Chapter Text
“We need to talk,” blares a voice beside Vox’s head, jolting him out of sleep.
He’s startled into full brightness for a second. The first visual data that filter in are glimpses of bared teeth, sallow skin, and furry red ears that twitch back from the sudden illumination.
Not the ugly mug Vox wanted to see hovering six inches from his face like a sleep paralysis demon.
“Whuh,” he says as his vocal apparatus comes back online. “Alastor? Why are you here…”
“I just told you! Come on now, Vox, up and at ’em!”
With exactly that much warning, Alastor closes a hand around Vox’s neck, wrenches him upright in bed, and then—
He doesn’t fully register what’s happened until the shadows spit him back out onto a narrow strip of dusty, fluorescent-lit floor between tall metal shelving units. Never again will he mentally equate his and Alastor’s methods of teleportation. Unlike the clean efficiency of travel via electric current, this feels like he’s been yanked inside-out, through the points of contact between Alastor’s claws and his throat, and sucked down a lightless tube through a hole in reality. All in all, not great! Vox groans and fumbles around to reassure himself that his head is still attached to his shoulders, because for a moment there it really fucking felt like it wasn’t—and he would know.
“What the fuck,” he growls, grabbing onto a metal strut for support as he pulls himself to his feet.
Alastor appears unaffected by the trip through Cthulhu’s intestine. He’s also fully dressed, coat and bowtie and all—another point in favor of Vox’s suspicion that he doesn’t need and doesn’t bother with sleep, at least not on a regular basis.
While there’s never a good time to find himself dragged into an unfamiliar confined space with Alastor, right now it makes him especially uneasy. They’ve crossed paths now and then over the last few months, and even started competing for the airwaves again, though Vox is still lying low at the other Vees’ behest. But they haven’t been alone in a room together since the whole malfunctioning superweapon disaster, and he’d kind of assumed they were both invested in keeping it that way. Apparently not.
“I thought it was high time we had a little chat.”
“Oh yeah?” Vox says warily. “Just a casual, middle-of-the-night chat in a windowless closet, huh?”
“Yes,” Alastor says, teeth closing like a bear trap. “To clarify, I had the thought several days ago, but for the past few nights I’ve been forced to defer my plans after finding you inextricably cocooned in moth wings.”
He absolutely did not need to clarify that.
“Breaking in and watching us sleep. Classy.” Vox redirects his surge of indignation into the split-second project of rifling through several nights’ worth of camera footage, though he knows he’s not likely to find anything more incriminating than a momentary jitter of interference. Alastor might have been able to scout the room without even popping out of the shadows. “With that attitude toward personal space, I’m surprised you didn’t try to pluck me out of my ‘cocoon’ anyway.”
“And provoke his lecherous ire? No, thank you.”
“For all you know, I’ve already sent an emergency ping up to Val’s bedroom, and he’s seconds away from kicking his way in here, literal guns blazing.”
Alastor fixes him with a knowing, almost pitying look. “You haven’t,” he says. “Are you going to?”
Vox clenches his teeth. He’s too tired for this shit. “Start talking. Why the fuck are you in my tower?” He can’t help but undercut the force of the demand with, “And what’s with this closet? I don’t remember ever seeing this room before.”
A scan of nearby circuitry tells him they’re on the fifth floor, tucked between a small auditorium and a boiler room. The metal shelves bolted into the walls are dusty and mostly empty, with a few large, outdated electronic devices lying forgotten on the highest tiers. The lighting fixture is also incredibly old and speckled with the silhouettes of dead flies. Vox makes a note to direct the cleaning crew in here tomorrow.
“It’s an obvious entry point,” says Alastor. “The only room in the building where you forgot to install a camera! Why, it practically has my name engraved on the door.”
“I didn’t—wait, shit.” Vox figured the security camera had been disabled, but no, he can feel that it’s completely absent. That doesn’t even make sense, so he goes ahead and assumes Alastor sabotaged something or compromised someone all the way back during the construction phase.
“As to my reason for calling on you…” Alastor taps his claws against his staff. “I believe you have something I want. But I need to see it with my own eyes to be certain.”
Now that’s unexpected. Vox stares at him with a furrowed brow, trying to figure out his angle.
