Collateral Damage: A Background Character's Memoir

• Chapter 1 Temp Work at Ground Zero
• Chapter 2 The Act of God (or Alien) Clause
• Chapter 3 Mind the Falling Gargoyles
• Chapter 4 Commute Delayed by Monologuing
• Chapter 5 Insurance Claims for Cosmic Beams
• Chapter 6 Third Floor, Now First Floor
• Chapter 7 The Coffee Machine Broke Again (Vaporized)
• Chapter 8 Rent Hikes in a Hazard Zone
• Chapter 9 Tuesday's Infiltration, Wednesday's Filing
• Chapter 10 Dressing for the Apocalypse
• Chapter 11 Red Tape and Blue Lasers
• Chapter 12 The Secret Lair Next Door
• Chapter 13 Parking Permits vs. Alien Invasions
• Chapter 14 HR Policy on Temporary Mind Control
• Chapter 15 Collateral Damage in Row 4B
• Chapter 16 Duck, Cover, and Re-Key the Data
• Chapter 17 The Landlord's Favorite Excuse
• Chapter 18 Dry Cleaning a Singed Business Suit
• Chapter 19 A Brief History of Shattered Skylights
• Chapter 20 Classified Files and Breakroom Gossip
• Chapter 21 Evacuation Route B is Blocked by a Giant Robot
• Chapter 22 Hazard Pay is a Myth
• Chapter 23 Standing Directly Behind the Protagonist
• Chapter 24 Rebuilding Metropolis on a Temp Salary
• Chapter 25 Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Laser Grid
• Chapter 26 Two Weeks' Notice in a Collapsing City

The problem with temping in Apex City isn’t the data entry, the lousy coffee, or the fact that no one bothers to learn your name. The problem is that the middle floor of an office tower is the exact altitude where superheroic men in primary-colored spandex prefer to throw supervillains who have been engineered out of scrap metal and ancient curses.

My name is Arthur Pendelton, and I am a professional background character. On paper, I am an administrative consultant specializing in short-term data migration and office logistics. In practice, I am the guy who spends thirty-five hours a week hovering near the photocopy machine, praying that today isn't the day a roly-poly radioactive warlord decides to use our floor-to-ceiling glass paneling as an improvised decelerator.

It was a damp Tuesday morning when I arrived at my new placement on the fourteenth floor of the Vanguard Financial Building. I had taken the assignment through Apex Staffing Solutions—a firm whose liability waiver was notably longer than its employment contract. The building was a classic eighty-story monolith of dark tinted glass and structural steel, situated squarely in the downtown grid known casually among locals as the "Impact Zone."

"Arthur?" asked the receptionist, a woman named Brenda whose tight curl of hair looked as though it had survived three major municipal rebuilds and a brief period of alien martial law.

"Present," I said, setting my lunch bag on the granite desk. I always brought my lunch in a soft-sided cooler. Hard plastic containers tend to splinter into shrapnel if you have to throw yourself under a desk during an unexpected sonic boom.

"Form 402-B for emergency evacuation routing is on your desk," Brenda said without looking up from her monitor. She was typing with rhythmic, unhurried clicks. "Fire stairs are on the left. Pressurized bunker is in the basement. If you hear a trumpet sound coming from the sky, don't use the elevators. If you hear a hum coming from the floorboards, don't use the stairs. If you see a guy in a cape fly past the window, hit the floor and cover the back of your neck."

"Standard protocol," I nodded. "Where’s the breakroom?"

"Next to the load-bearing pillar," she said, finally glancing at me with a look of mild approval. "Smart man. The coffee pot is running, but don't touch the second pot. That's for the guy from accounting who might be a mole for the Syndicate. We're letting HR handle it."

I took my seat at Cubicle 4-F. It was a standard gray-carpeted box with a monitor that flickered slightly, a stack of unfiled invoices from a subsidiary that no longer existed due to a localized temporal anomaly the previous month, and a window view that gave me a clear, unobstructed sightline to the city's sky-corridor.

