in the comfort of our own beds.”
I looked at the young man. “That true, Jerry?”
He nodded, head still low. “Fire alarm went off, a long while back. We started to get nervous that if anything happened and people had to burst through…”
I tried to maintain my composure. it was like any other morning: coffee, traffic, and dragons waiting in my office. When you work pro bono on discrimination cases for ‘mythics’ as we called them, the occasional sad story comes with the territory. I didn’t know this about dragons, though. I wasn’t sure what shook me the most; the fact that I had been working with the Mathesons for almost a year now and hadn’t heard this before, or the fact that they had been living like that for almost a year and still had the energy to drudge through this case.
“Camilla, Jerry, have a seat. Gina said you had something for me?”
Camilla, still standing, took a phone out of her pocket. “That, Bartholomew Holder, is direct evidence that they were trying to get Jerry fired.”
I grabbed the phone. It was a grainy video of the warehouse the boy used to work at. After a couple seconds, a man walks into the shot, pouring something on the floor.
“And…what is this, exactly?”
Jerry sort of jumped in his seat, leaning to the phone. “That’s Mike, he works…worked, with me at the factory. That’s the oil I slipped on when I…shifted back.”
“You shouldn’t even have to be ashamed of shifting back, Jer.”
I tried to bring our attention back to the evidence in front of us. “And you’re sure it’s him? And of what he’s pouring on the floor?”
“That’s the only guy in the warehouse that looks like that, and that’s exactly where I fell, timestamped about an hour before—”
“Whatever he poured was there for an hour in a crowded warehouse and not a single other person passed there and fell?”
Doubt spread across the young man’s face. “Well…I dunno, maybe everyone else was in on it?”
“That’s a guess, Jerry, it’s not evidence.”
“You’re saying that we can catch the guys he worked with on tape pouring shit onto the floor, and we still got nothing, Barty?” Camilla was pissed.
“I’m saying that this might be able to sway a jury, or squeeze out a deal, but only if they’re sure that we’re sure of what this is. And we’re not.”
“Can’t you, I dunno, bluff it like they do in those lawyer shows or whatever?”
“Camilla, if you want me to act like a fictional lawyer, then don’t come with a real case that you really want to win.”
“Damn it, Bart! Shapeshifting to protect from a fall is absolutely natural, and was not grounds for them to get rid of him!”
“I know, Cam. I know. But his employer claims that the company was not aware that he was a mythic when they hired him, that he deliberately declared himself to be human when he applied, took advantage of non-mythic insurance and benefits policies—”
“—Which he wouldn’t even have been able to use because he’s not human!”
“You don’t have to explain the difference between human and dragon dental plans to me. I’m trying to explain their case to you. A judge might decide that it doesn’t matter if they actively hired a staff dragon slayer. They claim they didn’t know. Which means that all this video means is that we can…try to convince them to take a deal on the wrongful termination charge because of an OSHA violation that they can pay off before the end of the day? Come on…”
There was a tense silence for a moment, with Jerry slumped in his chair in defeat, and Camilla pacing around my office with a slowly growing rage. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she let loose a roar, arms raised as if to put her fist through one of my bookshelves.
“Mrs. Matheson, you don’t have to calm down, but you need to not fuck up my office.”
Cam looked back at me, her illusory brown eyes glaring a draconic red for a second, before taking a deep breath and finally taking a seat. “Alright then, Mr. Holder. What do we do now, then?”
I took another quick look at the video, then gave them back the phone. “Okay, let’s see if we can’t do a bit more digging…”
This is my first crack at the Katha Writing Group’s weekly writing prompts! If you want to join in, see more of the prompts, or follow some of the other writers who might be giving it a shot on their own social media, check out the post below!