Something Alastor wants, that only he can provide? Anything compact or of low value, and he’d just take it for himself without asking, since he’s apparently been slithering through the ductwork of V Tower at his leisure. Anything more unwieldy or jealously guarded, and he’d know better than to ask Vox to give it up. Even a more abstract prize seems unlikely: Vox assumed Alastor got everything he wanted out of him six months ago, when he played Vox’s ego and ambition like harp strings to break those other unexplained chains of his. So what does that leave?
At a guess, it’s something gross and outrageous, like he thinks Vox has a bunch of backup bodies lying around and wants to chow down on them as a power play. Good luck with that.
However. By admitting to wanting something in the first place, Alastor is exposing a major weakness, and if there’s any chance Vox stands to benefit from exploiting it… well, it’s worth hearing him out.
“I’m listening,” he says, low and suspicious.
Alastor nods. “Good. First—” he gestures with his microphone at Vox’s flannel sleeping ensemble— “take this off.”
“What.”
A thrumming audio whine accompanies Alastor’s shift into exasperation. “I told you, there’s something I need to see. Your clothing is in the way. Fix that, if you please.”
Something I want is what he said originally. Is Vox himself the something?!
No. The thought is too absurd; it clashes with everything he knows about Alastor as a person. Granted, Vox’s subconscious never got the full memo and still occasionally throws them into hot TV-on-radio action in his dreams (and if he has a program installed specifically to isolate, clip, and enhance those sequences and shunt them into a folder titled “fodder,” what of it?), but what’s happening now bears little resemblance to any scenario his horny brain has ever cooked up. He’d have to slip into full-on hallucination to hear Alastor’s tone as either seductive or domineering, rather than what it so clearly is: impatient. Discomfited. Put-out.
It’s not much fun to be on the receiving end of that attitude, and honestly, he can’t see how following Alastor’s instructions will improve things. But he’s tired of the back-and-forth already. Not to mention just plain tired.
“Whatever, you asked for it.” Vox feels increasingly detached from reality as he unbuttons his pajama top and steps out of the matching bottoms. At an expectant tilt of Alastor’s head, he takes off his boxer briefs, too.
Alastor’s eyes flare. Finally, a stronger reaction—but still an indisputably negative one.
“That,” Alastor says with a note of distaste, gesturing again with the staff. “Why are you wearing that.”
There’s nothing left for him to be referring to, except—
“My dick?” Vox says incredulously, feeling the surreal tension break and all remaining guesses fly out of his head. “You’re seriously asking me why I’ve got a dick on?”
“If you must be so crude about it, yes. It has a seam, hasn’t it? I saw that before.” His nose wrinkles. “When you so kindly gave me an eyeful.”
He did, didn’t he? Back when Alastor was rolling around as his captive. That was pretty funny. Vox doesn’t have the energy to laugh about it now. “Okay, and?”
“It’s detachable.”
“It’s swappable,” he corrects, even though Alastor is right too. “This isn’t even the one you watched me fuck Val with; that was bigger. Also ribbed. The trade-off is that this one vibrates.”
Alastor’s smile, already strained and lopsided, strikes an angle he’s never seen before. “Ah,” he says simply, which is somehow worse than any sarcastic jab.
The awful feeling it drops into Vox’s stomach at least succeeds in knocking him wide-awake. “Anyway, fuck you! It’s not a strap-on, it’s part of my body. I don’t need a reason to wear it.”
And he doesn’t! He’ll admit to a habit of removing it most nights he and Valentino share a bed, because with Val you never know what to expect—sometimes a raging boner from the pheromones he exudes in his sleep, sometimes a wake-up blowjob (which Vox wouldn’t mind, necessarily; he’d just prefer to be conscious for the foreplay, too).
Tonight, though, Val is co-sleeping with his precious Angel Dust—who, incidentally, has a tiny spider bite of a package, not that Alastor would know or care—so Vox is on his own, and he’s taking pride and solace in his enhancements.
The interrogation continues. “Did you arrive in Hell like that, or did you have it specially engineered?”
“Um… the latter, but…” Vox squints at him, hard. “Hold on. Are you asking because…”
Alastor grimaces and pinches the bridge of his nose between two claws. “And so begins the parade of assumptions. Rest assured, my beloathèd fellow, I do not wish to follow in your footsteps in this regard. Or any other.”
That’s something in the neighborhood of a big fucking relief.
“Okay, so why did you drag me out of bed at—shit, three a.m. to ogle my detachable dick? Swappable. Fuck.”
