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It's All in the ReflexesIt was approaching 5 am on a Monday and we find ourselves in Dormitory Building 4, a housing development for Express Delivery Systems, colloquially known by the acronym of EDS. The building itself was nothing special; it stood at a mere four stories, and housed, at a maximum, a total of 120 Employees, all of which were on the 2nd to 4th floors. The first floor was for administrative facilities and held the common areas for the building's tenants, like kitchens, cafeterias and lounges.Dormitory Building 4, the fourth and final of EDS's Employee Housing Blocks, shared space with one other dorm building of the same size and a parking garage that stood twice the height of the dorms.The room of the hero of our story was on the 4th floor, on the side of the building that faced north. The room was spartan in furnishings, but, given its size, a paltry 400 sq ft, roughly the size of a studio apartment, there wasn't a whole lot of room to put some of the bigger items, like a television or stereo system. It had enough room for a small, full bathroom(with a standing shower, no bathtub), twin-sized bed, which was occupied, a pair of dressers, a small closet, and a computer desk, and not much else.At the moment, though, none of that was important. For you see, it was now 5 am."When it's time to party, we will PARTY HARD!"The music blared from the computer speakers at levels so high, the walls were vibrating. Not more than a split second after the first few notes were played, the body in the bed jerked, mightily, as though shocked, and swore loudly."Jesus - Fucking blankets! Damn, Damn" -SLAM- "DAMN! Shit!"He-Hm...Well, this is his story. Let's let him tell it, shall we?{[^.^]}I bolted out of my bed...after falling face first to the carpeted floor, while trying to untangle myself from my accursed bedding. I wiggled the nigh unresponsive mouse around until it woke up the damn computer and, as quick as I could, turned off the media player, thereby killing the music. In hindsight later that day I would remember, as I always did much too late for it to be of any damn use, that I could have simply turned off the speakers. Every. TIME.My heart thudded loudly in my chest and it felt like it reverberated throughout my entire being. Waking up like that, while probably not good for my heart in the long run - or even my mental health in the short term - is, I am forced to admit, a very, very, effective alarm clock.No matter how much I wanted to

throw the whole damn lot out the friggin window.I was now wide awake, without the need for any kind of stimulants, like coffee or sugary energy drinks.Not that I needed any of that crap anyways; I needed sleeping pills to sleep, I didn't need a damn thing to stay awake.The name's Sergio. Sergio Delagama. I work as a courier for EDS, the biggest delivery company on the continent. Technically, it's the biggest in the world, what with it being the amalgamated mass of North America, the Indian Subcontinent and the northern third of the African continent sloppily melded together like a freakshow orgy.South America joined back together with the rest of Africa to form another continent, the European mass, from the Atlantic to the most eastern edge of Finland and everything in-between formed another. The russo-china continental mass was cut in half, and divided by a few thousand miles, and Australia was, well, Australia. It didn't change. Or move, for that matter.Yeah, there was some crazy shit going on about a hundred years ago...{[T^T]}In the year 2018, A man, whose name has been totally and completely lost to the sands of time, found out that demons and angels, and all that the knowledge of which entails, were real.So what does this guy do? Does try to bring this evidence to light, to show this proof to the world like so many theologians wish they could?Nope.He makes a deal with a devil.Not the devil, mind, but a devil. Demon really, but the semantics aren't important for this.What deal he made, no one knows, except him and the devil he made it with...Maybe God, but no one's seen or heard from him since all this began, so we'll never know that one either.Anyway, long story short, he somehow cheated the demon and, here's the kicker, got away with it.Sorta.Which, you know, seems like a great thing, outconning a demon and all by pulling a Faust, but considering what happened afterwards, eh, not so much.You see, cheating a denizen of Hell, regardless of how high or low they are in the rankings, just isn't done. It's against the rules, and breaking those rules...they come with a heavy penalty.The guy, whose name is lost, committed a crime so cosmically heinous, he was put to Complete Death.Strange thing, Complete Death. Sounds a bit odd. You'd think that dying was about as complete as being dead goes. Body dies, and the spirit goes...wherever it goes. High or low doesn't matter, after you die, it goes somewhere.Not this guy. He was as dead as it gets. Not only was his body destroyed after his untimely demise, at the hands of the grand high one Himself, but his soul/spirit/whatever was erased too, along with any memory of his existence, save for his greatest mistake, so that we, the "innocents", would