By ten fifteen, I had keyed in four hundred rows of quarterly expenditure data. It was quiet, honest work. The kind of work that exists entirely to keep the cogs of society grinding forward while the godlike beings above us debate the ethics of orbital laser defense systems.

Then, around eleven o'clock, the light in the room shifted.

It wasn't a cloud passing over the sun. It was the specific, heavy crimson tint that usually accompanies an interdimensional tear or a high-end plasma rifle. A faint vibration hummed through my desk, causing my paperclips to dance in tiny, synchronous circles inside their plastic tray.

I stopped typing and looked at my watch. It was a cheap digital model with a built-in altimeter—an essential tool for any temp in the city. If the pressure drops suddenly without a weather front, you have about six seconds to locate the nearest structural beam.

Thump.

The building swayed. It wasn't the deep, rolling rumble of an earthquake. It was the sharp, top-heavy tilt that happens when something weighing approximately forty tons impacts the roof at Mach two.

Across the room, a young man in a crisp white shirt—a permanent employee, judging by his lack of panic—looked up from his keyboard. "Was that a delivery?"

"Get under the desk, kid," I said softly, slipping off my glasses and stowing them in my breast pocket.

"Wait, what?" he asked.

Before he could finish the sentence, the entire northern glass wall of the fourteenth floor ceased to exist.

It didn't shatter into thousands of twinkling pieces the way it does in the movies. It burst inward in a high-velocity sheet of diamond-hard powder, propelled by a backpressure wave of superheated air. The sound was an unholy hybrid of a thunderclap and a jet engine inhaling a crate of steel chains.

A figure shot through the newly created opening, skipped twice off the vinyl floor tiles like a flat stone across a pond, and slammed into the heavy steel filing cabinets behind Row 3. The cabinets crumpled like soda cans, spilling fifteen years of audit reports across the room in a whiteout blizzard of paper.

The dust began to settle, revealing a seven-foot-tall figure clad in spiked black armor that hummed with purple electricity. It was Malakor the Undying, or possibly Iron Dread—they tend to share the same tailor. He groaned, a sound like grinding tectonic plates, and pushed a three-drawer file cabinet off his chest.

"Is that... is that a supervillain?" the kid from accounting squeaked from under his desk.

"Don't establish eye contact," I whispered from my position beneath Cubicle 4-F. I was curled into a tight cannonball, arms locked over the crown of my head, knees pulled up to shield my ribs. "If you talk to him, he’ll use you as a human shield or give a monologue. Either way, we lose twenty minutes of billable time."

Malakor stood up, shaking his head. Bits of shattered drywall and pulverized glass cascaded off his shoulders. He looked around the office with red, glowing optics, completely ignoring the fifteen terrified temps currently tucked into various office furniture like oversized land crabs.

"Curse you, Apex Man!" Malakor roared, his voice rattling the fluorescent light fixtures. "You cannot hide behind the fragile structures of your puny mortals!"

Right on cue, a blue-and-gold streak descended from the sky outside, hovering effortlessly in the open gap where our floor-to-ceiling glass used to be. It was Apex Man. His cape fluttered in a breeze that seemed to exist only for him, his jawline crisp enough to cut glass, his golden hair completely untouched by the sonic boom he’d just created in our air space.

"It ends here, Malakor!" Apex Man announced. His voice had that rich, resonant baritone that guaranteed high ratings on the evening news and a forty-percent spike in regional property insurance premiums. "The people of this city will no longer live in fear of your Dark Energy Core!"

"Great," I muttered into the carpet. "He's going to use the core."

"Your arrogance is your weakness!" Malakor bellowed. He reached down, grabbed an industrial-grade Xerox machine—the heavy one with the finisher attachment that took three guys from logistics to install—and lifted it overhead with one hand.

I watched through the gap between my desk drawer and the floor as Malakor swung the five-hundred-pound piece of office machinery back, preparing to hurl it at the savior of our city.

