Season 1: Survival of the Fittest

  Ch 5: First Monday — Finding the Battlefield

  Monday morning arrived with grey skies, a biting wind, and the low, incessant rumble of the city awakening to its endless grind. Nysera stood before the cracked mirror in the tiny ft, pulling on the pinest blouse and trousers she could find, her expression set with grim determination. Invisibility was a weapon now, and she would wield it as deftly as she once wore a jewelled crown.

  The cursed phone, now marginally tamed, vibrated insistently in her hand. The little map sorcery was already active, its disembodied voice issuing commands in a cheery, condescending tone. "Turn left in two hundred metres," it chirped as she locked the ft door behind her.

  Nysera narrowed her eyes at the screen. "You could simply say 'at the third standard-bearer,'” she muttered under her breath. "Have you no respect for crity?"

  The journey was a trial by chaos. She stalked along the uneven pavements, weaving through a tide of grim-faced mortals clutching takeaway coffees like lifelines. The Underground station loomed up like the mouth of some vast, grim beast. She descended into it warily, clutching Mira's battered Oyster card as if it might bite.

  The phone instructed her to "Mind the gap," which she transted mentally into "Beware unstable terrain — possible pit trap." The train roared into the station, a gleaming silver snake that reeked of steel, sweat, and faint despair. Nysera boarded, wedging herself between a woman weeping quietly over a broken umbrel and a man aggressively eating a croissant without regard for civility.

  The map continued to bark commands. "Change lines at Oxford Circus."

  Nysera hissed low in her throat. "Circuses are for fools and clowns," she said, earning a wary gnce from the man with the croissant.

  At each turn, each exit, she obeyed with tight-jawed resentment, driven not by trust but by grim necessity. She understood strategy: sometimes one must heed the incompetent generals until the battlefield could be seized in full.

  The train rocked beneath her feet as Nysera clung grimly to one of the grimy poles, sardined between the peasantry. Around her, mortals buried themselves in their small gss rectangles, tapping and scrolling with gzed, indifferent expressions.

  It was, she supposed, a form of scrying. Knowledge, after all, was power.

  She drew Mira’s cursed phone from the depths of her coat pocket and, after a few false taps that opened an app devoted to endless pictures of baked goods, she stumbled upon a small blue bird icon tucked in the corner of the screen. Curious, she pressed it.

  A flood of words unfurled before her. Fragments of mortal thought, hurled into the void without care or curation. Some witty, some bitter, some so catastrophically inane that Nysera nearly dropped the phone in horror.

  It took her a moment to realise she was already signed in — Mira’s name stared back at her from the top of the screen, accompanied by a blurry photo of her smiling awkwardly into the middle distance.

  She scrolled, intrigued and appalled.

  "Monday is a construct and I am its prisoner," read one post. Another: "If I disappear under my duvet, tell my boss I died bravely." Further down, one even bleaker: "Nothing like surviving a ten-hour shift to afford a Tesco meal deal and a vague sense of purpose."

  Nysera’s mouth thinned. This was a battlefield, and Mira had id herself bare upon it like a mb before the sughter. Every self-pitying whimper, every plea for attention — a public ledger of weakness.

  You might as well wear a pcard around your neck that said “Exploit Me”.

  She flicked her thumb decisively across the screen, moving into the settings with ruthless efficiency. The name vanished. The pitiful, self-deprecating bio — "Just a tired marketing girl with a coffee addiction" — was wiped clean without ceremony.

  In its pce, Nysera entered a new name: ViscountessV.

  Short. Sharp. Suggestive of power, but with enough vagueness that no mortal would think to question it.

  For the handle’s first post, she thought carefully. Nothing cheerful. Nothing meek. No desperate cwing for sympathy. She tapped the gss with careful precision, each word an incantation:

  Respect is a currency. Most of you are bankrupt.

  She read it once, nodded in satisfaction, and pressed 'send.' The message disappeared into the ether, a bde cast into the sea.

  Nysera slid the phone back into her pocket, the corners of her mouth tilting upwards in the faintest, most dangerous of smiles.