learn from it.Another thing to come from it all was that it released the King of Hell himself, Satan, from his imprisonment in the Ninth Ring of Hell.He resided in a place where the light of God touches it not, and the hottest fires of Hell are extinguished, Where naught but the cold winds of treason blow, where the traitors and dissenters and the breakers of trust between one another are encased in their icy prisons for all eternity in those freezing gales that were so excruciatingly cold, they burned with greater intensity that the fires of Hell themselves.So yeah, he escaped that. Well, not really escaped. More like he was released from prison, without the need for parole.So what does he do once he gets his freedom?He starts redrawing the maps of the Earth. He shifted and merged the continents around as he saw fit, and shifted the Earth's axis 90 degrees and made the planet spin north to south like Uranus.In a matter of hours, he's changed the face of the planet to the point of that it was unrecognizable as the Earth we had once known.Why, you may ask yourself, why would he do that?The answer's simple.

Because he could, and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about it. He did it as a show of power, to let the world know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he wasn't to be trifled with. Period.After that, things got real calm. There were no more wars, no more petty old hatreds. That stuff didn't matter anymore. Not when the King of Hell had come to Earth.But not to rule, it would seem.Apparently, he had no desire to rule -nor outright destroy- humanity, either in part or as a whole.That's how he got sent to Hell in the first place, by breaking off from the holy choir and trying to annihilate the human race.We all know how that worked out for him.So then, what does the King of Hell do with his new found freedom if not rule over us lowly beings?He's the President and CEO of EDS.That's right.The Devil himself is my boss.{[T^T]}That's enough wool-gathering for now. It's time to get ready for work.I start my day, after my heart rate stops going 200 mph and slows down a bit, by taking a shower. The little cubicle shower is more than big enough to fit my fairly small to average build with room to spare.After marinating in water that's maybe only two degrees away from becoming steam, the water nozzle pulls back into the wall and several vents open along the walls and blow warm air out to dry me.Most of the ten or so minutes it takes to perform this task are spent on my short, stubby tail.Yes.I have a tail. A short stubby one, about 14 inches long, that's mostly black with a few white streaks on it.In case you're wondering, and I know most of you are, I'm an anthropomorphic badger, and one of the few.Anthropomorphic anything's are pretty uncommon, but far from rare. Maybe five or six percent of the overall human population are anthro, and that's stretching things. The rest are either regular humans -which are the minority now but still more numerous than us(the anthropomorphs)-, metahumans -of which I am a part of, despite my physical appearance-, transformed magical beings -pixies, elves, fairy-folk and shit like that- and either Celestial or Infernal beings -which aren't human, and never were, but do reside on Earth and pretty much do the things that most humans do.Like work. I finish getting ready by brushing the ol' chompers and get dressed in the company uniform of either a black and gray short-sleeved polo shirt or a black oxford shirt and gray vest(I pick option two), gray slacks or short-pants(option two again, and DON'T Call them SHORTS. The boss hates it when you call them that), gray running shoes and a hat, which can be either a black and gray ball cap(with the company logo on the front), mon-thurs, or a tasteful hat of your choice on Fun Fridays.I roll the sleeves three quarters of the way up my forearm, my freshly pressed