"Not the copier," Brenda’s voice rang out over the inter-office public address system. The speaker crackled with static, but her tone was entirely flat. "That unit is leased. Throw the water cooler instead."

Malakor paused for a fraction of a second, his glowing red optics flickering toward the ceiling speaker in brief, bewildered confusion.

Apex Man took advantage of the hesitation. He lunged forward, executing a flawless flying tackle that carried both himself and Malakor straight through the southern wall of the building, taking out the breakroom, the load-bearing pillar Brenda had recommended, and the second coffee pot.

The building gave a long, sickening groan as the structural load shifted. Dust poured down from the ceiling tiles like gray snow. Somewhere down the hall, an automated fire alarm began its shrill, rhythmic shrieking: BEEP. BEEP. EVACUATE. BEEP.

I waited five seconds. Then ten. When no further cosmic blasts shattered the remaining drywall, I uncurled myself and stood up, dusting off the knees of my slacks.

The northern and southern walls of the fourteenth floor were completely gone, creating a pleasant, if somewhat drafty, cross-breeze straight through the center of Vanguard Financial. The floor was littered with paper, crushed aluminum ceiling grids, pulverized glass, and one very shaken junior accountant who was currently hyperventilating into a manila folder.

I walked over to my desk, picked up my soft-sided lunch cooler—miraculously intact—and pulled my glasses back out of my pocket. I wiped a layer of gray drywall dust from the lenses, put them on, and looked at the clock on the wall. It was 11:14 AM.

Brenda emerged from beneath the main reception counter, smoothing her skirt with practiced efficiency. She held a clipboard that had survived the blast completely unscathed.

"Alright, everyone," she called out over the sound of the fire alarm. "Management has declared a temporary hazard pause. Facility engineering is assessing the floor's structural integrity. Please sign the exit log before heading down the emergency stairs."

I walked over to the desk, pulled the tethered pen from the counter, and signed my name on line fourteen.

"Tough first day," Brenda said, glancing at the gaping hole where the breakroom used to be.

"Could be worse," I replied, adjusting the strap of my bag. "At least it wasn't the guy with the freeze ray. That stuff takes weeks to dry out of the carpets."

"True," Brenda agreed. "See you tomorrow at eight?"

"If the stairs are still there," I said.

I turned toward the emergency exit, joining a quiet, orderly line of accountants, paralegals, and administrative assistants who were calmly walking down fourteen flights of concrete stairs, stepping neatly over fallen debris, and preparing to spend their lunch hour explaining to their insurance adjusters why their parked cars were currently flattened beneath a five-hundred-pound piece of leased office equipment.

It was just another Tuesday at Ground Zero.

The human mind possesses a remarkable capacity to adapt to the unfathomable, provided the unfathomable is accompanied by sufficient paperwork.

By eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, twenty-one hours after Malakor the Undying crashed through the fourteenth floor of the Vanguard Financial Building, I was sitting in a plastic bucket chair on the fourth floor of the Apex Municipal Claims and Compensation Building. The room smelled of wet drywall, stale coffee, and collective financial despair. Around me sat forty other citizens, each holding a color-coded ticket and a manila folder stuffed with receipts, property assessments, and photographic evidence of violent, superhuman interruption.

To my left, a man in a rumpled suit was quietly weeping into a laminated copy of his commercial lease. To my right, a woman with a neck brace was meticulously categorizing photographic prints of her crushed Toyota Corolla, which had been converted into an improvised projectile by a vigilante with telekinetic tendencies.

I adjusted my glasses, smoothed the lapels of my windbreaker, and opened my own blue folder. Inside was the document that governed the existence of every working stiff in the metro area: the Standard Metropolitan Liability and Exemption Rider, colloquially known throughout Apex City as the "Act of God (or Alien)" Clause.

Before the Age of Vigilantes—which historians pin to the late nineties, right around the time the first solar-powered philanthropist decided that wearing a mask was cheaper than paying corporate taxes—insurance law was relatively straightforward. If a tree fell on your roof during a storm, that was an Act of God. If a drunken driver knocked down your fence, that was third-party negligence.