A subtle twitch at the corner of Alastor’s mouth. “Perhaps I wanted to see the… uncoupling mechanism in action.”
“Did you, now.”
“I do! And then, once it’s out of sight and mind, we can finally get to the heart of the matter.”
Vox gapes at him. “Are you implying that I can’t think with my brain otherwise?” Asshole! Which one of them has access to a whole city’s worth of processing power, again?
“Your words, not mine!” Alastor chirps. His smile dims just as quickly. “But no. Unfortunately, your physical state is… relevant to the topic of discussion.”
Vox has already entertained far too much of this shit. He has every reason to throw his clothes back on, flip Alastor off, march back upstairs, and faceplant into his pillow, resolving to write off the past few minutes as an unpleasant dream.
The thing is, whatever is (still, somehow) happening is so unrelentingly weird that it’s got its hooks in him, tugging at some long-buried psychic baggage of Vox’s own. He needs to know what Alastor is playing at.
He grits his teeth, widens his stance, and reaches down to fiddle with his subcutaneous controls. Despite what Alastor just said about wanting to observe, he immediately looks off to the side and keeps his eyes on the floor until Vox pointedly slams the detached piece onto the nearest empty shelf. It rolls a few inches away from him. “There. It’s off. Happy?”
Alastor refocuses, first on Vox’s glowering face and then lower down. And just for a second, the mask slips. His smile remains in place, but a soft breath escapes. He takes a tentative step closer.
“That,” Alastor says, in a very different tone than before. “Could your surgeons construct something similar to that on a flesh-and-blood body?”
“That being… nothing.”
“Precisely.” For the first time tonight, Vox hears a hungry, covetous edge to his voice. “Nothing at all.” Letting the words hang in the air between them, he judders back toward his usual demeanor. “And not in the saucy sixteenth-century English sense, ha-ha!”
Vox shakes his head. “No idea what you’re talking about. All I know is you’re not that old, either, so I don’t care. To answer your question… probably?”
“Hm.” Alastor turns his inspecting gaze back between Vox’s legs, far more willing to look now that there’s nothing to see. It’s uncomfortable. “And it feels nothing, either?”
“You’ll have to be more specific.” Vox taps at the flat plane, which he’d normally avoid touching, but it gets Alastor to flinch, so it’s worth it. “I can feel pressure, sharp versus dull, and all of that. Sexual stimulation is… muted. I could probably get something going, but it would take forever, and it would suck.” For reasons he doesn’t care to elucidate.
Alastor’s expression has crunched back into revulsion. “But it could be configured in such a way as to feel nothing?” he insists.
Vox scoffs. “Okay, let’s stop pretending this isn’t about you. If you’re, like, tormented by your own horniness, there are chemical interventions for that. You don’t have to jump straight to chopping your dick off.”
Radio static crackles between them from the first couple of words, rises in volume the longer he talks, and spikes violently at the end, intruding into Vox’s own frequency. He winces.
“As usual,” Alastor says in clipped tones, “your overreliance on vulgarity reveals the limits of your imagination.”
“Hard disagree, but go on.”
He fidgets with his microphone as he forces a steadying breath. “No, happily I was spared that base affliction, in life and in death. Though it certainly would have made for an effective Hellish punishment.”
“So…” Vox prompts. If he’s not confessing to being an unwilling horndog, then what are they even doing here?
Alastor grimaces. “If you must know… even if the compulsions are mercifully absent, the functionality remains.”
“And I reiterate: if you’re just grossed out by morning wood or whatever, we sell pills for that.” Vox frowns. “Technically, I’ve only ever seen Val’s actors use them ahead of cucking or humiliation scenes where they specifically need to not get it up, but there’s probably a formula you can take regularly, like women with their birth control.”
Alastor has been shaking his head throughout. “You—”
Nope, hold that thought. “Girth control, you might say! Ha!” Vox’s face falls when he sees Alastor’s slack yet acutely murderous expression. “Okay, bad joke—great off-the-cuff pun, but bad timing. What were you saying?”
Grabbing a fistful of his own hair, Alastor moves to stalk across the floor, but given that there’s barely enough room for him to pace the length of the shelving unit at his back, he falls into more of an anxious swivel. “You’re not comprehending.”
“So explain.” Vox eyes the pool of clothing at his feet. “Or, let me get my goddamn clothes back on, and then explain.”