vest centered properly, make sure my short-pants are mostly without wrinkles and that there's no surprises on the bottoms of my shoes.After checking that I have my wallet, I grab my beat-up old Timex watch and my hat and leave my room.It's 5:45. Not too shabby of a start. I've got a little over an hour before I have to report to the delivery room.One elevator ride later, because I was too lazy this morning to take the stairs, I'm in the cafeteria, which has been open for less than half an hour.My sensitive nose tastes many delicious smells in the air, and my stomach responds with a ravenous growl. I make my way to the serving tables and grab a tray.I load up on my proteins, you know, eggs(fried and boiled), sausages -of which I grab three varieties in chicken, pork and beef- and mutton slices, and grab some country potatoes and a full carafe of orange juice and look for a place to sit. You'd think, this early in the morning, that it'd be empty. Not so.The night shift guys are just getting off while the day shifters are just getting up, so we've got both groups ready to get some grub, and I'm no different.I'm about to head back to my dorm room rather than try to find an open space at a table, or waste my time waiting for one to open up, when I hear someone calling my name."Reflex! Hey! Over here!"My "Hero" name, anyway.{[^.^]}Like I said before, I'm a metahuman. What that realistically translates into, though, is I'm a superhuman, but, at least in my case, mostly without the human part of it. Metahumans have special abilities, like being able to breathe fire, or fly, or have super strength or something cool like that.Didn't get that lucky.My abilities are that I have superhuman reflex speed, which makes my physical responses to threats of any kind something to behold if you're a bystander. It's not all that great though. I'm still bound by physical laws like gravity and inertia and mass and things like that, so I can, technically, only move so fast, and reach nowhere near the speeds of those blessed with superhuman speed, who, somehow, are able to defy those laws.I also have superhuman stamina reserves. It is very, very, very hard for me to get tired. So hard, in fact, I have to take sleeping pills in order to go to sleep.When I was in my senior year at high school, I decided to go off my sleep meds for a while and see what happened when I stayed awake for a few months.After the fifth one, I was just shy of becoming a gibbering lunatic, and was almost committed to an asylum for the "gifted".A few weeks of being on sleep meds fixed that, and I never did it again. The thing about staying awake that long is that you're perpetually getting new sources of stimuli that are feeding you all sorts of information -much of which is almost useless- without taking any breaks. You're

always seeing something or someone or going somewhere. Always. You have to. There's no rest, no time off, always thinking and doing, thinking and doing, thinking and doing... And that's the bad side of it all; you're constantly doing something, and after a while you start becoming consciously aware of everything you do, even unconscious things like breathing or the beating of your heart. You can get lost in a loop of forcing yourself to breathe a certain way or trying to make your heart beat faster or slower. Then, if you try to do something else, you forget to breath or make your heart keep beating because you can't remember how to multitask your unconscious bodily actions, then you start being consciously aware that you're going to die, so you begin regulating your unconscious biological actions. It's kinda like great white sharks; once they stop moving, they die; If I stopped thinking about those bodily functions, well, they'd stop working.I needed a member of the Medical Psycorps to repair my mental functions so that I wouldn't have to think about them for them to work again. It was crazy.The human mind wasn't meant to be on as long as mine was, and it showed in my frayed nerves and nearly fractured psyche. Once I was back on my sleep meds, though(and a Psycorp badass named Jim-Bob), I stopped being aware of everything, and just concentrated on sleeping, and dreaming, and two weeks later, I'm as good as gold again.{[^.^]}I look over to where I hear the voice, and see one of my fellow couriers; a Speedstar named Felix Willcott, but most just called him by his hero name."Ten Legs", I say in greeting after I make my way to his six-man table. "How's it going?""It's still early Reflex, so I can't complain", he replies as I take the open seat between him and a pale skinny dude named Nekro. "Yet, anyways."I murmur in agreement and say my hellos to the rest of the table."Nekro", I say to him on my left and work my way clockwise around the table, "Double Tap, Bones, Hoarfrost; how's the morning treating you guys?"Nekro gave a silent nod while the others issued out tired greetings.Not everyone can have my boundless enthusiasm and my Joie de Vivre I suppose.I'm about to take my first bite of jet fuel when I hear an asshole behind me talking shit.And I wish it was just a fart."Well, well, well, if it isn'--""Go jump off a bridge into a river of shit, Floyd. It's too damn early in the morning to listen to that big mouth of yours make noises that sound like you're trying to talk," Ten Legs retorts without looking up. The rest of us keep eating.Floyd Robertson is a low level administrator for another part of the company. Despite the fact that he, as well as myself and the rest of us couriers, are roughly on the same pay scale, he's determined, somehow, that he's better off than the rest of us.