  Emerging at st into the city streets, she straightened her blouse, gred up at the pale, weeping sky, and consulted the map again. A few wrong turns, feeling personally attacked by the London Underground’s signage, a close brush with a bus that seemed determined to assassinate her, and a humiliating incident involving a revolving door ter, she found herself standing before the edifice of her new life.

  Crown & Hart Communications.

  The building was tall and gssy, trying valiantly to look important despite the slightly grimy facade and the cracked tiles at the entrance. A corporate pace past its prime, desperately clinging to dignity — a mirror of everything she had observed of this world so far.

  Nysera drew herself up to her full, mortal height. She would not stumble now. She would not falter at the gates.

  She was a Viscountess, a strategist, a survivor. And soon, she would be so much more.

  Adjusting the strap of Mira’s battered work bag, she marched towards the gss doors, the phone muttering its st, pathetic instruction: "You have arrived at your destination."

  "As if there were ever any doubt," Nysera said, and pushed the door open.

  The reception desk barely gnced at her, a bored nod from a woman tapping mindlessly at a keyboard. Nysera hesitated for half a second — was she meant to announce herself? Decre her purpose? But no one else did. She mimicked the casual shuffle of the others, offering nothing more than a brief tilt of her head, and moved towards the bank of lifts with the dignity of a duchess walking into exile.

  The lift was a gleaming metal box that hissed open like the maw of a beast. She stepped inside cautiously, tapping the lit button she'd seen the others press. The doors slid shut with a soft metallic sigh. She stood stiffly in the centre, hands csped before her, bracing for a jolt like a carriage setting off — but the lift glided upwards almost soundlessly, save for a mechanical wheeze that made her wonder if the structure might colpse out of sheer exhaustion. She counted the floors, breathing shallowly, until a ding sounded overhead, brittle and uncertain, like a dying bell, tolling for the third floor.

  The doors slid open onto a sprawl of open desks, battered partitions, and a low haze of fluorescent lighting. The air smelled faintly of burnt coffee, printer ink, and the slow, stale despair of the defeated. Laughter bubbled up sporadically from unseen corners. Somewhere, a printer groaned in protest. Nysera stepped forward, mimicking the purposeful shuffle she had observed in the mortals ahead of her, although every fibre of her being screamed against the casual, slumped posture they all seemed to adopt. She could feel eyes flicker towards her, quick and assessing. A few voices floated past — "Is that Mira?" "She looks... different?" "Did she cut her hair?"

  Nysera made no outward acknowledgement. She offered no smiles, no eager nods. She simply moved towards what she recognised as Mira’s desk — a small, sad isnd surrounded by a defensive ring of Post-it notes and a wilting desk pnt — and sat down with the deliberate, unhurried grace of a queen seating herself at council.

  The effect was immediate. Conversations dipped in volume. Someone dropped a pen. She kept her gaze neutral, absorbing everything: the subtle gnces exchanged, the curious looks, the air of tentative unease. Mira — or the thing they thought was Mira — had returned changed.

  Nysera allowed herself the faintest smile, one she hid in the downcast flicker of her eyes towards the ptop tangled with charging cables. She moved carefully, studying the byrinth of cords and accessories, handling them as if defusing an unfamiliar trap.

  "Morning, babe," came a voice, bright and familiar. Nysera gnced up to find the woman from Tesco — the one who had shepherded her broken mortal form back to this grim roost. She looked no better than Nysera felt, sungsses perched atop her head, her coffee clutched like a weapon against the day.

  Nysera offered a slow, regal nod, as if acknowledging a foreign emissary at court. With the ritualistic solemnity of someone pronouncing an ancient, bitter truth, she said, "Monday sucks."

  There was a beat.

  “True,” The woman ughed, visibly relieved, and sauntered off toward the coffee station.

  Nysera watched her go, absorbing the transaction, the ritual, the casual alliances and invisible boundaries that marked this battlefield.

  She had survived the first greeting. The first inspection. The first impression.

  Now came the true work: mapping the terrain, uncovering its weaknesses, and preparing her rise.

  The court of Crown & Hart had no idea their new queen had already arrived.