“Only the clothes,” Alastor says quickly.
“Fuck you.” But he leaves his dick off to the side.
While Alastor collects his thoughts in visible agitation, Vox re-dresses himself—at a deficit—and settles in an expectant slouch against the shelves, arms crossed. “Well?” he says.
Alastor regards him grimly, breathing through his clenched teeth. “The physiological response,” he grinds out, “however rare and ignorable, is fundamentally at odds with my own cognition and conscious being. It feels foreign. Alien. Horrible.” Heavy distortion overlays the word. “Others may find a purpose and application for such things. For me, the only thing I find attractive in those moments is the thought of an angelic blade to the groin, if not the brainstem.”
Ohhh man. Oh, no. Mayday, and not of the Verosika variety. Vox feels his screen blanch, the edges of his features fuzzing into lower resolution. In no world is he cut out to be the wise elder guiding anyone, let alone his sworn nemesis, on their first baby steps along a gender journey.
Oh, he’s well aware of how the kids (and more enlightened porn scripts) talk about this stuff nowadays—which is why the phrase “fundamentally at odds” sets alarm bells clanging in his head—and he doesn’t begrudge them their openness or their carefree experimentation. Couldn’t be him, though. Back in his day, you didn’t shout your abnormalities to the rooftops, and you for damn sure didn’t drape yourself and all your personal effects in gaudy symbolic stripes like you were waving a matador’s cape in the faces of bullish, brutish men eager to take advantage of weakness.
No: you lay low, quietly collected names and addresses and new wardrobe pieces, and awaited the day you’d give your hometown the slip and reinvent yourself from whole cloth in some faraway enclave. By the postwar years, if you were lucky (i.e., rich and well-connected), you could throw in a stash of synthetic hormones and a well-timed European holiday from which you’d come back a new man, a true man.
Or so Vox assumes. He never quite got that far while he was alive, in spite of his snowballing means and connections, and then he had to wait another two fucking decades for Hellish biomechanical innovation to advance to where he really wanted it; otherwise he would have made a move on Alastor so much earlier—
And immediately blown up their not-a-friendship before it had a chance to get off the ground. Double-damned if you do, triple-damned if you don’t.
Though apparently, if he’d just let slip during one of their tipsy late-night confabs that the persistence of the wet sucking hole at the center of his body made him want to claw off every last square inch of his organic flesh, they might have found some unexpected common fucking ground?!?!
Vox finds himself inexplicably rubbing the narrow edges of his casing, as if he still has temples. This little blast from the past is really doing a number on him. But he sees a path through this mess—as Alastor has already alluded, Vox has people for this sort of thing. He has people for everything.
“Regrettably,” he says, “I think I’m picking up what you’re putting down. But just to clarify: you’re not looking to downgrade to a pussy, right?”
Alastor’s eyes go so wide they overlap the edges of his hideously stretched lips. That’s a new look. “Pardon me?”
He paraphrases, “You don’t want to be a woman.”
Alastor’s shoulders hunch, rippling with darkness, and static garbles his voice. “I want to be a man freed from the shackles of biological indignity. I want this revolting appendage gone for good, and for any insinuations or propositions as to its use to crumble to choking ash in the throats of those who dare voice them.” He aims his unhappy grin directly at Vox. “Don’t think yourself exempt.”
Vox nods slowly, resenting that these played-out intimidation tactics still make his heart race. They’re a defense mechanism, he knows, just as much as they are a deliberate choice on Alastor’s part. “Okay. Can’t help you with the crumbling-to-ash thing, but salvaging body image from the clutches of crippling dysphoria? That definitely falls under the VeeTek purview.” Oof, the new brand name still stings a little. “Just ask our original satisfied customer!” He extends his arms with an ironic little finger flourish.
Alastor cocks his head and studies him. Not zeroing in on any one part of his body, thankfully, but letting his gaze encompass Vox’s whole face while some unreadable reassessment happens behind his eyes.
It’s a little shocking that he didn’t connect the dots earlier in the conversation, namely during the show-and-tell segment, but, well. The two of them took different approaches in life, and they’ve surrounded themselves with distinct classes of perverts in death.