Then came the Omega-Level entities.

When a ninety-foot sovereign from the lower mantle of the Earth erupts through Broadway to demand the immediate surrender of the surface world's surface water, traditional legal definitions buckle faster than reinforced concrete. Is an subterranean warlord an Act of God? An act of war? A natural disaster? Or merely an uninsured motorist with a very large drill?

The insurance industry, faced with insolvency within forty-eight hours of the first sky-portal opening, did what it always does in times of existential crisis: it hired five thousand contract lawyers and invented a brand-new lexicon of technical loopholes.

"Number forty-seven!" a voice barked through a crackling intercom overhead.

I checked my ticket. Forty-seven. I stood up, picked up my cooler bag, and navigated the maze of orange plastic chairs toward Window 3.

Behind the bulletproof glass sat a middle-aged woman named Mrs. Gable. She wore a visor to block the harsh fluorescent lighting and held a yellow highlighter like a surgeon holds a scalpel. She did not look up when I approached.

"Name and claim type," she said flatly.

"Arthur Pendelton," I replied, pressing my paperwork against the tiny silver turntable in the glass counter. "Temporary administrative deployment interruption and personal property damage. Vanguard Financial Building incident, yesterday at 11:14 AM."

Mrs. Gable swiped my paperwork through the slot, spun the turntable, and began scanning the document with a speed born of soul-crushing routine. Her yellow highlighter flickered across the pages with rhythmic efficiency.

"Vanguard Financial," she mused aloud. "That was the Malakor incident. Primary combatant: Apex Man. Secondary combatant: Malakor the Undying." She paused, her highlighter hovering two millimeters above line twelve. "Which side of the building were you on?"

"North window line, Cubicle 4-F," I said. "Direct blast radius of the initial entry, but I took cover prior to the structural wall failure."

"Did you sustain physical contact with the primary or secondary entity?"

"No, ma'am. I executed standard duck-and-cover under an ergonomically reinforced desk frame."

Mrs. Gable tapped her highlighter against her chin. "Were you hit by debris generated directly by Malakor, or debris generated by Apex Man’s defensive maneuver?"

This was the trap. I had read the small print of the 2024 Revised Municipal Code three times on the subway ride over.

"The debris was a direct result of Malakor using a leased Xerox machine as an improvised missile," I answered carefully. "However, the structural failure of the load-bearing pillar was initiated by Apex Man's flying tackle. Under Sub-clause 14-B of the Metahuman Indemnity Act, if a registered hero causes structural damage while intercepting an unregistered villain who is holding commercial equipment, the claim shifts from standard commercial property to the Municipal Heroic Restoration Fund."

For the first time, Mrs. Gable looked up over her reading glasses. Her eyes narrowed in mild evaluation, the look one professional gives another across a chessboard.

"You read the addendum," she stated.

"I temp for a living, Mrs. Gable," I said simply. "If I don't read the addendum, I end up paying out-of-pocket for my own dry cleaning every time a guy in a cape breaks the sound barrier over main street."

She let out a dry, breathy sound that was likely the closest she had come to a chuckle since 2018. "Alright, Mr. Pendelton. Let’s see what we’re dealing with."

She pulled up my file on her monitor. The clatter of her keystrokes sounded like a distant machine gun.

"Apex Staffing Solutions filed your placement contract under Hazard Tier 3," she observed. "That gives you basic coverage for lost daily wages, provided the site of employment is declared uninhabitable for more than seventy-two consecutive hours. Vanguard Financial’s entire fourteenth floor currently has an ocean view and no floorboards, so I think we can safely check that box."

"Thank you."

"However," she continued, her voice dipping into that slow, ominous cadence reserved for bureaucrats delivering bad news, "the property damage claim for your personal effects falls under the Force Majeure Extension Rider."

"My lunch cooler?" I asked.

