Strange Things, Strange Office

Connie's two-hole-punch for punching ledger sheets had gone missing.

Trips up and down aisles, asking people where it had been, had only resulted in her noticing a lot of empty cubes, offices and desks that she had not recently noticed being vacated. She didn't wonder what had happened, though. Asking questions of the PHBs of Cubetown was something she'd learned long ago through simple osmosis, and not a few Dilbert comics. Then again, none of the managers on her floor at Duibne were actually pointy-haired, nor male. It was actually rather refreshing. There could be lines at certain times of the month outside the restrooms, though. Studies had shown, after all, that women who work or live together, cycle together.

Which made it a good thing, Connie realized, that she no longer cycled. Hadn't cycled, in fact, in two hundred twenty years.

Nyra did, though, and Connie knew when she started, when she stopped... Occasionally it was maddening. Both from a "me vampire, drink blood" standpoint, but because her artist seemed to become a bit more frisky during those times. Which, needless to say, she did not mind in the slightest.

The one thing she did mind, though, in all that she perceived as the Perfection of her relationship with Nyra, was that Nyra did not know The Truth. This both worried and relieved Connie.
Worried because what if at some point Nyra did need to know, for instance if she found blood on Connie's clothes after her weekly hunts? How would she react?
Relieved because, once that line of secrecy was broken, other lines must be drawn to say "here's what you can know, here's what I don't know, and here's why we can't ever say anything about it."

Things like this Connie pondered as one part of her brain processed the numbers needed for her job. Into her eyes, jumbled in her brain, sorted out on paper or an adding machine, and dropped. She just didn't need to remember what she worked on.

What she did need, though, was her ledger punch.

"You'd think a floor FULL of accountants would have more than ONE ledger punch!"
"Then again, maybe all the people who left their desks all spic-and-span took every single last unit, item, and piece of office supplies that wasn't nailed down?"
"And maybe even stuff that was, I heard about that series of computers going missing..."
"Not to mention all those people coming in who looked like they were in a warzone."

The last cube she checked had a regular hole punch. A boring old, hand held, silver single hole punch. Connie was not looking forward to using that to punch four hundred sheets of ledger paper - undrilled ledger paper, since all the prepunched seemed to have disappeared, much like her punch.

She wondered if there was a 24-hour Staples in the city.

The four hundred sheets of ledger paper got tossed into a box taken from a pile near one of the nine copiers on her floor, and she shut her computer down for the night. Morning. End of her shift. Whatever. Four-thirty had come, and home Connie was bound.

Maybe if she could get someone alone at the store, she'd indulge in a little snack...