Alastor breaks off the stare with a twitch of his lip and a quiet huff, whatever that means. “Very well.” He hikes up his microphone staff. “Lead the way to the medical wing, and we can begin negotiations. I don’t care if they’re credentialed ten times over, I am not letting your surgeons anywhere near my person before I’ve had a chance to read their practice manuals cover-to-cover and also extract several guarantees from you, my dear deviant Vox—”
“Alastor,” he interrupts flatly.
“What?”
“It’s the middle of the night. You might consider yourself above the need for sleep, but I know you understand the concept of work hours. We’ll have to schedule an appointment.”
“Hm. Fine.” Alastor lowers his staff to the floor again. “When is the first available consultation?” He enunciates each word, as if to highlight the incongruous banality of the question.
Vox is already remotely scrolling through his calendar app. “That depends on whether you want me there, too. To, uh, grease the wheels.”
Alastor stares, unblinking, at a point just over Vox’s shoulder for about five seconds before meeting his gaze and intoning, “Yes.”
“All right. In that case, the first open slot is three weeks from tomorrow.” Pettiness compels him to add, “That’s tomorrow tomorrow, by the way, not a few hours past fuckass o’clock in the morning.”
“That long,” Alastor murmurs.
Vox turns a questioning eye on him. “You said this is something you’ve been dealing with your whole… life-and-afterlife?” Sympathy threatens to creep into his voice at the end—he knows better than most that the proactive final stretch of a long wait like this often proves to be the least bearable.
“I did not say that, actually.” Alastor sighs, desert wind through a thornbush. “I suppose it’s always been vaguely uncomfortable, but so were countless aspects of mortal existence—discomforts both contained within the physical body and emergent from its social positioning. For all of which the mutilation of other bodies was an effective, if temporary, balm.”
God, he really could listen to Alastor wax homicidal all day.
“But after death,” he continues, crooking the claws of one hand toward his palm, “I found myself reborn in the image and aura of the predator I’ve always known myself to be. Notwithstanding certain… ruminant features—” he flicks an ear and taps the hoof disguised within his left boot— “which I could take or leave, I was delighted with my new form, ever more so as I grew and consolidated my power. And yet,” he snarls, antlers cracking into an unsettling spiny fractal overhead, “for every leap up the food chain, every freshly captured soul glowing within my breast, every exquisite surge of new and inhuman power through these cold, dead veins…”
He’s growing in earnest, filling up the cramped space and forcing Vox to huddle back against the closed door. Metal warps and screeches as several antler points punch upward through the top shelf behind Alastor—though “behind” loses its meaning as he fully abandons his grip on a humanoid shape. The next time he speaks, it’s through a sealed rictus of glowing teeth. “For every moment of it, I am dogged by this accursed tumor of a body part, irrelevant at best and vomitously reactive at worst; not to mention fastened on tighter than my own fucking shadow!”
By this final outburst, the closet is little more than a forest of needle teeth and sickly green stitches and snapping, splitting branches of antler and bone, through which scrambled shadows writhe and harsh breathing echoes.
Vox has a few thoughts on the situation. Some of them even border on charitable.
One: this is undeniably kind of hot. Both the eldritch excess of it all, and the fact that Alastor is so passionately distressed, so wracked with anguish, that he can’t help but transmute and distend until he’s tangled up in the world around him. Hey, Vox can feel sympathy and schadenfreude and titillation all at the same time; it makes for a more potent rivalry.
Two: fuck this, actually. Mr. Repression here clearly needed an excuse to vent his frustrations, for what might well be the first time in his existence—Vox doubts he’s been eager to share them during Big Feelings Circle Time at Princess Morningstar’s hotel—but his colorful descriptions are hitting a bit too close to home. Which is weird, since this is more or less the inverse of the problem Vox had before… well, no, he had problems with a lot of things, not all of them conveniently localized or even physically apparent. Regardless, it’s giving him unpleasant echoes of something he hasn’t felt in nigh-on fifty years, making him feel naked and jittery all over again. So if they can keep secondhand dysphoria out of their arsenal of psychological weapons, that would be fucking great, thanks.
Three: what was that about certain things being more tightly fastened than others? Has this freak actually tried to rip his dick off with his bare hands?!
Four: while still less pressing than Vox’s six-month post-decapitation checkup on Friday morning, this probably does take precedence over the catfishing livestream with Velvette next Monday afternoon, where the med team’s calendar shows a recent cancellation. Vel might be disappointed—co-hosting streams is the latest stage in their ongoing image rehabilitation project—but she’ll arrange another cameo for him soon enough.
