Hector squeezed his eyes shut, struggling in vain to return himself to the dream that had just ended. He wanted to know what Volithur did with magic powers. He could see the arc of a grand revenge story, with the Lord General Asshole falling at the feet of the boy. This may be the first time he’d ever experienced an episodic dream. Never before had he gone to sleep and picked up right where he left off. Maybe he would manage to do it again tonight.


    He needed to know what happened in the next part of the story. For a moment, Hector considered throwing off his morning schedule to dive back into bed in the hopes that his subconscious would return him to the narrative.


    The moment passed. His father was dying, today was cardio day, and there was nothing he could learn in a dream that didn’t come from his own mind. The book would probably say something silly like ‘concentrate really hard’ or ‘visualize what you want to happen’. Or maybe even some new age chakra nonsense.


    His morning passed quickly, starting with fifty minutes on a rowing machine at the gym. Then came the hospital visit which his father only rose to consciousness briefly for to mumble incoherently before drifting into slumber once more. Then it was time for work.


    Hector entered the warehouse where he had spent most of his career and immediately discovered it was going to be a bad day. His administrative assistant informed him that they had two no-shows for work that morning, the pallet wrapper was busted again, and someone had flushed a clogged toilet until water covered the men’s room floor.


    “Start making calls. Get two bodies in here to help out. If no one agrees to come in, get Jared to transfer someone over from operations for the day. He owes us after we expedited that rush order last week. Remind him of that if he digs his heels in.” Hector stomped over to the pallet wrapper, where George and Timmy were staring at the machine.


    “Someone ran into it with a forklift,” George announced.


    Hector studied the main body, which was tilting like the Leaning Tower. “I was hoping something was stuck under the turntable.”


    “The frame bent,” George observed. “Then Timmy turned it on and the engine burnt out.”


    “Right. We’ll be manual wrapping until we get a fix or replacement then.” Hector didn’t bother to berate Timmy. The man didn’t intentionally cause these types of situations. He was a good worker so long as someone with more common sense than a rock was supervising him. The last thing Hector needed was another able-bodied employee calling it quits.


    Hector eyed George. “I am going to need you to handle loading today.”


    “I’ve been loading three days already! I’m supposed to have a turn on packaging today!”


    “I know, George. I need someone I can trust running this section today.”


    “This is ridiculous. The damn kids get out of all the hard work because they can’t be relied on and I get punished for doing a good job.”


    Hector folded his arms. “I’ll give you a choice.”


    “Oh, great, a god damn Hector choice.”


    “The toilet overflowed in the men’s room. I don’t know how bad it is, but it’s an OSHA violation for sure. I was on my way to handle that situation after talking to you, but we can switch jobs if you want.”


    George squinted at him. “Who do I get on my team?”


    “You can have Timmy and Roy.” One hard but dumb worker and one lazy guy. It should be a balanced team, considering who they had to work with.Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.


    “I don’t want Roy. Give me Suzanne.”


    Hector took a steadying breath. “Fine. But now I have to figure out who is in charge of receiving.”


    “It’s all shitty jobs today,” George laughed, his attitude much improved after getting his way.


    He made a quick stop to the packaging section and informed Roy he was working receiving. The scrawny, heavily-pierced punk make a pair of devil horns with one hand. “Rock on, boss man.”


    Then came the toilet problem. It was a lot of water. Enough water that you had to question if someone had made a mess intentionally. Hector used a mop to push the water towards the drains, then taped a home-made ‘out of order’ sign to the impacted stall. He filled the bucket with bleach water and did a thorough once-over of the entire floor before putting up a ‘warning: wet floor’ cone.


    Following that, he put in a service request with the facilities group to have a toilet unclogged. Alice stopped by his desk as he was wrapping that up. “I have Vic coming in, but I had to tell him you would give him tomorrow off instead. If you aren’t okay with that, you will have to tell him you changed your mind. Operations is sending One Arm Walt over.”


    The rest of the day, Hector split his time between solving problems for his people and jumping in to assist with the work. He had to reschedule his budget meeting for another day because of everything happening, but chances were the meeting wouldn’t get him any more funding than senior management had earmarked for his group. The warehouse didn’t make the company money. Sales and operations were the darlings of the executives, while warehouse only received attention if they failed to get everything on a truck by the deadline.


    Several times throughout the day Hector had to make trips around his territory to break up conversations that were disrupting work. “This ain’t a social club, ladies,” he would announce while snapping his fingers at the guys.


    Things were behind when the morning shift ended, which placed the evening crew in a bad mood as they knew chances were good they would be staying late. “Why are we running slow on a Thursday, Hector? Did half the morning crew sleep in to score extra dream time?”


    “There were two no-shows. I haven’t heard their excuses yet. Let’s just hit it hard this shift so we can get out of here at a reasonable time. I’ll order pizzas as a reward for everyone in this group showing up for their assigned shifts.”


    The next eight hours flew by in a rush. There was less chatting than on the first shift, but he did have problems with a couple of the guys staring off into space, lost in thought. They managed to finish up before midnight. As Hector was locking up the warehouse, a younger guy named Jeremy waited for him by the time clock.


    “Hey Boss, everyone was curious but no one got around to asking about your situation.”


    Hector didn’t immediately respond. He kept a strict boundary between work and personal, so he wasn’t sure what situation the guys had heard about, or – more importantly – how they had heard about it. Had someone discovered his dad was in the hospital again? Or was the Jennifer drama becoming public knowledge? “What situation are you asking about?”


    “Your dreams.”


    Hector’s eyebrows shot up halfway to his hairline. “My dreams? Why would you want to know about my dreams?”


    Jeremy snorted. “Everyone is talking about their dreams. Even the news is talking about it. The whole world started having crazy dreams. I mean, when I sleep I’m something called a Jinn. Not like Genie from Aladdin, like a human who can manipulate reality with legal energy. Before waking up for my shift, I was watching my dream dad design a crazy complex circuit he was going to upload his mind into. Fred is a vampire in his dreams. A freaking vampire.”


    The word Jinn echoed in Hector’s mind. He had heard that word used very recently. Or, rather, Volilthur heard that word used. The Jinn were the enemies of the Xian. According to one random Xian soldier, the Jinn would have done worse to his – no, Volithur’s – community if they had been the conquerors instead.


    “Everyone is having these dreams?”


    “Yeah. It’s like watching an episode of a TV show in your head every time you go to sleep. I really don’t blame the morning shift for screwing off of work. I mean, what if this only goes on for so long before the dreams stop? Waking up for work might mean you never get to live out the whole story.” The kid’s smile widened. “So what’s your situation, Boss? Are you an old man working in a warehouse there, too?”


    Hector swallowed. In spite of all his misgivings about sharing personal information with his coworkers, he felt he owed a debt in that moment. The experience of being Volithur had been validated, and that meant more to him than he would ever have imagined possible. Standing to his full height, Hector announced his ‘situation’. “I am training to be a Xian.”


    “Dude,” the kid crowed, “we’re like mortal enemies in our dreams!”