"Your lunch cooler, your prescription reading glasses, and your tailored orthopedic seat cushion," she clarified, tapping the screen. "You claimed sixty-four dollars for the cushion."

"It has lumbar support," I defended. "Do you have any idea what six hours of data entry on a standard metal folding chair does to an L4 vertebra?"

"It doesn’t matter if it has built-in heating and a massage function, Mr. Pendelton," she said, leaning forward. "The underwriter has flagged Malakor the Undying as an Extra-Dimensional Entity of Sub-Terrean Origin."

I felt a cold sensation settle in the pit of my stomach. "Meaning?"

"Meaning he is not classified as a human citizen, a foreign national, or a domestic terrorist. He is classified under Section 8, Paragraph C as an 'Inter-Realm Sovereign.' Under current federal case law—specifically City of Apex v. The Void-Lord Inc.—damage caused by Inter-Realm Sovereigns claiming ancient birthrights or sovereign immunity is legally defined as a Non-Denominational Act of God."

"Malakor isn't a god," I protested, keeping my voice low and even so as not to draw the attention of the armed security guard lingering by the fire exit. "He’s a guy in a suit of cybernetic armor who lives in a volcanic fortress beneath the crust. He has a tax ID number in Delaware for his shell companies."

"Does he claim divinity in his official declarations?" Mrs. Gable asked, raising an eyebrow.

"He called himself 'The Eternal Herald of the Shadow Realm' right before he threw the copier," I admitted.

"There it is," she said, slapping a pink rubber stamp onto the upper right corner of my claim form. HEARSAY OF DIVINE ORIGIN - RECLASSIFIED. "The moment an entity claims eternal, cosmic, or divine status during the commission of an act of violence, the primary insurer defaults to the Act of God exemption. Your landlord’s insurance won't pay, your temp agency’s liability policy won't pay, and the city’s Heroic Fund only covers damage caused by registered heroes operating within their assigned jurisdictions."

"Apex Man was in his jurisdiction," I pointed out.

"Apex Man was engaged in defensive intercept," she countered effortlessly. "Sub-clause 14-B only applies if the hero causes avoidable collateral damage. The court established in 2021 that tackling a cosmic conqueror through a load-bearing wall is considered 'reasonably necessary force' under the Municipal Preservation Directive."

I stared at the pink stamp on my folder. It was a masterpiece of corporate legal maneuvering. In one swift motion, the system had managed to frame a forty-ton alien warlord’s workplace violence as an unpreventable celestial event, leaving the guy who makes fourteen dollars an hour to shoulder the cost of his own lumbar cushion.

"So," I said, leaning closer to the glass. "What you're telling me is that if a normal guy breaks my window with a brick, it's vandalism. If a guy in a leather jacket with glowing eyes breaks my window because he's having an argument with his clone, it's a tornado."

"Precisely," Mrs. Gable said without a trace of irony. "Now, if you want to appeal the classification, you can file Form 909-C with the Metropolitan Paranormal Claims Commission. But be warned: the current backlog is forty-four months, and they require three independent affidavits from certified thaumaturgists confirming that the entity in question does not possess a divine soul."

I closed my eyes for a moment, taking a deep, steadying breath. I thought about the forty-four months of waiting. I thought about the cost of hiring a certified thaumaturgist—those guys charge three hundred dollars an hour just to look at a photo and smell the sulfur.

"What about the secondary rider?" I asked, opening my eyes.

Mrs. Gable blinked. "Which one?"

"Rider 802-F," I said, reaching into my bag and pulling out my neatly annotated copy of the Apex Staffing Solutions Employee Handbook. I flipped to page forty-two, where I had highlighted a paragraph in pale green. "The Temp Agency Continuity Protection Clause."

She adjusted her glasses and read through the glass as I pointed my index finger at the fine print.