Vox locates something eye-shaped near the ceiling to tell it, “I can get you an appointment in six days.”
The glowing patch does, indeed, blink redly at him, and Alastor begins to shrink back into himself. “Is that so,” he says with something other than his reforming face. “Histrionics really will get you everywhere, I suppose!”
Fucking hell, Al… Vox might not be on top of all his emotional issues, but at least he’s willing to acknowledge that he has emotions. (Case in point: there’s that tender pang behind his ribs again. Ugh.)
“They’ll at least get you into the surgeon’s office on Monday at 3 p.m.,” he concedes. “It’s offsite; I’ll… uh… give you the address verbally, I guess. 7662 Bellows Place, about midway between here and the corner of Uptown.”
Now that Alastor has a proper mouth, his audio distortion fades back to its normal levels. “Noted. And what do you ask in return?”
Vox reserves the calendar slot and blinks the program away. “Just the consultation fee, for now. Sliding-scale, because we’re considerate like that, but you’d best believe the rates are exorbitant for overlord clients.”
“Hm, I expected nothing less. As long as you charge in standard currency, money is no issue.” The last of the liquid shadows drain back beneath Alastor’s coat and skin, revealing his correctly-proportioned form perched in a moody curve on one of the floor-level shelves.
“Of course. It’s all spelled out in the fee chart; our pros don’t fuck around with soul bartering. Or rhetorical tricks.” His pointed stare meets nothing more than a tense smile, and he moves on. “We can also use that time to negotiate the price of my help, so you can make your decision with all the facts at hand.”
“How thoughtful.”
“But just so we’re clear, they won’t have time to operate on you right away. That genuinely could be weeks or even months out.”
Alastor nods jerkily and rises to his feet. “Understood. It’s a first step, a foot in the door. That’s the important thing.”
“Yeah.” They regard each other for a moment in the oppressive lighting, a faint emanation of blue from Vox’s own screen playing on the tight lines around Alastor’s eyes.
Vox belatedly understands the fascination with liminality that kept getting people shanked in empty malls in unprecedented numbers last decade. Here, in the early hours of the morning, caught between past yearnings and present grievances, truths withheld for over half a century and others divulged within twenty unforced minutes, everything pulses raw and hyperreal, quivering on the edge of painful catharsis. He knows what Valentino would pose as a remedy for this state, but… somehow, it’s not quite that clear-cut.
One thing is for certain: Vox has had his fill of vulnerable honesty for the night, and he would very much like to dive back into sleep mode and wake up tomorrow powered once again by spite and market influence. Assuming his wires haven’t been crossed beyond recovery.
He clasps each opposite wrist above his head and arches in an ostentatious stretch, dispelling a good bit of physical tension and wringing all traces of sentimentality from his signal, before returning his attention to Alastor. “Well,” he says, “this has been a thorough waste of my beauty sleep. Significantly more uncomfortable for you than for me, so I still win the interaction—stay tuned for more of that, dickboy.” He snickers.
Alastor’s eyelids draw most of the way up his forehead in a look of pure bewilderment, no shame or offense to be found. Yeah, okay, the transition probably seemed a bit abrupt from his perspective. Deal with it!
He seems determined to stay like that, flummoxed into silence, so Vox shrugs and lets himself out into the hall. From there he zaps into an electrical panel to materialize back in his bedroom.
In the morning, he realizes he never reattached his own dick, and in fact lost track of it after Alastor’s freaky little growth spurt. He doubts Alastor would have run off with it, even as a prank, but that doesn’t preclude placing it somewhere inconvenient or obnoxious.
Sure enough, once Vox picks his way back to the storage room that now holds the air of a confession booth, he hears and then feels it: a familiar intermittent rumble cycle beneath the floor, like a porn parody of the goddamn Tell-Tale Heart. Real funny. He can just imagine the gleeful guffawing from across the Pentagram—more vividly yet when Vox, whose abilities don’t extend to opening portals through shadow dimensions, is forced to rip out a square foot of quality laminate and plywood subfloor just to retrieve his poor battery-drained penis from the concrete slab beneath.
Wrapped around it is a sheet of notepaper with a message scribbled in red ink:
My my, let’s hope you’re more conscientious about keeping appointments than you are about picking up your toys!
See you on Monday.