Sabine has a minion!

Evangeline the Nutcrickadee

Sabine sighed a deep sigh as she hurried through the cramped hallways of her office building. She shifted her grip on the heavy pile of notebooks she was carrying, but they slipped out of her paws and tumbled to the floor. Loose sheets of paper scattered, and she kneeled down to pick them up, cursing the chain of events that had brought her to this position.She’d been perfectly happy being a Monster-in-the-Closet. She’d loved rattling doors, she’d loved scaring children witless. She’d been good at it, too. One of the best, probably. But then, The Incident.

She’d been caught. A parent, trying desperately to prove to their child that a monster did not, in fact, live in their closet, had been far more thorough searching her closet than she’d ever anticipated. The parent had seen her. The parent screamed, the child screamed, she’d screamed- before being teleported back to HQ. As she arrived, alarms were blaring and lights were flashing, indicating her failure and her compromise of their secrecy.

Her disciplinary hearing had been... difficult. The Council had a tendency to make an example of those that were caught, and she had been no exception. She had gotten off a little more lightly than she had expected- typically offenders were stripped of their Monster title and outcast. Due to her exemplary work, however, she had simply been removed from active duty and put onto a taskforce.

Since then, the taskforce had been the bane of her existence. Budget cuts throughout the Monster City had meant that the unsavoury decision had been made to combine the Monster-Under-the-Bed and Monster-in-the-Closet departments. Which meant that Sabine had been placed in a position where she had to directly work with the Monsters-Under-the-Bed. It was a disgrace.

Having collected her paperwork, Sabine stood. After taking a deep breath she entered the office that had been assigned to her and her... partner. A Monster-Under-the-Bed- no, she checked herself- they were all just Monsters now, as per office policy. He smirked as she walked into the office, clearly noting the askew notebooks she was carrying. He primly reached into a desk drawer and pulled out his own, immaculate notebooks.

Ugh, he was insufferable.

Today, they were continuing negotiations on territory. These had been moving at a snails pace, as neither party wanted to give up their holdings. Sabine’s partner had been particularly insistent upon gaining holdings in a suburb of Centropolis that the Monsters-in-the-Closet had had a stranglehold on for years. Sabine had been equally insistent that she not cede that suburb, mostly because he wanted it. But also because she felt she had given into a fair amount of demands so far, and she didn’t want to allow him to bully her further.

That suburb was the last thing she needed to hold out on. Later in the afternoon, she and her partner would take their proposal to committee to be approved. They would side with her and let the suburb stay under her jurisdiction, right? They just had to.

The hours crawled by, until finally it was time to present their findings. Then, perhaps, her nightmare would be over. Maybe this would be enough of a penance to be allowed back on duty.


Other Monster stories: Sweetpea, Vivika, Ponder, Maynard, Cosette, Ree, Fionn


credits ;;
overlays (v1 and v2): frederick
profile: chi and Princess
story: Trithie
background by lost&taken
profile art by frederick
animation basic code by A. Saeeduddin