"'In the event that an assignment is terminated prematurely due to sudden structural dissolution, catastrophic inter-dimensional rift, or divine intervention,'" I read aloud, "'the agency agrees to provide immediate reassignment to a comparable facility within twenty-four hours, OR pay a daily disruption stipend equal to eighty percent of the contract rate until such time as a stable cubicle is made available.'"

Mrs. Gable stared at the paragraph. Then she looked at me. "Your agency signed this?"

"Apex Staffing Solutions uses standard boilerplate," I explained with a faint, tight smile. "They put that clause in back in 2017 to lure temps into accepting jobs in the Financial District. Most people don't read past the health waiver on page three. But it’s valid. And since Vanguard Financial is currently a chimney, and you've just declared Malakor's attack an Act of God, the continuity protection triggers automatically."

She picked up her phone, punched in a three-digit extension, and held the receiver to her ear while eyeing me with a mix of professional annoyance and newfound respect.

"Gary?" she said into the phone. "I’ve got an administrative temp at Window 3 holding an un-waived 802-F continuity clause on the Vanguard collapse. Yeah. No, he caught the divine classification trap... Right. Put him in the priority re-assignment pool before he realizes he can claim back-pay for the lunch hour."

She hung up the receiver with a soft click and pulled a fresh, green sheet of paper from a tray behind her desk.

"You're a nuisance, Mr. Pendelton," she said, her voice dropping back into its flat, monotonous register.

"I'm a survivor, Mrs. Gable," I corrected her. "In this city, the heroes smash the buildings, the villains smash the heroes, and the insurance companies smash the survivors. You have to know where to stand when the dust settles."

She filled out the green form with quick, angry strokes of her pen, stamped it with an approved seal that hummed with a satisfying metallic thud, and slid it through the turntable.

"Take this to Apex Staffing main office on Fifth," she instructed. "They have an emergency temporary assignment opening at nine-thirty. A logistics firm in the Industrial Zone."

I picked up the green sheet and checked the details. "The Industrial Zone? Isn't that right next to the abandoned chemical plant?"

"It is," she said, pulling a new file from her inbox.

"The one where the secret societies keep fighting over the ancient power crystal?"

"The very same," Mrs. Gable replied, without looking up. "They need someone to re-key their inventory spreadsheets. Wear long sleeves. Sometimes the residue from the mutagenic spills leaves a mild rash."

"Hazard pay?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Ten cents extra an hour," she said. "And they provide free bottled water."

I folded the green paper neatly, placed it inside my blue file, and tucked the folder under my arm.

"Have a good day, Mrs. Gable."

"Number forty-eight!" she yelled into the intercom before I had even turned my back.

I walked out of the Municipal Claims building into the bright, sharp sunlight of downtown Apex City. Above me, high in the sky, two tiny specks were crisscrossing against the clouds—one trailing a streak of gold light, the other a trail of jagged crimson smoke. A faint, distant sound like popping bubble wrap echoed down through the concrete canyons of the city as their sonic booms collided miles overhead.

Around me, the citizens of Apex City barely looked up. Construction crews were already hard at work three blocks down, erecting heavy steel scaffolding around a skyscraper that had lost its top five floors during Monday’s sky-alien skirmish. Street sweepers were clearing sparkling piles of pulverized reinforced glass from the gutters, pushing it into neat, glittering mounds for the municipal reclamation trucks.

We are a resilient species, not because we possess superpowers or invulnerable skin, but because we have mortgages, car payments, and public transit schedules to keep. The gods may throw mountains at each other in the stratosphere, but down here on the sidewalk, the meter maid is still going to leave a ticket on your windshield if you overstay your two hours.

I checked my watch. It was 8:45 AM. If I took the subway line under the river, I could make it to the Industrial Zone with ten minutes to spare before my new shift started.

I pulled my windbreaker tighter around my chest, picked up my cooler bag, and headed down into the concrete entrance of the subway, making a mental note to stop at a pharmacy along the way to pick up a fresh tube of hydrocortisone cream. If I was going to be working next to an ancient mutagenic power crystal, I intended to be fully prepared.